Fuddland

Entries concerning music and musicians.

At some point, presumably around the time Audioscrobbler became one with Last.fm, the format of the RSS feed changed, so it’s time for an updated version of my original feed parser. [Requires a PHP-based site.]

If it’s something you’ll find useful, just:

• install MagpieRSS if you don’t already have it on your server

• download the new version of the script and change the settings at the beginning

See it in action on this very site [of course I’ve added an extra bit to the code which filters out all the Spice Girls tracks I listen to].

Thanks to Robert for making me aware of the change—check out his alternative script if this one doesn’t float your boat.

For no real reason, I’ve decided to reveal some statistics about the music I listen to.

A few years ago I started using my PC as my all-in-one entertainment centre—stereo, radio, DVD player—and the whole reason I signed-up to Audioscrobbler last year was in order to get a genuine, unobscured insight into my musical tastes, and not try and make out that I only ever listen to obscure acapella trance-dub from Norway. If my most listened-to song turned out to be You Can Count On Me [The Theme from Hawaii Five-O] by Sammy Davis Jr., there’d be no point in denying it any longer. [Thankfully this turned out to not be the case. It only comes in at number 14. Ha!]

Read the rest of “This is in no way a picking-up of any batons”…

When Paul McCartney wrote Yesterday, he was sure that he’d copied another song; the melody sounded very familiar, yet he, nor no-one that he played it to, could tell him exactly where they’d heard it before. Eventually they decided that it was an original piece, but it was just so good that it made you feel as though you’d already heard it [which goes some way to explain why it’s apparently the most-covered song ever.]

On a musical high from re-stringing my guitar, I decided to dust off my long-neglected mandolin, give it some fresh strings and have a little play. After double-checking that I could still remember the basics of Losing My Religion [which, sad as it may be, was essentially the reason I bought it in the first place], I worked out the beginnings of a couple of short, original tunes. Or so I thought.

Now I’m in no way claiming to have written the mandolin-equivalent of Yesterday, but one of them sounds familiar. Sometime-housemate Kav also thought it was someone else’s tune, but after we’d ruled out Peter Gabriel’s Salisbury Solsbury Hill, we can’t pin it down. If you’d like to have a go, have a listen and see if you can identify it. [Do excuse the fairly shoddy playing, it’s been a couple of years since I last picked up the thing, and I don’t generally like using a plectrum, but you really have to with a mandolin.]

I could try and use this weekend’s unexpected loss [and subsequent full retrieval from backup] of my weblog database as some sort of backwards justification for not writing anything for nearly three weeks—if I’d written anything recently, the backup might not have been current enough to restore everything—but I fear that wouldn’t wash with anyone [least of all me], so I suppose it’ll have to be the boring old: I just haven’t felt like it. No real reason beyond that.

I started to write about the things I’d been doing over the last few weeks, but it all seemed rather pointless: I already know, and why should anyone else care? I find myself being less and less interested in writing weblog entries which are little more than reportage [such as, erm, this very entry]. But then commenting on, or having an opinion about, current affairs requires actually reading the news from time to time, something which I’ve also become rather lax about of late; I still skim the headlines of the BBC’s various RSS feeds, but rarely click through to the main article.

Instead, I’ve been lending a helping-hand to friends in a spot of bother [involving, amongst other things, a weekend of painting and decorating which was the most fun I’d had in ages]; forging new friendships; rekindling old ones; and of course, doing a bit here and there towards completing my PhD. The pressure’s really on but the end remains frustrating, tantilisingly just out of reach.

I decided recently that I needed to listen to some really authentic blues, and after a tip-off from a scene in E.R. of all things, I went right back to near the beginning of recorded music and got hold of Robert Johnson’s Complete Recordings, the fruits of just two recording sessions in which he laid down his repertoire of songs, classic blues that are still being covered by today’s artists.

