Day 8: Caetano Veloso and Chico Buarque – Juntos e ao vivo

 

Today’s disc is Juntos e ao vivo, a 1972 live album by Brazilian musicians Caetano Veloso and Chico Buarque. I bought it when I lived in Madrid in 1986 (aged 19) and I’m not quite clear how I got it back in one piece when I all I came back with is a rucksack but somehow I did.

I learned about lots of new music that year – pretty much all by Spanish or Latin American artists. Many of the friends I made there were Latin Americans, most of them in some kind of exile, and so I listened to a lot of music from that part of the world. I can’t speak a word of Portuguese but Brazilian Chico Buarque, in particular, was one of the artists that was played and spoken of often (along with Cubans Silvio Rodríguez and Pablo Milanés). Knowing Spanish I can have a good guess at many of the words but there is still a lot of mystery in this particular listening and somehow that does make it all the more enjoyable (for me anyway). I suppose that’s how some people feel about Italian opera. Here is a taste of the album:

I probably bought this album because it was the only Buarque one in the shop and I listened to loads, especially when I came back to England. I did always think the audience were very loud on the recording but Wikipedia tells me why:

 

It was recorded in Salvador's Teatro Castro Alves shortly after Veloso returned from his exile in London, imposed by the ruling Brazilian military dictatorship. Because of the political connotation of the songs and the repressive nature of the regime at the time, audience shouts and clapping were made intentionally louder in some parts of the album which contained verses that the censors had vetoed.

 

Both Buarque and Veloso were born in the early 1940s so they are both pretty senior these days. After David Soul passed away a day after the post that mentioned him last week I’m a little nervous to draw any attention to them at all. Both have long Wikipedia entries if you want all the life stories but the music speaks another language and this is a great album so seek it out. Here’s another track.

Back tomorrow with something made closer to (my old) home.

For the first intro post to this series go here.

Day 7: The Isley Brothers/Isley Jasper Isley/Quincy Jones – The Artists Vol IV

This is a 1986 album featuring music by two artists (or groups of artists) that I really enjoyed, mainly in the 1980s. At some point I did have other records by these artists. I’m sure I had the 1981 Quincy Jones album The Dude, for example, but no sign of it now –  I imagine that in one of my must-clear-out-some-vinyl sessions over the year I decided that just keeping this compilation would be a good compromise. Street Sounds, the record label for this one, put out loads of compilations, particularly in the 1980s, concentrating on soul, electro, hip hop, rare groove and so on. You may well have one or two somewhere in your dusty collection. Here is the back cover:

 

The Isley Brothers (on Side 2) are musical phenomenon (6 brothers, all in the band at one point or another, only 2 still alive, 1 died young, very early on in the band’s career). As well as the Isleys there is one brother-in-law, Chris Jasper, a writer, producer and also in various incarnations of the band 1973-87 (and the splinter group that included his name, Isley Jasper Isley 1984-88). The Isley Brothers put out their first single in 1957 and their most recent album in 2022 – quite the streak. I probably first saw their name on the 1979 7” single It’s a Disco Night (Rock Don’t Stop) because that was in in my brother’s huge record collection (mentioned back on Day 5) but I must have heard some of their other tracks before that because there are so many of them. They wrote and recorded Shout (1959, the song later released by Lulu) and they recorded various big hits for Motown in the 1960s (you probably know more than you think, mainly written by Motown writers). An Isley brother wrote a Fight the Power in 1975 and Harvest for the World in 1976. Many of their songs have been covered but one of their biggest hits Summer Breeze (1974) was written by a band I’ve never heard of, despite having heard the song many, many times, Seals and Crofts. The song Caravan of Love (later covered by the Housemartins) was written by Chris Jasper and put out by the Isley Jasper Isley splinter group in 1985. I still have a copy of that on 12" too for some reason.

The Isley Brothers version of Summer Breeze is probably one of the reasons I kept this Street Sounds volume. I loved that song – mainly in the 1980s, a good while after its release – and listened to this album over and over, largely for that song, whilst at uni where soul was required to get through the nonsense. The only song on this I’m not mad about is Between the Sheets. I think generally I’m good with songs just not mentioning sheets at all (that Ed Sheeran ‘bedsheets smell like you’ business – I can live without that too, no place for that in a Zumba class, thank you).

