"Don't worry, it's not..."

Disclaimer: this post was written in December 2023, and scheduled for future posting. Its contents may no longer be accurate or appropriate.

So said BBC TV weatherman Michael Fish 37 years ago today, in response to a caller to the station who'd enquired about French weather warnings that a hurricane was on its way.

Of course it was on its way and if, like me, you lived in East Kent you were in for a hell of a night. I woke at around 2am - the power was already off, and the noise! The continuous booming roar of the wind was beyond my sleep-addled, teenage comprehension, to the extent that my first thought was that a nuclear bomb had been dropped close by and this was the shockwave. I know, I know, but I couldn't understand what else would have the power to shake the house like that, and Glasnost was still a couple of years away, after all.

The next morning I discovered a hole in the outside of my bedroom wall, where a roof tile from next door had blown across two driveways and embedded itself in our pebbledash. I also spent some time gathering the remains of our greenhouse, which was in bits all over the garden, before exploring the neighbouring hospital, the hill-top wooded grounds of which were decimated. A particularly massive beech tree had gone over on the print shop, completely destroying it, as I recall. My dad worked at the hospital and had walked to work in pitch darkness at 5am, clambering over fallen trees to get there. He also tells the tale of dodging empty milk bottles as the wind picked them up and blew them horizontally across a yard, like little glass missiles.

I'm not going to embed the Michael Fish clip - we've all seen it before, and it seems very harsh on him. But here he (sort of) is a year later, immortalised in song with a clutch of his meteorological mates. With bonus Wogan content!

By the way, A Tribe of Toffs didn't get the Christmas Number One, in the end, despite the appearance on primetime Wogan - this peaked at 21.

42 years ago

Disclaimer: this post was written in December 2023, and scheduled for future posting. Its contents may no longer be accurate or appropriate.

The Internet (never wrong, right?) tells me that this is the earliest professionally shot gig footage of Athens' finest, REM. Recorded on the 10th of October 1982 at the Pier Club in the Cameron Village Underground, Raleigh, by cable channel WYFF-TV of Greenville, South Carolina ("your friend"), this is less than two months after the band's debut EP Chronic Town was released.

The audio has been EQ'ed to within an inch of its life, in a manner that may or may not be to your taste. What's undeniable, though, is the brilliance of both the setlist and the general time-capsulism of this absolute gem of a find. Completists should also note the moment the band's early producer Mitch Easter joins them on second guitar for 1,000,000.

I saw REM live twice, in the blistering heat of the Milton Keynes Bowl in 1995, and in a football stadium (of sorts) in 2005. But oh, to have seen them like this...

Getting away with it ... all my life

Disclaimer: this post was written in December 2023, and scheduled for future posting. Its contents may no longer be accurate or appropriate.

I'll be honest, I struggled a bit with Electronic at the time. I didn't really want Johnny Marr songs to sound like New Order, and I definitely didn't want them to sound like The Pet Shop Boys. I was then, as now, more than a little parochial in my tastes, and, if truth be told, was probably not handling the end of The Smiths very well. I tried though, helped by seeing Getting Away With It on 7" for 49p in the Woolworths' bargain bin. I still have that, of course. The vinyl is in great nick, because I didn't play it very often, though the sleeve suffered at Woolies before I got my hands on it, sadly. And it was a great, striking sleeve.

Note the short-lived exclamation mark after the band name

Looking back, I can view Electronic in a kinder light. Certainly kind enough to have invested in their retrospective best of, Get The Message. You could do a lot worse, you really could.

Johnny is barely in this video, a fact I might have appreciated at the time. He does contribute a lovely solo in the middle though. Plus the chorus to this has that killer "clear to see" couplet. All together now...

Sunday short: 40 Second Song

Disclaimer: this post was written in December 2023, and scheduled for future posting. Its contents may no longer be accurate or appropriate.

As you can tell from the thumbnail, this little REM curio is from the Out Of Time era. Specifically, it got released as a CD-single filler track for Shiny Happy People. And despite the title, it's about 80 seconds long. Maybe they ran through it twice?