Apple’s new iPod shuffle and it’s “innovative” notion of random playlists is precisely how I usually use my own MP3 player: very rarely do I copy entire albums into its 256+64Mb memory. I just fire up either Rio’s bespoke synchronisation application or Windows Media Player and copy over a random selection of my music, and enjoy the playlist for a couple of days before uploading a new one.

It’s because I knew this was how I wanted to use my player that I didn’t opt for a proper iPod in the first place: I don’t want all my music with me at all times, but listen to only ten percent of it on a regular basis—I want to be pleasantly surprised by a song I haven’t heard in years. And if I forget the name of the song or which album it’s on, I have a handy LCD providing the basic metadata, something Apple decided wasn’t worth adding—I can imagine that might lead to some frustrated users desperately trying to recall the name of the singer whilst out and about, having no choice but to try and remember to look it up later on. I can understand the thinking behind not including a display [reinforcing the fact that it’s designed for random play, as well as cutting the cost I should imagine], but personally I prefer to have the information readily available.

There’s an interesting [and lengthy!] look at the idea of shuffled playlists over at City of Sound.

Although I like to mess around on the guitar—and lately, the piano—making up tunes, I lack any formal music training and know nothing beyond a few basics about the difference between keys and modes, or about modulation, or even reading music. Whilst on the one hand I quite enjoy this ignorance—not knowing really what you’re doing frees you up to a certain degree, being guided by what sounds right without the distractions of the theory—on the other hand I am conscious of the fact that the music might not be as sophisticated [note that this does not mean “complicated”] or original as it could be, and on the other hand I tend to be quite conservative and not as confident as I might be if I knew about the less common scales. [With three hands I really should be a wizard piano-player, music theory expert or not.]

Read the rest of “Howard Goodall’s 20th Century Greats [and why I’m not one of them]”…

One of my favourite lyrics goes:

And your bones have been my bedframe
And your flesh has been my pillow
I am waiting for sleep
To offer up the deep
With both hands

But when no words will do, it’s hard to beat three shades of Pachelbel’s Canon in D.

The latest issue of Total Guitar magazine has a feature on the top 100 guitar riffs of all time, the first 20 of which are reported by the BBC.

1. Sweet Child O’ Mine - Guns N’ Roses

2. Smells Like Teen Spirit - Nirvana

3. Whole Lotta Love - Led Zeppelin

4. Smoke On The Water - Deep Purple

5. Enter Sandman - Metallica

6. Layla - Derek & The Dominoes/Eric Clapton

7. Master Of Puppets - Metallica

8. Back In Black - AC/DC

9. Voodoo Chile (Slight Return) - Jimi Hendrix

10. Paranoid - Black Sabbath

11. Crazy Train - Ozzy Osbourne

12. All Right Now - Free

13. Plug In Baby - Muse

14. Black Dog - Led Zeppelin

15. Ain’t Talkin’ ‘bout Love - Van Halen

16. Walk This Way - Aerosmith with Run DMC

17. Sunshine Of Your Love - Cream

18. No-One Knows - Queens of The Stone Age

19. Paradise City - Guns N’ Roses

20. Killing In The Name - Rage Against the Machine

I don’t know some of those songs, but I’m at least familiar the bands and it’s clear there’s one thing common to all the riffs: they’re all played on electric guitar. I’ve got nothing against electric guitar riffs and there are some classic ones in this list, although obviously I’ve got my own preferences [most of Jimi Hendrix’s songs deserve to make the top 100, and “Little Wing” should be way up there, along with Bernard Butler’s killer opening to Suede’s “This Hollywood Life”]. But, ignoring the rock bias of Total Guitar and its readers, I see no reason why acoustic guitar riffs can’t be as good as electric ones, so in an attempt to redress the balance I had a look through my song collection and tried to pick out a list of what I consider to be great acoustic riffs.

