I believe I'll dust my broom (Fleetwood Mac)

The Greatest Hits run through continues apace. I'm up to the F's in the rock/pop genre and R in Jazz (Sonny Rollins in case you were wondering).

I have two Fleetwood Mac Compilations - The Essential Blues Collection compiles the Peter Green/ Jeremy Spencer/ Danny Kirwin era and Greatest Hits is exclusively the cocaine years with Christine McVie/ Lindsay Buckingham/ Stevie Nicks.

They are two distinctly different bands. One was mega commercially successful and the other played the best blues licks in the UK. I much prefer the comparatively raw latter version.

I'm pretty sure I've blogged about this before but I usually prefer the initial formats of bands that have two distinct eras with different personnel. Bon Scott AC/DC, Peter Green Fleetwood Mac, Ozzy Osbourne Black Sabbath are three, but there are obvious exceptions too - David Gilmour Pink Floyd, Steve Hogarth Marillion are two that spring to mind.

One listen to Fleetwood Mac's Oh Well (part 1) will be enough to convince you. T'other FM is nice in an airbrushed way but if you want the real deal you need to Shake Your Money Maker with the original band.

Have you never heard a way to find the sun (Nick Drake)

Regular readers will know I am steadily moving through the Greatest Hits compilations in my collection. I am up to the D's in the Rock/Pop genre and K in jazz (Stan Kenton has just left the room).

My first contact with Nick Drake was via an article in Mojo (the Feb 1997 edition). I loved the photos of Nick in that Mojo edition (an example is on the left) and had always been intrigued by the cover of his Pink Moon album which I'd noticed in the album cover books I have. Some months later I bought Way To Blue (an introduction to Nick Drake) to sample what Mojo was raving about, just in case it was rubbish. I had no time to listen to it before we had a family holiday in Taupo and so this album formed the soundtrack of that holiday. I think I played it every day. It was perfect!

The opener is Cello Song and I never tire of hearing it. His guitar style is refreshingly original. His easy vocal style suits the material perfectly and there is an abiding feeling, when you hear it, that no one else on the planet sounds like him. He was an extraordinary talent and although his suicide left behind a relatively small body of work it is of such startling depth and clarity of expression and execution that it glows ever more brightly as the years pass on by.

A change would do you good (Sheryl Crow)

The trek through the greatest hits continues apace. Into the C's and Sheryl Crow's Hits and Rarities. Again bought in Doha when I was keen to track down Run Baby Run on CD (I only had it on a sample cassette back in Nu Zild).

Run Baby Run is an awesome track. I remember watching the video which I loved and then Roger gave me a mix tape with it on. Love the organ sound here and her vocal is lived it!

What a real shame that she has never hit those heights again. Peaked very early. The CD has the usual big suspects (All I Wanna Do, If It Makes You Happy) that are okayish. The only other good moment is her version of Sweet Child O'Mine (organ makes a welcome return) which I prefer to the original.

I'm the greatest and you better believe it baby (Ringo Starr)

It's been raining a lot in Stratford lately. That means only one thing - time to re-sort the collection.

I've thought about splitting off all the Greatest Hit compilations from the rest for some time now. The Best Of compilation has always seemed a superfluous part of a band's history in many ways. Until recently, they contained no new material that would add to the legend. Instead they are, too often, a cynical way of generating revenue for the man. For music fans though, they are also a short cut to the hits. I wanted an album of just the hit songs of The Beach Boys so that I didn't have to keep changing albums or make a tape. But really - how many times can you compile The Beach Boys? Seems to be (an) endless (summer). It seemed to me my collection would be streamlined by the relocation of these compilations.

So I did the re-sort and was a tad shocked by how many I had (199 of them on CD and I haven't started on the vinyl yet). Also shocked by how many variations of title there are. Here's a selection of what the marketers have used over the years.

Essential... The Best Of...The Very Best Of...Greatest Hits...The Collection...The Ultimate Collection...A Short Cut to...Anthology...Hit Single Anthology...The Hits Collection...A Stack Of...Remember...Classic...The Classic Years...The Essential...Golden Greats...Hits and History...The Definitive...

My favourite titles are the bespoke ones like Meaty Beaty Big & Bouncy (The Who), Last Chance For A Thousand Years (Dwight Yokam), Strictly Commercial (Zappa), Everything and Nothing (David Sylvian), The Beast of Alice Cooper, and Echoes (Pink Floyd)

I've decided to play my way through them too. Just listened to Jack Bruce's collection called Willpower (a twenty year retrospective). It's an excellent collection with unreleased songs, a brace of Cream songs, and a judicious selection from Jack's excellent solo career up to 1987. I also like how it's set out chronologically for the most part. You get to trace a career. One of my fav's is Jack's original version of Theme From An Imaginary Western that Mountain performed in a different but also brilliant way.



Currently up to Retrospective - The Best Of Buffalo Springfield. 12 tracks of gold! All killer, no filler. Generally I like these early compilations much more than the later exhaustive collections.

I must say the less is more philosophy definitely applies to Best Of.. compilations. Usually, I just want the hits. The Very Best Of Cher is a case in point. I just wanted Gypsies Tramps and Thieves, Half Breed and a couple of the Sonny & Cher hits like The Beat Goes On. Instead I get a double CD of 42 tracks!!!!! NOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!! Massive delusions of grandeur here girl. 42 tracks !! Yeech. This should have been cut down to a single album size - 12 tracks like the Springfield. Instead we get swathes of trendy dance music in the wake of Believe that I have to skip dross to get to the good bits. I remember playing it in the car in Doha and Jacky couldn't believe I'd bought it coz I only listened to a fraction of it.

