There's a guy at the hospital where I work whose sole purpose over the past couple of weeks appears to be blowing leaves. Every morning he's there, blowing them out of the road. You can guess the rest. It's particularly satisfying to watch on a windy day. Makes me feel a little less worthless.
Is there any greater metaphor for the futility of existence than the leaf blower? There was a time I'd have found this depressing, but I take reassurance in the strangest things these days. Like erstwhile airwaves pilot, Charlie Dore, still making music and finding inspiration in the strangest of places. Here she uses the drone of a leaf blower as backing for a wonderful tune about the circular nature of life that's a lot more subtle and moving than Elton's Lion King song.
I never meant to cause you any sorrow
I never meant to cause you any pain
I only wanted to one time to see you laughing
And solving Snapshots in the purple rain.
Blimey - working out the scores from yesterday's quiz took a bit of work. I had to take my shoes and socks off. Lots of half marks flying around too, but as I write this it looks like a draw between Alyson and Rigid Digit... although nobody's solved #9 yet, so that could change.
Anyway, here are the answers...
10. My latest car has no gearstick and runs on flower power... but it wins the race and holds the secret to getting me a better job.
I loved the suggestion for this, from Happy Mondays to U2... I'd love to know how the clues led you to those guys. Bit obscure, but somebody gave me this song on a mixtape about 20-odd years ago and it's been a favourite ever since...
4. Frank smokes a joint with Strangers in the Night, headphones on.
In Strangers In The Night, Frank memorably sang "doobie doobie doo", which wasn't anything to do with drugs but might have inspired a ghost-hunting pooch.
Laurel Canyon producer who's worked with Conor Oberst, Father John Misty, Bonnie 'Prince' Billie, Roy Harper, Dawes and Glen Campbell... among others... also makes a decent racket on his own.
The Hold Steady got back together at the end of last year but have been pretty slow in releasing new material. Still, I'm a huge fan and every track is to be treasured. Hoping for much more in 2019.
Mark Kozelek probably released another twenty albums this year that I haven't yet heard... he's probably released another one while I was typing this sentence... but his eponymous solo album produced more glorious autobiographical ramblings that you'll either dig or want to bury. The word "art" is much misused in the contemporary music industry, but I would argue that Kozelek is the closest thing we have to a true artist working in the field today, putting himself 100% into his music, warts and all, and making a truly individual noise that will touch and speak to only a tiny minority... I consider myself fortunate to "get him" where millions won't.
And then we have Britain's answer to Mark Kozelek, another "artist" whose work becomes more eccentric and individual with every release. His latest album, I Sometimes Dream Of Glue, is a collection of songs about Airfix, Hornby, sex and Subbuteo that ploughs deeper into the unique 70s/80s nostalgia groove that has become his stock-in-trade. Although Subbuteo Lads isn't the best song musically on the album, it does have the best opening line.
From two artists who've swam about as far from the mainstream as it's possible to get... I give you the best pure pop song of the year, from an artist following very well in the footsteps of Elton John & Billy Joel (he's even supported Billy and covered Piano Man for Children In Need). This particular track starts out as a straightforward piano duet then morphs into and 80s power ballad - wait till the drums hammer in around the 2 minute mark and we're suddenly into Diana Ross / Lionel Ritchie or Roberta Flack / Peabo Bryson territory.
My Top Ten: proud to have been irking the musos since 21012.
I only got the album for Christmas and haven't watched the Netflix performance yet... but if this is anything to go by, I'll have a lot more to say about this record soon.
A tribute to Leonard Cohen from his fellow Canadians. Powerful stuff.
1. Okkervil River - Famous Tracheotomies
Will Sheff's parents tried for a long time to have a child, with miscarriages and more making it a very traumatic time for them. After Will was finally born, he became very ill as a young boy. The operation that saved his life involved fitting him with a tracheotomy tube which he then had for a long period throughout his childhood.
This song is about Sheff's gratitude for that little tube that allowed him to still be here today... and many other famous names whose lives have been saved by tracheotomies, including Dylan Thomas, Mary Wells, Gary Coleman (Arnold from Diff'rent Strokes) and Ray Davies, who wrote Waterloo Sunset in memory of the time he himself had been recovering from such an operation.
