Discover Weekly #2

Back after a short break to allow for Christmas and the added complications my sister and I are currently dealing with – our mother having recently been admitted to a care home, supposedly on a temporary basis….

Perhaps not the best time to start a blog, but it does at least take my mind off things.

The latest Discover Weekly landed on Boxing Day morning, but I’ve only just looked at it, and specifically at the 26th song on the list, Boxing Day being the 26th December and all that.

My initial thought was along the lines of “Oh, bother – that’s just trampled all over another piece I was going to write in a forthcoming series”. The Spotify algorithm is good I have to say – picking up on things I like, without me having obviously demonstrated any liking for it on that platform.

Mrs TGG and I both like Prince. We actually attended the same Prince gig at Maine Road, Manchester, a couple of years before we became aware of each other’s existence. However, there’s no question that one of us is more favourably disposed towards the track at #26 on this week’s Discover Weekly. And that will be me.

For the uninitiated, Hindu Love Gods was a one-off project featuring R.E.M. and the late Warren Zevon. The story goes that these recordings came about after some alcohol had been consumed in the small hours and everyone started playing some cover versions. Including this. It’s a cut above the average covers band, with Zevon snarling out a vocal as only he could.

I’m not the world’s biggest fan of cover versions, it has to be said. For me, what is absolutely key is that the act doing the cover should make the song their own, and that certainly happens here.

Not previously playlisted, I’ve added it to my Should Have Been A Hit? playlist – I can’t see any evidence of it hitting the Charts in any territory where it was released.

The forthcoming series I referred to is The Cassette Albums, of which more in the coming days. My (re)appraisal of the one and only Hindu Love Gods album may now have to wait a little.

TGG

December 28, 2022

1. 

   barrystubbs

   January 12, 2023

   I hope your mother us doing OK GoG.

   Hindu Love God’s were one of those bands that kicked around when I was younger but I never explored.
   Swc.

   LikeLike

   Reply

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Discover Weekly #1

This is what is intentioned to be a weekly series (although as previously mentioned, I’m not good with self-imposed deadlines, so it will appear when it appears).

I had only vaguely noticed a playlist on Spotify entitled Discover Weekly and had never really bothered with it. That was until J (age 24), the elder of my two sons, alerted me to it, largely because his version of said playlist seemed to have a lot of stuff that I like on it. To be fair, his main playlist owes a lot to stuff he’s heard me playing over the years – I’ve schooled him well!

Anyway, I’ve started exploring my own Discover Weekly as a result. I can generally categorise the 30 songs on each week’s list as follows:

• Stuff already on a playlist but in a different version (e,g, full length version, radio edit, etc) – no discovering here.
• Stuff I’ve heard of that isn’t on a playlist because I limit the number of songs by one artist on some of them.
• Stuff I’ve heard of that isn’t on a playlist because I consider it to be complete and utter bilge.
• Stuff I think I haven’t heard of but then realise I have heard before after all.
• The odd genuine new discovery

My worry is that entries in this series may get a bit “samey”, but hey, let’s give it a go.

I’ll pick a tune each week and jot a few lines about it. The tune will be selected by using the date the playlist was released (if it’s the 31st, song 30 will get picked). This week’s list was out on 19th December, so song 19 it is.

My initial reaction was that I hadn’t got the faintest idea what this was. A spot of research confirmed an initial hunch that Michael Penn is indeed related to Sean Penn (brother). This did little to raise my expectations of what I was about to listen to. Once I started playing it, it sounded somewhat familiar, possibly because it’s been in my iTunes library since 2015, picking up 3 (presumably random) plays in that time. It deserves to be there. It’s a likeable, catchy tune from 1989 – not ground-breaking, but pleasant. It puts me in mind of Crowded House a bit, and that’s not a bad thing.

The song, released in 1989 didn’t trouble Chart compilers in the UK, but did reach #13 in the US. It’s from his debut album “March”. Quite how it got onto my iTunes library, I cannot explain. I can only think it was on a compilation of some sort that I loaded in. Anyhow, I’ve listened to the song more times in the last four days than I had in the previous seven years, so the algorithm certainly got that one right.

TGG

December 23, 2022

1. 

   JC

   December 23, 2022

   I’ve loads of things on my laptop hard drive that I’ve obviously downloaded from other blogs at some point over the year, but have no recollection of when and from where. It’s funny how often I then give such a song a listen again many years later and wonder what possessed me in the first instance!!

   Just to say, welcome to the blogging world. Good luck and have fun.

   LikeLiked by 1 person

   Reply
2. 

   barrystubbs

   December 27, 2022

   Just discovered your blog TGG. Excellent stuff.
   I’ll be checking in regular.
   Swc.

   LikeLiked by 1 person

   Reply

Martin Duffy R.I.P.

The fourth post on the blog, and the second obituary. Not really what I was planning.

Martin Duffy is perhaps best known for his work on keyboards with Primal Scream and from 1996 with The Charlatans. For me though, the impact of his keyboard playing will be best remembered in mid-80s Felt (a band I will almost certainly revisit on this blog). This is the lead track from the 1986 album Forever Breathes The Lonely Word.

TGG

December 21, 2022

Terry Hall R.I.P.

