Sunday Music

Another Sunday and some more music. In case you only read my music posts I'll repeat from one of my earlier posts, last Sunday was Father's Day so I didn't have time to post anything. One day I'll be organised enough to get things written in advance so we won't have any missing weeks or long parts of the week without any posts. 

Originally I'd planned on using this song when I posted Here's the thing but I decided it didn't fit. I think it would have come across as a little narcissistic in the context of the post. Without that context I think it's time to post Regina Spektor's cover of Radiohead's No Surprises. I think this version really highlights the clarity and pureness of her voice.

On the basis that more people need to hear Fela Kuti and people who have heard some Fela Kuti need to hear more of him here's his song Water No Get Enemy. At the very least you should all own The Best of The Black President, two discs of music and the DVD 'A Slice of Fela'

His 'N' Hers was Pulp's fourth album and their breakthrough. It was nominated for The Mercury Prize but narrowly lost out to M People's Elegant Slumming, which is a superb album title. Back to Pulp, this was the album that broke them to a mainstream audience in the UK and lead to them being labelled as part of the Britpop movement. Their next album Different Class came out at the end of 1995 and won the 1996 Mercury Prize. This is the title track from His 'N' Hers and serves as a perfect example of their mid-90's output.

Possibly my favourite hip hop track ever Harder Than You Think by Public Enemy. If you're from the UK you may now this better from the 2012 coverage of The Paralympic Games. Channel 4's usage of the track lead to the track reaching number 4 in the single charts 5 years after it's original release. The themes of persevering and not giving in to outside pressures and the tribulations of life of course tie in perfectly to with The Paralympics but the songs success really is down to how good it sounds. A lesson in how well songs can do with the right amount of exposure. If you still need convincing to listen to this, the horns are sampled from a Shirley Bassey track.

 Trenchtown Rock by Bob Marley & The Wailers. You should know this is a great track already. This is from the Live album recorded in London in 1975. It may be the greatest live album I've ever heard.

As promised I'll be including a track by Trick in every edition of Sunday Music for the immediate future. This week it's Tricky's cover of Something In The Way, originally by Nirvana. As you can imagine it is very different from the original and very much worth listening too.

Let's talk about comics a little

I was originally going to write a review of Craig Thompson's Blankets here but instead I decided first I want to talk about comics in a more general way. Something to serve as a preface for reviews and other comics-related writing I'll be doing here.

Blankets by Craig Thompson

One of the main things I want to address is the idea that comics=superheroes. Comics are a medium, superheroes are a genre. The two are certainly very closely linked but we need to get away from the idea that one inevitably contains the other. You've probably seen at least one of Christopher Nolan's Batman films, Joss Whedon's Avengers or the more recent X-Men: Days of Future Past, all superhero stories told outside of the medium of comics. The Adventures of Tintin, Blue Is The Warmest Colour and The Walking Dead are all comics that aren't superhero stories.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World by Bryan Lee O'Malley

It's not my intention in anyway to try to say that superhero comics aren't a large and important part of the medium. Nor do I want to try and belittle superhero comics as in some way less worthy stories than other types of comics. It is my intention to show that comics are much more than superheroes. As an example I've just counted all of the graphic novels (a quick aside. I'm using the term graphic novel here to refer to the sort of comic you'd find in a book shop rather than pamphlet style comics you'd find in a comic shop. Graphic novel isn't technically the correct term for all of these but it will do as a catch-all term) my wife & I own. We have 332. Of those 71 are superhero comics.

Two things come across to me from those numbers, apart from the need to buy/build some more shelves. First, we have a lot of superhero stories. Secondly, we have a lot more non-superhero stories. I hope from this that when you see I've written a comic review you won't automatically think it's a superhero and I hope the word 'comic' won't make you dismiss the review or the book I'm reviewing.

One last thing. When you're thinking about superhero stories be it film, TV or comic books you're almost certainly thinking of a character from one of two publishers. Marvel or DC. The Avengers, The X-Men, Spider-man, a whole host of characters with alliterative names, those are all Marvel. Superman, The Flash, (Green) Arrow,  Batman and plenty of other bat-related characters, those are from DC. These two companies dominate the superhero market almost totally. But not completely. There are other superhero comics not published by these companies. One of my favourites is Martin Eden's Spandex about a team of 7 LGBTQ  people based in Brighton. It is fantastic and I'll be reviewing the first volume Spandex - Fast & Hard as my next review after Blankets.

Spandex by Martin Eden

Here's the thing

I know it's been a while since I posted, much longer than I wanted. I've been thinking about what I want the blog to be and what it's actually been since I re-started it. I want it to be a few things but mainly they can all be summed up as, I want it to be somewhere I can write about the things I want to write about. Somewhere to get my ideas and music and film and books out of my head and down somewhere. I hope that this will help me clarify why I feel the way about certain things, why I like the things I do. I hope it'll help sharpen my writing up too. I was pretty happy where it was when I was blogging regularly, now I've not only failed to continue to improve, I've regressed. I want to turn that around.

