Fortran 5 - Bike (Sid Sings Syd) mp3

Mute
12MUTE126
1991




Fortran 5 were an early 90s sampletastic ambient dance outfit, sort of like a cross between the Justified Ancients of MuMu and The Orb. Producing a broad mix of tracks and ideas, and remixing for bands as diverse as Erasure and Laibach, it is nonetheless the genius one-joke novelty of Sid Sings Syd that calls me back more than anything else they did.

You know that bit in the end credits of Spinal Tap where David St Hubbins is explaining the tapes he's listening to?

I've been listening to the classics, I belong to a great series. It's called The Namesake Series cassettes, and they send you the works of famous authors done by actors with the same last name.

So I've got Denholm Eliot reading TS Eliot, I've got Danny Thomas doing A Child's Christmas In Wales by Dylan Thomas. Next month it's McLean Stevenson reads Robert Louis Stevenson. Treasure Island, I believe.

Fortran 5 painstakingly sampled Sid James to make him say the words of Bike by Pink Floyd. This was 1991. None of this was done by googling any samples, this must all have been from sitting there watching hour upon grinding hour of Sid James movies on VHS, occasionally exclaiming, "There! He said 'cloak'! Rewind it while I press record!".

There's an extra twist in the fact that the session was helmed by producer Stephen James, son of Sid. It was released on the B-side of the Groove EP, and later on the album Blues.

For their next project they moved a step closer to David St Hubbins territory, actually getting Derek Nimmo into a studio to sing Layla by Derek and The Dominoes. Genius.

download Bike (Sid Sings Syd) (7.8MB MP3)

Wilson Pickett - Sugar Sugar & Cole Cooke and Redding mp3

Atlantic
45-2722
1970




Known to everyone for mid-60s belters like In The Midnight Hour, the late 60s found Wilson Pickett applying his gritty yawp to some unusual covers. The drawn-out anguish in his version of the Supremes You Keep Me Hanging On is just glorious.

More incongruous - and regular Dusters will know I'm a sucker for the weird shit - is his cover of Sugar Sugar, a bubblegum pop tune so twee the Monkees turned it down for being too cheesy, so it was released by a fictional band of cartoon characters, The Archies. It was the monster hit of summer 1969, and still high in the charts when Pickett gave it his solid soulful treatment. (For an equally unlikely take, check out Bob Marley's version, a Jamaican 45 that finally got worldwide release on The Complete Wailers box set).

For the B-side, Pickett did another bizarre recut. Abraham Martin and John was a late 1968 American hit for Dion, previously best known for turn of the 60s edgy-end-of-cleancut pop fare like Teenager in Love, Runaround Sue and The Wanderer. This song was quite different, a reflective ballad grieving the deaths of progressive public figures Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King and John Kennedy. The verse simply replaced the name in order to draw a sense of moral lineage between the three men, adding a fourth verse for Bobby Kennedy.

Has anybody here, seen my old friend John?

Can you tell me where he's gone?

He freed a lot of people, but it seems the good, they die young

But I just looked around and he's gone.

Here in the UK we best knew it as a top ten hit for Marvin Gaye, whose impeccable intelligent subtlety of phrasing and gliding molten chocolate voice perfectly suited the lyric's mix of stoicism and thoughtful melancholy. For reasons unknown (was Motown already showing a fear of Marvin getting into political ideas that would lead to such a battle to get the What's Going On album released?) this version was never released in the USA.

In his preamble to the song, Wilson Pickett credits Moms Mabley's then-current 1969 version as his inspiration. Pickett, however, remoulds it as a tribute to three giants of soul music who died young.

I have simultaneous contradictory feelings about it. On the one hand it's an inventive, touching and sincere nod from one soul singer to his antecedents, drawing on soul's gospel roots to address mortality.

Yet it also seems a tasteless belittling of the fact that dying of lung cancer, being shot in dubious circumstances or going in a plane crash aren't the same as being assassinated by reactionaries because of your political beliefs. You know Bob Dylan's comments at Live Aid about how it would be good if some of the money could go to help American farmers? It's a bit like that.

Whatever, it's certainly a great piece of vinyl era oddity, which is exactly what this blog's about.

download Sugar Sugar (4.3MB MP3)

download Cole Cooke and Redding (5.4MB MP3)

The Spotnicks - Hava Nagila mp3

Oriole
45-CB1790
1963




Several years ago I had my musical gland squeezed in the middle of the night by a track played on Charlie Gillett's show for the BBC World Service. He was playing a selection of tracks that first made the West aware of other musics, antecedents for what we call world music. The one that made me sit bolt upright, switch the light on and write the details down so I could buy a copy was Soul Makossa by Manu Dibango. It has a couple of killer funk-soul hooks but with this great spacey loose funk groove that was unlike any of the American funk or soul I knew.

That was the clue that 70s soul wasn't just an American affair, that there was stuff around the world that would be every bit as rich, dirty and face-twistingly funky.

