Mid-Century Modern Music

Serge Gainsbourg was a French musician, singer, composer, actor, filmmaker and author. He wrote contributions to popular music spanning four decades (1950s to the 1980s), covering diverse styles, including jazz, pop, rock, afrobeat, reggae, funk and rap. His compositions pilfered from Dvorak, Chopin, Beethoven, and Olatunji, among others, without making much of a secret of it. This is an introductory mix of his work and will probably be surprising in it's stylistic scope to the listener untouched by the SG legacy. I assure those people, there is a lot more to be discovered if your curiosity is piqued. I can't exactly recall where my fascination with his music started, but it may well have had something to do with the effect of Jane Birkin's breathy orgasmic sighs in "Je t'aime..." on my very young male brain in 1969! Quite simply, it's impossible to do him justice in a mix in the space of under 70 minutes, but what the hell, here goes... CREDITS (duplica...

        Mountain Man by Mid-Century Modern This was the result of a collision between a somewhat-puerile 'bloke’s joke', and one of the finest pieces of music by Norway’s most famous composer. It opens with a Morricone-esque harmonica wailing. The timpani-led staccato stabs that follow felt like they required a John Barry/Bond theme type treatment. The chorus lines of “Up We Go” and “Keep It Up” are followed by suitably ascending rejoinders from the orchestra. Then comes the ”Bauhaus bit” - it was originally very sparse and minimal and it reminded me of “Bela Lugosi’s Dead”, but the four chords descending in semitone steps (C, B, Bb, A) were actually prompted by Grieg’s score. Playing these chords on a nylon string guitar I accidentally discovered the “flamenco” bit - by holding a Bb major in a standard “E” shape, but instead of using the index finger to barre the chord, use it just to hold down the 2nd string, letting the open E on the first string ring as part of ...

While I think of it, in no particular order... Roxy Music, Sparks, Wire, T.I.S.M., Serge Gainsbourg, The Isley Brothers, The Fall, James Brown, Nick Drake, Throbbing Gristle, Traffic, Bauhaus, Sly and Robbie, Ian Dury, Specials, Prince, EPMD, LL Cool J, Afrika Bambaataa, A Guy Called Gerald, Steinski, James Last, Scritti Politti, The Byrds, Gang Of Four, Tones On Tail, Devo, David Holmes, Funkadelic, Mantronix, Shuggie Otis, Scott Walker, The Laughing Clowns live with Tactics at the Grand Hotel, The The, Daft Punk, The Chambers Brothers, Isolee, Arthur Lee and Love, Robert Johnson, Derek Forbes playing bass in Simple Minds, PIL, Jimmy Webb and Richard Harris, Cowboys International ®, Jimi Hendrix, The Wailers, Doors, Arthur Russell, Human League, Cabaret Voltaire, Led Zeppelin, Stetsasonic, Jimmy Cliff, Isaac Hayes, Kraftwerk, The Associates, Psychedelic Furs, Pauline Murray and the Invisible Girls, Colourbox, Yello, Buzzcocks, Soft Machine, Lene Lovitch, Marc Bolan, The (British) Beat...

When a song fires my soul, I’ll usually sit down and work out how to play it. If it’s interesting, or simply fun to play, I might then proceed to trials of arrangement for guitar and vocal, as though I was preparing for a solo live performance. Apart from the simple benefits of practice, practice, practice, this arranging process can often reveal the particular songwriter’s economy in their craft, as well as hitherto hidden connections between the words, the melody and the accompaniment. This song came on the radio the other day - so gorgeous, I hadn’t heard it in years. That warm buttery horn intro just kills me. One thing immediately struck me, I don’t think it had registered before - Sandie Shaw’s vocal vibrato. “Girl Don’t Come” was a hit for Sandie Shaw in 1964/65. Only a few months earlier she’d had a massive hit around the world with her version of the Bacharach-David tune “(There's) Always Something There to Remind Me”. Sandie possessed a breathy, vulnerable voice with a k...

I can’t be terribly objective about any assessment of Ed Kuepper’s “The Way I Made You Feel”. The song evokes such pangs of sweet nostalgia the instant those first muted guitar strums sound. These pangs are even more pronounced when hearing it with the original video that received late night saturation play on Rage throughout the 1990s. But when I discovered a certain song from Status Quo’s very first LP record, released in 1968, some weird nostalgic echoes suggested to me I had found a musical influence for Ed’s masterpiece. “Sunny Cellophane Skies” was written (and maybe sung) by bassist Alan Lancaster. It’s a loping fuzz-driven piece of psychedelic pop. After the intro riff, it jumps straight into a signature chord progression: the major chord that starts the bar then descends, after the second beat of the bar, to the major chord a semitone lower, and a semitone lower again, in eight note steps.   This clumsy description won’t ring any bells, although the music might. But just w...