When you're a kid people ask you what you want to be when you grow up. I still don't know, I'm 34, but I do know that what I don't want to do any more is my current job. Don't worry, this isn't going to be a 'poor me I'm so unfulfilled' post. The truth is I am fulfilled in pretty much everyway. My family (now might be a good time to mention that there was no Music for Sunday last week because it was Father's Day and my daughter was determined to spend as much of the day letting me do as little as possible. It was lovely), my friends, all the things I love to do.  But not work. I want to do something else. I don't know how doing this blog will in any way help me do that, but it is at least doing something else. Something that is, even if only in a small way, productive. And something that is productive for me, again maybe only in a small way, and not for a huge company. I don't hate my job by any stretch of the imagination, I'm just utterly bored by it. Thinking about what I want to write about in my blog is a good, here's that word again, productive way to help pass the time. But if I don't ever do it, if I just think about it, then it's not really helping at all.

I'm aware that this hasn't really explained much in the way of why I haven't been blogging. Mainly the purpose of this post was to shake off the inertia and get something down. I guess in a lot of ways everything I wanted to say could have been better expressed by Frank Turner's song Photosynthesis. If you aren't familiar with his music you really need to get familiar with it. Start now.

Stuck

Some songs get stuck in your head, even if it has been months since you heard it. Something calls them to mind and they're there, in your mind. If it happens to me at work, where we have no music, the song can be stuck there for hours. Today it was Do You Remember The First Time by Pulp. Below is the live version from BBC2's New Years Eve show, Jools Holland's Hottenanny, from 2002.

I remember this performance. I watched it the next day on the New Year's Day repeat. I was 22 and had been dating a woman for 6 or 7 months. In two months it'll be our 9th wedding anniversary. Of course, that has nothing to do with why this song was stuck in my head today and it has no special relevance in my relationship with my wife. But it is why I chose this version for the blog.

Sunday Music

Time for some more Sunday music. Just the three songs today, but I think they pack in enough quality to make up for the lack of quantity.

Let's start with a cover. First, a bit of Velvet Underground history. The band were signed with Verve and released their first two albums (The Velvet Underground & Nico and White Light/White Heat). They then moved to MGM, Verve's parent company, and released a third album (The Velvet Underground) in 1969. MGM were going through some financial troubles and released The Velvet Underground from their contracts. (This would be much easier to follow without all the eponymous records, I'm sorry). The band then signed with Atlantic and released Loaded. However between the release of the album The Velvet Underground and the band's release from their contract with MGM they had recorded 19 tracks, the so called Lost Album. Verve eventually (in 1985) released most of these tracks on what was essentially another eponymous album, VU. One of the tracks on VU is Temptation Inside Your Heart. The song is recorded in a much more light hearted, traditional rock and roll style than is common for The Velvet Underground. This cover bu the Crystal Stilts sounds much more like a Velvet Underground song. A band reimagining a covered song and making it sound more like the sound of the original band than it was at the start is unusual enough for me to include it here. And of course, it's really good.

A few recent conversations with a good friend have led to me re-listening to a lot of Tricky lately. It's not that I'd forgotten that his music was good, more that I'd forgotten just how good it is and how much of it he's released. Expect to see a lot of Tricky showing up on the blog in forthcoming posts as I go through his discography. For today here are a couple of live performances from his debut album Maxinquaye. If you do not have this album in your collection you are missing out and you should remedy that as soon as possible. First up, Hell Is Round The Corner from Glastonbury's jazz stage in 1995:

This is Overcome. Tricky co-wrote Karmacoma with Massive Attack, Overcome is his own version of the song:

A few days off

I took a week off work and so, decided to take the same week off from blogging. And then when I got back to work I found I had to do so much catching up that I didn't really feel like blogging for the first part of the week. In retrospect taking the week off was a mistake. Having time off work gave me plenty of time to spend on blogging, I should have used that time. Especially when I've just started blogging again.

Regardless, I made a bit of spare time tonight to post something and avoid this becoming another week without a post and to share some music. This is a great Live version of Ian Dury and the Blockheads best known song, hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick.

Sunday Music

In this blog's previous incarnation every, (well most), Sunday I would post 6 covers. The posts were called, descriptively but not imaginatively, Covers for Sunday. They were by far the most popular posts I did. Even today, 3+ years on from the final Covers for Sunday, the most viewed post ios an old Covers for Sunday.