 

To say, they’ve been around so long and put out so much music the Isley Brothers are a family band that I don’t know that much about (when you think how much you know about other family bands). Surely there must be a good documentary about them somewhere (I love a music documentary). All of which leads me back over to Side 1 and Quincy Jones as there is a great 2018 film about him, Quincy, made by his daughter actor Rashida (Ann Perkins*) Jones and Alan Hicks. Now 90 years old, Quincy Jones has had the kind of career you can’t sum up in a paragraph or two so I’d suggest that documentary as a good starting point. All but one of the songs on today’s disc are from his 1981 album The Dude which you don’t hear much these days but was pretty huge in its time. Here’s the title track (a few famous names in the credits for this one – Stevie Wonder on synth and Michael Jackson and Syreeta Wright on backing vocals, James Ingram on lead vocals).

Back tomorrow with something Brazilian.

*Her character in the sitcom Parks and Recreation. Much loved by our daughter (the show and the character).

For the first intro post to this series go here.

Day 6: The Smiths – Hatful of Hollow

 

Today’s record is Hatful of Hollow (1984) by the Smiths. Strangely perhaps, this is a compilation album that came out the same year as the Manchester band’s first album (which was just called The Smiths). The debut came out in February that year and the compilation in November, awfully close no? Many of the versions on HoH were recorded over several Radio 1 sessions so I guess that made it different enough (for fans). Their record label was Rough Trade – Manchester’s Factory Records and majors like EMI having turned them down, apparently. I don’t play this album very much these days (for many reasons) but I did play it a lot back when it was new. I’ve never had any other Smiths’ albums but for some reason I’ve kept this one – it has a lot of great tracks (if missing lots of the big tracks from later on, obviously, Panic and the like). It’s quite a lonely creature in my collection as I was never really into anything like indie or indie/punk rock (besides dance remixes or bands associated with dance acts) so it stands a bit alone. I think Morrissey would probably approve of that, awkward fecker that he is.

 

When I got this record I was 17 (going on 18), living in London (our family not long moved down from Middlesbrough) and studying for my A-levels. I think it was a school friend who was into the band and I caught the miserable bug from her. We were both studying English and responded to the words as much as anything, no doubt. Mainly in London up to that point I’d been listening to Capital Radio and going to either disco-type events (where you could see, for example, the first showing of a video for Michael Jackson’s Thriller in a club on the Strand – woooo!) or drunken teenage parties with groups of young men pretending to be in old-fashioned heavy rock bands. This meant the Smiths’ sound was something very different and I don’t think I knew what to make of it. Moody, funny, swirly, knowing, jangly, drony – somehow it suited our 17-year-old brand of giddy, self-obsessed sadness very well and I listened to it quite intensely for a short, period of time. The cover is a big gatefold affair:

 

I rarely really came back to listen to the band again after those couple of months or so but I’ve always kept the album. There’s something about it – so blue, so much of a time – and there are some cracking songs on it. A friend once recited some of the words to Heaven knows I’m Miserable Now to me (without music) and somehow you get the humour much more that way (I was looking for a job and then I found a job and heaven knows I’m miserable now....  we’ve all been there, n’est-ce pas?). Lyrics in Smiths song are very clearly presented, beautifully so really, and they are often unexpected. Here’s that song:

 

I know Morrissey has gone beyond the pale and into whatever comes after that but I never liked the band enough, or for long enough, to really care or feel betrayed or anything like that. According to the oracle that is Wikipedia he was an unpopular loner at school so I guess he’s just come full circle. Before big fame he worked in a record shop and wrote for Record Mirror*, amongst other things, so we have a couple of things in common (but nobody’s shouting about that these days). On the other hand, the Smiths’ other big name, guitarist Johnny Marr, couldn’t be more in vogue just now, played with everyone and their dog at Glastonbury last year and is widely agreed to be a genius (while Morrissey has gone more for infamy, a Nigel Farage of pop). For those who never liked him or the band (including my nearest and dearest, who feels about the Smiths the way I feel about Take That ... which is just ugh), this is proof that there was always something off about him. And maybe that’s true but still, some great songs, guys, some great songs.

 

Back tomorrow with a bit of soul, I think. 

 

 

 

*I wrote reviews of 12” dance singles in the 1990s for Record Mirror (a good way to get promo copies more than anything).