Monday long song: 32 Flavors

Disclaimer: this post was written in December 2023, and scheduled for future posting. Its contents may no longer be accurate or appropriate.

What do Ray Charles, Bruce Springsteen and Ani DiFranco all have in common? They were all born on 23rd September... so happy birthday. I guess. Others will no doubt write about Brother Ray and The Boss, so I'll go with Ani.

32 Flavors is from Ani's 1995 album Not A Pretty Girl, and takes a pretty direct aim at society's evaluations and expectations of women.

Ani's Wikipedia page is also quite informative - she has been, as Billy Bragg would say, active with the activists. More power to her.

Wiped out

Disclaimer: this post was written in December 2023, and scheduled for future posting. Its contents may no longer be accurate or appropriate.

It's getting on for thirty years (okay, it's 29) since I first played Wipeout with my excellent friend Tim. The basic premise was ... well, you raced anti-gravity ships around tracks, picking up weapons and other enhancements as you went, and tried very hard to be faster than the computer-driven opponents. The graphics and speed of play were literal game changers back in 1995. As was the soundtrack, which included a selection of high-octance dance tracks. We almost always raced to Chemical Beats by The Chemical Brothers, over and over again, for hours at a time, into the small of the night.

There's a moment from about 2:10 in this where Ed and Tom introduce a sort of protracted phasing of the top-line melody, producing something akin to a Doppler shift. On our favourite race track, this would usually line up with an echoey section of tunnel, in a way that just seemed so very ... right.

Two years later, the sequel came out (Wipeout 2097) and from then we raced almost exclusively to an instrumental mix of Firestarter by The Prodigy. A better track, in most objective terms, but not quite as good for anti-gravity racing (although the intro was great on the starting grid). This little clip gives you a sense of late 90s gameplay, although I can't help but point out the player here, whoever they are, misses the turbo start off the line. Rookie error.

Finally

Disclaimer: this post was written in December 2023, and scheduled for future posting. Its contents may no longer be accurate or appropriate.

I've been blogging for nineteen and a half years and yet somehow this is the first time I've managed to feature this track on the 9th of September. Honestly. Someone should have a word with my line-manager.

All the way from 1983, this is 9-9 by REM. To my ears it still sounds fresh, different and just plain unusual now, more than 40 years later. Imagine how it must have sounded at the time...

The Big Noise

Disclaimer: this post was written in December 2023, and scheduled for future posting. Its contents may no longer be accurate or appropriate.

Remember when broadsheet newspapers used to give CDs away at weekends? Those were good times, weren't they? So often the source of new music or, as is the case for this post, rare tracks or curios from established acts.

All of which pre-amble leads us to a cardboard slipcased CD entitled The Big Noise, given away by The Guardian exactly 21 years ago today. It was produced in collaboration with Oxfam, to highlight the latter’s “Make Trade Fair” campaign. Amongst other things, the CD included tracks from Coldplay, Lemon Jelly, The Chemical Brothers, Mali Music (featuring Damon Albarn and Afel Bocoum), The Sakala Brothers and Ladysmith Black Mambazo (featuring, somewhat incredibly, Archbishop Desmond Tutu). That's quite the line-up. However, it was the other two tracks I was interested in. First up, a rare-ish demo version of Where I End And You Begin by Radiohead.

And as if that wasn't enough, there was also a rare-ish live recording of The Lifting from REM. Originally the opening track on the album Reveal, this version was recorded live by Pat McCarthy at the Museum of Television and Radio, New York City, on May 18th, 2001 (four days after Reveal was released).

There, that was good, wasn't it? Which did you prefer? I miss free CDs... I miss broadsheet freebies in general... but then, what don't I miss? Sigh.

Blue Friday: The Other Woman

Disclaimer: this post was written in December 2023, and scheduled for future posting. Its contents may no longer be accurate or appropriate.

Lana Del Rey's voice belongs to another time. We're lucky to have her now.

"Some of us need to be background scenery"

Disclaimer: this post was written in December 2023, and scheduled for future posting. Its contents may no longer be accurate or appropriate.

...in which I continue my quest to bring Glenn Donaldson (for he is The Reds, Pinks and Purples) to a wider audience.