While I studied for my A Levels during the week, I spent my Saturday mornings in a radio studio. Not actually the on air studio though, just the Master Control Room... which makes it sound a whole lot fancier and more important than it actually was. The only time I got to go into the on air studio was to take in the coffee, and very occasionally you'd hear my voice on air if the jock deigned to throw a question my way... but mostly that was a muffled, off-mic thing. Rarely did he throw open the guest mic and let me speak clearly. On the rare occasion he did that... well, it made me want a whole lot more. I wanted to get behind that desk myself. Have complete control of the mic fader. Feel my lips just a whisker from the pop shield... that sacred totem that was flecked with the spittle of every jock who'd ever sat in that glorious, all-powerful presenter's chair (apart from the hygeine-conscious ones who brought in their own pop shields and swapped them over before and after their shows).
That wasn't going to happen without a little on-air experience of my own though, and it soon became clear I wasn't going to get that at the station. The old quandary that besets most teenage job-applicants: they want experience first, but how do you get it?
The answer was Hospital Radio. Most of the jocks I spoke too said that was how they'd got started, and they encouraged me to give it a go. It wasn't what I expected.
For a start, it wasn't even in the hospital. It was a few streets away, in the basement of a grand old townhouse that had been converted into flats. And as shabby as the radio station I already worked at looked, this made that look like Radio One. But every Thursday evening, I'd dutifully trudge down there and serve out my time.
The staff weren't at all what I expected either. No wannabe radio stars: at least not on the night I worked. There was a retired schoolteacher who liked the sound of his own voice and a middle-aged mother (she was in her 30s, but that was middle-aged to me back then) who obviously just needed a night out of the house. Then there were the ones who never even wanted to get in front of the mic (I know!); happy enough just to sit in the operating room (an even more down-market MCR) or prowl the wards asking for requests. This was way before the days of texts and email, remember. (I promised I'd get involved with that side of the job when I joined hospital radio. But I managed to never once set foot inside the hospital. Kept well away from all the sick people.)
It was here that I honed my craft. Not presenting, per se, but co-presenting. I was pretty good at that. Giving the sarky comeback, setting up the gags and paying them off. Throughout my short-lived on-air career, I was always much better if I had someone to banter with. (Like a cut-rate Mark Radcliffe, without half the wit.) I'm not sure I ever cracked the intimate conversation with the listener, but then the opportunities for flying solo were always pretty limited. (At Christmas, I'd volunteer for the shifts no one else wanted. New Year's Day, I was down there at 8am to do my own thing and play my own thing to absolutely no one. Even in hospital, people had a lay in on January 1st.)
I enjoyed it though. There was no pressure on hospital radio. You just turned up, played Jim Reeves 'I Love You Because' and probably something by The Brighouse & Rastrick Brass Band (because they were always requested), then maybe made up a couple of your own requests that allowed you to play some Meat Loaf. The record library wasn't anywhere near as extensive as the one at my other job: far more Foster & Allen than Foreigner & Abba, but I brought my own records in and snuck them on air whenever I could. This was the late 80s though, and regularly readers of this blog will be well-acquainted with my late-80s tastes. No one at hospital radio had even heard of The Smiths.
Around this time, I put away my childish things. Quit the brass band which had been my only social life for a good four or five years and gave up the piano lessons I'd been taking (unsuccessfully) since I was in primary school. I didn't have time for any of that if I was going to be a radio star. There would, however, be one other lesson I'd soon find myself desperately in need of...
Elocution.
18. Charlie Dore - Pilot of the Airwaves
Here's another radio song I owe to Uncle Tel. Soon after the story above took place, this was to become the last ever song played on Radio Caroline. But I remember it from the first time round. A huge hit in the States, Canada and even Australia... though it only got to #66 in the UK singles chart of 1979. Singer-songwriter Charlie Dore was British though, and although this was her only solo hit, she did go on to pen a number of other successful tunes... one of which I'll be mentioning later in the week. You may be surprised.
