I'm sort of permanently enamoured of Minnie Driver, whose 54th birthday it is today. "Debi" was her character in Grosse Pointe Blank, as you will know if you'd read my post about when I met Minnie at CarFest '22.
No songs today (although Minnie has had a recording career too), just posting this so I can watch and listen to Minnie talk films. Sigh...
A mid-programme selection of television adverts from ITV and the long hot summer of 1976.
Lots to enjoy here: the deadpan pay-off from the Birds Eye voiceover; the Smash robots; Bernard Cribbins voicing a prototype Busby for BT; Lorraine Chase on a Campari ad ("Nice 'ere, innit?"); the Bilko-esque Corona fizzical; an of-its-time slice of 70s machismo for Yorkie; and a hot-off-the press ad for cold Guinness, reacting to the (then) unprecedented heatwave.
A simpler time, and better for it, I think.
In 1976, EMI re-released all The Beatles UK singles. They had matching green front covers, and release-appropriate photographs on the back, much like these:
I can't remember the who, when or how but at some point somebody bought me two of these. They quickly became especially important to me, in part because I had very few records of my own back then. I had I Want To Hold Your Hand b/w This Boy and Ticket To Ride b/w Yes It Is (above). I'm not going to write about the A-sides, because there can't be many people in the known universe who aren't already familiar with them. But I hope this explains why This Boy and Yes It Is are, for me, every bit as familiar, engrained, and beloved.
So why am I posting about a sexagenarian song now, in 2024, rather than at any other point in this blog's longish and undistinguished history? Well, brace yourselves for a tenuous link, because today is Susanna Hoff's 65th (?!) birthday, giving me all the excuse I need to post a live radio rendition of Yes It Is by The Bangles, itself now twelve years old.
Happy birthday, Susanna (obligatory sigh, etc...)
I heard Crazy Again by Gossip on 6 Music over the Christmas period. Whisper it quietly but I rather like it.
Yes, I know it is not my usual bag by any means. And yes, I know I have struggled a bit to warm to Beth Ditto in the past, partly because the music press got very excited about her but for what I thought were the wrong reasons, possibly even disingenuous reasons. But enough of my miserable old man schtick. This song: the simple, repeated guitar line on top of this really worms its way into your ear, I think. And there's a bit in the middle where some of the percussion sounds a bit like an Eighties Ariston advert. I approve.
The video is rather good too, and funny ("This weather really sucks dick..."). Though I should probably add that, unless you work somewhere very laid back, it might be considered NSFW in a few places.
Well, it had to happen. I'm only five days into my sabbatical but have to break it, briefly, because I've just heard that David Soul has died and, with him, another piece of my childhood. The statement his wife has put out describes an "actor, singer, storyteller, creative artist and dear friend" which is all true, no doubt, but to me and anyone close to my age he was Hutch, pure and simple. No late-70s Christmas was complete for me without the Starsky and Hutch annual, and although I preferred Starsky (I had the Corgi Ford Torino, of course, with the least undercover livery of all time), Hutch was essential. Morecambe and Wise, strawberries and cream, Starsky and Hutch.
I'm not going to post Silver Lady or Don't Give Up On Us (both UK chart-toppers, don't forget) because that was the sort of nonsense girls like my sister were into, and I was a boy, into cars and American cop shows and wearing your jeans in the bath so they'd allegedly shrink to fit like S&H's (really). So instead, here's the iconic S&H title sequence. Series 1 had different music, and was clearly going for a slightly grittier, Serpico-lite feel. The TV audiences of the day didn't want Serpico though, lite or otherwise, so the show got less edgy and more commercial; here's the re-edited Series 2 title sequence with the music that everyone remembers best. He hurt his back, you know, jumping off that wall onto the roof of his car (43s in).
RIP Hutch. May your heaven be filled with go-go dancers in leopard-print bikinis that you can look at until your best mate blows on your cheek. Maybe go easy on clambering in and out of swimming pools fully clothed. Right, now back to the sabbatical. I wrote 1,100 words of fiction yesterday, you know?
The November issue of Uncut magazine had a big article on The Who, specifically on the forthcoming deluxe edition re-issue of Who's Next coupled with tracks from the troubled and much mythologised Lifehouse project. Excitingly, for Who fans everywhere, the magazine's cover mount CD had ten Who tracks, handpicked from that deluxe edition. It's been in my car, doing sterling service, ever since. But here's the thing - I say "handpicked" as a throwaway description, but I wonder if the tracks were handpicked by Mr Townshend? He certainly has lead vocal duties on six of the ten tracks, in part because some of them are his home studio demos, and Roger wouldn't have been around. But if you'd just landed from another planet, and this disc was your first exposure to The Who, you'd be forgiven for wondering who the nuclear-powered guest vocalist was on the incendiary live rendition of Won't Get Fooled Again.
Anyway, this is Pete's home demo of Pure & Easy, and in the accompanying magazine article he describes it thus:
For Tommy, the founding song was 'Amazing Journey', which told the whole back story, the under story, of it. And 'Pure And Easy' did the same for Lifehouse, which is why it’s such a shame it was left off Who's Next. It was easy to write and it was a pleasure to write. It’s very simple, just three chords, basically. I wrote it on piano.