This is a Recording

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...

Having acquired the soubriquet "the walrus of love", Barry White thereafter became something of a figure of fun, something that misled me (and presumably others) into disregarding his music. Only within the last few years have I begun to pay it more attention. After picking up a copy of his '74 album Can't Get Enough last summer, which I loved, I sought out some of the music by his protegés Love Unlimited. From a Discogs seller I ordered well-used copies of Under the Influence of... ('73) and In Heat ('74) for only £6.25. The only unappealing thing about In Heat is its awful title. The songs and the singing are strong; the arrangements rich & warmly enveloping. As one would expect from White, the thematic focus is firmly fixed on amatory matters. The opening number 'Move Me No Mountain' (the only one on the record not written by White) offers a refreshing rebuttal to the kind of lyrical hyperbole in songs like 'Ain't No Mountain High E...

If I have an album by a particular artist on vinyl, I'll generally try to get any others of theirs I want on vinyl too; or if I have one CD of someone's music, I'll typically aim to get more CDs when I choose to explore their work further. But not always. Having been given a vinyl copy of Curtis , Mr. Mayfield's excellent debut solo album, last Christmas, and having much enjoyed playing it, getting a copy of Superfly seemed to an obvious next step. Trying to find a vinyl copy of Superfly for less than £30, however, proved difficult. I placed orders on Discogs twice for copies that seemed to be marginally below the going rate, only for both orders to be cancelled on me. Meanwhile there was no shortage of CD versions of it on offer, for a quarter of that price or less, and ulimately I gave up on the idea of format uniformity, saving myself some money and hassle by buying one of those. I ended up with a copy of the 2002 "special edition" on Charly Records which...

For a few years I was haunted by a song I could not identify. On the infrequent occasions I listened to the radio during my time in Rome, whichever station it was I'd settled upon as the least objectionable might play a jazzy-sounding number in which a deep male voice sang in Italian, but with some words of English in the chorus: "It's wonderful... good luck my baby...I dream of you... chips, chips". It was the kind of song where it seemed likelier that these were the chips one might be given in a casino, and not any potato-based foodstuff. I grew to love the song, but each of the half dozen or so times I heard it I never caught the artist or track-title being announced. I resigned myself to its remaining a mystery. But then I heard a snippet of it again a few years later in Amsterdam, issuing from a hotel-room TV as the soundtrack to an ad. On returning from that trip back to the UK, I resolved to see if the internet might be able to solve the puzzle for me. This w...

My copy of 'Nutbush City Limits' is clearly marked "Promotional / NOT FOR SALE" yet I paid a pound for it about three years ago. So far, I have escaped any adverse consequences for contravening that 49-year-old interdiction; as, to the best of my knowledge, has the charity shop that sold it to me.  It has a stereo mix of the song on one side and a mono one on the other.  On the label is a helpful note for DJs that the introduction takes up  22 seconds of its 2:57 duration. I daresay some of them will have taken the liberty of talking over those crucial seconds, which is too bad, as they set up the body of the song very nicely indeed. This outstandingly satisfying groove then becomes a launch-pad for Tina Turner's precise but powerful vocals. It's a tightly-constructed & forcefully-delivered thing of beauty. The song reached No. 4 in the UK (outsold by the likes of Slade, The Sweet and David Cassidy) and did better still in the German-speaking world. I had ...

'Being Boiled' was one of the more unlikely hit singles of the early '80s. A song protesting the cruelty of sericulture, it was The Human League's debut single, first issued in 1978. A reworked version appeared on the band's second album Travelogue in 1980, with a re-release of the original 7" (slightly tweaked with added stereo effects) following a few months later. Only in the wake of the League's breakthrough album Dare , did a further re-issue (seemingly identical with the 1980 one) finally achieve success, reaching the respectable heights of number 6 in January '82. Even then, it still sounded forbiddingly futuristic, despite its having been "recorded on a domestic tape recorder, in mono, in an abandoned factory, at a cost of £2.50" (wikipedia). My copy is one of the re-issued variants, very likely the later one. The B-side, 'Circus of Death' is good too, though I'm not sure it really needed the 25-second spoken introduction ...

A few years too young to properly absorb the impact of punk when it was new, I feel now as if I've aged my way past it to some extent, much more often inclined to reach for the musical equivalent of a pipe & slippers than anything shouty or confrontational. In between, I was very much a fan, more so of the pop-punk side of things (The Ramones, Blondie, Buzzcocks, The Undertones) than of its angrier or more politicised aspects. I first bought Singles Going Steady on cassette when I was twenty-one, and it was already ten years old. At that time it felt like the perfect album. I'd mentioned my erstwhile affection for it to my sister, who subsequently (about five years ago) found a well-worn vinyl copy that she kindly gave to me. It turned out to be a US first pressing. Thrilled as I was to hear it all again, I've not often revisited it. Despite that, I don't think I'll be letting it go in the forseeable future, unlike my copies of Never Mind the Bollocks... and t...

