Great Voice and He Knows It

I just saw this on Youtube. Yes, I know it's been there for over a year but, give me some credit - I'm old!!



Anyway, I think this is a great version of the song.

There must be a word for it in Greek...

"The Grimleys" was a minor British comedy from the late nineties which featured a nice conceit that it took place in an alternative universe where the members of the Glam Rock bands of the 1970s had given up their profession before they achieved success and went back to the day job. The most musically sophisticated of that type of band was Slade fronted by Noddy Holder, who, in the series,  played the music teacher in the school.

I can remember not giving the series much of a thought when it came out but I ran across this clip on Youtube in which Holder ends one of the episodes singing what would nowadays be called an "unplugged" version of the Slade hit "Cum on Feel the Noize".

I found the rendition really quite touching. I think it is a tribute to Holder's acting skills that he is able to convey the pathos of an alternative history, replete with missed opportunities and lost promise, that didn't actually happen. And, I suppose, it makes me feel old and contemplate my own missed opportunities.

So Tom Jones, Van Morrison and Jeff Beck went into a bar... er.. recording studio...

and came up with this...

Summer's Here!

Exam Boards are over. There's a short window between now and the Resits. The sun is out. The days are long.

I'm obviously showing my age but this is one of those songs to which I can't help smiling.

What is the plural of "Genius"?

Eric Clapton & Mark Knopfler - LAYLA

Sunshine on Leith

With all due respect to Liverpool and Celtic, there's only one winner when it comes to football anthems and that is Hibs' rendition of "Sunshine on Leith" by the Proclaimers.

This is them at their CIS Cup victory in 2007 against Kilmarnock. I'm not a Hibs fan but it makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.

I remember that the BBC coverage of the event stopped the player interviews to listen to the crowd singing. The sound is better but you don't get the feeling of being in the crowd that the video clip has.

The Proclaimers' version is here.

It's a beautiful song and I want it sung at my funeral.

Titanium

A recommendation from my kids.

Titanium - David Guetta ft. Sia - Official Acoustic Music Video - Madilyn Bailey

Glissando - Floods

Glissando - Floods (Shortened Version)

Sigur Rós - Varúð

Sigur Rós - Varúð (Valtari Mystery Film Experiment / Directed By Jeff Ray)

I really like this.

They Did It Right

Being a teenager in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I never really understood - and to be honest, still don't understand - the appeal of punk rock as either a musical or a cultural movement. I mean, I understood, at least when I was at college and was expected to have a view on these sort of things, what people were talking about in terms of democratisation of popular music and so-forth. But it aways seemed to me that this was just an excuse for people with little musical ability to be in a band and stand up in front of an audience. And it was clear that it was merely the next in a series of inter-generational cultural conflicts stretching back to the creation of the "teenager" in the mid-1950s.

Part of the problem for me was that there already was an English "back-to-basics" musical genre in existence at this time. This was the pub-rock scene of the mid 1970s, the main exemplar of which was the Canvey Island group "Dr Feelgood". These bands were the musical descendants of sixties bands like the Animals and the early Rolling Stones. I love the cover of their 1974 album "Down by the Jetty" which captures perfectly the feeling of grey, dreary, hardness of recession-hit mid-70s Britain.

Here they are performing probably their best track (although you could also argue for "Roxette"), "She does it right". In terms of sheer energy, this leaves the like of the Sex Pistols looking distinctly underpowered. Despite the decidedly-dodgy TotP environment and mid-70s fashion of the audience, they dominate the stage.

There's another link here to another, may be better, version in which Lee Brilleaux is wearing his trademark white jacket.

The sheer prowling menace of both Lee Brilleaux's vocals and Wilco Johnson's guitar-playing remain a testament to the vibrancy of that era of popular culture. It wasn't a musical wasteland populated by the excesses of prog- and glam-rock and banal, mindless pop. There was real passion and danger in the music. And it was about the music, not some superficial attempt at rebellion that all-too-soon became swallowed up by the very machine that they were trying to fight against.

Lee Brilleaux died of cancer in 1994 and I heard an interview with Wilco on the Radio 4 a couple of weeks ago in which he described his feelings at his own recent diagnosis of inoperable pancreatic cancer. He said that his overwhelming feeling on hearing the news was of being "vividly alive".