If music be the food of love, let’s eat it.
Music: What Are You Listening To?
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The biggest one-hit wonders from the 70s
It’s frightening how many of those songs I have in my iTunes library.
Obviously now I need to buy the ones I’m missing.
Weirdly (and presumably to JR’s surprise) I have almost none of them.
I’m not really a song person, I’m an album person. If someone’s making hit singles, I probably don’t know them. And if I do know it, I probably think it’s the worst song on the album it comes from
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I’m not really a song person, I’m an album person.
Are those options available? I’m a human person and would like a change.
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If someone’s making hit singles, I probably don’t know them. And if I do know it, I probably think it’s the worst song on the album it comes from
Does that mean you think “Smoke on the Water” is one of Deep Purple’s worst songs?
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If someone’s making hit singles, I probably don’t know them. And if I do know it, I probably think it’s the worst song on the album it comes from
Does that mean you think “Smoke on the Water” is one of Deep Purple’s worst songs?
Smoke on the Water wasn’t released as a single from Machine Head. The single was Never Before, which if I were pushed I might say was the weakest song on the album, and I also think it was also edited down for single release which of course makes the single worse than the album version
Smoke On the Water was released a year later, following the unexpected success of the live version on Made in Japan, and yes I can categorically say that Smoke is the weakest song on MiJ.
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Running late on my monthly write up. What do we have this month?
Lithuanian hardcore, Yorkshire goth metal, London shoegaze and Canadian ambient / shoegaze.
Stuff basically
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Linda McCartney — RAM
I’m pretty sure someone else was involved in that album…
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Running late on my monthly write up. What do we have this month?
Lithuanian hardcore, Yorkshire goth metal, London shoegaze and Canadian ambient / shoegaze.
Stuff basically
Honestly had no idea Paradise Lost were still going. I was only a marginal fan, but it’s still nice to hear they are still active.
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all these albums… The best year ever?!?
You won’t find me arguing
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Since you said unlikely:
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Great story about 11 year old playing onstage with the Foo Fighters
https://www.yahoo.com/amphtml/lifestyle/drumming-prodigy-nandi-bushell-dreams-113505190.html
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Great story about 11 year old playing onstage with the Foo Fighters
I always say that Dave Grohl is one of the nicest guys in rock n roll. This is proof of that.
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It would be a tie between Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, and Queen.
But my question would be, though: Are any of those performances of the acts listed considered on of their “best” or “greatest”? For example, is the KISS performance on February 18, 1977 one of their best performances ever, or was it just an average show? While it would be cool to see the performers in their prime, I would rather see them in what is considered by many their “greatest show. If one or more of those performances listed is considered a “best”, I would go to them.
I think I would rather travel in time and attend the Monterey Pop Festival held June 16-18, 1967, where I could see also Hendrix and Grateful Dead along with some other legendary performances.
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Which one can replicate their music/sound the best live? Billy Joel or Elton because their music is mostly piano? Maybe.
Who puts on the best live show even though they don’t sound a lot like their records? Hard to say.
Still… Just seeing them in front of you should be worth it.
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One of the very few bands I regret not seeing live is Led Zeppelin, so I guess that has to be my answer from that list.
I’d pick Led Zeppelin too. I actually saw Elton John and Paul McCartney on the respective tours listed there, though Elton was on a different night and Paul/Wings was at a different venue (Nassau Colosseum in Long Island).
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F the author of the question. Greatest performance in the 70s was Springsteen
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I ‘ve been going through the music thread on what I posted and the discussions. Here are a few things:
It was reported that Clapton said “Ask Prince” when someone asked Clapton about being the best guitarist. Well, he never said that. The report is actually a variation of the time someone asked Hendrix and he mentioned someone else…Here are the links:
https://ultimateprince.com/prince-eric-clapton-quote/
As for Clapton calling Prince a combo of James Brown, Little Richard, and Hendrix, he did say it after he caught the movie. ( See the above ultimateprince link.