Earlier this year my dear friend the venerable Gyrus sent me a copy of Nigeria Disco Funk Special: The Sound Of The Underground Lagos Dancefloor 1974-79. Like most various artist compilations it's not of consistent calibre, but fuck me when the spectrum ranges from the good to utter riproarers that's no bad thing.

Then more recently I found this page of 70s Iranian funk. Who'd have thunk the funk would be out that far? The authorities banned pop music in the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic revolution, but it seems up till then there was some magnificent stuff being made and played in Iran. As an extra reason to hate their vicious regime, the Iranian funk page gives us a clue to what musical talent has been suppressed.

Weirdest of all is the version of Hava Nagila, a traditional Hebrew tune of celebration. Iranians doing an African-American style version of a Jewish tune. It'd be worth hearing just for the on-paper incongruous nutness of it, but play it and hear that it stands tall and firm on its own merits too.

This, in turn, sent me off to dig out the version I already have, an equally improbable early 1960s Tarantino style surf guitar version done by a Swedish band who wore spacesuits on stage.



download Hava Nagila (3.4MB MP3)

The Freshies - I'm In Love With The Girl On The Manchester Virgin Megastore Checkout Desk mp3

Razz (through MCA)
MCA 670
1980




This fabulous piece of perky provincial powerpop faintly pestered the charts outside the top 40. Nice postpunk Skidsy guitars combine with 60s harmonies to give it a crisp playful momentum that matches the lyrics.

Mistakenly seen at the time as something of a novelty record, it's actually more the kind of indie wit that the Wonder Stuff would make a career of.

The lyrics are a fine documentation of that attitude, so common at the time but slightly mystifying now, that records were in and of themselves sacred and wonderful artefacts. And so, just like the way people disproportionately fancy bar staff due to some subconscious primal understanding of them as providers, we'd readily swoon at cool people working in record shops.

It takes the minimum of effort to have this song remind me of the woman who worked in Our Price in Southport. How I hoped she would be impressed by my pre-ordering cool records like Starfish by The Church. If she was, she hid it very well.

The Freshies continued that vinylophilic theme with their ploddy follow-up 45 I Can't Get 'Bouncing Babies' by The Teardrop Explodes.

But before that there was a problem to overcome with the Virgin Megastore single. This being the 1980s before everything was sponsored, and with the BBC putting masking tape over brand names when using cereal boxes to make stuff with sticky-backed plastic on Blue Peter, the namecheck in this single's title was a commercial hindrance. So it was recut as I'm In Love With The Girl On A Certain Manchester Megastore Checkout Desk. (Hear that version here).

Perhaps the rewording accounts for the words bring in the wrong order on this version's label ('Virgin Manchester Megastore' instead of 'Manchester Virgin Megastore').

Freshies mainman Chris Sievey later invented a Freshies fan, the staggeringly unfunny 'comedy' character Frank Sidebottom. Somehow he ended up doing Sidebottom for years on end, along the way spawning a cohort, Caroline Aherne's - who'd have thunk it possible - even less funny Mrs Merton character.

But never mind, because this single is such a glorious uplift.

download I'm In Love With The Girl On The Manchester Virgin Megastore Checkout Desk (4.1MB MP3)

Lunar Funk - Mr Penguin Pt.1 mp3

Bell (USA)
45 172 (Bell 1225 in the UK)
1972




Over at one of my favourite blogs, The Quiet Road, Jim has posted a Youtube video of the Mothership Connection. I see no reason why we shouldn't let the funk seep on over to our place.

If, like me, you had never heard of this record before you saw a second hand copy, I sincerely hope you would feel as I did. Namely, any record called Mr Penguin by something called Lunar Funk has to be worth hearing.

Whilst it doesn't have the heavier sturm und thang delivered by some of their contemporaries, it grooves along with fuzzy guitar, trippy vibes and tricky rhythm.

Most importantly, it has what - as the venerable Adam Warne rightly observed - any track needs to be truly funky: a man with a deep voice saying funky stuff.

download Mr Penguin (4.1MB MP3)

If you're a funkafreak and want me to email you the Part 2 that appears on the B-side (pretty much another three minutes of the same), leave your email address in the Comments.

Salford Jets - Who You Looking At mp3

RCA
PB5239
1980



Dexys Midnight Runners' first album, a humid soul tangle, was brought to the limelight by the number 1 hit Geno. The second album, all that soul but with celtic folk sounds woven in, had it happen with the bigger hit Come On Eileen.

Then there was a huge wait before Don't Stand Me Down, a third album released with no flagship single and had them sat in corporate suits on the cover. It bombed. Yet it is every bit the equal of the first two, and in many respects excels them. A true lost classic.

To me, the giant on there is This Is What She's Like, one of the most extraordinary and brilliant love songs I've ever heard. A twelve minute epic, the lyric is a conversation, one party asking what 'she' is like and the other trying to explain. But he does it with non-verbal phonetics as words fail him.

Before that, he tries by listing a lot of disparate, curiously specific things that she's not. All those things that annoy, the things that denote people who are clueless and hopeless at root, things that make you want to give up on people, things that 'she' is such a refreshing change from.

