This is a Recording

Songs like ' Suddenly ', from her 2013 album One Breath had piqued my interest about Anna Calvi. When I heard the title track from her covers EP 'Strange Weather' the following year, the desire to acquire kicked in, and I ordered a vinyl copy of it (I can't recall why I didn't save myself a few pounds and get it on CD). In any event, I did not regret my purchase: it's an intriguing selection of songs confidently interpreted. I wasn't familiar with FKA Twigs' 'Papi Pacify' before hearing Calvi's version. The original's electronic instrumentation is replaced here by piano, guitar, bass, drums & strings (the last arranged by Nico Muhly), building in an unsettling crescendo from a spare & soft beginning. Another then-recent song follows, in the shape of Connan Mockasin's vaguely creepy 'I'm the Man that will Find You'. A couple of older compositions start and end side B: Suicide's 'Ghost Rider' and Dav...

Thanks to my newfound enthusiasm for Pixies' Surfer Rosa in 1988, I soon afterwards became aware of  Throwing Muses, the two labelmates often being mentioned together in the music press. The next year I bought the latter band's third album Hunkpapa , only to find it easier to admire than enjoy. It wasn't until '91, and The Real Ramona (album #4), that I properly became a fan. The opening track 'Counting Backwards' was my favourite of its songs. Decades later & with those cassettes long gone, I was intrigued, ca. 2018, to find a vinyl copy of The Real Ramona in a Chepstow charity shop. I couldn't see a price on it, so queried the cashier who shrugged and suggested £2, which seemed like a bargain. On getting it home I found there was a price sticker, but inexplicably affixed to the inner sleeve where neither of us had seen it: £12. Having been briefly pleased at landing a good deal I then felt bad at having snatched a tenner from the hands of the needy...

I have relatively little disco music on my shelves. I used to have damaged copies of Herbie Mann's Discothèque and Car Wash by Rose Royce, but now I'm left with some records by Barry White and his protegés Love Unlimited (which might be considered proto-disco); a couple of 7" singles ('Funky Town' & 'Supernature') and this glorious 12" one, which brings together three tracks by those masters of the genre, Chic: 'I Want Your Love', 'Le Freak' and 'Chic Cheer'. A 6:53 re-mix of 'I Want Your Love' occupies the A-side, with the other two tracks on the reverse. The label helpfully gives the BPM values for all three: 116, 120 & 113 respectively. I did enjoy some of Chic's music when it was new, 'Le Freak', in particular, though as disco was falling sharply out of favour by the time I reached my teens, I wouldn't have admitted as much to my peers.  Back then I would have been responding to the overall ...

I caught Frankie Goes to Hollywood's debut TV appearance when a performance of 'Relax' was aired on The Tube in February 1983. I was impressed by the song, and meanwhile conscious of its being daringly risqué for early evening viewing. After it had been reworked and polished up by Trevor Horn et al , it sailed to No. 1 despite a temporary ban by the BBC. I found my copy of it in a Swedish junk-shop about twenty years later. Thanks to Discogs I know it's a 3rd press UK version of the 12" single on which the A side is misidentified as the 'Sex Mix' rather than the so-called 'New York Mix' it really is. The 12" single was issued in a money-grabbing plethora of versions with a variety of sleeve designs, this one being known as the "Two Bodies" sleeve. On the B-Side are the band's version of Gerry & The Pacemakers' 'Ferry Across the Mersey' along with the original version of 'Relax'. One hopes drugs were invol...

Pye Records in the UK had a "Big Deal" series of four-track 12" EPs. Most brought together tracks by a single artist, but this one comprised four numbers first released on Stax Records. I've had it since 2015 or so. It would have been a local charity shop purchase. It's a quality item: Side A features (Theme From) 'Shaft' by Isaac Hayes and 'Who's Making Love' by Johnny Taylor, while on Side B are 'Private Number' by Judy Clay And William Bell, followed by Booker T & The MGs' classic 'Time Is Tight'. Tracks A1 and B2 are my particular favourites (both #4 hit singles in the UK), but the whole thing is a delight. I hadn't known until just now that Booker T. Jones produced and co-wrote 'Private Number', and that he, the MGs and Isaac Hayes all played on 'Who's Making Love'.

A really good EP can make for a particularly satisfying listening experience when there are three or four first-rate tracks in snappy succession. Grant Hart's All of My Senses is just such an EP. I mentioned in an earlier post how I came to acquire it. On the A side is the title track, an expansive song which feels at once cyclical and uplifting. On the B-side the mood is altogether darker, with 'The Main', an acoustic number about heroin addiction whose melody is reminiscent of The Pogues' 'A Pair of Brown Eyes'; and the Arthur Lee song 'Signed D.C.', another tale of addiction, supposedly based on a letter sent to Lee by the original Love drummer Don Conka . The B-side tracks were originally recorded for a session broadcast by BBC Radio Scotland. Overall, it's a highly enjoyable nine-and-a-bit minutes of music. I like the photomontage on the front cover too.

My Dad was an Eurythmics fan. I don't know how it is he took a shine to their music, but not to that of any of the other synth-pop duos of the day, but there it is. He had copies of the Sweet Dreams and Revenge LPs. I'd been a fan too, since falling for their song 'The Walk', which I'd long assumed had been the lead single from Sweet Dreams , but no, wikipedia tells me it came out after 'This is the House'. It's hard to believe in retrospect that the immediately seductive 'Love is a Stranger' was only the third single from the album (only to be re-issued anew in the wake of the great success of 'Sweet Dreams' (the song)). It sounds fantastic given the room to breathe on a 12" single. I've always loved the video for the song, too. Of the two tracks on the B side, the first 'Let's Just Close Our Eyes' is a synth-heavy reworking of 'The Walk' which I like much less than the original. The second track, 'Mon...

At the British Heart Foundation charity shop in Chepstow (now seemingly closed) one pandemic Saturday morning I found a cache of late '80s/early '90s indie records including a single by Bob Mould's band Sugar and this 12" by Grant Hart's Nova Mob; as well as Hart's first two solo singles. I wondered if perhaps there had also been some Hüsker Dü vinyl that another punter had snapped up first. I'd been slow getting in to Hüsker Dü, only climbing aboard that bandwagon when it had stopped moving, after the release of Warehouse: Songs and Stories . But I listened with interest to what I heard of Mould's and Hart's subsequent work, almost buying Sugar's Copper Blue ; and hoping to buy (but, at the time, failing to track down) the self-titled Nova Mob album, having taken a shine to their song 'Old Empire'. On the A side of this record are two mixes of 'Admiral of the Sea'. The 'First Ave. Mix' has the drums pushed right to the ...

'Mr. Pharmacist' (1986) was the first of The Fall's songs to catch my attention, although of course it wasn't one of their own compositions, but a cover of a twenty-year-old single by San Francisco band The Other Half. Presumably, Mark E. Smith would have heard it on the '85 compilation Nuggets Volume 12 . I had encountered a few Fall tracks before that, and would already have been aware of John Peel's reverence for the group, but, up to then, their music had struck teenage me as colourless and cacophonous. Even thereafter, I never became a true believer, and was, at best, a part-time, fair-weather fan. Without the efforts of the then Mrs. Smith to steer them a little closer to the mainstream, I may never have boarded that bus at all. The only one of their records I bought in the following years was The Frenz Experiment , almost no-one's idea of their finest hour, but, even so, I retain a fondness for it. Despite my on-off & sometimes lukewarm enthusi...