Farewell also to Vivienne Westwood. You might argue she's not taking a snapshot in this picture... but she is driving a tank to David Cameron's house, so I think she wins.
Here are this week's answers... I would have said all the numbered streets were from New York, but at least one of them (Charles Wright's street) is from L.A. I checked, so you don't have to.
A Simon & Garfunkel song, obviously, but Paul appears here often enough. Also, this was the version that made the UK Top 40 back in 1967. With a very young Boris Johnson in the band...
4. Found on Mount Sinai with Spearmint Shirley & Manic Wire.
Shirley Lee is the lead singer of Spearmint. If you don't know that, you should.
Nicky Wire is a Manic Street Preacher.
The Ten Commandments were found lying around on Mount Sinai. There may have been a burning bush involved, I don't know, it's been a long time since Sunday School.
Probably the most famous example of using movie clips in a hit song... but if you strip them out, there's little else in Flash beyond John Deacon's bassline, Brian's typically OTT guitar solo... and, of course, Freddie belting out the chorus like he's strapped to a rocket hurtling into the sun. But it's the quotes that make this track... not least, Brian Blessed giving uncharacteristic understatement to the most famous line of his career: "GORDON'S ALIVE!"
If you're gonna sample movie dialogue, then at least steal from the best... in this case, Quentin Tarantino. Huey & co.'s breakthrough hit sampled numerous clips from two Tarantino classics: Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. The fact that both the movie dialogue - and Huey's lyrics - contained a variety of very bad language somehow wasn't a barrier to airplay... though the edited version did leave very little to the imagination.
Less a song, more a cobbling together of various tracks from the Batman soundtrack, this always divides both Prince and Batman fans (especially the latter who were expecting Tim Burton's 1989 movie to use Neil Hefti's famous 60s Batman theme tune). Being that I was a huge fan of both back in the day, I devoured Batdance on first hearing: bought the single, the album, the T-shirt... even went to the 6th Form fancy dress disco as the Joker with full face paint (not a good idea - my teenage acne went wild).
Listening back to it now, this track sounds utterly, utterly mental. Only Prince could have got away with it and made such a crazy concoction work in the way it does. The video is insane as well, featuring the kind of language and behaviour that again ONLY PRINCE WOULD GET AWAY WITH. There's even a bit where he appears to repeatedly shout "Get the fuck out!" but I'm reliably informed he says "funk", so that's OK. Incredibly, he took this infernal mishmash to #2 in the UK singles chart - and #1 in the States.
Partyman, from same album, is a much better song (though the video omits the Jack Nicholson quote that opened the original) but it wasn't anywhere near as big a hit.
The most famous BAD song features their most famous use of movie sampling - with a variety of quotes taken from Nic Roeg's movie Performance starring James Fox and Mick Jagger. Like many people, I used to believe the samples were Michael Caine dialogue... which made more sense of Einstein's equation, if you think about it.
This wasn't the only time BAD using movie sampling though - their entire debut album was peppered with film quotes, including The Good, The Bad & The Ugly; A Fistful of Dollars; and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
Some men you just can't reach. So you get what we had here last week, which is the way he wants it.
Well, he gets it.
I don't like it any more than you men.
Then again, I used to think that that Axl's closing question, "What's so civil about war, anyway?" was evidence of what a deep thinker he really is... so what do I know? Or Bono or Sting delivered that line, I'd be pissing myself...
The album version of Chumbawamba's biggest / only hit begins with a rousing clip from the movie Brassed Off, featuring the late, great Pete Postlethwaite giving it everything he's got.
The truth is, I thought it mattered. I thought that MUSIC mattered.
But does it bollocks! Not compared to how PEOPLE matter.
Sadly, the record company edited that off the single version and went straight into the whiskey drinks and lager drinks, making the song sound like an anthem for pissheads, which went down very nicely in the late 90s... but wasn't the band's intention at all.
