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...

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...

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea has attracted a great deal of fervent praise and no small measure of derision in its time. As is to be expected, given that I own a copy, I count myself among its admirers. It was already five years old before I'd even heard of it. Come 2003, intrigued by laudatory reviews I'd found on-line like this one , I downloaded an mp3 copy via LimeWire. A first cursory listen to a few snippets failed to impress me, but my on-line peers kept going on about it, and in due course ('04) I ordered a CD copy from Amazon. On sitting down to properly listen under headphones for the first time I became a convert within its first five minutes. By the end I was deeply impressed and moved. I revisited it very often in the years that followed, and tried to spread the word among my off-line friends and acquaintances (absolutely none of whom were interested). Not only did I find it a fascinating work of art in its own right, it also served as a gateway to further won...

Benny Green, one time jazz critic of The Observer , begins his sleevenotes for this UK pressing of The Oscar Peterson Trio's Night Train with a heavy-duty literary reference: "'The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of the intellect,' wrote Proust, 'in some material object we do not suspect'". Green is thereby setting up his contention that "it is a brave man indeed who would make an album composed of material which he knows belongs to the past consciousness of those likely to listen to it", a roundabout way of explaining most of the tracks here were well-worn, familiar standards by 1962, when the album was recorded. The telescoping effect of time's passing inevitably gives the listener from a later generation a foreshortened perspective and a less acute sense of the historical truth: I know in the abstract that Duke Ellington's 'C-Jam Blues', for example, evokes the early '40s rather than the early ...

Among my favourite songs of 1981 was The Teardrop Explodes' breakthrough single 'Reward', a UK No, 6 hit in March of that year. I was thinking it was as good a song as Julian Cope ever wrote, so was surprised to see on the label that it's credited to "Gill and Balfe", the band's guitarist and keyboardist at the time it was recorded. While Alan Gill reportedly came up with the memorable bassline and blaring trumpet fanfare, it seems Cope did provide the lyrics, and was responsible for shaping the song's final frenetic sound. According to Cope, "Gary [Dwyer] could only drum two ways, reggae and soul, so he played it soul and we had a song..." The B-side, 'Strange House in the Snow' is a rather more experimental concoction, with something resembling scraped violin strings prominent in the mix, along with piano (plus the usual guitar, bass & drums) and an unhinged-sounding vocal performance from Mr Cope. Drugs may have been involved.

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 ...

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...

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 ...

Swing may not have altogether still been the thing even in 1956 when this album was recorded. It isn't, in any case, what I look for when I put the record on, but rather tenor saxophonist Jean-Baptiste Illinois Jacquet's way with slow blues & ballads. He plays here as part of a sextet including such notable big band veterans as Jo Jones on drums and Roy Eldridge on trumpet. Jacquet himself had first found fame in the early '40s playing with Lionel Hampton's orchestra. My favourite track is the singularly evocative version of ' Harlem Nocturne ', with the number that follows it ('Can't We Be Friends?' - a mellow ballad dating back to '29) a close second. Not much in evidence (even on the more uptempo numbers) is the "honking" sax style that Jacquet had become associated with, where high harmonics alternate with notes from the bottom of the instrument's range. He had hit upon this style - according to the slightly stilted sleeveno...

Several of my musical discoveries of the '00s were sparked by listening to the Now Hear This! promotional CDs affixed to The Word magazine. The disc that came with the May 2006 issue kicked off with the track 'Diferente' by The Gotan Project, which I enjoyed well enough to place an Amazon order for the trio's album Lunático . I must have clicked carelessly, as I was taken by surprise when a large, flat, square parcel arrived the following week. I'd meant to order it on CD, but instead had procured a 2-LP vinyl copy. That year happened to be when vinyl sales were at their nadir, and, although I had by then acquired a small collection of second-hand LPs, I'd no intention of buying new records, imagining them to be virtually a thing of the past (outside of club culture). Lunático is about an hour long - as was commonplace for albums then - an inconvenient duration for vinyl, so it had been split into four roughly quarter-hour-long sides, necessitating annoying...

'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...

Between his stint as XTC's keyboard player ('78-9) and co-founding Shriekback ('82), Barry Andrews released a solo EP ('Town and Country') and this 7" single ('Rossmore Road'): the latter in 1980; and then again in '81 with a different B-side ('Pages of my Love'). It's the B-side of the first version, however (' Win a Night Out with a Well-Known Paranoiac '), that led me to buy the record. I'd known and loved it from the mid '80s, having heard it a number of times on Anne Nightingale's request show on BBC Radio 1. Where 'Rossmore Road' is a deadpan evocation, with a mellifluous chrous, of the titular London thoroughfare (in Lisson Grove, not far west of Regent's Park); 'Win a Night Out...' is an extravagant six-minute-plus fantasia with an agitated & appropriately paranoid-sounding narration alternating with the track's title repeated as a sung refrain.  The rear of the picture sleeve lists...

Why do I have a bulky 12-LP box set of "Light Classical Music" occupying some of my limited shelf-space when I have no intention of listening to the music therein? Sentimental reasons explain it. Visiting my father one day he asked what music I was listening to & I replied that about half of it was classical in some form or another. He'd never acquired any taste for it, he said, whereupon a thought occurred to him and he retrieved this box from another room and handed it to me: it had been his mother's. I didn't imagine I'd end up with a keepsake of my paternal grandmother. It was surprising that anything of hers had survived some rather chaotic episodes in her house in the years following her death. Having said that, it had suffered considerable wear and tear: the box itself was broken, some of the inner sleeves were torn & stained, and one of the discs (no. 4) was in patently unplayable condition. Knowing it had been kept near a coal fire, and not fa...

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...

At an illicit teenage party thrown by my sister while our parents were out, one of her friends, under the influence of a flagon or so of Strongbow, had put his copy of Motörhead's Ace of Spades on to my Dad's turntable and, as close as he could get to the speakers was shout-singing along utterly enthralled by the title track's chorus, meanwhile accompanying himself on air guitar. Two years her junior (I would have been twelve or thirteen), I was under strict instructions to say nothing to anyone about their revelry: an injunction I have respected until now. I'd heard 'Ace of Spades' before, but witnessing that moment I properly felt some of its mind-altering power for the first time, and learned a new respect for it. I don't exactly recall, but this event may have taken place in 1981, the year that "Headgirl's" (i.e. Motörhead's and Girlschool's) collaborative St. Valentines Day Massacre EP was released. Few would argue it's a hig...

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...