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I believe we spent a lot of time about celebs ripping off things from other people’s culture. I don’t want a rehash although Gareth did want to start a Thought Provoking Thread on it, but I will just say there is a big difference between cultural APPRECIATION and cultural APPROPRIATION
This was revived on social media when this girl wore a Chinese qipao to here prom:
Now, I won’t get into the TikTok dances being stolen and no credit or millions going to the original choreographers. It is all online if you want to Google it.
———————————————————I hope I clarified things and redeemed… Ready to be a “happening” kind of guy again. 😂
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Al -seriously. If you want a discussion on this topic then that’s fine.
a) take it out of the music thread, that has nothing to do with wearing a Cheong Sam to a prom.
b) try and add something new rather than go in circles.
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I love Massive Attack. There’s a very high likelyhood that their founding member, Robert Del Naja (or 3D) is actually Banksy too.
Their music is incredible. Coming out of a graffiti collective in Bristol they basically invented the genre of Trip Hop. Everything is a mashup of various genres in a very dark and moody style. A rotating cast of singers from the start means it never sounds the same as well as musically shifting in and out of hip-hop, classical, indie, soul and house.
Unfinished Sympathy came out in 1991 but still topped many polls in the UK of best song of the decade. I find it hard to disagree.
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I love Massive Attack. There’s a very high likelyhood that their founding member, Robert Del Naja (or 3D) is actually Banksy too.
I thought the general consensus was that it was Robin Gunningham.
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I thought the general consensus was that it was Robin Gunningham.
It could be. I don’t think there is a general consensus though. Whoever it is has to be secure in another source of income.
Gunningham is dropped in many places as the name but also I can’t find anything much about him outside of that. The repeated original source that it is him is the Daily Mail.
Banksy has the means to travel a lot, a level of financial security that he doesn’t care his works are sold for millions but he never gets any of it. There’s a recurring anti-war message which is very much in the 3D wheelhouse politically.
The other thing is it could be both of them or more. Banksy’s work is largely stencilled so it can be done quickly and so far nobody has caught them in the act. If you had to press me my suspicion is of a collective.
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New Abba:
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It’s an interesting idea, the technology keeps getting better but there’s still a little bit of uncanny valley going on there in that end bit.
As to the song, I may need to listen a few more times but it does remind me a little of the lost Beatles songs from the Anthology like ‘Free As a Bird’. Very recognisably them and a decent tune without being a classic.
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As to the song, I may need to listen a few more times but it does remind me a little of the lost Beatles songs from the Anthology like ‘Free As a Bird’. Very recognisably them and a decent tune without being a classic.
Pretty much the same thoughts I had.
Which still makes it the best piece of new pop music I’ve heard all decade
I wish the video had contemporary footage. I don’t need to see what they looked like 40 years ago.
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With the 20th anniversary of the September 11 events looming in front of us, I’ve been listening to Bruce Springsteen’s THE RISING album. This was his response to the tragedy, and to record it he went back to the studio with the E Street Band for the first time in 18 years (they had previously reunited to tour in 1999). The result was this beautiful, sad, inspiring album. Here’s the opening track:
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Robert Plant is into history and attended a lecture my mother gave a couple of years ago on medieval Welsh rulers. She’s 12 years older than him so was not really that aware of The Who and preferred Tommy Steel and other middle of the road 1950s stars.
In the end we all just get older, that’s all it is.
Even the ageing rockers thing is old, people were mocking the Rolling Stones heading out on tour as middle aged men when I was a teen. They’ve not had a great hit single since ‘Start Me Up’ when I was 8 years old. So they’ve been trading on nostalgia most of my life.
I know Dylan has actually had a few well received albums in recent years but outside of that was anyone really expecting much more from these artists?
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Robert Plant is into history and attended a lecture my mother gave a couple of years ago on medieval Welsh rulers. She’s 12 years older than him so was not really that aware of The Who
Gar, I always forget: was Robert Plant was a member of The Who before or after he founded Led Zeppelin?