We wanna be free - we wanna be free to do what we wanna do
And we wanna get loaded
And we wanna have a good time
Normally, this is the sort of thing that gets my back up, not being the biggest fan of either dance music or remixes. Credit where it's due though, Weatherall created a far more interesting record... one that virtually defined an era. More about that here, if you're interested.
Primal Scream & Andrew Weatherall pulled the same trick a few years later with Kowalski, sampling the movie Vanishing Point. Another great example of this sort of thing done right.
This post took longer than expected, but I'm pretty positive I missed out some other famous tracks featuring dialogue culled from movies. If you can think of any, do let me know in the comments.
As is often the case with Robyn's songs, I don't really have a clue what this is all about, but there will be golf courses on the moon one day if we keep dreaming...
Buzz Aldrin took me by the arm
And said one day that I'd be rich
I think he meant that I was gonna be your lover in his lifetime
And I thought I heard, I thought I heard NASA clapping
Janelle pays tribute to the third woman in space (after Valentina Tereshkova and Svetlana Savitskaya... who hasn't, to my knowledge, had a song written about her).
I'm packing my space suit
And I'm taking my shit and moving to the moon
Where there's no rules
See also Ride, Sally Ride by Lou Reed... which I'm guess wasn't about this particular Sally Ride as she didn't even join NASA till 4 years after it was released. Probably has more to do with Mustang Sally.
Christa McAuliffe died in 1986 on the Challenger space shuttle, a disaster that had a tremendous effect on a young Frank Turner. Here, Frank imagines her death as showing her the opening to another world... and the message she sends back to earth can only be heard by a young boy over his ham radio...
It came as some surprise to realise that as she lost everything
The world was revealing a transmission so real that she understood everything
You're still alive, you're still alive...
1. The Divine Comedy - Absent Friends
Leave it to Neil Hannon to pay tribute to the first dog in space... and break our hearts in the progress.
Laika flew through inky blue
'Til Laika neared the atmosphere and Laika knew
Laika's life was through...
Absent friends, here's to them,
And happy days, we thought that they would never end,
But they always end.
Any astronauts floating around in your record collection?
Loads of ideas for Top Ten lists... not enough time to write them. Here's another entry into my musical tour of the USA, stopping off in one of the five boroughs of New York City... because if I start trying to tackle the city as a whole, I'll be here till the end of time.
Admittedly, this 10th spot would have gone to John Peel favourites Bob with their 1989 single 'Esmerelda Brooklyn'... if only I'd been able to find it anywhere online. Al Stewart gets a pass instead, a well-deserving runner-up.
Seattle's Barton Carroll has a nicely cynical Nick Lowe-ish edge to his songwriting.
I'm not a dandy or the sharpest knife in the drawer
and I've always had to work with my hands,
But I use what I was given and I work for a living
and that's more than you can say for your man.
Every now and then, in the course of compiling these charts, I come across a song I've never heard before by an artist I've never heard before, that's really quite lovely. I was taken with this one, until Louise came in and asked, "What are you listening to - it sounds like Kermit." Too late, I'd already downloaded it from Amazon. On her account (accidentally) - that''ll teach her to leave it signed on!
Ten years ago, Jesse Malin released an album, The Fine Art of Self-Destruction, which still remains his career best. This song goes a long way towards explaining why.
Yes, I'm breaking one of my main rules here, but I couldn't resist. This one's a classic, written by the great Jimmy Webb, sung like his life depended on it by the late Johnny Maestro and his band... Brooklyn Bridge.
Someone on youtube describes them as "the American Mumford & Sons", which isn't a bad comparison. This is the most beautiful song they've yet recorded. Oh, and Brooklyn features heavily, even if it doesn't appear in the title.
1. The Beastie Boys - No Sleep Till Brooklyn
Inevitably.
Were the Beastie Boys ever really this young? Were any of us...?
They were Brooklyn's best... unless you know different. As always, let me know your favourites - or any I left out...
