The Rough And The Smooth

I went to two gigs in successive nights earlier this week and they were quite a contrast in terms of both venue and music.

On Tuesday I was at my regular haunt The Shacklewell Arms in Dalston for one of their free gigs. This one featured three bands: Great Silkie, marcel (no caps please we're belgian) and Bureau de Change.

I'm not sure any of them will live long in the memory to be honest but the pick of the bunch were probably Bureau de Change. They are a bit hackneyed but were shouty, energetic and quite fun. They also kindly make their music available on a 'name your own price' basis - click on the links on each band's name if you wish to explore further.

After a quick scrub up and a wash behind my ears, the next night I went up west to the far famed London Palladium to see the great Al Stewart on his farewell tour of UK and Ireland. 

It was an excellent show. Al was in fine voice for a man of 80, with great backing from The Empty Pockets and special guest Peter White, the man whose nifty guitar licks enhanced "On The Border", "Time Passages" and many more back in the day. Al has written so many fantastic songs that he could never fit them all into one set but I was pleased to hear some favourite 'deep cuts' (or album tracks as we called them then).

Another point of contrast between Al and Bureau de Change - at least in today's selections - is song length. The two tracks together clock in at 20 minutes; Al accounts for 90% of that.

They do have something in common though. Bureau de Change are very sweary. Its not big, its not clever, and its not original either. Respectable Al was doing that way back in 1969 when he traumatised the nation by putting a rude word in "Love Chronicles". It is believed to be the first time this word was committed to vinyl. I won't mention it but its roughly sixteen and a half minutes in, shortly after he says "plucking".

 

"Shaken Not Stirred" - Bureau de Change

"Love Chronicles" - Al Stewart

Listen To The Voices

Guided By Voices have their latest album coming out at the end of the month. It is called "Thick Rich and Delicious" and having been sent an advance copy by the excellent Jack at Tell All Your Friends PR I can assure you it is an absolute corker. You can pre-order a copy over at Bandcamp. Actually, delete 'can' and replace it with 'should'. 

Robert Pollard had been the guiding light and only constant of Guided By Voices for 40 years now. During that time they have churned through almost as many members as The Fall, but they have had the same five man line-up now since 2016. Familiarity is clearly breeding whatever the opposite of contempt is as the recent run of albums is as good as anything in the back catalogue. 

And it is a big old back catalogue too. "Thick Rich and Delicious" is the 42nd studio album released by Guided By Voices, with 13 of them in the 2010s alone. In addition Mr Pollard has released 23 albums under his own name, 16 as Circus Devils and over 20 others using different aliases and with various collaborators. He is so prolific that he will probably have issued another album by the time you finish this sentence.

Here is one of the two advance tracks from the new album and golden oldies from "Mirrored Aztec" and "Its Not Them, It Couldn't Be Them" (in 2020 and 2021 respectively).

"(You Can't Go Back To) Oxford Talawatha" - Guided By Voices

"To Keep An Area" - Guided By Voices

"High In The Rain" - Guided By Voices

One of the members of the current line-up is Bobby Bare Jr, who as some of you will know has had a pretty good career in his own right. While he's nowhere near as prolific as Mr Pollard he has been working even longer. Here he is way back in 1973 helping his dear old Dad to #2 in the country charts.

Monday's Long Song

I don't often participate in the multi-blog phenomenon that is Monday's Long Song, but I recently acquired a piece of music that I thought would be a good way of testing the concept - possibly to destruction.

Junior Brother is a man whose voice was described by the woman from Manchester I found myself sitting next to at a recent live performance as "grating". I wouldn't agree but it is certainly wayward and lacking in some of the conventional virtues like hitting all the right notes. 

For me that is part of JB's charm. But can that charm by maintained over nearly twenty minutes and can you the listener make it all the way through? That's the test today.

I strongly suspect that George will be the only person to even attempt the task so let's rephrase the question using his famous 2B scale - is this bobbins or bifter?

Sock it to 'em, JB.

"Junior Brother's Favourite" - Junior Brother

Colombian Cover Up

A brief follow-up to my post on Colombian music earlier this week (Part 7 of our El Dorado series). Here are a couple of songs that were on the long list for that post but were cut because they are cover versions. But they are too much fun to deprive you of them completely.

"Combate A Kung Fu" - Wganda Kenya

"Cumbia Del Pichamán" - Meridian Brothers

Watch out for some bonus Biddu in the first video (or viddu).

Ernie's El Dorado Part 7 - Colombia

We are nearly a third of the way through our tour and we have arrived at a real musical hotspot. So hot that if you linger too you'll get third degree burns.

So for health and safety reasons, as well as the fact that real life has got a bit busy, we are going to forego the usual long introductions and go pretty much straight to the music.