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As to the song, I may need to listen a few more times but it does remind me a little of the lost Beatles songs from the Anthology like ‘Free As a Bird’. Very recognisably them and a decent tune without being a classic.
Free as a Bird and Real Love are really quite good songs though. Sadly a better version of Lennon’s Real Love demo was found after Anthology; using it would have greatly improved the track (his vocals are very muddy and distorted), and a 3rd “new” song was meant for Anthology 3 – Harrison didn’t like the finished product. Once he passed away I thought for sure it would be released – no dice.
It’s been 25 years since Oasis’ massive Knebworth show and – after sitting on official footage and recordings for decades – a film and live album are coming out to celebrate the event. This is less than 2 years after their debut album was released.
They have so far released one track as a video and track on spotify/Apple Music:
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Rock stars get old and die. This is not exactly news. When they do, nothing will stop you listening to their music, which will sound just the same as when they recorded it and will continue to sound the same forever.
The thing you will lose is the chance to see them in concert, but I don’t think many people will care. Nobody has seen Led Zeppelin live in 40 years, and it hasn’t actually dented their popularity much.
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As to the song, I may need to listen a few more times but it does remind me a little of the lost Beatles songs from the Anthology like ‘Free As a Bird’. Very recognisably them and a decent tune without being a classic.
Free as a Bird and Real Love are really quite good songs though. Sadly a better version of Lennon’s Real Love demo was found after Anthology; using it would have greatly improved the track (his vocals are very muddy and distorted), and a 3rd “new” song was meant for Anthology 3 – Harrison didn’t like the finished product. Once he passed away I thought for sure it would be released – no dice.
It’s been 25 years since Oasis’ massive Knebworth show and – after sitting on official footage and recordings for decades – a film and live album are coming out to celebrate the event. This is less than 2 years after their debut album was released.
They have so far released one track as a video and track on spotify/Apple Music:
This is squarely in my era and so is a huge nostalgia hit for me.
Pretty great lineup for the full day at Knebworth too, which often gets overlooked for all the focus on Oasis.
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Free as a Bird and Real Love are really quite good songs though.
That’s kind of what I was saying. They are good songs without being peak Beatles. Which is probably why they didn’t release them.
Saying that though you can’t always trust an artist to be the best judge there. I can think of a few cases where tracks that haven’t been released or sent to a B side are better than ones that made it onto albums.
A good example is some of Oasis’ B sides are better than album tracks. Also Prince just got great reviews for ‘Welcome to America’ a 2010 album he shelved for material less well received.
His incredible productivity is an oddity there though too, depending on who you listen to he has as many as 3000 songs recorded and not released. That’s not including the ones he just gave away like Manic Monday, Erotic City, Nothing Compares 2 U and A Love Bizarre which are way better than many tracks he released himself (in the case of Manic Monday he apparently felt it worked better lyrically with a woman singing and sent it anonymously to The Bangles under his Christopher Tracy pseudonym).
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I saw Oasis play at Panama Joe’s nightclub in Cardiff, around the time they just hit the chart heights. One of those where the gigs are booked a long time before the band gets that much bigger and up a level like in video games. Knebworth being boss level game complete.
To be fair it was a very big nightclub, I’d guess a couple of thousand capacity and they had been lauded by the music press by that point but not yet top 10 material. I went to Prodigy there too when they were still wearing Andy Pandy pyjamas and Keith had a ponytail but hadn’t gone full Wolverine hair and piercings.
I saw Coldplay and Scissor Sisters play in the Barfly which was 150 capacity in similar circumstances. On booking nobody had heard of them, by the time the gigs came up they were top 10.
Oasis are always a strange thing in my life. I have never bought one of their records but as with Dave it was a cultural phenomenon. It was everywhere so I can sing every lyric to a lot of their songs. To me in that 2 or 3 year period Noel Gallagher is right to hype himself, he was an incredible songwriter. It’s never hugely original but so anthemic and if it was that easy to do that other would have, but they didn’t. They fucked up every attempt to properly break America by their own dysfunction as a band but that is all PR bullshit. Matchbox 20 or Bush who did do well never wrote a song fit to lick the boots of Live Forever or Wonderwall.
