This is a Recording

Little Axe is a stage name used by guitarist Skip McDonald (itself an alias for the man born Bernard Alexander). It's also the name of one of his collaborations with producer Adrian Sherwood, aided by long-term musical associates Doug Wimbish on bass and Keith LeBlanc on drums, and also in this instance by percussionist Talvin Singh. Whereas Sherwood is best-known for his Jamaican-inspired dub, this record is built on the foundations of McDonald's formative blues influences. The clever title alludes to Howlin' Wolf, whose voice is sampled on some of its tracks. While there's virtually nothing of house music per se in its musical ingredients, it does involve programming & sampling used in ways which arguably owe something to it. The feel of the album is generally dark & weighty, with its mesmerising grooves the main attraction. McDonald's bluesy guitar work blends with as tight a rhythm section as one could wish for, with Singh's tabla a fascinating addit...

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...

Among the several strands of '60s revivalism in the '80s there was a re-exploration (and re-exploitation) of the classics in the Tamla Motown songbook. A new generation grew to appreciate the musicianship of "The Funk Brothers" and the vocal talents (and songwriting skills) of the likes of Smokey Robinson. Not that his music had exactly faded into oblivion: songs like 'The Tears of a Clown' (a UK No. 1 upon its re-issue in 1970) were oft-replayed oldies that had formed part of the background radiation as I was growing up. In recent years I've acquired a few of Robinson's singles: a '67 copy of 'I Second that Emotion' (a song I'd first come to know via the cover version by art-pop outfit Japan); 'The Tears of a Clown' (from the hit '70 re-release); and his '81 hit 'Being With You' (previously mentioned in passing here ). While the former two numbers were by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles; the latter was a stric...

My introduction to TV on the Radio was via the TV, not the Radio. In 2004 I caught the video for 'Staring at the Sun' on MTV2 and realised at once it was something well out of the ordinary. I didn't love it at first acquaintance, but after seeing and hearing it a few more times, I'd changed my mind and was inclined to pay some money for it, ordering a CD copy of the 'Young Liars' EP from Amazon.  I'm glad I ordered the EP first, rather than their debut album Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes as I think it's the better effort. Had it been the other way around I may have been discouraged. 'Satellite' comes first: with its rapid heartbeat-like rhythm and layered vocal harmonies - it's a good song, but better is to come. The eerie and disconcerting 'Staring at the Sun' follows it, which still sounds out on its own nearly twenty years on. Coolly world-weary - and a tad less unconventional - 'Blind' is the EP's longest numbe...

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...

I distinctly recall seeing Jeffrey Daniel's famous 1982 appearance on Top of the Pops promoting 'A Night to Remember': which introduced "body-popping" to a fascinated British public. The song, and the three other hit singles that followed it ('I Can Make You Feel Good', 'There It Is' and 'Friends') were very often on the radio and TV that year - and I found them pleasant enough, but my musical attention (such as it was, when I glanced up from my new Sinclair ZX Spectrum home computer) focussed more on the likes of Madness, Soft Cell, The Fun Boy Three, XTC and Yazoo. Why then should it be that on picking up a copy of Shalamar's Friends at a charity shop six months ago, seeing those song-titles in the track-listing should provoke such a heady surge of affectionate nostalgia? Snippets of the music began playing in my head, and I thought that for the £1 asking price it was well worth taking it home to see how I'd enjoy the album. I ...

The Id is an album which gives the impression of having had a great deal of talent, time and money thrown at it in a way that by no means guaranteed a successful outcome. Recorded in the wake of the runaway success of her first record On How Life Is , Macy Gray's second features a large cast-list; seems to have been recorded all over the place; runs to nearly an hour long; and includes many thickly-layered production jobs. Yet (for me) it does mostly work very well, just about holds together, and marks an improvement over what had been an excellent debut. I don't think I bought this from a record shop but rather from some other kind of retail space - a petrol station or a department store maybe - it would have been somewhere in Sweden in late 2001. While I was a tad nonplussed by it at first, it has grown on me, and I've played it so often that the disc is now in a sorry-looking state: I probably ought to get a new one. The opener 'Relating to a Psychopath' sets up...