I grew up listening to Terry
Wogan. He was a warm and friendly voice on the radio; he often made me
laugh, sometimes till I cried; and like all the best DJs, he introduced
me to some great records. Here's ten that will always remind me of old
Tel...
The only pop song I know that mentions Terry by name, and that's what drew my attention to Franz Ferdinand in the first place. It's about a band starting out and dreaming of a better future - including an interview on Wogan.
So I'm on BBC2 now, telling Terry Wogan how I made it
What I made is unclear now, but his deference is and his laughter is
My words and smile are so easy now
Yes, It's easy now
Yes, It's easy now
It's a curious, dreamlike interlude in the song which doesn't quite fit with the rest, but that's what makes it great. It certainly helped lift Franz Ferdinand a step above other turn-of-the-century guitar bands like the Libertines, though I'm not sure they ever did anything so self-consciously odd again.
I resisted including The Floral Dance or any of Terry's own musical recordings (although he did have a damned fine voice and if you can track down his duet with Cerys Matthews on Que Sera Sera, recorded for Children In Need a few years back, you'll be amazed), but I couldn't resist this. For many years, Ray Moore presented the show before Terry on Radio 2. Moore was a quiet, very well spoken gentleman representative of the old school BBC, with a wickedly subversive sense of humour (much like Tel himself). Somehow, Moore's jokey charity record based on a rhyme from his Liverpudlian childhood reached #24 in the charts in 1986. Sadly, he died of cancer in 1989, but not before being reunited with his old radio sparring partner one last time...
When I posted my initial reaction to Terry's death with the video for my #2 song, saying how it always reminded me of Terry, my old pal Sally responded immediately that she agreed... and then mentioned Billie Jo Spears. A few weeks back, I picked up a Billie Jo CD in the local charity shop and was surprised by how many of them I remembered... from a long, long time ago. My misspent youth: listening to Terry Wogan on the wireless.
Any excuse to play some Glen (and Jimmy Webb). I thought about crowbarring the Greatest Record Ever Recorded in here again, but it's Rhinestone Cowboy, not Wichita Lineman, that reminds me more of Terry.
I guess I can trace my love of country music to Sir Terence. While rock and indie and alt-everything else came later, Radio 2 was the station I listened to as a small child, and Terry introduced me to many of my favourite country singers.
Apparently, the album this comes from was Terry's all-time favourite 33 1/3. I didn't know that till compiling this post, but I did know the song... thanks to Tel.
Clifford T. Ward slips into the Nick Drake category - a heartbreaking singer-songwriter too shy and retiring to play the fame game. One listen to this song will tell you he could have been massive... if he'd had the confidence.
Written by Randy Newman, who only does film scores these days, this was the theme to the second Babe film, Pig In The City. Getting Peter Gabriel to record it along with Paddy Moloney of the Chieftains and the Black Dyke Mills brass band lifted it beyond the schmaltz of its roots, turning it into something really quite moving. When Terry appeared on Desert Island Discs, he chose this as the favourite of all his selections.
The record that was at Number One in March 1972, the month I was born. A couple of weeks later, Terry Wogan took over the Radio 2 breakfast show and became the most recognisable radio voice of my childhood. And he played this song a lot...
Another favourite of Tel's, for obvious reasons as it's about a morning radio jock who's feeling his age. There's a radio edit of the song that ends a little happier than the album version, but I'm sure Terry used to play the original, sadder version. (I might be wrong: my memory makes its own rules.) Hearing this song on Terry's show when I was a kid introduced me to the late great Harry Chapin and I've been a fan ever since.
1. Hoyt Axton - Della & The Dealer
I've been wanting to feature this song here for a while. It's a longtime favourite of mine and I know for certain it was Terry who introduced me to it. I've never heard anyone else play it on the radio, and I'm not sure I'd have heard of Hoyt Axton (beyond his most famous role as Zach Galligan's dad in Gremlins) otherwise. It was the first song that came to mind when I heard about Terry's death, so it makes Number One today...
If that cat could talk, what tales he'd tell,
About Della and the Dealer and the dog as well.
But the cat was cool,
And he never said a mumblin' word...
Good night, Terry. Dallas wouldn't have been the same without you...
