Words & Music #4: I Can Sing A Rainbow

As a sequel to George's Rainbow Post yesterday, I decided to respond to Martin's Challenge and pick one song for each colour of the rainbow. Only one song!?! Impossible. So instead of picking the obvious tunes, I went looking for some lost gems...

RED

Eat were from Bath. They formed in 1986 and released their debut album, Sell Me A God, in 1989. Red Moon is taken from that, a record which reached #10 in the album chart... though its follow up, four years later, disappeared without a trace. Eat reformed in 2014 because that's the law now. 

ORANGE

Romeo Void came out of San Francisco in 1979. They're full of New Wave goodness, and the vocal ramblings of Debora Iyall on this track make me wonder if Florence Shaw from Dry Cleaning is a fan.

YELLOW

This is probably Devendra Banhart's most well-known tune. Was it in an advert at some point? Probably. I prefer not to look that up.

GREEN

Liverpool 1982 welcomed Candy Opera onto the scene, with a similarly lush romanticism to Prefab Sprout. They stuck around until 1993, much unappreciated. And then came back in 2020 with a new album. Because that's the law now. This is one of their older tunes...

BLUE

The X-Certs were Bristolian punks who occasionally flirted with reggae flavourings between 1978 and 1981. I chose this because they're singing about "blue movies", which seem both innocent and antiquated in today's world of wall-to-wall internet pornography. Simpler times.

INDIGO

I have to admit that I struggled a little with indigo, particularly as Martin had already bagged the Peter Murphy track. Then I remembered my favourite Frank Sinatra album, In The Wee Small Hours, and this timeless Duke Ellington tune...

VIOLET

Levon Helm was the drummer in The Band. You probably know that already. He also released some very fine solo records. This comes from his 1980 album American Son, and it's really quite lovely.