Well you know how the English upper classes are thick and ignorant?

You know the newly wealthy peasants with their home bars and hi-fis?

People who describe nice things as wonderful.

And, first on the list, the kind of people that put creases in their old Levi's.

Imagine the level of tosserliness required to do it to the extent that your jeans have a discernible lightening down those creases. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Salford Jets.



I find it heard to believe the crease could be lightened by mere ironing. What did they do, delicately paint down their kecks with a bleachy cotton bud?

The EP pictured is a 1979 collection of I Want To Hold Your Handish beaty pop, with an arrow logo and a couple of skinny ties to cash in on the waning mod revival.

Fed Up of Stalybridge had the main letter in last Thursday's Manchester Evening News. They complained young people had abused them in the street.

Such hostility to strangers is, they assert, getting 'increasingly common'. 'Have people always displayed such an aggressive "watchoo lookin at?" attitude?'



To answer that question let us welcome back Greater Manchester's all-time most negligible band. Ladies and gentlemen, once again I give you the Salford Jets.

The year after the EP they released a single of breathtakingly brainless, affected spilt-pintery. Scraping into the charts at number 72, Who You Looking At? features two verses and a chorus of cod-punk twaddle. They even drift into that Estuary English accent so essential for pseudo-punk.

Who you looking at
When you're walking down the street?
Who you looking at?
You better not be looking at me
I said who you looking at?
Who you looking at?
Who you looking at?
It better not be me

Fractionally redeemed by a brief tasty organ break, nonetheless it's one of the most ludicrous, risible records ever manufactured.

download Who You Looking At (3.1MB MP3)

Seventeen - Bank Holiday Weekend mp3

Vendetta
VD001
1979



I said in an earlier post that I couldn't remember if I'd seen The Alarm in December 1985. Well, for those of you who who've bitten their nails to the quick awaiting an answer, relief is at hand.

A rummage around brings to light the ticket stubs. Saw them in November 84 (I remember hitch-hiking home and listening to the American election results on the radio. Reagan re-elected. Fuck.)



And again the following May.



With another tour in December they certainly weren't slacking. And they undoubtedly did really good gigs, but by late 1985 my interest in them had waned. They were becoming a bit too straightforward, a bit - as it was known at the time - rockist.

They'd come through a couple of years earlier with several bristling singles and an aptly titled confident and earnest debut album, Declaration.

Lyrically they had broad-brush politics about justice, hope and the concerns of the ordinary person, a gift for terrace-anthem choruses, and a specific obsession with war imagery (soon adopting a splattery poppy as their logo).

Musically they had real gusto yet tempered it sonically with sweeping layers of strident acoustic guitars and emotionally with a melancholy tint.

The sound was thus intricate yet epic, bold and provocative yet ornate and even wistful, it could curl like a creeper vine or explode as big and startling as their hairstyles.



If you could repress your cynicism - or had yet to form any to speak of - then they were fresh, exciting and involving. I still stand by that first album as being all those things.

Though I'd personally lose interest as my tastes went a little toward darker and more oblique music (REM, The Church), at least The Alarm didn't go as dull as Big Country. And you've gotta respect a band that would cut their fourth album, Change, in two different vocal versions, one in English and one in Welsh. Especially a band from as anglophone a part of Wales as Rhyl.

But let's let the screen go into that heat-haze effect that tells you it's a flashback.

Before they were The Alarm they were a post-new wave mod band called Seventeen. Taking that Merseybeat brightness with a bit of solidly chuggy new-wave guitar, like The Members or The Chords or the Lambrettas, only they don't seem to have been as good as those ones. Who, in turn, weren't that good themselves.

(Before this, incidentally, singer Mike Peters was in a punk band called The Toilets. Worth doing it just for the name I reckon).

Seventeen issued a single, both sides written by the future Alarm mainstay team of MacDonald and Peters. The A-side was Don't Let Go, but it's the B-side, Bank Holiday Weekend, that catches my ear. You can see them trying to latch on to the mod iconography of bank holiday punch-ups on Brighton beach, but as its fifteen years later and they actually live in a seaside town they know that the truth is somewhat different. Bored families, tacky tat for sale, the deflation of something looked forward to being dull.

I've no idea, but I'm guessing this was their only release and quite possibly a DIY job, given that it has the catalogue number VD 001. I love that prefix. When I was in a band, our fake record company for what turned out to be our only release was Rampant Records, letting us use PANTS 001. You've got to take the opportunities for smut where you find them.

There's no clue at all that these people would go on to do anything of worth. In that way, it's opposite of the Johnny and the Self-Abusers single (a piece of slinky arty punk that, after a namechange to Simple Minds, gave way to one of the most vacuous and execrable careers in the history of eardrums).

download Bank Holiday Weekend (4.4MB MP3)

By the way, if you're some Alarm completist gagging for the MP3 of Don't Let Go as well, leave your email address in the Comments and I'll send it to you.