I don't want to do Covers for Sunday again. I want the blog to be different now, and searching for 6 different covers every week is surprisingly time consuming. I do, however, want to post some music every Sunday. So the plan is every Sunday I'll post at least 3 songs and at least one of them will be a cover. Those are the only rules I'll impose upon myself.

Here are this weeks songs:

Firstly a cover. You may or not like folk, you may or may not like Springsteen. You may not even like music and have happened upon this looking for film talk. Regardless, you owe it to yourself to listen to this cover, truly one of the best covers I've heard in years. It is Hayward Williams covering Bruce Springsteen's Thunder Road:

I've posted Fela Kuti before, one of the most interesting people of the second half of the 20th century in my opinion and a great musician. Not enough people have heard his music, because everybody should have heard it. If you haven't heard any of his music here's your chance to change that. Fela Kuti with Lady:



Let's have another cover, and this one too is a folk cover. Anais Mitchell covering Bob Dylan's A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall. There's not much to say about this except it's an exceptional live cover. The type that makes you wish you'd been in the room to experience it in person:

Someone else I've posted about before is Christian Scott. In the comments for this video someone describes it as jazz for the 21st century. I think that sums it up perfectly. This track comes from the album Anthem, which you really should own. Christian Scott Quintet performing Litany Against Fear:

It's no secret that The Velvet Underground are my favourite band so it's only fitting they should be featured here. This is from their third album, The Velvet Underground and was the only single released from that album. What Goes On by The Velvet Underground:

Finally, a live version of Karmacoma by Massive Attack. Already a great song, this version manages to make it even better:

Thinking about directors

Recently I've been involved in a project to rank the Top 50 directors of all time. I'm not claiming the list has any authority but it was fun to do and made me think about what it is I like in a director and really if my favourite directors aren't just the same as the directors who made the most films I enjoyed. I'm going to do a series of posts about the directors I picked, why I picked them and talk about the films of theirs I love. Today though, I'm just going to tell you who I voted for and where they ranked overall on the list and go into a little bit about why I picked the list I did. I won't go into the complete list, although I will post the final group list.

My top 10 was (In brackets is the final place in the group ranking):

1) Akira Kurosawa (6th)
2) Alfred Hitchcock (3rd)
3) Stanley Kubrick (1st)
4) Werner Herzog (33rd)
5) Sergio Leone (26th)
6) Ken Loach (NR)
7) Quentin Tarantino (5th)
8) The Archers (NR)
9) Mike Leigh (NR)
10) John Ford (NR)

Other directors that came close to making the list:

Ingmar Bergman
Martin Scorsese
David Lean
Stephen Frears
John Carpenter
Robert Bresson

Unfortunately I messed up while I was trimming my list of possible into the actual Top 10 and somehow forgot Martin Scorsese. Really he should be 4 instead of Werner Herzog. So that would make my actual list:

1) Akira Kurosawa
2) Alfred Hitchcock
3) Stanley Kubrick
4) Martin Scorsese
5) Sergio Leone
6) Ken Loach
7) Quentin Tarantino
8) The Archers
9) Mike Leigh
10) John Ford

It's silly to be bothered about this, especially as this list certainly isn't set in concrete and could, and doubtless will, change in the future. However, it is a type of silliness I'm prone to indulge in, I wouldn't be writing blogs about my favourite directors if I didn't.

One final quick note before I call it a night. I've only seen one movie from both Ingmar Bergman (The Seventh Seal) and Robert Bresson (Diary Of A Country Priest). I loved both of these movies but one great movie wasn't enough to put them on my top 10 list and won't be enough to get them a blog in this series. I do plan on eventually watching more of their films and I'll probably blog more about them then.

Shaking off the dust

I knew it had been a while since I'd last blogged anything but still, I'm shocked that it's been over 3 years. I've been toying with the idea of restarting the blog for a while now. I was going to do a Lou Reed tribute post when he died but, obviously, that didn't happen. Too many times I've put restarting the blog off. Ultimately it's easier to put things off but much less satisfying. The balance tipped from easy to dissatisfied enough to make me write this. To tie it back to the blog's title, I'm ready to move back from thought to expression.

So, what now? The blog will be different. It won't feature mp3s anymore, unless bands/artists ask me too, but it will still feature music. I'll use it to talk about other things that interest me too. Books, films, comics and I'm sure other things that I can't think of right now.

Of course a blog is written to be read but I'm under (almost) no illusions, I'm writing this for me mainly. I hope visitors do come along and do enjoy what they read but I'll be writing what I want to write, what I want to talk about. I think my first few posts will be talking about some of my favourite film directors, what I love about their films, why I love them. I'll be doing some general housekeeping as well. I want to change the look of the blog, make it lighter. And find a new picture for the header.

This is enough for now, I think. See you soon.