The clumsily-titled Stay Awhile / I Only Want to be With You was Dusty Springfield's debut US album release. As often seemed to happen, the track-listing differed from that on her first UK 12" A Girl Called Dusty , issued a couple of months beforehand. Gone are the tracks 'Do Re Mi', 'My Colouring Book', 'Nothing' and 'Don't You Know'. In their places are - as the album title suggests - her first two 7" A-sides 'I Only Want To Be With You' and 'Stay Awhile'; along with 'Something Special' (B-side to 'Stay Awhile') and 'Everyday I Have to Cry' (which, in the UK, had been one of the four tracks on the 'I Just Don't Know What to Do with Myself' EP). A Girl Called Dusty peaked at no. 6 in the UK, but Stay Awhile... despite its higher hit-content, only made it to no. 62 in the US. As with the British original, Springfield is pictured on the cover resplendent in double denim & iconic ...

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 ...

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...

My favourite album of last year was Fatigue by L'Rain. I can't recall how I first heard about it - did I read a review and then seek it out? Did I catch one of its tracks played on the radio? Had the YouTube algorithm, in its finite wisdom, suggested something from it? I suspect my first introduction to it was on-line, and took place about this time last year. By whatever means I made its acquaintance, I fell under its spell almost immediately. Even so, I hesitated for a short time before buying, as it was not made available on CD. It irked me to spend more on a larger disc when I might otherwise have paid less on a smaller one. I don't think there's any special benefit derived from its being on the older medium - if anything, some tracks (such as the opening 'Fly, Die', which begins with snatches of music - overlain by noises of sirens, gunfire and helicopters - punctuated by brief silences) might have had slightly more impact in digital form. Tightfisted qu...

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...

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 the almost-completely out-of-touch, end-of-year best-of lists can be useful and instructive. Having stuck my head in the musical sand in the Spring of 2020, I'd missed the advent of Sault's two Untitled albums until I saw enthusiastic praise for them that December. After trying on a few tracks for size, I ordered CD copies of them both (from Juno, as I recall) in January last year, It hadn't been long since I'd first seen the name "Inflo": in the credits for Michael Kiwanuka's eponymous 2019 album. Impressive as that record was, it's as captain of the good ship SAULT that his vision & talent have truly come into their own. Untitled (Rise) can seem an uplifting carnivalesque counterpart to the oftener mournful & angry Untitled (Black Is) - but that's an oversimplification, as they're meanwhile cut from different parts of the same cloth. Even a dance music ignoramus like me can appreciate some of the strands skilfully interwoven he...

Having found this 1965 LP at the local charity shop I was pleased to find a commenter at Discogs had written: "If you can only have one Jr Walker, this is it, because no collection but this contains all these essentials: 'Roadrunner', 'Shotgun', 'Cleo's Mood' and 'Cleo's Back'". It's a terrific album, - the All Stars' first - and it has been too long since I put it on (I'll remedy that later). I was already acquainted with the title track, and with 'Roadrunner', but the rest was all new to me. The opener, 'Cleo's Mood', is a slinky instrumental. 'Do the Boomerang' raises the tempo and introduces some vocals, which provide instruction & encouragement for those doing the titular dance. Then comes the knockout combination of 'Shotgun' and 'Road Runner', and so on. The LP's only flaw, which isn't really much of a weakness, is that it feels more like a set of singles than a ...