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I watched that HBO Bee Gees documentary over the weekend so I’ve had a few of their tracks running through my head – the doco raised a point I’d never realised – Stayin’ Alive is quite a serious song, and not at all about dancing. I’d never really paid attention to the lyrics, but it’s inspired by life in the then quite rough NYC of 1977.
Christel and I watched that doc a few months ago. It was very good.
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I watched that HBO Bee Gees documentary over the weekend so I’ve had a few of their tracks running through my head – the doco raised a point I’d never realised – Stayin’ Alive is quite a serious song, and not at all about dancing. I’d never really paid attention to the lyrics, but it’s inspired by life in the then quite rough NYC of 1977.
That’s the case with Saturday Night Fever as well, where if you only go on its’ rep it’s a movie about disco dancing, but it’s actually a hard-edged drama about young people looking for an escape from the drudgery of their everyday lives
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I remember that movie. The new dance partner was trying to go places by moving to Manhattan and so on. She asked him a few questions on his life and it was pretty much he lived with his family, worked in a paint store, and dances in the clubs on the weekends with his friends. That’s all. It finally hit him what she meant when he was in the paint store and saw the guy who worked there for 15 years. He just stared at him and at that moment he got the point she was making.
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Rock stars get old and die
this is true but that’s not the lyric. The Lyric is “better to burn out than fade away”
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That’s the case with Saturday Night Fever as well, where if you only go on its’ rep it’s a movie about disco dancing, but it’s actually a hard-edged drama about young people looking for an escape from the drudgery of their everyday lives
Absolutely. It’s probably the most misunderstood film ever because of the imagery of jazzy clothes and disco excess.
It’s actually a very rare example of Hollywood looking seriously at working class American life. Before the franchise got silly Rocky is another example.
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Rock stars get old and die
this is true but that’s not the lyric. The Lyric is “better to burn out than fade away”
I thought it was “die young, stay pretty”.
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Live Fast, Die Young, and Leave a Good Looking Corpse
It’s Better to Burn Out Than Fade Away
Huh. I thought it was from Def Leppard’s “Rock of Ages”
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Huh. I thought it was from Def Leppard’s “Rock of Ages”
That is where I first heard it too
The Neil Young song where it first appeared was, imo, was a blah, kinda whiny tune that doesn’t match the feeling of the lyric. Again, imo, Young’s idea of “burning out” is like a campfire that dwindles down to nothing before the dawn comes. Def Leppard’s is much more passionate giving an image of a dance club going out in a explosion of heat and flame.
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Live Fast, Die Young, and Leave a Good Looking Corpse
Or as vampires say:
Die Fast, Rise Young, and Leave a Blood-Drained Corpse
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Another month and I’ve another blog post. It’s been an amazing month for new music, we have noise rock, stomping industrial, dance music and a bit of Indie for luck.
Oh, in case anyone cares, that last Gary Numan album is one of the best things he’s done, which is pretty impressive.
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You might like this: a very in depth technical analysis of the guitar solo:
As I said before… Real guitarists who know what is involved in running the fingers like that and music theorists who analyze teh work… They acknowledge someone as the genuine article no matter what.
Everyone else (especially the superficial ignorant) will make it all a matter of race, make superficial comparisons, and say things like “Prince, Hendrix, and Santana are Ok but they aren’t as good as Clapton, Page, or van Halen… )
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Ok, I’ll come clean and admit that’s not true. To test my statement, I’ve checked the review section of the music magazine I’m reading currently (Prog #123, September 2021).
They review 33 new album releases.
The first one is “Swell” by Sel Balamir. And in the very first sentence of the review they say that’s he’s Turkish. So there’s the race card played immediately. But to be fair, they then talk about how his background has fed into his music, so I think it’s relevant. After all, if they hadn’t told me he was Turkish, I might think he was guilty of cultural appropriation.
