Come on skinny love just last the year

This one's for my friend Mark who asked me yesterday for some recommendations. Always tricky that - what if they don't like them?

I thought for a minute and blurted out - BON IVER. It's such an amazing experience listening to his music. Bon Iver isn't his real name, by the way. It's Justin Vernon. The mystery associated with the choice of Bon Iver to perform under is also there in the haunting music on the album For Emma, Forever ago.

I've written a lot about Flume on the 49er list below so I thought I'd add a few clips to this post instead. There's a guerrilla style a cappella version of For Emma; Lump Sum; I have to include Flume and a raw version of Skinny Love from the Jools Holland show Later. It's spectacular. Enjoy!!

49 Bye Byes

Thought I'd do a bit of a summary post of those last 49 songs, mainly for my own interest sake, just to see a breakdown of decades, genre, gender (although I already know it will be heavily tilted to males) and maybe some other things.

So here's the list:

1 The Beatles - Don't let me down
2 Eels - Grace Kelly blues
3 The Carpenters - Rainy days and Mondays
4 Jim Croce - Alabama rain
5 Rory Gallagher - Cradle rock
6 Charlie Parker - Romance without finance
7 Dave Brubeck - Take five
7 Glen Hansard/Marketa Irglova- Falling slowly
8 Grover Washington Jnr - Jamming
9 George Harrison - Under the Mersey wall
10 John Lennon/Yoko Ono - Cambridge 1969
11 Paul McCartney - Ode to a Koala bear
12 Ringo Starr - Love is a many splendoured thing
13 Patti Smith - Babelogue/ Rock 'n' roll nigger
14 Ricky Nelson - Garden Party
15 Rage Against the Machine - Killing in the name
16 Rammestein - Asche zu asche
17 Avenged Sevenfold - Almost easy
18 Jethro Tull - Thick as a brick
19 Bon Iver - Flume
20 Jefferson Airplane - Crown of creation
21 Bob Dylan - I shall be free
22 Jimi Hendrix - All along the watchtower
23 George Harrison - Be here now
24 Badfinger - Without you
25 The Raspberries - I can remember
26 Aimee Mann - Red vines
27 Billy Bragg - Levi Stubb's tears
28 The Four Tops - I can't help myself (Sugar pie honey bunch)
29 Headband - The laws must change
30 Evermore - Light surrounding you
31 Chi-lites - Have you seen her?
32 BoyzIIMen - The end of the road
33 Oasis - Sunday morning call
34 Van Morrison - Haunts of ancient peace
35 Joni Mitchell - Song for Sharon
36 Prince - Let's go crazy
37 Beach Boys - California saga: California
38 Brian Wilson - Orange crate art
39 Woody Guthrie - Deportees
40 Mountain - Nantucket sleighride
41 David Crosby - The lee shore
42 Frank Zappa - Big swifty
43 The Tremeloes - Here comes my baby
44 Syd Barrett - Dominoes
45 Velvet Underground - Waiting for the man
46 Rolling Stones - Wild horses
47 New Radicals - You get what you give
48 Embrace - Ashes
49 The Beatles - Let it be

Okay I know there's actually 50 songs there - I stuffed up with repeating number 7. Neverthemind.

So - what have we got? The male female split is overwhelmingly male. Only three females figure in their solo state. And only four entries are of a mixed gender. So even at best it's only 7 female and 43 male. I don't consciously just listen to male musicians - it's just worked out that way. The females I do gravitate towards are strong/different ones - Yoko, Grace Slick, Marketa Irglova, Joni Mitchell, Patti Smith, Aimee Mann types rather than the Karen Carpenter types.

Groups and soloists are fairly even though.

The Americans outnumber the British almost 2 to 1 and of the others there were two NZ, and one German. This is interesting because I generally feel that my cultural bias is to British bands and soloists. I was a tad surprised to see such a lack of balance.

Rock music clearly predominates in the genre stakes because as I stated along the way - that's what I love most!

All the decades since the 50's are represented on the list. The most heavily represented decade is the seventies - when I was aged 13 to 23. The least represented are the fifties (2 entries) and the nineties (4); then the eighties (5); the naughties (9); the sixties (12); and the seventies are the champs with 18 entries. What surprised me a little are the number from the eighties - a much maligned decade.

Okay - next entry will be about the (very few) songs I can not stand listening to.