Booker T. Jones & the M.G.'s are captured in seemingly sombre mood on the cover of their 1970 album Melting Pot . Reputedly, by the time this this record was made, both Jones and guitarist Steve Cropper were becoming estranged from Stax records - their musical home for most of the '60s - in the wake of a change of management there. The photo need not, of course, have had any relation to those tensions, but it does help illustrate that all was not well behind the scenes. Happily for the listener, however, it is in no way an "off" or awkward-sounding record: quite the opposite. Made in New York, rather than their native Memphis, the band are on top form throughout. Most of their previous albums had given the impression of being hastily-assembled sets, heavy on the cover-versions, but on this one, all the tracks are original compositions. The very best comes first, in the shape of the 8:15-long title-track, an outstanding groove with Al Jackson, Jr.'s drums its b...

A part-smoked Sobranie cigarette with lipstick on the filter tip perched on a fancy ashtray; a single long-stemmed red rose; a bottle of costly-looking booze (cognac?) and a glass poured from it; a cup of coffee and something resembling a half-eaten chocolate truffle; two glasses of Dom Perignon champagne, one of them, again, marked with lipstick; and the open champagne bottle and its cork; a bowl of beluga caviar; a single uneaten prawn; and a pair of high-heeled shoes. Exactly how these these signifiers of affluence and romance relate to the music on Bill Withers' Greatest Hits (1981) isn't obvious, but it is an interesting and eye-catching cover design. I was familiar with the biggest of these hits: 'Just The Two Of Us', 'Ain't No Sunshine', 'Lovely Day' and 'Lean On Me', from radio play back in the '70s and '80s, but at that time these songs, as with most soul music, seemed as if it were a language I didn't quite understand a...

My first time back at the local charity shop after the long lockdown early last year, I found copies of the self-titled Roxy Music and For Your Pleasure LPs there: "deluxe" 1977 re-presses rather than early '70s originals, but in great condition. The novelty of being in any kind of shop other than a supermarket for the first time in months meant that I gladly paid up the £25 combined asking price, where otherwise I might have baulked. Being a "deluxe" copy means it retains the original issue's gatefold sleeve, with the fantastic photos of the band inside , where each of the five core members pose with a guitar. All of them look fabulous, especially Brian Eno, resplendent in blue eyeshadow, lipstick, an ostrich-feather-trimmed jacket, black flared trousers with silver spiderweb detailing and platform-soled boots. For Your Pleasure was released in March '73: four months later, Eno was out of the group.     My father was a great admirer of Roxy Music, al...

I knew and loved The Only Ones' 'Another Girl, Another Planet' when I was in my late teens, but wasn't aware of the band's catalogue beyond their best-known song. At some point during my university years I took a chance on a cassette copy of their Peel Sessions Album , then newly-released. At first hearing I wasn't sure I liked the session version of 'Another Girl...' as much as the single version; but subsequent listens changed my mind, and I grew to love many of the other tracks too. When, at length, I found a cassette copy of the band's third album Baby's Got a Gun , I was disappointed by it: I did not care for the production on it at all. I later tried again with their compilation The Immortal Story , but again, found I liked it much less than the Peel Sessions , which, as one Discogs commenter pithily put it, is "like a 'best of' but with even better versions of all their best songs". I let the matter rest there, but then t...

On the back cover of Memphis Underground is a remarkable photograph taken in the American Sound Studio (in Memphis) during the making of the album. From an elevated vantage-point we see Mann himself, shirtless & hirsute in tight white jeans playing his flute; along with five other musicians and one other man, who I think may be recording engineer extraodinaire Tom Dowd. Mann is separated from the others by padded room dividers to help isolate his contribution, the larger of those dividers with a window in it seemingly punctured by four bullet-holes, above which is written - possibly in lipstick - "BONNIE AND CLYDE WAS HERE". It's a very good album of soul jazz, or perhaps jazz-meets-r'n'b. While I admire and enjoy Mann's flute-playing lead, for me the chief interest comes from the wonderful grooves laid down by the "Memphis Boys", i.e. the studio's excellent house band, aided by an additional trio of visiting musicians, among them Roy Ayers....

For someone who was a curious neophyte, getting a six-CD box-set of The Meters' "Complete Josie/Reprise & Warner Recordings 1968-1977" was excessive. In retrospect, Here Comes the Meter Man , a less extensive compliation collecting the first three albums over two CDs may have been a better choice, but some reviews had complained of the sound quality on the latter, and this one wasn't all that much more expensive. The six discs contain eight full albums and a wealth of singles and other bonus tracks. Also in the box is a forty-page booklet with many photos and extensive notes by Charles Waring, plus a very thorough breakdown of the discs' contents. After playing through all the discs a couple of times apiece, my preference is firmly for the impeccable instrumental numbers, mostly drawn from The Meters and Look-Ka Py Py that fill Disc #1. For me, it's the perfect music for driving to. That's not to say that there aren't treasures elsewhere too, suc...

