Show 7 was heard by the smallest number of listeners I’ve had so far, which was a shame as it had some music that I really liked and really wanted to share. Never mind though, because here is the playlist section from Thursday, give it a listen:
Andy Stott – Faith In Strangers
DARKSIDE – Metatron (Music Video)
FKA twigs – Lights On (Live on KEXP)
Purity Ring – heartsigh
Le Couleur – Femme
Flying Lotus – Coronus, The Terminator
Forest Swords – The Weight of Gold
Lower Dens – Société Anonyme
Nina Simone – Feeling good (Nicolas Jaar edit) “Nico’s feeling Good”
Nicolas Jaar – Encore
Shlohmo – Put It
Baths – Aminals
Moderat – Reminder
Prefuse 73 – Still Pretending
Shigeto – Pulse
Burial & Four Tet Feat. Thom Yorke – Ego HQ
Nosaj Thing – Aquarium
Tokimonsta – The World Is Ours
Nu – MAN O TO (Original Mix)
Fujiya & Miyagi – Flaws
Giraffage – Tell Me
Massive Attack – Butterfly Caught
Matthew Dear – Shortwave
The Bug – London Zoo – Poison Dart ft.Warrior Queen
The Juan Maclean – Happy House
It’s extremely unlikely that there will be a show 8 any time soon as, while I really do appreciate the time given and feedback from those that have tuned in, to see the number of listeners decreasing week on week tells me I’m doing something wrong. I had hoped to see it increasing of course. I may just look into producing a weekly download that people can listen to whenever they like as having to listen at a set time every week is restricting, I know, it is for me as well.
I’ll have a little think about it and see what I can come up with.
I wish more people would accept awards in the manner of John Lydon at the Q Awards in 2001. Rock ‘n Roll is not supposed to be humble, it should be brash, and loud and irreverent.
The opening playlist from show 5 before we dived back into 1981:
MØ – Kamikaze
Ghostpoet – Survive It
Roots Manuva – Let The Spirit
Tricky – Puppy Toy
M.I.A – Bad Girls
Massive Attack – Pray for Rain
Bonobo – Stay The Same
Nightmares On Wax – The Sweetest
Gold Panda – You
Boards of Canada – Dayvan Cowboy
SBTRKT – Hold On
Portishead – Only You
Arca – Soichiro
SOHN – Bloodflows
Opening Playlist from Show 6 before digging around in in 1995:
Rat Boy – Sign On
Polica – Wedding
Soak – Reckless Behaviour
Hinds – Bamboo
Formation – All the rest is noise
Halsey – Ghost
John Grant – You and Him
Marcus Marr & Chet Faker – The Trouble with us
Exciting record store news, if you live near Leamington Spa, to be specific. One of our record stores has moved to new, larger premises, and has included a new room,’The Vinyl Room’. Set to open it’s doors for the first time tomorrow, I’ll be there!
Tonight was show 6 and I was lucky enough to have a few nice people listening so that I wasn’t just talking to myself. The show was 30 minutes of tracks that I’d been listening to this week followed by a look back at 1995 for 90 minutes. It was supposed to be 60 minutes but I got a bit carried away.
I’ve had a couple of requests from folks who missed it to re-broadcast but instead I’ll just put it here on the radio page and you can listen whenever you like and I’ll take it down in a few days.
Maybe next Thursday you will come and join me live, or maybe it will make you never come here again!!!
From the 1981 section of last weeks Radio show, for MK.
I’m the operator with my pocket calculator
I’m the operator with my pocket calculator
I am adding and subtracting
I’m controlling and composing
I’m the operator with my pocket calculator
I’m the operator with my pocket calculator
I am adding and subtracting
I’m controlling and composing
By pressing down a special key, it plays a little melody
By pressing down a special key, it plays a little melody
I’m the operator with my pocket calculator
I’m the operator with my pocket calculator
I went to the Leamington Record and CD Fair on Saturday, and was a little underwhelmed. I’ve been several times before but I wold, more often than not, go every six months or so, I’ve been to the last three and the frequency is quite possibly the issue. There was less for me to get excited over and a lot for me to get a bit miffed over. I don’t buy records to own something that has a different coloured label or a fantastically rare catalogue number, I genuinely don’t care. I go there to find records that I can play that are less than the £20 needed for a re-issue on 180g vinyl.
I did find a few things but I came way from there with most of my money still in my pocket, and I made the mistake of buying something (for £3.50) that I already had, not for the first time, which suggests that since I bought the first one I haven’t listened to it and begs the further question, do I need either of them?
So what did I buy? Well, I bought these (album titles are links to Spotify):
Street Legal by Bob Dylan – £3.50 (and the one I already had)
If you were counting that’s 7 vinyl LP’s and a 12” single for £28.50, which is lovely, although really it’s 6 with the duplicate, but I should be more positive about it, I did get some things I wanted, so that’s good. Where I get frustrated is with some of the stall holders who have albums that, to my mind, are massively overpriced. Now this may well be because I don’t want to play £150 for a record that I can buy re-pressed at 180g for £20, but also because some of these albums are there month after month after month and never sell, and probably never will at the level they are asking.