Whisper words of wisdom

49 The Beatles, ‘Let It Be’

And so the journey comes to an end, because all things must pass.

The slight dilemma about where to end this list of 49 songs (49 reasons) was settled in my mind as I wrote about the Velvet Underground and the Rolling Stones a few entries ago.

My love of music begins and ends with the fab four, and in terms of bookending opposites - John Lennon and Paul McCartney fit the bill.

I began in entry number one with a celebration of John Lennon’s superb ‘Don’t Let Me Down’, which was written and performed during the ill-fated Let It Be sessions. What could be more appropriate for this last entry, than a celebration of his partner – Paul, and HIS finest moment as a Beatle, also written and performed for the Get Back project that became Let It Be.

They were chalk and cheese weren’t they? Not so freakishly, they were fated to meet and work together. They were both young guys living in Liverpool who were interested in music - not hard to imagine them eventually getting together is it? All it took was a couple of mutual friends, a love of playing guitars and creating songs. This happens all over the world every second of every day – somewhere on the planet right now - two people are sitting down trying to figure out guitar chords or trying to match some poetry to an original tune.

What is freaky is that two giant talents should get together in Liverpool and by their actions totally change my world.

What often gets me is that they grew so far apart having started out like ying yang twins. Paul and John - two halves of a whole that couldn’t sustain their working arrangements. Even though they could later patch up their friendship, they couldn’t (and didn’t) ever get together in the studio, or on the stage again. No mind. They left such a fantastic body of work behind, both as a group and as solo artists. Rejoice in that.

Let It Be is, for me, the perfect end of the Beatles. The message is a good one – let it be.

And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make

47 New Radicals, 'You Get What You Give' ; 48 Embrace, 'Ashes'

I am definitely a glass half full kind of guy. I would much rather be positive than not and so I naturally gravitate towards positive message songs. You know the type - Electric Light Orchestra's Hold On Tight (to your dreams), Bob Marley's Trenchtown Rock, The Lighthouse Family's Lifted - that's the kind of thing I'm talking about. Maybe these lines from Lifted sum it up best - 'I wouldn't say I'm mad about the rain, but we'll get through it anyway'.

Generally the message is all about rising up, making something of yourself, following and holding on tight to those dreams - and we ALL need to be reminded of these things from time to time.

To represent these feel good/good message songs I've chosen two songs I first heard on television, being used to sell cars (I think) and football. Isn't it great when you eventually track down a song you've loved on TV and it turns out even better than the advertisement!

wild horses

45 The Velvet Underground,
'I'm Waiting For The Man';
46 The Rolling Stones, ‘Wild Horses’

With only five songs to go I now have to consider what I’ll be leaving out and what five to include. I haven’t really followed any cohesive plan along the way. I’ve only had a few songs peculating at any one time and certainly not five. My modus operandi has been to wait till inspiration hits and then the entry pretty much writes itself.

For the final five, I'm pretty sure there won't be any rap, hip hop or funk, or classical, or opera, or House, or Techno, or 'world' music. I just don't like those forms/genres. There are only a couple of rap songs that I can bear to hear twice -Nelly's Ride Wit Me definitely, and maybe Eric B and Rakim...maybe. But that's it. Funk is a genre that is something of a mystery to me. At the risk of sounding like my parents complaints about Led Zeppelin, it's the mindless repetition within the funk form, as with Techno and House, that fails to move me. As far as I'm concerned Opera and Cradle Of Filth style death metal are one and the same - unlistenable, and I enjoy the baroque style of classical music but more for appeasing Jacky when she's sick of hearing Dwight Yokam.

So, the final five will in all likelihood be quality pop music. That's that settled.

For some time I've been thinking about another conundrum. I have been wondering what to end my list with.

An early thought was that the 49th song needed to bookend my first one (The Beatles’ Don’t Let Me Down) by contrasting with it. The Velvet Underground and Stones were contenders for some time because, to me, they are the polar opposite of the fabs. But in the end I've chosen a more appropriate way to finish. Instead you get VU and the Stones now.

An early post on this blog dealt with my feelings about The Velvet Underground, and my belief that everyone’s musical taste can be ultimately tracked back to either The Beatles or The Velvet Underground, who I contend are at the opposite ends of the pop spectrum.