The P-Funk section of my record collection begins and ends with this '76 single on the Casablanca label. Obviously it's better than nothing, if not by much. I did once also own a copy of Funkadelic's Maggot Brain on CD, but that got lost somewhere along the way. It's a shorter version of a track from their '75 album Mothership Connection . where it went by the reversed title 'Give Up The Funk (Tear The Roof Off The Sucker)', as it likewise did on some other releases of the 7". I learn from an annotation on genius.com that "If you listen to 'Give up the Funk' as a single, outside the context of Mothership Connection , it’s just a good funk dance track with lyrics that seem to serve no purpose beyond rallying you to the dance floor. In the Mothership Connection story, though, this is the climax of an alien invasion..." Having not heard the album, I was unaware of that subtlety. Even so, it does work remarkably well as just a good fun...

Isao Tomita made his name, following the example set by Wendy Carlos' Switched-on Bach , with a succession of albums through the '70s featuring works from the Western Classical canon adapted and arranged for the analogue sythesizers of the day. For example, his first record in this vein - Snowflakes are Dancing (1973) - was based on works by Claude Debussy. The basis for much of Tomita's fifth such offering, The Bermuda Triangle (1979), comes from pieces composed by Sergei Prokofiev, but this time some of the adaptations are looser, and, as the title suggests, there's more going on than just that. Nowadays we're told that the Bermuda Triangle is no more (or less) inexplicable than any other expanse of deep ocean, but in the late '70s and early '80s it was having its mysterious moment in the moonlight, as exemplified by such productions as the Bermuda Triangle board game (1976); the TV series The Fantastic Journey (1977) and of course Barry Manilow's ...

I can't recall hearing anything about Nick Drake until the early '90s, and the release of the Way to Blue compilation. If I'd caught any of his songs on the radio before that, they had failed to register. Previous re-issues and compilations of his music had passed me by. In the late '70s and '80s, his sister Gabrielle 's name was undoubtedly better-known than his, owing to her work as a TV actor. Over the last twenty-odd years his posthumous fame has seemed only to spread ever more widely, and was long-established before I belatedly acquired any of his records. The first one I picked up was Pink Moon . On a rare visit to the HMV shop at the Cribbs Causeway mall a few years ago they had copies of the 2013 re-release on offer, and I thought "why not?" The pandemic was in full swing before it was joined by Five Leaves Left . A copy of Bryter Later - again, from the 2013 release - completed the set last summer. Unlike the other two albums, this one doesn...

I wouldn't usually write about a record I'd only listened to once, but in this case I'm at least slightly acquainted with most of the music on it; and unavoidably know some of it very well. In Chepstow a couple of weeks ago I picked several records out of a crate on the floor of a charity shop of which this was one: a 1978 double-LP Hendrix compilation. It cost me rather less than the £6.30 price sticker on the cover from a prior sale. As with any compilation I'm more in agreement with some of the editorial choices than others: we have 'Purple Haze' here but not 'Foxy Lady'; 'Little Wing' but not 'Spanish Castle Magic'; 'Burning of the Midnight Lamp' but, sadly, not 'Crosstown Traffic'. It also ventures beyond the three Experience records, with the last couple of tracks on Side C and all of Side D taken from some of the many of his posthumously-issued albums like The Cry of Love , Rainbow Bridge , and so forth. These, b...

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 ...

Here is a 1974 7" single by Kevin Ayers on the Island label. It was released a few months after his ambitious (but, to my mind, lacklustre) album The Confessions of Dr. Dream and Other Stories , and one month after the June 1 1974 concert featuring Nico, John Cale and Brian Eno; which may have been a happier occasion had Ayers' dalliance with the then Mrs. Cale not been brought to light shortly before it. 'After The Show' itself is rather a tepid number, and an odd choice for a single. The attraction for me is all in the B-Side, 'Thank You Very Much', a song I dearly love. Ayers sings it soft & low, accompanied only by acoustic guitar. It's a refreshingly simple and direct recording, in sharp contrast with the overcooked production that prevailed on Dr. Dream .  Neither of the songs on the single were on Dr. Dream nor on Ayers' next album Sweet Deceiver . I bought it two or three years ago from one of my usual haunts in Chepstow. It cost me a poun...

'Midnight at the Oasis' was very often on the radio when I was five years old, and occasionally thereafter. I wasn't especially fond of it as a young child, though it has since grown on me. For a long time I wouldn't have been able to link that song with Maria Muldaur's name, and it was probably only within the last 5-10 years that the connection was established in my mind, a connection that chimed when I saw a copy of Waitress in a Donut Shop on sale locally last summer, I was happy to wager a few pounds on it (and another few on Barry White's Can't Get Enough ) in the hope I might like them. It proved a small risk well worth taking. Barry White, of course, is a genius, and Waitress in a Donut Shop, while not the sort of album that tends to feature on "Best Of" lists, is excellent entertainment, beautifully made. Having a supporting cast of such notable artistes as Ry Cooder, Jim Keltner, Linda Ronstadt, Spooner Oldham, Paul Butterfield, Klaus V...