An example is The Beatles and The White Album. I can buy a perfect copy for £25. It’s not 40 years old, it doesn’t have pops and crackles, the cover isn’t worn nor are the corners dinged. A perfectly playable copy in perfect condition. I picked up a copy for £8 and thought, well I’ll have that, even though it looked a little tired. I had misread the label, it was £80 and had no indication anywhere on it as to why. I didn’t buy it, obviously.
I know there are collectors out there who want rare items, but I just can’t quite grasp why. If I have an album that I bought for £5 from a second hand bin and somebody else has exactly the same album but with different colour label that is supposedly worth £200, so what, if you put it on a turntable it will play exactly the same songs, and that’s really all I care about. And why is it worth £200? Surely this is theoretical as the prices should be driven by supply and demand. It’s only £200 if somebody is willing to pay that much for it and judging by the number of high priced records I see over and over again, the vast majority of people are not prepared to pay.
I do understand that there are some items that do command higher values, such as Bob Dylan – The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan from 1963 that featured 4 tracks deleted from subsequent releases is purported to be worth $35,000. If those 4 tracks are not available anywhere else then I get that, but if they have been released elsewhere, why that much money?
Ringo Starr’s own copy of The Beatles – The Beatles (The White Album in fact) from 1968 sold for $790,000, presumably because it was numbered – No.0000001. If you want to listen to it on vinyl then spend £25 on a new one. It’s madness!
I get nostalgia, and have paid a little bit more for something simply because I once owned it, or wanted to own it, sometime back in the past and now have the opportunity and resources to get myself a copy, but that has its limits from a price perspective. As an example, in 1979 I was rather taken by the song ‘Bang Bang’ by B.A.Robertson and had the 7” single. I really wanted the album (I was 12 years old, don’t judge me!) in the way that somebody that you does, I obsessed over it, but never actually bought it. I saw a copy of the album at the record fair and it was £6.50 but I wouldn’t pay it, because it simply isn’t worth that much to me, it was at one point, but not now, it would have to be £2.50 maximum for me to buy it, and I realised some time ago that B.A.Robertson was crap, which was a big influencer on my decision. Now, if I knew that the album was worth £60 I would have bought it and immediately stuck it on Ebay, but I would never be the one paying £60 for it.
There are a number of albums that I know are rare, such as a lot of the Krautrock stuff that came out in the early 70’s which is not currently available elsewhere, if you want to listen to it you might have to pay £100 for the privilege, I understand that, but if it was re-released then the re-release would do, or even the ability to stream it on Spotify as it could quite easily be crap. This happened with Tago Mago by Can, which is an album I adore. An original copy sells, on average, for about $110 (£70), I could have paid that for it but, instead, paid £19 ($27.50) for a re-release and am extremely happy with it, why wouldn’t be? It’s brand new!
At the record fair one of the stallholders was telling me that his colleague once had original copies of the first 15 Elvis Presley singles, which he sold for a couple of hundred pounds several years ago, when now they would be worth thousands. It was entirely meaningless to me. I had an original copy of ‘Return to Sender’ by Elvis when I was a kid and I played the damn thing until it was almost worn out, and I thoroughly enjoyed every moment of it. Had I kept this 1962 release in pristine condition it would now be worth somewhere in the region of £1.50. I had a lot more value out of it than that and didn’t have the hassle of keeping it perfect all these years.
I do sound like I’m moaning a bit, but I genuinely can’t get my head around paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for a vinyl record, even though I love them, I could buy a couple of very nice houses for that. Perhaps somebody could explain it to me.
I’ll leave you with what might appear to be an odd choice for me, but I do really have rather eclectic tastes:
Search ‘All Radio For Shoutcast’ on the App Store or Google play. When installed search for ‘For the love of vinyl’ and when broadcasting you can listen from this app on your phone. Or you can listen in your browser, it would be great if you could join me for a while on Thursday at 20:00 GMT:
The Radio show returns on Thursday with the following on the menu:
20:00 The Playlist -An eclectic mix of songs they don’t usually play on the radio
21:00 That Was The Year That Was – 1981 – An hour of UK Top 75 Songs from this weeks year, but not the ones you might expect. Help shape the hour by taking part in song selection here:
The Radio show returns on Thursday with the following on the menu:
20:00 The Playlist -An eclectic mix of songs they don’t usually play on the radio
21:00 That Was The Year That Was – 1981 – An hour of UK Top 75 Songs from this weeks year, but not the ones you might expect. Help shape the hour by taking part in song selection here:
If you would like an e-mail reminder, plus perhaps some other stuff (but I promise not to bombard anybody with updates) then sign up here and it will pop into your inbox:
I may have been a little hasty in declaring the demise of the radio show as I still have a month of server time that I’ve already paid for. So I shall probably at least use that up. I’ll post some instructions and links each time so that it’s always easy to find and I have a facebook page here:
Well I tried, and I did rather enjoy doing it, but I spend a lot of time preparing the shows and when I find there isn’t anybody listening, not even friends and family, then it’s just verbal masturbation and time to give up.