I hadn’t really expected to be doing a post like this so early in the life of this blog. Having seen the news late yesterday evening, I have had time to read many tributes to Terry Hall during various pauses during my working day. And many there have been from both fellow musicians and fans alike. For me, as a 13 year-old, hearing Gangsters as it entered the Charts, The Specials seemed exciting, different, dangerous. The attitude of punk, the words a little clearer and a tune you couldn’t help but dance to. They were a band I stuck with until their demise just two years later. Terry’s next project, Fun Boy Three, also caught and held my attention – his deadpan vocals covering a multitude of edgy topics.

After Fun Boy Three ceased to be, in my head I was paying less attention to Terry and his work. Until today, when I realised that along with records by The Specials and Fun Boy Three, he also features on CD or vinyl in my collection with The Colourfield, Terry, Blair & Anouchka, Vegas and as a solo artist. Then there are the guest appearances with the likes of Gorillaz and the couple of tracks I downloaded from his collaboration with Mushtaq. I’ve spent a lot of time listening to his music.

My only regret is never seeing him live. I had a ticket to see The Specials in Manchester in September 2021 – only to test positive for Covid a couple of days beforehand and to have to pass the ticket on to a mate.

I’ll leave you with a couple of tracks – my favourite one from Fun Boy Three and a solo favourite from 1994.

TGG

December 20, 2022

Something Old

As an easy way of getting started, here’s something I wrote for the now defunct blog When You Can’t Remember Anything, back in 2017:

My parents were born in the mid-1930s. They met in the early 1950s, before rock ‘n’ roll was a thing, and by the mid-1960s when I rolled up, they had amassed a record collection which would have served well as a playlist for the new Radio 2 station at its launch the following year. There was nothing by the Stones (despite Paint It, Black being No. 1 on the day I was born) and only one Beatles record (bizarrely, the Twist & Shout EP). The Hollies were OK though – there were a few of theirs, presumably because unlike the Fab Four, they hailed from the “correct” end of the East Lancs Road.

Throughout the next eighteen years, additions were made, with albums from the likes of Andy Williams, Perry Como, James Last and Richard Clayderman appearing on a regular basis. With that background, it probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise that I was a very early starter in the “liking music your parents don’t” stakes – at the age of five to be precise. Seeing T. Rex performing Hot Love on what I presume must have been Top Of The Pops was my eye-opener and I clearly remember my father’s horrified reaction when I pointed at Marc Bolan and announced that I wanted to be like him when I grew up.

So, by April 1984, just a month or so shy of my eighteenth birthday, my parents had grudgingly accepted that this wasn’t a phase I was going through and that I had acquired a lot of vinyl that they didn’t want anywhere near the stereo in the living room.

That was when something rather strange happened as we ate our evening meal. I presume there must have been a lull in the usual conversation, which would have been around the seeming lack of revision I was doing for my forthcoming A Levels (a conversation that is strangely being repeated right now with my eldest…). My father suddenly asked, “Echo And The Bunnymen – are they one of those groups you listen to?”. Bracing myself for some sort of sarcastic remark, I looked at my sister, rolled my eyes and replied in the affirmative. “Their new one’s very good”, he stated. My sister and I looked at each other.

It was she who took the initiative, guessing at what she thought was going on. “The Killing Moon is their old one, Dad”, she said, “they’ve got a new one out now”. My father put down his cutlery, clearly affronted by her comment. “No”, he said very pointedly, “I mean the new one. Something to do with fingertips”.

The ensuing conversation revealed that in the timber yard where my father worked, the radio was on pretty much constantly in the various buildings on the site. In recent years, as the average age of the workforce had lowered in relation to my father’s, Radio 1 had become the station of choice, exposing him to some of the “rubbish” he believed I listened to.

My father didn’t really elaborate too much on what it was he liked about Silver, but there was a post-A Level conversation where he described Seven Seas as “another good one”. He had started buying cassettes to play in the car around that time and had moved onto The Eagles among others – maybe this had paved the way to him liking the works of Ian McCulloch and co.

So that’s Silver and what it means to me. I never did sit my father down and play Ocean Rain to him as I did OK in those A-Levels, went to Uni and those family evening meals became a thing of the past. I’m not sure if he’d have liked all of it, but I always think of him when playing tracks from it.

As a footnote, my father passed away a few years ago after a prolonged illness. He lost interest in most things, including music. However, my mother has picked up the mantle of surprising the offspring with musical observations, declaring Biffy Clyro’s original Many Of Horror to be far more “real” than the version by the bloke who won the X Factor….

TGG

December 19, 2022

Some Introductory Waffle

Hi – I’m Dave, a fiftysomething music fan who’s been boring friends and others verbally about music for many years. For some time, I’ve felt the urge to put something into writing, as the About section explains:

This is a blog I planned to start some years ago and as with many things in life, I never got round to it. It’s meant to just be personal observations and anecdotes around various pieces of rock and pop music. It’s really nothing more than that. At some point, I may even get started on it.

All being well, things will get going before too long. Posts will be irregular, because I really don’t function well with self-imposed deadlines.

I go by the name of TheGreatGog on here. Gog stands for Grumpy Old Git (which has been used to describe me since my mid-thirties), and I conferred the greatness upon myself. I will try to be kind about music, events and people, but I’m sure the things that really irk me will show though. Apologies!

TGG.

December 19, 2022