Discover Weekly #6

Still playing catch-up with #23 from 23rd January, and a band I can’t say I knew anything about until the early 2000’s.

That was when I started being asked to provide a music round for a pub quiz, and on a few occasions, provide a complete music quiz of several rounds’ duration. Fine, I thought, I’ve got lots of CDs and vinyl that I can easily copy bits from onto a cassette. Problem – I’ve got a great selection of stuff that I like, but which to a “normal” person is quite obscure. There was nowhere near enough material that was suitable for a quiz where an average person could sit there recognising a tune, but not being able to name it straight away. There was just a lot of stuff that would have people asking if next week’s quiz could be easier, please.

My solution was to visit various record emporia and buy up as many cheap / cheapish CD compilations of as many music genres as I could think of. That’s why I’m the proud owner of a 16 track compilation entitled The Golden Age Of Swing, featuring Woody Herman and Django Reinhardt, among others. And a 3CD compilation of records that only reached #2 in the UK Charts – bought for a specific series of rounds in the hope that no participant had the same set of CDs. Yes, it does include Vienna (Disc 1, Track 8).

There were also some compilations, proclaiming themselves to be of the Punk / New Wave variety, with the term New Wave being stretched to pretty much breaking point in some cases. It was on one of those that I first heard a cover version of River Deep, Mountain High that a band called The Saints had very much made their own. At some point subsequently, I have learned that the band were Australian. My iTunes library has also acquired their only UK Chart entry, This Perfect Day, and their debut single, (I’m) Stranded. All decent tunes and the latter two have made it onto Spotify playlists.

Therefore it shouldn’t have surprised me to see one of their tunes being offered for me to “discover”. Not that it did surprise me. It was this track, which was released as a single in the UK in 1978, and is from the Eternally Yours album released in the same year.

To me, it does seem a little more accessible than the other songs I’ve mentioned, and maybe the record label felt the same as it is the album’s lead track. Definitely another successful “discovery”.

Sadly, Chris Bailey, who was the main songwriter and vocalist / guitarist passed away in April 2022. The band appears to have been performing live certainly up until 2021 (albeit with nearly as many ex-members over the years as The Fall).

#7 in this series will also feature a band from the Southern Hemisphere.

TGG

February 8, 2023

1. 

   JC

   February 21, 2023

   “Problem – I’ve got a great selection of stuff that I like, but which to a “normal” person is quite obscure.”

   Yup. Got me fired after just the one week of compiling the quiz!

   Chris Bailey was a personal favourite of Nick Cave. There’s an excellent single from an otherwise underwhelming Bad Seeds album on which Chris sang a co-vocal.

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