Cassette experiment day 70 - The Clash 'London Calling'

I’d like to start with a little musical history lesson today. It’s aimed at those who grew up in the CD and mp3 generation. If you pre-date this period (as I do) then you may wish to skip the next paragraph as you might find it just a little bit patronising – sorry.

In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s an album that contained 70-80 minutes of music was known as a double-album. Single albums generally consisted of 20 minutes per side, give or take a few minutes – so if you had any more music than this you would either keep it for the next one, or release a double album consisting of two discs, often contained in a gatefold sleeve.

Some of the greatest albums ever made have been double albums. ‘The Beatles’ by The Beatles, ‘Blonde on Blonde’ by Bob Dylan, ‘Out of the Blue’ by ELO, ‘Songs in the key of life’ by Stevie Wonder, ‘The lamb lies down on Broadway’ by Genesis, ‘Tusk’ by Fleetwood Mac. I could go on (as you know!).

One of the many, many things that the ‘Punk movement’ used to sneer at was the music ‘establishment’, and one of the most ‘establishment’ aspects of music was the double album. Then something changed. A punk band (in attitude if not in music) released one of the greatest ever double albums – possibly the greatest ever.

Released just before Christmas 1979, ‘London Calling’ by The Clash is one of the most consistently exciting albums ever released. From the slightly over-familiar title track all the way through to the un-credited closer ‘Train in vain’ the album sparkles with energy and quality.

Personal favourites are ‘The right profile’, ‘Clampdown’, ‘The guns of Brixton’, ‘Death or glory’ and the aforementioned ‘Train in vain’. But play me anything and I’ll just grin from ear to slightly sticky-out ear.

The album’s iconic artwork mirrors that of Elvis Presley’s debut LP, which I also own. Unfortunately the cover of my copy of Elvis’ debut is badly torn. Spookily, as you can see from the picture above, so is my ‘London Calling’ cassette insert.

And of course following ‘London Calling’, The Clash proceeded to record one of the all time great triple albums, ‘Sandinista’, of which I have two vinyl copies and one CD copy, but no cassette copies. So it won’t feature in the cassette experiment in the weeks to come. Sorry.

Label – CBS

Year – 1979

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Cassette experiment day 69 - Art Garfunkel 'Lefty'

The acknowledged yardstick for musical inoffensiveness seems to be whether you could play a record to your Grandma.

I'm working from memory here, because neither of mine are still around. I can say though that I never remember either of them ever owning a record. Not even the two singles that Grandmas in the 70s seemed to have to possess by law - Ennio Morricone's 'Chi Mai' and Lena Martell's 'One day at a time'. Sweet Jesus.

The reason I’m waffling in admittedly characteristically obtuse fashion is by way of introduction to our cassette today, the distinctly Granny-friendly 'Lefty' by Art Garfunkel.

There's absolutely nothing here to scare anyone’s Granny - but that's not to say it's not an enjoyable experience (far more so than my recent foray into Art’s ‘Watermark’ as you may remember).

The album features a cover photograph of a much younger Art (probably still referred to back then as ‘little Arthur Ira’ I would imagine) in a baseball stance preparing to face the pitcher. Art holds the bat left-handed, hence the album’s title.

The big hitter here (see what I did?) trumpeted by the sticker on the cassette’s box is Art’s version of The Tymes’ doo-wop classic ‘So much in love’. While the original is one of my all-time favourites, Art’s version is pretty pleasing too.

Others standing out are a very slow version of gap-toothed smoothy Percy Sledge’s ‘When a man loves a woman’ and ‘Love is the only chain’, which starts unremarkably but develops into a very addictive Fleetwood Mac (‘Tango in the night’ era) style cracker.

Also featured is Stephen Bishop’s ‘King of Tonga’. It’s not much cop if you ask me, but it is the only song I know that mentions Tonga. I’d be fairly certain that Tonga’s national anthem may also mention Tonga too. Just a hunch.

So there we have it. Art Garfunkel’s ‘Lefty’. I’m just off for a haircut.

Label – CBS

Year – 1988

Cassette experiment day 68 - Prince and the Revolution 'Parade'

Music films are a mixed bag. Top of the heap as far as I’m concerned is probably ‘Walk the line’, but there are some other fine ones too. ‘Still famous’ pushes my buttons. So does the under-rated ‘Empire Records’. And ‘La vie en rose’ is, in the words of Barry Norman, ‘an absolute corker, and no mistake’.

Some, however, are not quite so accomplished. Today I listened to a cassette that is actually the soundtrack to a film that many who’ve seen it (yours-truly included) would like to forget, ‘Under the Cherry Moon’. The album, of course, is ‘Parade’ by Prince and The Revolution.