Through the garden of your smile I saw the back door or your life (The Rumour)

I recently picked up a compilation of The Rumour - a NZ band of the seventies (not to be confused with The Rumour, Graham Parker's band from the UK).

Some thoughts - they started as The Surfires (two of their songs are on the compilation) who were (near as dammit) very similar sounding as the hit making Rumour.

Shade Smith was the key ingredient - his songs carry the band forward. When he was hot - so were the band. Unfortunately he wasn't hot that often. Of the 24 tracks (value!!) only five can be described as 'hits': L'Amour est L'enfant de la Liberte; Garden of Your Smile; Holy Morning; No Money On Our Trees; and Queen of Paradise. Pity the CD doesn't include the other big hit Sunshine Through a Prism that was covered by Suzanne.

The dominant style is seventies soft rock a la Bread or Air Supply. Sometimes it's successful, but other times not. For instance What Have You Done (with that day God gave you) is pretty icky.

The harmony work is superb though and these five songs still resonate. The sound isn't always great though - sounds like it was mastered off old vinyl in places.

It's a nice overall package with some great photos and details of the band's rise and fall. One slight pedantic point - why is Graham Nash's song Teach Your Children credited to someone called John J Francis?

Finally - the CD thanks Roger Marbeck. Wahoo!! Good stuff Roger. Great to see your name in print on a CD.

I never look away, that's no lie (Phoenix Foundation)

I'm a big fan of songs that refer to the mythic nature of a landscape. Great Southern Land by Icehouse (Australia), In A Big Country - Big Country (Scotland), Haunts of Ancient Peace - Van Morrison (England), and Chuck Berry's The Promised Land are some that do the job.

NZ is so small and so young - we don't have a great tradition of this kind of thing. The Night Train Back to Waiuku (by the wonderful Murray Grindley) is a great song but it doesn't do a mythic job - more the ironic. A singer songwriter I loved in the 70s has a couple of songs that head in the right direction. John Hanlon is his name (where is he now? In Aus apparently - running an advertising agency) and he was a big deal there for a while in the mid seventies with his combination of John Denver style concerns for the environment (I Care and Damn The Dam) and Leo Sayer/Cat Stevens style rock.

His two best albums were Higher Trails (1975) and Garden Fresh (1974). The songs I'm thinking of are on the latter - I'd Rather Be A Bird and On A Hillside In The Rain.

How refreshing for an Auckland, NZ kid like me to hear a song that starts - 'Heading out of Auckland/ in the morning rain'. We'd heard songs for years about the rest of the world out there somewhere (I was a teenager growing up in middle class suburbia and had no clue about the world even though I gorged myself on American comics, music and films). The line hooked me and the mention of rain was specific (unlike the Beatles' Rain) and something I knew about.

Same with On A Hillside... I've always associated the song with growing up on the slopes of One Tree Hill in Auckland and the sound effects of the rain are judicious!

Here is his music, the setting is NZ, the adventurers are American.

You gotta go slow below the surface and gaze into the well (Dan Fogelberg)

Been reading Mojo magazine's latest edition. It contains a rhapsodic piece on Van the man's Astral Weeks album by Greil Marcus.

Will write about that in a sec. But first - time for another guilty pleasure. Dan Fogelberg. Yes I know he was sometimes a bit of an egotistical plonker but he made one album that I regard as a stone cold classic - Captured Angel.

No one really rates this album, except me. You can find it an any remainder bin you care to look in. Or you could. Silly me - I forget - no one actually goes to a CD shop anymore do they. No one cares about Dan anymore either (apart from Keegan who asked me for a place to start).

I suggested Captured Angel. It starts with glorious strings (Aspen - clear as a frosty morning)and then glorious acoustic guitars (These Days) and then gorgeous harmonies. All by Dan! He plays and sings most of it. The songs make me smile, strum my air guitar, sing along, feel good, and each song ends when it needs to. The rest of the album slides along effortlessly. Clearly a huge amount of creative effort goes into music but this album is so damned easy to love because it sounds so free and easy. Emancipator's music has the same effect on me.

Of course the associations of happy family travels as the album played over and over in the car certainly help elevate its place in my affections. I'd turn it up as loud as Jacky could bare and sing along on trips to Taupo with Keegan, Adam, Samantha, and Jade, at various times, on board. I'm sure it traumatised them all.

I've just played the album again and I've had a relaxed grin on my face the whole time.

I thought about Dan and my love for Captured Angel as I read the Marcus piece on Astral Weeks. In the piece he makes a lovely point about the synchronicity of all the elements coming together at one point to create a work of genius. He uses Bob Beamon's huge 1968 Olympic leap to illustrate his point (it was an act for which there are no parallels and no metaphors). Unfortunately for Greil, you can make the same point about anything can't you? The bowl of cereal I ate for breakfast this morning frinstance.

Astral Weeks is an album I've never been able to love. I dig it out once and a while and try hard(like right now as I type this) and, every time, it fails to move me the way Moondance and especially St Dominic's Preview move me. I find his voice too harsh on Astral (still in Them mode) and not the softer meditative soul voice he would gain later; the songs are too long and, for me, the music doesn't always suit the song. For me, there is no emotional core as there is on his other major albums like St Dominic's.

Hey it's all subjective. As Paul Simon says - one man's ceiling is another man's floor. At the end of the Marcus article he says as much himself - Astral Weeks became part of his life years ago and 'remains inseparable from it'. Astral Weeks was an album I came to while going back through Van's back catalogue. It's not an album I'm fond of in the way I'm fond of Captured Angel. I remain separate from Astral but Angel is in my soul.