All Tomorrow's Radio Stations

-



Driving back from the park just now, I switched on the radio and hit a random preset button: what was that wonderful droning, almost atonal sound? 4ZZZ playing the Velvet's "All Tomorrow's Parties"!

I probably first heard that song in the late seventies on this very same radio station! 

ZZZ was such an ear-opener for this schoolboy back then. An introduction to worlds of exciting music. Kinda weird to think they're still going, and still playing this stuff... 


MCM on BANDCAMP 


MCM on SPOTIFY


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Way Sunny Cellophane Skies Made Ed Feel?

-
Image
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...
Read more

Girl Don't Come

-
Image
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...
Read more

Mountain Man

-
Image
        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 ...
Read more