FP10006
1972
A year or two back Dave Boulter and Stuart Staples of The Tindersticks did an album called Songs For The Young At Heart. They got an impressive range of guest vocalists in to sing songs remembered from childhood.
The dependably heart-squeezing voice of Cerys Matthews doing White Horses, The Go-Betweens' Robert Forster doing Uncle Sigmund's Clockwork Storybook, Puff The Magic Dragon by Bonnie Prince Billy (I can't ever get into using the quotemarks round his middle name, it feels too much like the way newspaper headlines denote allegation).
Jarvis Cocker does a reading of Marriot Edgar's poem The Lion and Albert, and the CD is packaged in a book with pages made of card like books for the under 5s. Stuart Murdoch from Belle and Sebastian does Florence's Sad Song from the feature length film of the Magic Roundabout, Dougal and The Blue Cat.
The Magic Roundabout. Fucking mad as you remember it being. Then there are the songs, words written and sung by narrator Eric Thompson (father of Emma).
Florence's Sad Song is about as depressing a song as you've ever heard, a hopeless emotionally blacked out lament with startling lyrical similarities to I Am A Rock; the singer rues ever having been trusting and open, and resolves to construct a permanent and impenetrable psychic barricade to keep others out.
Yet look what you get on the back, a drawing of the artists to colour in with crayons or paints. You don't get that with System Of A Down.
There is one thing that can make this black pit of a song go one darker. Play the fucker at 33rpm.
[MP3s deleted to make way for new ones. Sorry!]
3 comments:
Stuart Staples could have chosen no one better that Stuart Murdoch, the King of Sad Songs Featuring Girls, to bring this song to an even more all time down. Sometimes it seems all you need to know to know who's who in stylish British indie music is a single first name - Stuart.
Being Dutch myself, the Magic Roundabout to me is even a more curious curiosity than it is for you - I can only remember seeing fragments of it which were displayed as fillups on impossible television hours. So it's only through knowning the Songs for the Young at Heart project that I got curious about it.
The link between these two Stuarts, by the way, is a remarkable thing, as the latter also has his own children's music project - Colours Are Brighter, and neither of both mention their collegue's efforts anywhere. Remarkable, but at least there are two great albums with a nice fresh take on so-called "pop" music!
Website for Songs for the Young at Heart.
Hi
You wouldn't happen to have the entire 'Dougal and the Blue Cat' vinyl lp would you? If so, any chance you could rip it to 320k mp3?
Cheers,
Tel.
Tel, yes I've got the EP and would gladly encode it for you. Gis your email address and I'll send them to you via transferbigfiles.com
Post a Comment