The line between a riff and a chord progression is blurred at the best of times, and it becomes especially difficult to distinguish the two in an acoustic song where the guitar is generally utilised to a greater degree to “fill out” the song more than an electric guitar backed-up by rhythm guitar, bass and drums. It became much more about deciding what I considered a riff, a chord progression, an introduction or an all-out solo, and then ruling out the song if it fell in any but the first category; no doubt some of these will still be contentious choices.

• The Wild Ones - Suede

• Tears in Heaven - Eric Clapton

• Losing my Religion - R.E.M. [mandolin riff!]

• High and Dry - Radiohead

• Kielbasa - Tenacious D

• Here Comes the Sun - The Beatles

• Warehouse - Dave Matthews Band

• The Shining - Badly Drawn Boy

• Lie in our Graves - Dave Matthews Band

• You Light the Fire - Bernard Butler

• Loser - Beck

I don’t listen ever to the radio for music; I much prefer to put my own specific choices on, or trust WMP’s automatic playlist generators to keep track of my MP3 collection. However, after reading about Radio 1’s landmark 10 Hour Take-over—firstly over at City of Sound and then in more detail at hackdiary [how cool is it to be able to read first-hand accounts from the people who built the system?]—I’ve been tuned in since ten o’clock [actually, not really “tuned in” as I’m listening via their broadband stream, now that it works properly], and it’s very entertaining—much better than shows dedicated to specific genres.

The idea is simple: from ten o’clock this morning until eight o’clock tonight, all playlists are scrapped and the entire output is dictated by the public texting- or emailing-in their requests, which are processed and managed by some nifty bespoke software. It’s made for some genuinely eclectic mixes—for example, here’s what was played in the last hour or so:

1. Coldplay - Shiver
2. Janet Jackson - That’s The Way Love Goes
3. Dolly Parton - 9 to 5
4. Felix - Don’t You Want Me
5. Joy Divison - Love Will Tear Us Apart
6. Foundations - Build Me Up Buttercup
7. Suede - Trash
8. House of Pain - Jump Around
9. Manic Street Preachers - A Design For Life
10. Paul McCartney - We All Stand Together (The Frog Chorus)
11. Hole - Celebrity Skin
12. Dennis Waterman - I Could Be So Good (Theme from Minder)
13. Men at Work - Down Under
14. Elbow - Newborn

I’m definitely impressed at the technology running everything—nothing seems to have fallen over so far—but it’s the choices made by the Great British Public™ which have made this idea really successful: I keep listening because I want to see what’s coming up next—it really could be anything. [Gah, they’re playing “Do the Bartman” now—perhaps it’s not such a great idea after all!]

Read the rest of “10 Hour Take-over”…

Just so you know, if any of you wanted to purchase Norah Jones’s lovely new album but were a bit concerned that the so-called “copy protection” would prevent you from ripping it legitimately onto your computer, to transfer to your portable MP3 player for example, let me reassure you that I’ve ripped it with no problems using nothing more than Windows Media Player on Win XP.

When the CD is inserted a dialogue box pops up asking the disconcertingly vague question, “Certain files need to be updated in order to play this CD. Proceed?” Hitting Cancel and opening up Media Player allowed me to rip it error-free to my library. I don’t know what would happen if I’d hit OK—perhaps this would have locked the CD—but I wasn’t going to chance it.

The same is true of the Dave Matthews Band’s Central Park Concert; I haven’t tried playing either album in my portable CD player, but I suspect the same thing will happen as with Radiohead’s last effort: I’ll have to burn a new CD from my rips in order to play them.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Johnny Cash lately—his American III & IV albums, which are fantastic. I won’t pretend to have always loved Johnny Cash, or that I know which are considered his best records; I’ve only recently got these two records, and the only other recording I have of his is Wanderer, on the end of U2’s Zooropa, but I’m really enjoying these two albums and will check out his earlier stuff at some point.