‘Under the Cherry Moon’ stars Prince as Christopher Tracy. It also stars Kristin Scott Thomas, Francesca Annis and with a number of others who, quite frankly, were old enough to know better.

While the album does reference the film’s story line in places, it is also very capable of standing up on its own – which is quite fortunate because it has now had to do so for 27 years.

Suffering slightly from an early onset of Prince’s now well-known quality control problems, the album opens with the poorest three tracks, before hitting its stride at track 4 with the film’s title track. The chirpy ‘Girls & Boys’ follows at track 5 before the quality tails off considerably towards the end of side one with the repetitive ‘Life can be so nice’ and the unremarkable instrumental ‘Venus de Milo’.

Side 2 is typically more consistent, containing three singles typical of Prince’s output. The first, ‘Mountains’ has to be the drabbest single that Prince released while still in his creative hey-day, the second, ‘Kiss’ towers head and shoulders above the rest of the album. While in its single form ‘Kiss’ ends abruptly and imaginatively, here it melts nicely into the third of side 2’s singles, one of Prince’s most under-appreciated tunes, ‘Anotherloverholenyohead’. Side 2’s final track is the slow but lovely ‘Sometimes it snows in April’ (but of course it will only be newsworthy if it happens in London).

Anyone want to watch ‘Purple Rain’ with me?

Label – Paisley Park

Year – 1986

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But only if you want to!

Cassette experiment day 67 - Big Daddy 'Cutting their own groove'

You may well have gathered by now that I have fairly unusual musical tastes, particularly in light of evidence given to you in the blog yesterday!

Today’s cassette may add further fuel to that particular fire, as it’s by the band credited in some quarters as the inventor of the ‘mash-up’ (which may be a good or bad thing depending on your point of view), Big Daddy, with their 1991 album ‘Cutting their own groove’.

I’m no great fan of the lazy shorthand description of being a ‘Marmite’ band, but in this case it’s extremely accurate, you’ll either love them or hate them. When I played it in the car yesterday Susan gave me the impression that she’d rather be having teeth pulled. She doesn’t like Marmite either. Or its slightly less strident antipodean cousin, Vegemite.

So, what we have here is an album consisting entirely of cover versions (and you know how much I love those!) of modern (in 1991) tunes recorded in the style of classic tunes and artists from the 1950s and 1960s.

So we have the unique experience of hearing ‘Nothing compares 2 U’ performed as Little Richard’s ‘The girl can’t help it’, ‘Once in a lifetime’ re-imagined as Harry Belafonte’s ‘Day O (the banana boat song)’ and, logically, Welcome to the jungle’ as ‘The lion sleeps tonight’ (or is it the other way around?).

There are some misfires too, for every inspired choice – ‘Like a virgin’ being sung in Frankie Avalon ‘Venus’ style is one – there is a lame Elvis style version of ‘Graceland’. And I’m not that interested in hearing ‘Money for nothing’ re-recorded by anybody if brutally honest.

It is fun though to hear the pompous bubble that is Mike and The Mechanics’ ‘The living years’ pricked and brought back to life as one of the great ‘death songs’ of the 1960s, ‘Leader of the pack’

One last thing – ‘Ice ice baby’ (already a mash-up of sorts anyway) as ‘Johnny B Goode’ really has to be heard to be believed!

Label - Rhino

Year – 1991

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Cassette experiment day 66 - Boney M 'Love for sale'

We live in an age of musical rehabilitation. Acts previously sneered at are now the height of fashion again. The phenomenon probably started with ABBA and we’ve all slowly started to re-embrace musicians that we would previously never have admitted to loving.

So now we all love Showaddywaddy again, Bucks Fizz albums are considered to be pop classics and groups like Dollar for example are being cited as influences on many of the current crop of musical trailblazers.

As if to illustrate the truth behind this theory, I proudly purchased the 1978 Bee Gees classic ‘Spirits having flown’ last weekend (for the princely sum of £2 from a charity shop in Leyburn). Come on, you know you love it. If you’ve got a copy I urge you to dig it out and listen to it with fresh, 2013 ears. I’d also be interested to know if you think the boys’ shorts have been arranged for dramatic effect on the inserts’ silhouette picture.

There is, however, one group whose rehabilitation seems a million miles away. Boney M. Maybe it’s the fact that only some of them performed on their recordings. Possibly the reason is that the musical driver (and major performer) was the German producer behind the Milli Vanilli ‘scandal’, Frank Farian. Could it be that our cassette of the day, their second album, ‘Love for sale’ had a hugely inappropriate cover. (The girls, naked and bound with gold chains, with Bobby (gloriously asymmetrically haired as usual) standing over them, wearing only a gold lamé posing pouch). The fact that an alternative cover was later produced probably tells its own story.