Day 5: Amii Stewart – Knock on Wood/Amii Stewart

Today’s disc is Amii Stewart’s 1979 album which was released under the title Knock on Wood in most places but for some reason was just called Amii Stewart in the UK. I didn’t buy the album at the time (hence the 50p sticker on the front), I probably bought it in a charity shop some time in the 1990s. I had very fond memories of her two huge 1970s disco singles (Knock on Wood and Light My Fire/137 Disco Heaven) and when I was DJing, as part of the duo Daisy & Havoc in the ‘90s, I think I bought this album to play those tracks when we were booked for back rooms, bars and parties. Playing back rooms was often more fun than playing the ‘big rooms’ where tastes for harder and harder trance as the ’90s progressed weren’t really in sync with our own pretty eclectic preferences. Playing big rooms paid more though. 

 

Although Amii Stewart’s two big singles were released in 1978 and 1979 respectively I first knew them from listening to the 7-inch singles a couple of years after their release in my next brother up, David’s, bedroom in the early 1980s on the edge of Middlesbrough. Four years older than me, David had LOADS of records (singles and albums: rock, pop, disco, funk) and he went out a lot so I spent hours listening to his music (on his record player). I don’t think I ever even asked permission but luckily he’s a pretty laid-back guy and didn’t seem to mind. At this point my own record collection wasn’t very extensive (what money I had went on Embassy Regal cigarettes, Littlewoods own brand vodka and Toyah Willcox eye shadow). With male friends I mainly listened to old heavy metal and rock (Black Sabbath, Led Zep, the same tracks over and over) and with female friends I listened to old Motown and some pop of the time like Adam and the Ants (the same tracks over and over). On my own in my room I listened (yes, over and over) to albums like Michael Jackson’s 1979 Off the Wall, randomly Neil Young’s 1972 Harvest (though it was already a good few years old by then, not really sure how I got into that, possibly via the other brother) and the few singles I had (Spandau Ballet, Motorhead, Commodores’ Three Times a Lady – all the essentials). David had so many more records though – piles and piles of them – and he put all his singles in special little cardboard covers with the titles written on in flouncy biro. He had albums like Funkadelic’s One Nation Under a Groove (which blew my mind), he had quite a lot of Thin Lizzy, he had both Amii Stewart singles (and I loved them!).

 

Her big singles were both covers – old tracks given the disco treatment. The first, Knock on Wood, was originally performed and co-written by Eddie Floyd. It was put out by the soul label Stax in 1966 and written, apparently, in the famous Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee where Martin Luther King was shot and killed. We went there, as it happens, when we visited the US in 2011 (read about that here if you like) – it is now part of the Civil Rights Museum. Stewart’s 1978 disco version, originally for a German label, went to number 1 in the US. It is great but I probably prefer her next less successful hit Light my Fire/137 Disco Heaven (a cover of the Doors song in a medley of a sort). Back then I always sang 127 instead of 137 (no idea why, I was just high on disco perhaps) and I never really thought about the number. Listening to it over our evening meal this week it was suggested to me that maybe it’s about BPM. I haven’t tested the theory but it sounds plausible – anyone feel like checking?  

 

Here’s the official video for that single – quite the outfit on Amii here:

Originally a trained dancer and turning 68 later this month, Amii Stewart has continued releasing music and moved to Italy in the mid 1980s where she has been a TV star and is much loved – she even works as a goodwill ambassador for Unicef Italia. So if you’d been wondering where this 1970s icon was, now you know. 

Back with something much less cheerful tomorrow. 

For the first intro post to this series go here.

Day 4: Not The Nine O'Clock News – Not The Nine O'Clock News

 

Today’s disc is the 1980 LP from a TV show called Not the Nine O’Clock News. [Side note – do people even know what LP means these days? It’s from ‘long playing’ or ‘long play’ and it’s what we used to call an album, a big record usually with several tracks on each side]. The show Not Nine O’Clock News was created by John Lloyd (who also produced Blackadder, Spitting Image and created QI) and it ran on BBC from 1979-82. It mainly featured the four performers Rowan Atkinson, Pamela Stephenson, Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones and the writers included Colin Bostock-Smith, Andy Hamilton, Peter Brewis, Richard Curtis and Clive Anderson but the performers all got writing credits on the LP too (so I’m bit unclear why they aren’t listed as writers on Wikipedia). 