Musically Colombia is in the import-export business (you can insert your own reference to other less salubrious exports here if you wish). Cumbia originated on the Caribbean coast of Colombia but has spread across all of Latin America, and there are many other indigenous styles. Wikipedia gives a good summary.

But back in the 1970s the locals fell heavily for Cuban and Puerto Rican salsa and to a lesser extent to the rock, pop and funk sounds heading down from up north. More recently there has been explosion of hip-hop, with a local twist, and Mandatory American Reggaeton (MARton?). It all adds up to a dock load of disc-based fun.

The waterfront is too broad to cover but today's selection was chosen so you can dip your toes into a range of styles. In order, we have two cuts of cumbia, two salsa and one each of champeta, música llanera, 1970s pop, afrobeat, hip-hop and MAR. Where the album from which the track comes or the artist is on Bandcamp I have added a link in their name.

Special thanks to the excellent Vampisoul label for reissuing several of the albums featured below (and many more excellent records).  

The videos kick off with undoubtably the biggest global Colombian star of recent times. Unfortunately she seems to be one series behind but at least she has made an effort. 

I have followed it up with the great Joe Arroyo's tribute to Barranquilla, the only place in Colombia I have been to - I had one night there after my plane to the country we are heading to next got rerouted. A proper trip to Colombia is on my (very long) list to places to see. 

"El Tiburon Del Aire" - Aniceto Molina

"Que Te La Pongo" - La Sonora Dinamita

"Ténguere Que Tengue" - Fruko y Sus Tesos

"Micaela" - Sonora Carruseles

"Tungalala (El Sapo)" - Son Palenque

"Dueña De Mi Amor" - Tirso Delgado

"Soy Una Nube" - Elia y Elizabeth

"Tifit Hayed" - Wganda Kenya

"Pescao Envenenao" - Choc Quib Town

"Wayo" - Hety & Zambo

The Great Dictator

That is a cleverer title than I suspect you are going to give it credit for. And that's a badly constructed sentence, as English teachers out there might notice. Anyway...

Charlie Chaplin the comic actor and director seems to be one of those Marmite performers. People either love him or hate him.

There is no such division of opinion about the reggae DJ Charlie Chaplin (Richard Bennett to his Mum), although admittedly that may be because many people have never heard of him. Hopefully these two tracks from 1982 and 1983 respectively will encourage you to join the pro-Chaplin 2 camp.

Chaplin 2 was fairly successful in the 1980s in Jamaica and is still about although according to Discogs he hasn't released any new material since 2006. When I looked for him on Bandcamp I found a single from 2016 released by Operation Sound System with Charlie Chaplin credited on vocals, but it turned out to be a sample of Chaplin 1 from the film in the title. 

The credits on "Dictator" are pretty confusing all round. I assume Razzle and Sasquatch are not related to the saucy magazine and hairy mythical creature with whom they respectively share their names.

"Jamaican Collie" - Charlie Chaplin

"Unity Is Strength" - Charlie Chaplin (with Don Carlos)

"Dictator" - Charlie Chaplin, Razzle, Sasquatch 

Chaplin 1 also turned his hand to music, writing a lot of his own film scores. One instrumental theme from his 1936 film "Modern Times" had some lyrics added in the early 1950s and became a standard. Chaplin 2 hasn't done a MRV of it, which seems a missed opportunity, but he isn't averse to adapting an old Peter Tosh tune.

Ilectro Boogie Woogie

Some 1980s Tamil film music for you today. Not that old chestnut, I hear you say. I'm afraid so. 

I was rooting around in the bargain bins of a local second-hand record shop recently when I found a copy of "Ilectro!: Euphoric Electronics and Robotic Funk by Maestro Ilaiyaraaja", released on the always interesting Finders Keepers label in 2013. The cover alone was enough to persuade me to hand over the money.

To quote from the liner notes: "This compilation focuses on Ilaiyaraaja's growth in the mid-1980s as a confident young composer adding freak pop fuel to the flickering flame of Kodambakkam’s [an area in Chennai where studios were located] Kollywood film industry, while embracing domestic synthesiser technology and fusing the power of electro and synth pop to his Carnatic canon". So now you know.

Ilaiyaraaja is still going strong at 82 and earlier this year became to first Asian film composer to have a symphony performed in London (with the Royal Philharmonic). Very impressive and a far cry from his 80s days.

But we're here to dance. Let's gather together the cast of thousands and get the show started.

"Unithaan" - Ilaiyaraaja 

"Aththi Marakkili" - Ilaiyaraaja 

Ilaiyaraaja had perhaps the biggest hit of his illustrious career in 1991 with his music for the film "Thalapathi". The soundtrack was included in The Guardian's list of "1000 Albums to Hear Before You Die" and the song "Rakkamma Kaiya Thattu" was placed fourth in a BBC World Service poll of "World Top Ten Popular Songs of All-time" (although with "Believe" by Cher at #8 I'm not sure how much faith to place on this list). 

Here are the hits.