The mix of originals and covers works well, although I don’t think anyone should ever try and cover Bridge Over Troubled Water, no matter who you are. It’s such a grandious song and Art Garfunkel’s original vocals are pitched so well, you have one of two options if you want to be different from the original:

• Go completely overboard with your vocals—the route that would chosen by the Mariah Careys and Craig Davids of this world, and hence of no interest to me whatsoever.

• Be terribly serious and sombre, trying to make the song your own—but we know you didn’t write it, which distracts from the sincerity.

Having said that, Cash pulls off The Mercy Seat and Desperado as if they were written by and about him—it’s really only Bridge Over Troubled Water that I think is “uncoverable”. Anyway, what I really want to talk about is his version of Danny Boy, and specifically the fact that I’d never noticed before that the lyric is:

If I am dead, as dead I well may be.
You’ll come and find the place where I am lying.

It’s “…well may be”? I was sure that couldn’t be right—surely it should be “…may well be”? I convinced myself that what had happened was: he’d sung it incorrectly, yet there was something about this take that meant it had to be the one on the final cut. He’d re-recorded it, I thought, to get the line right, but something just didn’t sound right no matter what he tried. I listened to it a few more times, trying to hear what it was that made this take special—it’s an interesting exercise. Try it yourself: take a song you think is great, put it on, and pinpoint the exact thing that the song can’t do without. I’m not talking about the drum beat or the guitar solo—I mean the way the singer sings a certain word, or the pause he leaves between words. As I was writing this, the example I thought of is Nightswimming—the way Michael Stipe sings the word “deserves” in the first line: it’s inimitable.

I checked out the lyrics of course, and it appears they were originally written the way Cash sings them. Never doubt a legend: even if they’re wrong, they’re right.

Excellent news: rather than just take the new regulations lying down, CD-WOW have managed to keep their prices as low as they were before January 25th. From their email:

We’ve been able to remove the additional charges for deliveries to the UK and Ireland on CDs.

We’ve been working our little cotton socks off to source our Chart Albums within the EU at the lowest possible price and cutting our margins even more.

In simple terms, from today the additional charges are no longer applicable. Chart CDs remain at £8.99 including deliveries to the UK - yippeee!

There have been a few cutbacks in the office, I’m working out of the YMCA and using an etch-a-sketch as my PC was sold.

But fear not - you get our great CD price - and I’m loving the YMCA tomato soup!

Barely a week has passed since the new law came into effect, so I don’t think this can be just a reaction to falling sales; and it does hammer home the point harder than ever: if they can sell CDs for £8.99, absorbing the £2 surcharge they thought they’d have to apply, and still be confident of being a profitable company, the mark-up of CDs in high-street shops is simply exorbitant.

I’ve just received an email from those fine purveyors of cheap CDs, CD-WOW!:

The UK Major record companies through their mouth piece the BPI have unfortunately restricted the UK and Irish consumers right to enjoy the freedom of the World Wide Web.

As from this weekend, any CD ordered for delivery to the UK and Ireland will incur a surcharge as we are only able to deliver CDs manufactured within the EU (more expensive).

We will of course still be supplying UK and Irish customers but as of Sunday 25th January 2004 a surcharge of £2.00 (3.00 Euros) per CD will apply.

Delivery to the rest of the world will not be affected.

This was the first I’d heard of it, but it was reported by BBC Online earlier today, and according to an ITV News story from last week, Amazon and Play are also in the BPI’s sights, but this might not be such a clever idea after all.

The industry is in a tight spot, though, because it often acknowledges that Internet retailers have become an important source of revenue at a time of crisis over declining sales.

[In other news, the BPI plan to have their cake and eat it.]

I really don’t mind them driving up the prices of affordable CD suppliers—if they want to force me to download music for free instead of buying it at a reasonable price, that’s their call.

Since sometime in early November I’ve been listening to Aqualung’s Still Life on practically a daily basis—it’s staggeringly beautiful in parts, and I’d say it was my top album of 2003 [narrowly beating Adam Masterson into second place]. So it’s quite a surprise to realise that before now I’d not checked out their official website.