In terms of opposites they fit the bill all over the place – different continents, very different musical processes, different artistic sensibilities. I mean, could you EVER imagine a Beatle song titled 'The Black Angel's Death Song' , and George Martin couldn’t be further removed from Andy Warhol really, could he?

I know The Velvet Underground & Nico is often on people's best ever classic album lists but it doesn't do a lot for me. Mainly because Lou Reed hasn't established his dominance yet, the quality of Sweet Jane and Pale Blue Eyes were some way off, and there was way too much of Nico for my taste. I'm Waiting For The Man though is an excellent slab of dirty guitar and Lou's whiney voice is perfect for this little tale of Lou waiting for his drug connection who's dressed in black with a big straw hat.

As for the Stones - well they're the Antichrist aren't they? Drug deranged child molesters and evil incarnate. Mick is the horned one (and the horny one), while Keef IS the skull ring. Again - can you imagine Macca decked out in one of them?

All very simplistic stuff. The superb neo-country of Wild Horses gives the lie to all that. The image of Keef lying on the floor listening to a playback in the Gimme Shelter movie immediately tells you that the human riff has soul (man). God bless him!

losing when my mind's astray

44 Syd Barrett, ‘Dominoes’

For entry number 44 (only 5 to go after this one), we move from the bright pop of the Tremeloes to the incandescent aura that surrounded Syd Barrett. It’s like comparing the atmosphere on Mars to the heat generated by the sun.

In 1970 Syd was not yet a burnt out cliched acid casualty. He was still frequently a coherent rapscallion who could play with the language and with the sounds that he heard in his head and, with help from Dave Gilmour, he could still translate those sounds into songs. One thing’s for sure – no one else on the planet could have written Dominoes, certainly not The Tremeloes.

It’s such a tricky song – it’s hard to pin down. It shifts and morphs and won’t sit still. Was it really written 40 years ago? Extraordinary! How is it that the power of a great pop song can survive for all those years? Maybe because the song is both of its time and universal. It’s got a sense of the twee and the cosmic, is dark yet warm. It deals with the mundane (playing dominoes) and questing (don’t you want to know with your pretty hair). It contains (probably not deliberate) references to various senses - (the sound of a lark, the texture of a shell) and the elements (fireworks, tears) but in the end it’s more about time passing than it is anything tangible. The days are like dominoes, one tumbles after the other in a permanent now.

Syd sings with a peculiar melancholic delivery and you can sense the days just drifting by him in a haze. That haze is created in the sound scape by the backwards guitars. After The Beatles Rain, this is the best, most natural use of this technique (David Gilmour’s production or Syd? Who knows? Only David now).

Poor Syd. He flamed out in a blaze of glory. Time goes by…

Robyn Hitchcock does a terrific version in his garden -

In the midnight moonlight hour

43 The Tremeloes, 'Here Comes My Baby'

Infectious pop music from 1967 floats my boat, pretty much every time.

I was ten years old in 1967. I got my first grown up bike, took my first tentative steps away from my mum (she let go of the seat and I was off), and listening to great pop music. The summer of 1967 was "The Summer of Love" in San Francisco. It also became an important year for psychedelic rock, with releases from The Beatles (Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Magical Mystery Tour), Eric Burdon & The Animals (Winds of Change), The Doors (The Doors and Strange Days), Jefferson Airplane (Surrealistic Pillow and After Bathing at Baxter's), Pink Floyd (The Piper at the Gates of Dawn), Love (Forever Changes), Cream (Disraeli Gears), The Rolling Stones (Their Satanic Majesties Request), The Who (The Who Sell Out), The Velvet Underground (The Velvet Underground & Nico), and The Jimi Hendrix Experience (Are You Experienced? and Axis: Bold As Love).

But I wasn't listening to this stuff (they would all come much later), instead I was aware only of songs. For example: The Small Faces - Itchycoo Park, The Beatles - Yellow Submarine, and The Tremeloes - Here Comes My Baby.

Especially The Tremeloes.


So, what do you notice about this video? It's obvious isn't it. The smiles. You can see the pure joy of singing this fun song about being dumped for another guy. I was 10 - being dumped for another guy wouldn't happen properly for another 9 years - thanks Dallas! All I was reacting to was the cow bell, the whoops of joy around the song, the beat, and the smiles that could be heard in the voices. Watching this video just makes me feel good. And that's important.