Can you think of a less appropriate act to record, and have a major hit single with, a tune about ‘the troubles’? You can believe it or not, but the evidence is here in side 2’s opening track, ‘Belfast’.

Essentially a singles band rather than an album band, there really only is one other decent track here, and that’s the international mega-hit, ‘Ma Baker’, about a criminal matriarch who met a sticky end in a bank raid.

The only other two tracks of any interest are an ‘interesting’ re-working of the Yardbirds’ ‘Still I’m sad’ which crops up again later on some of the group’s many Greatest Hit collections, and my nomination for the strangest title of a track ever to grace vinyl, tape or CD, ‘Gloria can you waddle’, which is nowhere near as much fun as the title suggests it might be.

I am prepared to accept that I may still be the only person campaigning for Boney M’s acceptance into cheesey pop’s hall of fame.

Label – Atlantic

Year – 1977

Cassette experiment day 65 - Sailor 'Checkpoint'

The 1970s were a very weird and wonderful time. Generally, if you wanted mainstream musical success you had to be prepared to dress the part. The Bay City Rollers dressed like tartan ‘bovver boys’, The Rubettes loved their wide-lapelled white suits and flat caps and Showaddywaddy liked nothing better than to turn up in their brightly covered ‘Teddy boy’ suits and ‘brothel creeper’ shoes.

Our subjects today, Sailor, weren’t averse to raiding the dressing up box themselves. While punks raged in safety pins and bondage trousers you could often find our boys on Top of the Pops dressed as slightly seedy sailors trotting out their finely honed pop nuggets.

By the time of their fourth album, 1977’s ‘Checkpoint’ their star was pretty much on the wane, but, while it’s not their best there are still some very good tunes to be found on today’s cassette.

My ‘track No 7 theory’ holds good here, with ‘Put your mouth where the money is’ not only being representative of the album as a whole, but also probably the best on offer – the cautionary tale of Iron Man McGuinn who challenges all-comers to a round in the boxing ring, only to lose when his drink is spiked. I think there’s a lesson there for all of us.

Others of note are the energetic ‘My girl (she knows what to do)’ and ‘Joe’s pianola’ the sad tale of a relationship break-up set to the mournful tinkling of a tinny upright.

Interestingly, group member Phil Pickett, who wrote absolutely nothing on this album, went on to co-write ‘Karma Chameleon’ with Culture Club.

Label – Epic

Year – 1977

Cassette experiment day 64 - Edie Brickell & New Bohemians

Like many people I know approximately two things about Edie Brickell. She’s married to Paul Simon (the little one out of that famous boy band) and she’s just released an album with Steve Martin (the one with the hat in ‘The man with two brains’).

The other thing I know about Edie is that her album with New Bohemians ‘Ghost of a dog’, released in 1990 is so good that it’s what I like to refer it as a ‘two-formater’. In other words I own it on two formats, in this case vinyl and cassette tape. It lives in my collection with many other ‘two-formaters’, such as our recent experiment subject, Danny Wilson’s ‘Be Bop Moptop’, Kraftwerk’s ‘Trans Europe Express’, Jonathan’ Richman’s ‘Back in your life’ and The Human League’s ‘Dare’ to name just a few. I’ve got some ‘three-formaters’ too, Prince’s fantastic ‘Sign ‘o’ the times’ being the first that springs to mind.

There are some brilliantly written ‘story songs’ on ‘Ghost of a dog’, such as ‘Carmelito’ where Edie tells us all about Carmelito and Vandito and how the latter slept with the former’s wife. I don’t think I’m spoiling anything if I tell you that one of theses two doesn’t make it through tom the end of the song.

Side 2 opens with the title track, where Edie recounts being puzzled after seeing and hearing an old dog that she ran over and buried years ago. Touching.

‘Strings of love’ apparently features a Mr John Lydon on background vocal. If you can hear him then you have better ears than I have. I sincerely hope that you do have better ears than I have, because one of mine sticks out a lot further than the other one.

The album’s two top tunes though, tucked part-way through the second side are the wonderful ‘Oak Cliff bra’ and the dark but beautiful ‘This eye’. On the former, Edie regales us with the tale of sitting on the front porch, in Oak Cliff, with her bra (which I think we can all relate to) and on the latter she explains how one eye looks with love and the other with judgement, and how she would like the sight to be taken out of one of them (but she doesn’t specify which, so I’ll let you draw your own conclusions).

Incidentally, this album is credited to Edie Brickell & New Bohemians, rather than the New Bohemians. Presumably this allows Edie to work with any New Bohemians who turn up off the street, rather than with specific New Bohemians.

Label – Geffen

Year – 1990

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