There are plenty of the usual treats like audio samples and video clips, but I was particularly pleased to find the Making of Still Life section, mostly for the ‘track-by-track’ interview with Matt Hale, describing what influenced the creation of each song, and how they evolved from certain ideas or sounds.

You Turn Me Around

“I had this idea that it might be nice to try and work out a drum part that was like 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover, but in 6/8.”

Seven Keys

“…we had this ‘vegas’ drum sound, and it started with a ridiculous drum fill. It felt like I should be coming up on a riser in a white suit with showgirls around me and golden confetti coming down…and a glitter ball…it was great…”

Extraordinary Thing

“I liked the idea of having real harpsichord, and I’d never played one—so I went to a strange but lovely man called Alexander who lives in Islington who has a front room full of harpsichords, and spent an afternoon recording this song. But in the end it turns out that a whole four-minute track of harpsichord starts to feel like someone’s banging you in the head with a screwdriver…”

Easier to Lie

“It just seemed to me to sound—this may be an odd thing to say—but it somehow sounds ‘important’. Not that I’m important or it’s an important song, just that it sounds as big and grand as the topic requires it to be.”

Brighter Than Sunshine

“What I wanted to capture is the idea that someone’s fallen in love, and they’re taken unawares by it, that they don’t expect it, that they weren’t looking for it; that they weren’t even interested in the idea, but suddenly it’s happened, and it’s amazing and they can’t believe it.

“I wanted that to be a surprised love song, to document the moment that you realise that it’s suddenly happening and it’s for real, and just as brilliant as it could possibly be. And even though you’re cynical, and remain a cynical, grown-up person, aware of the complexities of the world, you are nonetheless stupidly and madly in love. Sounds nice too.”

Sounds very nice.

i barely remembered that i was supposed to be seeing adam masterson and thea gilmore at the charlotte last night — it was about six o’clock in the evening when i noticed the date and thought to myself, ‘wasn’t i planning something for the 26th? oh yeah, bugger!’. there followed a few minutes inner turmoil where i wrestled ‘staying in the warm and having a nice dinner’ with ‘grabbing a quick sandwich and going out in the cold’. however, i did promise myself i’d go, so in the end i headed out the door.

Read the rest of “adam masterson and thea gilmore at the charlotte”…

despite the whole system being a bit overwhelming, i’m really impressed with how good the music recommendations that amazon comes up with for me have been. thanks to some computer somewhere learning about my preferences partly based on my past purchases, but mostly from my spending a fair amount of time rating the initial suggestions to allow it to hone in on my tastes, i’ve got to know the music of:

• tom mcrae;

• ed harcourt;

• aqualung;

• turin brakes;

• mull historical society;

• muse;

• shack;

• damien rice;

• adam masterson.

that list isn’t in any particular order, though adam masterson is the latest discovery, having read the write-up of his album and added it to my wishlist only a couple of weeks ago; i might never have got round to buying it myself, but luckily my lovely friend jo ordered it for me as a birthday present.

as you might expect from a recommendation engine, the musical style is similar to damien rice and tom mcrae [his first album at least]: simple, acoustic guitar-based with a great voice to carry the songs, and a couple of big band numbers which show he knows when to beef up the songs [‘into nowhere land’] and when to keep them sparse [‘sunlight song’]. considering he’s only twenty-two and this is his first release, it’s a very mature debut.

by happy coincidence he’s currently supporting a lady called thea gilmore on her tour, and they’re coming to my town at the end of october, playing at a small pub venue just down the road; i don’t go to nearly enough live shows [for ‘nearly enough’ read ‘any’] but i’ll endeavor to see this one.

as if you didn’t know, the title of this post comes from the lyrics of r.e.m.’s new single, in my opinion a welcome return to form after my disappointment at their last effort; the video — a take on breakfast news programmes — is notable for, i think, being the first time peter buck has ever been seen miming on film. [at the moment you can stream the video from their spoof website the morning team.]