Anyway, many people talk about Monty Python as the big influential UK sketch show but for one reason or another we had not been much of a Python family. It was a bit before my time and my oldest brother preferred the Goons (and all Spike Milligan stuff), if anything, while I think my Mum had been a fan of That Was The Week That Was (1962-3) and then in the 1970s she largely preferred her comedy via the mainstream joy that came from Morecambe and Wise, the Two Ronnies and sitcoms like The Good Life and Fawlty Towers (I enjoyed all these too - I watched pretty much any and all 1970s comedy). 

Not the Nine O’Clock News was the first comedy show I remember watching that felt less safe (by 1980 I was 13 and looking for trouble). The show had silly faces and daft songs but, though a while before the rise of what was called alternative comedy, it had satire too and could be quite unpredictable. Also some of it was really funny (handy for a comedy show) – sketches like Gerald the Gorilla (a memorable one for Rowan Atkinson and included on this LP) still work very well. Atkinson was a big name in comedy for some time and became almost national treasure material via Blackadder (but don’t mention the Bean business). I can’t say he’s ever been my favourite but he did make a very good pompous ape. Smith and Jones did (and still do in Jones’ case) heaps of TV and other things. In 1981 the two of them founded the TV company Talkback that has produced many, many shows (they sold it in 2000). Mel Smith is the only one of the four no longer breathing (he died in 2013). 

Doing my oh-so thorough research for this series, I was astonished to read that the ‘one woman’ spot (something that is only now going out of vogue in comedy) was first offered to Victoria Wood, who turned it down. This would have been a very different show with Wood in it and, much as I love VW, it was the very much not-British craziness and random glamour of Antipodean Pamela Stephenson that made the show a little different to everything else I had seen up to that point. With more than a touch of wildness and her many outfit changes, songs, wigs and false teeth, you never knew what she was going to do from week to week (a love song to Ayatollah Khomeini one week, teeth in for Esther Rantzen and Janet Street-Porter the next). After seeing nearly all men in TV comedy for most of the 1970s her presence certainly made my Mum and I sit up and watch her on this show. Here she is doing TV presenter/producer Street-Porter (with Rowan Atkinson doing his OTT thing –  it’s lasted less well, I think):

Stephenson went on, of course, to retrain as a clinical psychologist, write bestsellers about her husband (actual national treasure Billy Connolly), and present a fascinating set of TV interviews under the name Shrink Rap (her episode with Robin Williams was brilliant). Stephenson was also great on Strictly when she took part in 2010 (and had the best nearly-fall in the show’s history). 

Comedy records/LPs were quite the thing (before you could have VHS and then DVD and now Netflix specials of your favourite comedy shows and comedians). I still have one of my Dad’s comedy LPs (from 1961, see below), though this one is all songs. I keep it for totally sentimental reasons. In some ways I don’t know much about him but I know he loved comedy and so does most of the family. Keeeeep laughing.

And back to something more like music tomorrow.

For the first intro post to this series go here.

Day 3: Various – Disco Fever

 

So, this is 1977, the time when everything was called disco even when (like this album) it had a song by Smokie included towards the end (and if you don’t know who Smokie are, I envy you). Here is the back with the track listing:

I was 10 in 1977, nearly at the end of primary school and pretty much addicted to pop music. This is an album (a K-tel album) but mainly my brother and I bought 7” singles around this time (one a week usually). Sometimes we even fought over who should be the one to have particularly popular songs – leading to arguments about hits like 1976’s Don’t Go Breaking My Heart by Elton John and Kiki Dee. For that one, and that one alone, we just couldn’t agree and got a copy each – very extravagant.

 

This was years before UK compliation series like Now That’s What I Call Music! (Virgin Records only started releasing them in 1983) and there were a lot of these K-tel compilation albums around in the 1970s. At the time I knew nothing about the company but looking it up I see they are Canadian, started up in 1962 (selling kitchen equipment via TV ads) and sold their first musical album 25 Country Hits in 1966 (their second was 25 Polka Hits and it sold 1.5 million copies in the US, go polka!). The company is still going.