Thanks to those few who spent a little time with me. I may pick it up again, who knows, but for now at least, that’s the end of this little project.
It’s quite odd now to listen to this album again knowing that there is every possibility that Bowie didn’t know at the point of its release in 2013 that he was terminally ill, or perhaps at this point he wasn’t. Although only 3 years apart (and it had been 10 years since his previous release, “Reality”) the differences between this and ‘Blackstar’ are obvious. There is a darkness that permeates everything on “Blackstar”, and this is not hindsight as I’d been listening to the album for the few days before Bowie’s death was announced and there was a feeling that the songs drained much of the light from around the listener and took them to a place where the shadows were weighed down and the light was struggling to get through. It’s difficult to describe, and yes, there has to be an element of hindsight I suppose but that feeling was definitely there, even if I couldn’t quite identify what it was.
‘The Next Day’ was announced on Bowie’s sixty-sixth birthday, 8 January 2013. Bowie’s website was updated with the video for the lead single, “Where Are We Now?”, and the single was immediately made available for purchase on the iTunes Store. There was much talk at the time around the sudden nature of the release but this was all very successfully managed by a PR company, guided by Bowie, who as in much of his career, wanted to do something different. It was rather counter-intuitive as an exercise but it worked spectacularly.
The recording of the album was kept secret, which must have been difficult even when only using a skeleton crew in the studio, and was overseen by regular producer Tony Visconti. During breaks from the studio, Visconti would walk the streets of New York listening to music from “The Next Day” on his earphones: “I was walking around New York with my headphones on, looking at all the people with Bowie T-shirts on—they are ubiquitous here—thinking, ‘Boy, if you only knew what I’m listening to at the moment.”
My vinyl edition has a few extra tracks that are not on the original CD release, “So She”, “Plan” and “I’ll Take You There”. I haven’t actually played the vinyl copy yet, it only arrived yesterday so I can’t really tell you anything about these tracks but let’s assume they are good!
The cover is, of course, the ‘Heroes’ cover with a white square on it, and there were other images also with white squares on used for the promotion of the album. The cover was designed by Jonathan Barnbrook who explained the cover, saying: “If you are going to subvert an album by David Bowie there are many to choose from but this is one of his most revered, it had to be an image that would really jar if it were subverted in some way and we thought “Heroes” worked best on all counts.”
The obscuring of the photograph connotes “forgetting or obliterating the past”, however, lead single “Where Are We Now” is all about the past, relating as it does to Berlin, where Bowie wrote and recorded his trio of ‘Low’, ‘Heroes’ and ‘Lodger’. The man loves being contradictory.
Having streamed the ‘Basic’ version of the album several times now I find that the absolute stand out track is “Where Are We Now.” It is, simply, one of the best songs he’s written. This, of course, does mean that judging the rest of the album based on a career high is difficult, but it’s a very good album as a whole, trailing off a little at the end perhaps, but in these modern times of albums with a couple of minor singles and generic filler, it’s fair to say that quality control is high, and the first 6 tracks are wonderful, the rest very good. I do reserve the right to revise this opinion as sometimes I do a complete U-Turn after repeated listening.
At the weekend I will remove the plastic covering and get the discs on the turntable so that I can have a proper listen. Streaming into ear buds is not the best way to listen to anything.
It’s quite odd now to listen to this album again knowing that there is every possibility that Bowie didn’t know at the point of its release in 2013 that he was terminally ill, or perhaps at this point he wasn’t. Although only 3 years apart (and it had been 10 years since his previous release, “Reality”) the differences between this and ‘Blackstar’ are obvious. There is a darkness that permeates everything on “Blackstar”, and this is not hindsight as I’d been listening to the album for the few days before Bowie’s death was announced and there was a feeling that the songs drained much of the light from around the listener and took them to a place where the shadows were weighed down and the light was struggling to get through. It’s difficult to describe, and yes, there has to be an element of hindsight I suppose but that feeling was definitely there, even if I couldn’t quite identify what it was.
only using a skeleton crew in the studio, and was overseen by regular producer Tony Visconti. During breaks from the studio, Visconti would walk the streets of New York listening to music from “The Next Day” on his earphones: “I was walking around New York with my headphones on, looking at all the people with Bowie T-shirts on—they are ubiquitous here—thinking, ‘Boy, if you only knew what I’m listening to at the moment.”
verian.wordpress.com 