"A stunning introduction to music's freshest new voice!" boasts the hype sticker on my copy of Janelle Monáe's Metropolis: The Chase Suite EP: a bold claim, but not, in my opinion, too much of an overstatement. This "Special Edition" of Metropolis came out in 2010 around the time her major label debut album The Archandroid was hitting the shelves. Its original release (as Metropolis, Suite I Of IV: The Chase ) had been in 2007, with two further tracks included here. The scene is set by the opening number 'The March Of The Wolfmasters', where pseudo-orchestral music underpins a spoken introduction to the fictional world of the tracks that follow. The fun really begins with the uptempo 'Violet Stars Happy Hunting!!!', a thrilling rollercoaster ride through that world. Almost as good is 'Many Moons', where real world imagery overlays Monáe's imaginary city. 'Cybertronic Purgatory' is a short, ethereal interlude. Another hi...

Down among the least valuable albums I own is this 2010 CD of Corinne Bailey Rae's second full-length release The Sea . At Discogs the median price for it is currently £1.88, a penny more than the LP of orchestral music by Leos Janáček I wrote about in January, and a penny less than a CD copy of The Very Best Of Prince . In general, soul albums from the latter part of the CD era are cheap as chips: now is a great time to be buying them. In any case, it's another illustration, if any were needed, of the lack of correlation between monetary and artistic value. My late wife was binge-watching episodes of the show Medium one evening, ca. 2007, while I was busy with something or other at the computer in the next room. During one particlar episode (S3E12: 'The One Behind The Wheel') a brief musical refrain was played very frequently throughout: often enough that it caught my attention. My wife asked me to look up the song in question, which turned out to be CBR's 'L...

For about seven months in 1997 I shared an apartment in Rome with a fellow ex-pat, an Englishman with a taste for the acid jazz and neo-soul music of the day, and it was through him that I first heard the likes of Erykah Badu, D'Angelo and Maxwell. For all its merits, it was a style I couldn't seem to get a proper grip on at the time, and indeed, it was only really during the recent pandemic that I gave these artists another hearing, at last developing more of an appreciation for them. About this time last year I spotted a few Maxwell CDs in a box at the local charity shop & thought the MTV Unplugged EP might provide a digestible introduction to his work. So it proved - it's a record I very much enjoy. At over 34 minutes I'd say it's more a short album than an EP. On the strength of this disc I also acquired a copy of Maxwell's Urban Hang Suite but I found that a bit too much Maxwell for me in a single sitting, succumbing as it did to a common late-'90...

I've always loved The Jam's swansong single, and was delighted to find a 7" copy of it in a picture sleeve about four years ago. Back in the '80s my sister had a copy of the 'Start!' single, and, later, the Snap! double-album compilation. The latter, despite my affection for many of the songs thereon, never quite gelled for me as an LP: I seem to enjoy their music better in smaller portions; a single is ideal. Besides this one, I also have 'That's Entertainment' and 'The Bitterest Pill' as 45s. The core trio were augmented on this number by piano, trumpet & saxophone, and by Tracie Young's backing vocals. Bruce Foxton also joined in the singing. Paul Weller was obviously half-way to The Style Council by this point, not only on the soulful A-side, but on the B-side too. 'Shopping' is a moodily shuffling number that includes a splash of brass and some lovely guitar work, and isn't far short of coming together very nicely. ...

'Street Life' was, for decades, my one point of contact with the voluminous discography of The Crusaders. Only in the last few years have I heard a little more: I found one of their '70s albums in a charity shop, but it didn't grab me; and I picked up a copy of B.B. King's Midnight Believer (prominently featuring members of the band) which I enjoyed much more - although I ended up giving it to my Dad. I also found a copy of 'Street Life' on 7': this was every bit as good as I rememberered it. The sleek arrangement and Randy Crawford's exquisite vocal combine to wonderful effect. I'd been cluelessly oblivious to the fact that the single version (just short of four minutes long) was much abbreviated when compared to the album version, which clocks in at over eleven minutes. The B-side is 'The Hustler', a funkier instrumental number which conjures up a similarly nocturnal cityscape as one listens. The single version is again shortened relat...