 

We didn’t have a lot of these compilation albums (even as kids I think we knew they weren’t proper records somehow) but I do remember wanting this one (having seen TV ads no doubt) and this was definitely mine, not my brother’s. I suspect a big draw was the David Soul track Silver Lady on side 2 (and RIP David Soul, his death was announced just a couple of days after I put up this post). We were big Starsky and Hutch fans in our house and even though I was more a Starsky girl, David Soul as Hutch was a huge star. Like half the country, I bought his hit Don’t Give Up On Us (written by English songwriter Tony Macaulay) and listened to it so much that I know (without looking it up) that the B side was called Black Bean Soup (a duet with Lynne Marta, lyrics by actor Gardner McKay). Oh, alright then, here it is:

Other tracks I loved on this album were Meri Wilson’s Telephone Man (I listened to it again recently with the daughter – she is regularly horrified by what passed for entertainment in the 1970s and this was no exception), Baccara’s Yes Sir I can Boogie (now a Scottish football anthem) and Red Light Spells Danger by Billy Ocean (because who doesn’t love Billy O? Though my favourite track of his is the less well known LOD (Love on Delivery) from 1976). I also really, really loved Float On by the Floaters and to this day cannot hear the word Aquarius without saying “and my name is Ralph”, which can be confusing out of context (and I am an Aquarius, and my name is not Ralph). The lyrics are terrible it’s true but the suits and the whole vibe is a delight. There have been parodies but Float On is already doing all the comedy work on its own (and with lurve). The band were formed by a singer from the Detroit Emeralds and I still love this song and I don’t care who knows it.

And there are many other great tracks on this disc (The Crunch, Magic Fly, a contribution from Gladys Knight and her lovely Pips) as well as some really odd ones (Naughty Naughty Naughty, best left alone). Some were bands I had already grown out of by 1977 (Showaddywaddy? How 1975. Brotherhood of Man? Already past their Eurovision winning best only one year after victory). I also feel K-tel were running out of content by the end of side 2 (hence Smokie and a rather out of place Boomtown Rats). Anyway, for whatever reason this album is still in my admittedly patchy collection all these years later. Funny, the things you hang onto isn’t it?

See you tomorrow for a comedy LP from the 1980s.

For the first intro post to this series go here.

Day 2: Burt Bacharach – Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

 

Today’s disc is the 1969 album the score/soundtrack to the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid by Burt Bacharach. Pictured is our family copy – I don’t know whose record it was particularly, maybe one of my brother’s, but we all loved the film (and we watched it about once a year for much of the 1970s). There weren’t many things we enjoyed watching together (me aged say, 7, one brother 11, another 18, and my Mum, aged 50) but this was one of them. It had adventure, romance, beautiful people, shooting (one brother in particular was a fan of things with shooting, still is as far as I know). And it had this music. There are a lot of albums from my childhood that I haven’t hung onto but this one somehow has stayed in my ever-shrinking collection (vinyl is heavy, I’ve moved a lot – see this series).

The movie was directed by George Roy Hill and written by one of Hollywood’s most famous screenwriters, William Goldman. Wikipedia tells us the story is ‘based loosely on fact’ and that Goldman researched it on and off for a good few years before writing the screenplay. It was quite a change from your average western – a good part both rom com and brom com for a start – and it had very distinctive music. Picking Bacharach to write the music for this movie was an inspired choice – it contributes to making it feel so different. The man behind Walk on by and Anyone Who Had a Heart? Not typical western music really.

Of course the big song from the movie and this album is Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head – sung by B.J. Thomas*. Written by Bacharach and Hal David, it won the Academy Award for best original song (Bacharach also won for best original score) and it is a song I somehow really care about. I’ve written in blogland before that when our daughter was born in 2000 and I suddenly realised I needed something to sing as a lullaby the first thing that popped into my cradling repertoire was this one. I knew most of the words, though I hadn’t heard it for years, and it had the right kind of feel so off I went (and I didn’t make a conscious decision to sing it, it just sort of happened). I guess this is a song with a strong family feel to it for me – some happy memories of my fairly unusual childhood family watching something together and enjoying it (if for different reasons). Plus it’s just a lovely song: “The blues they send to meet me/Won't defeat me/It won't be long/Till happiness steps up to greet me.” 

And on that, ahem, note, see you tomorrow for another disc.

For the first intro post to this series go here. It has links to previous January projects (music, poems, stories etc.).

*B.J.Thomas is perhaps best known for this song but he did have other hits. He also sang Hooked on a Feeling in 1968 (written by Mark James, who also wrote Suspicious Minds). Hooked on a Feeling was later covered by Blue Swede, amongst others, (and that version made it into the popular Guardians of the Galaxy film in 2014).