Sha-La-La-La-Lee, etc.

What we have here is a three-track "Maxi-Single" issued in 1977 including the third, first and fifth of the Small Faces' A-sides: 'Sha-La-La-La-Lee', 'What'cha Gonna Do About It' and 'All Or Nothing'. I'm far from the biggest Faces fan, but knew and liked the songs and thought it worth the outlay of a pound to give them another hearing.

The label bears a few words that might strike fear into a purist's heart: "Electronically Re-processed Stereo" (though this only applies to 'What'cha Gonna Do About It'). To this casual listener's ears, however, it all sounds excellent: no-one involved in the recording, mastering or pressing can have put a foot wrong, and these songs practically jump off the disc, very much alive.

'All Or Nothing', in particular, here relegated to the B-side, sounds outstandingly good. Wikipedia tells me: "according to Kay Marriott, Steve's mother, Steve wrote this song about his split with ex-fiancée Sue Oliver, though first wife Jenny Rylance states that Marriott told her he wrote the song for her as a result of her split with Rod Stewart. Both statements are said to be correct."

A note to the imaginary reader: up to this point, all entries on this blog have been "randomly" selected, as per the strapline, courtesy of the Discogs "Random Item" link. I have done some steering, inasmuch as rejecting choices that would duplicate mention of artists/composers already discussed, with a little subsequent sorting of the choices to maximize variety. The random items are now turning up duplicates annoyingly too often, so for the remainder of this blog's short life I'll be providing the "randomness" myself.

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All Wrapped Up

Here's another of the compilation cassettes I bought this summer, having taken home a Denon twin-deck hi-fi cassette player from the local charity shop. All Wrapped Up is a 1983 compilation of singles by The Undertones, with Side One filled with A-sides, and B-sides on Side Two. A cassette must be the least desirable medium for such an arrangement, with a long rewind required if one just wants to hear the hits repeatedly. The Undertones were unapologetically provincial and anti-fashionable, with their songs sharply-written slices of life that pointedly avoided any mention of politics, or of the then-continuing violence in their native Derry. My favourite tracks are the obvious choices: 'Teenage Kicks', 'Jimmy Jimmy', 'Here Comes the Summer', 'My Perfect Cousin' & 'Wednesday Week'. Their later singles showed increased sophistication but lack the some of the straightforward charm of their earlier work. The B-sides, not unexpectedly, are mo...

Complete String Quartets

While the string quartets of Nikolai Yakovievich Myaskovsky (1881-1950) were all published in the Soviet era, a few of them had pre-revolutionary origins. Two quartets he wrote in 1911 and '09 while a conservatory student re-surfaced some twenty years later designated as Quartets Nos. 3 and 4. An even earlier "schoolboy" piece was later re-worked more radically as Quartet No. 10, premiered in 1945. Myaskovsky partook of an ample share of the turmoil and tragedy of his times: he was wounded and shell-shocked after service on the front line in World War I, and his father, who had been a high-ranking military engineer, was brutally murdered by a revolutionary mob. Despite that, his music, even at its most sombre, hasn't the black bile or biting sarcasm of Shostakovich's, or of his friend Prokofiev's. Of the works collected here, in excellent early '80s performances by the Taneyev Quartet, only Quartet No. 1 has any significantly metallic tang of early S...

Onslow

George Onslow was an odd-man-out among 19th-century French composers. Born into wealth and privilege, the grandson of an English Earl, he had no need to follow the operatic gravy train, with string quartets (of which he wrote 36) and string quintets (there are another 32 of those) forming the bulk of his compositional output. The present disc contains his 28th, 29th and 30th quartets, in compelling performances by the Quatuor Diotima. These quartets were written toward the end of a prolifically-creative period for Onslow in the years 1829-35. Viviane Niaux, in her informative booklet notes, ascribes this to the composer's having heard performances of two of Beethoven's late quartets for the first time in 1828, at their Paris première. Like many of his contemporaries, Onslow was at once "fascinated and disconcerted", and, although he considered them "extravagant", they seem to have been powerfully inspirational. A further spur to creativity may have been his ...

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