It's been a while since we did this, hasn't it? Well, why not?
“The Intro and the Outro” – Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band
And, looking very relaxed, Adolf Hitler, on vibes. Nnnice!
“My Sharona” – The Knack
Some songs are just irresistible, and this is one of them. All the way from 1979, and still sounding great. Mind you, the single cover is straight out of 1979 too….
Ah, well. Different times. Great song.
“Where Do You Go To, My Lovely?” – Peter Sarstedt
Noteworthy, apart from being a brilliant song, for having a swedish man pretending to be a sophisticated Frenchman who somehow grew up in the backstreets of Naples. This is a real favourite car song for us, and we’re often to be found ad-libbing gleefully along in all the appropriate places. A habit, I think we started when we were driving through the Canadian Rockies in the summer of 2010.
“You live in a fancy apartment
Off the Boulevard of St. Michel
Where you keep your Rolling Stones records
And a friend of Sacha Distel, yes you do.”
In a box, by your bed.
Aha-ha-ha!
Long car journeys just fly by.
Accordion solo!
“Down By The Water” – PJ Harvey
Mental but talented. She sounds like a proper fury from hell during this song…. I can remember buying “Rid of Me” back in the day, and although I think it’s fair to say that PJ has become a lot more musically sophisticated since the fairly uncomplicated shrieking she adopted there, the anger is perhaps all the more frightening for being controlled. That whisper at the end is frankly terrifying.
“Step Into My Office, Baby” – Belle & Sebastian
It took me a long time to succumb to their charms, and I’ve not really followed them much since the disappointment of “The Life Pursuit”… but at their best, they sound like nobody else and I love them. As Pitchfork once described them: “One of the most beloved, bewitching, misunderstood, and eventually disappointing bands in recent history”
My favourite album by far is “If You’re Feeling Sinister”, but “Dear Catastrophe Waitress” comes a very close second. It’s much less folksy, and embracing pop, but it’s surely none the worse for that. This song is just so… playful. A delight.
"She gave me some dictation
But my strength is in administration
I took down all she said
I even took down her little red dress"
Oh, you scamps!
“Stayin’ Alive” – The Bee Gees
We have some particularly complex warm-up / stretching routines at our Wednesday intervals session that seem to take forever and involve a lot of coordination between hands and legs. One in particular involves stretching a leg out and throwing a hand in the air, and every time I did it, I was irresistibly reminded of John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, and started to sing. There’s another one, a kind of skip with arms joyously windmilling, that had me singing “The Hills are alive….”. Perhaps it’s just me, but you have to pass the time and occupy the mind somehow when you’re about to flog yourself around a coned out track.
“Fourth of July” – Sufjan Stevens
I find “The Age of Adz” unlistenable, but “Carrie and Lowell”, his most recent album, is stripped right back to basics as Stevens explores his grief at the death of his mother. It doesn’t sound very uplifting, but it’s a beautiful album, and there’s no more beautiful song on it than this one.
“Shall we look at the moon, my little loon
Why do you cry?
Make the most of your life, while it is rife
While it is light
Well you do enough talk
My little hawk, why do you cry?
Tell me what did you learn from the Tillamook burn?
Or the Fourth of July?
We’re all gonna die”
Heartbreakingly beautiful.
“Bat Outta Hell” – Meatloaf
….and then, as if by magic, the intro from “Bat Out of Hell” sprang into my head and refused to leave.
Theme from Jurassic Park – John Williams
One of my team is off to the wedding of his sister this weekend. Apparently all of the tables are named after her favourite films (he’s sitting at “Wayne’s World”) and she wants to walk down the aisle to this. Well, I suppose that’s fine, as long as you understand that every single person in the room will think of wide-open vistas with dinosaurs sweeping across the verdant plains. Is that what you want? Because that’s what will happen.
“Delia’s Gone” – Johnny Cash
"First time I shot her I shot her in the side
Hard to watch her suffer
But with the second shot she died
Delia's gone, one more round Delia's gone"
How could you not love Johnny Cash when he delivers lines that that entirely dead –pan?
I’m off to Gozo (the destroyer? The traveller? The Gozerian? There is no Dana… only Zuul!). Have a great week, y’all.
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