just to prove i can be objective: i have to say i don’t really like r.e.m.’s new song. to those that know me, this declaration will probably come as something of a surprise — you might think i’d never admit to not liking an r.e.m. song, but the simple fact is that the reason i rate them as my favourite band is precisely because, until now, they’ve not composed something i didn’t like.

this song isn’t going to damage my opinion of them — if i’m honest, i’m still clinging to a small hope that because the version linked-to above is not the final mix, they still have a chance to work their magic — and in a way i’m glad i don’t like it. i sometimes wondered if i was somehow playing up to this image i’ve created — that of a diehard “they can do no wrong” kind of fan — but it really is the case that, with this exception, i think they make damned fine music.

this is the second album released to benefit the charity war child, the first being the ‘help’ album, and like its predecessor manages to get together some top talent to contribute. the premise is modern artists performing cover versions of songs that reached number one in the charts, and so we have muse doing a rocking version of ‘house of the rising sun’; stereophonics stripping bare ‘nothing compares 2 u’; badly drawn boy with jools holland & his rhythm & blues orchestra revealing the words to ‘come on eileen’ at long last; and mcalmont & butler rounding off the album with a rousingly soulful ‘back for good’.

each artist chose their song for a particular reasons — detailed in the sleevenotes — and the covers, for the most part, do justice to the songs. although i don’t care for some of the songs — more fire crew covering gabrielle’s ‘dreams’ [a song i wasn’t keen on to start with] doesn’t interest me — this is worth buying, as the songs by those artists i do like would be hard to come by otherwise.

i’ve started somewhat in the middle with mull historical society, having not listened to the first album, “loss”. that album was on my ‘amazon recommendations’ list for months, but i’d never got around to checking it out, so when “us” came out and all the reviews i read were positive, i decided i should give this new album a listen.

happily, i was not in the least bit disappointed. in a similar way to what i love about the music of tom mcrae, amongst others, there is a feeling that every sound has been attended to individually with equal care. i was delighted to discovered the ‘society’ is just one man — making the effort that has gone into making these songs all the more impressive. as the bio on the website says:

of course, all that effort would be for nowt if the songs were no good, but macintye is talented and concentrated enough for that not to be a problem. in the media there have been comparisons with the beach boys, specifically pet sounds, but whilst there is a definite beach boys-sounding influence in some of the songs, they are unquestionably ‘of this era’ [titles like “minister for genetics and insurance mp”, “the supermarket strikes back” and the belting rocker “live like the automatics” could only come from someone who’s grown up in the eighties and nineties], and i think the analogy is more to do with brian wilson’s legendary perfectionism than the music.

perhaps the only thing i need to say about this record is, i would think, what every artist wants to be told: it makes me want to hear more.

tom mcrae’s new album, just like blood, is just as brooding as his excellent debut, but musically more accomplished [and with more money and access to other musicians it seems]. he retains the overall feel of his earlier work: nothing here is over-the-top by any means. every refrain, every chord, every note, seems to have been carefully thought through and nothing is there that shouldn’t be. on one track, ‘overthrown’, he decides he doesn’t even need to do more than breathe the words over the layers of guitars he has laid down. but when he sings [‘you only disappear’], he can make every hair on my neck stand on end as only a few others can.

with this and his previous album, i always feel as though i’ve not as much listened to the songs, but allowed them to gently wash over me. there’s no harshness, no musical tricks are played on the listener; the songs have the simplicity that maturity and experience bring to songwriting. why use twelve chords when two will suffice? it sounds like mcrae learnt this lesson a long time ago, although from who i’m not sure as it’s hard to pick an obvious influence, and he’s gifted enough to be able find something original amongst all that history.

i’ve not listened enough times for the lyrics to have impacted on me, but with music this good i’ve no doubt they’ll have plenty of chances to do so.