Race isn’t mentioned again until the 20th review, “Pilgrimage of the Soul” by Mono. This review tells me the band is Japanese, and there was no need for that at all because in this case it’s irrelevant to their music.
That’s it as far as I can see. Two mentions of race in 33 reviews. Of the two mentions, I won’t be buying Sel Balamir’s album. This isn’t because I am an anti-Turkish racist, it’s because the description of his music (“a shoegazy shuffle with synthesiser fizz”) didn’t interest me, although the reviewer (a white male, I’m guessing) likes it. Balamir could be a white boy from Newcastle and it still wouldn’t interest me. I will be buying Mono’s album because their music does interest me, which is very surprising because the Japanese are a generally inferior race and we won the war anyway. (That last bit was a sarcastic joke, in case that’s not clear.)
I don’t think anyone that truly cares about music sees race.
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“we” won the war anyway.
of course you mean The US and then their lesser ally the UK.
But barely six months into the Pacific War, the British Empire had been almost eliminated
from the field. Eighteen months later, when the British Empire had re-established its influence in
the Pacific War, its effort paled almost into insignificance beside that of the United States.by The British Empire in the Pacific War by David Horner
(That last bit was a sarcastic joke, in case that’s not clear.)
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Huh.
No, Edwin Starr’s War came much further down the list.
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You were expecting Stairway again?
😂
I wouldn’t put Stairway either, but now that you mention it I’m surprised it’s not there 😂
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I wouldn’t put Stairway either, but now that you mention it I’m surprised it’s not there 😂
It’s at #61, just ahead of One by U2 and behind Running up that Hill by Kate Bush.
I went through and listened to most of them (well, I skipped a lot of the ones I’m very familiar with) over the weekend (where Apple Music would allow it).
The list makes a fine playlist for the most part but what stands out most to me as odd is Drake appears more than once on the list, and no track I’ve heard from him – ever – strikes me as remarkable or memorable apart from Hotline Bling. This is number 267 (ahead of Unchained Melody, and Closer (by NIN), and The Boys are Back in Town, and Penny Lane, and Dancing Queen, and You shook me all night long, and Won’t get fooled again, and Jungleland, and Wish you were here, and No Scrubs, and…) and it’s just… nothing.
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How sad…
Phil Collins:
https://pagesix.com/2021/09/20/frail-phil-collins-begins-genesis-farewell-tour-in-birmingham/
He said that the way he was sitting to play the drums all those years messed up his spine.
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he list makes a fine playlist for the most part but what stands out most to me as odd is Drake appears more than once on the list, and no track I’ve heard from him – ever – strikes me as remarkable or memorable apart from Hotline Bling. This is number 267 (ahead of Unchained Melody, and Closer (by NIN), and The Boys are Back in Town, and Penny Lane, and Dancing Queen, and You shook me all night long, and Won’t get fooled again, and Jungleland, and Wish you were here, and No Scrubs, and…) and it’s just… nothing.
Yeah that is very bland. I think it’s why you need to keep updating these things to see what truly sticks.
It’s not necessarily a genre thing (there are those that only want ‘classic rock’ in these lists) ‘No Scrubs’ you mention there is R&B/Hip Hip and it’s very memorable and still gets played.
I mean the whole concept is a bit silly and purely subjective but if you go with it I think your yardstick has to be something that has seeped out of the ordinary good song and into the general public consciousness. You can be modern music and do that I think, say for example Uptown Funk from Bruno Mars from a couple of years back (even if it’s a rip off The Really Wild Show theme tune). That song broke out of people following the latest acts to be everywhere for a while.
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something that has seeped out of the ordinary good song and into the general public consciousness. You can be modern music and do that I think, say for example Uptown Funk from Bruno Mars
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I’ve now decided.
The ABBA revival is genius. Those are two very very strong songs as if they’d left off yesterday and not 40 years ago. Peak era melodies and vocals.
Some artists have acclaimed material late on but I don’t think anyone has ever released anything of a style and quality that they can pretend they never stopped. As such I 100% get the virtual setup. I don’t want aged Abba, it’s like something like X-Men Forever but unlike that it works on every level.
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Agreed, they are strong songs, not up their with their best but still everything I would want from ABBA. I’ve already ordered the album.
The digital avatar thing is a bit meaningless to me. Looks are completely irrelevant to how I interact with music so I don’t care if they all look 70 or otherwise. It does mean that I wouldn’t bother seeing them live, though — I want to see real humans, not projections synced to a tape. That’s not live music.
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To everyone’s surprise, Deep Purple announced a new album (their 22nd) this year, only a year after releasing the last one. To even greater surprise, the track list has apparently been leaked. And it looks like this:
Volume 1
7 And 7 Is (Love)
Rockin’ Pneumonia And The Boogie Woogie Flu (Huey “Piano” Smith)
Oh Well (Fleetwood Mac)
Jenny Take A Ride! (Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels)
Watching The River Flow (Bob Dylan)
Let The Good Times Roll (Ray Charles & Quincy Jones)
Dixie Chicken (Little Feat)
Shapes Of Things (The Yardbirds)
The Battle Of New Orleans (Lonnie Donegan/Johnny Horton)
Lucifer (Bob Seger System)
White Room (Cream)
Caught In The Act (Medley)Yes, it’s a covers album.
There is some debate at the moment over whether the “leak” is actually a spoof. But I think it’s probably true. Purple don’t write songs in isolation or mail in their pre-written parts, they sit in a studio and jam to see what comes out. It seems very unlikely they’ve been able to do that over the last 12 months, so a covers album seems like a practical necessity.
Some fans are appalled and say they won’t buy it. I say, bring it on. It’s not what songs they play that make this a great band, it’s how they play them, and I’m very excited to hear how they play these songs.
And it’s not as if they are strangers to cover versions. This was their first hit, a cover of a Joe South song:
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In the 80’s, there was a series on PBS called “Rock School” where a trio of studio musicians explained the instruments, how they harmonize, and the different techniques used to get a specific type of music whether it was heavy metal sound, that 80’s Police sound, and so on.
The good news is that the videos are on YouTube…
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To be fair I think the majority paid for use but my main point is there’s a lot of cross cultural influence there in all directions and I think that’s massively positive.
To be fair I think the majority paid for use but my main point is there’s a lot of cross cultural influence there in all directions and I think that’s massively positive.
Yes… RoyalTy checks make the big difference.
On a side note… To be petty:
There are those who read a posting on either Facebook or wherever and then post here as if it was originally them.
Something like that kid in the first Spider-Man movie who repeated what Peter said about the Eastern Seaboard to impress that girl.
I propose here to say that you got a point you post from somewhere else…
Mention your sources… with a footnote!
😀
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R. Kelly is found guilty in sex trafficking trial
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There are those who read a posting on either Facebook or wherever and then post here as if it was originally them.
Are there many? I take it as read the memes and stuff in the picture thread are things people pick up off social media 90% of the time. I rarely credit the original source but never really imagined people though I’d made them myself.
If I had made one myself and it was really funny and went viral I’d definitely boast about that. 😂
Has anyone here gone viral with anything (as in on the internet, not Covid 19)? Carlos Fraille did when he posted a pic of Zooey Deschanel with no glasses and her hair tied back and she was unrecognisable and said it was proof Clark Kent’s disguise could work. He does get slightly pissed off that it comes back around every few months and never from his original tweet.
Interestingly though when I google image searched ‘Zooey Deschanel without bangs’ his name is the only one that appears, twice.
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How is he doing these days?
He’s good Al. I met up with him a couple of years back when he was travelling around Malaysia. I think he’s been living in the UK over 20 years now and he has no semblance of picking up the accent, he sounds as if he got off the plane from Spain the day before.
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Oops…sorry. I was looking for the Music Thread, but I ended up in the Meme Credits/Carlos Fraile thread instead. Carry on…
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