Category: Longform
You are viewing all posts from this category, beginning with the most recent.
Crucial Track for 28 April 2025: The Prince
"The Prince" by Madness
Madness: At the heart of the ska revival of the eighties. I’d have gone to see them in Glasgow, on the Two-Tone tour, with The Specials and The Selecter, if it hadn’t been at an over-18s-only venue. I was 16.
Crucial Track for 27 April 2025: Ticket to Ride
"Ticket to Ride" by The Beatles
It’s interesting that, although I could give you various answers to the ’first single’ question, I don’t actually know what the first album I bought was.
Still, it’s bound to have been a Beatles one. So let’s go with the Red Album, and ‘Ticket to Ride’.
Crucial Track for 26 April 2025: I'm So Free
"I'm So Free" by Lou Reed
Lou Reed is one of my all-time faves, both with the Velvets and solo. This one popped into my mind this morning as we were walking back from badminton (playing the game, not the place where they have horsey things). It’s from the mighty Transformer album.
Crucial Track for 25 April 2025: Baby, I Love You
"Baby, I Love You" by Ramones
First love, eh? 'Music was my first love,' as an old song has it, 'And it'll be my last.' But that's not what this is about, really, is it?
Let's go with The Ramones (they were going to turn up some time, in one or another form, of course), where they made it on to Top of the Pops. Maybe because Phil Spector was at the controls, though we'd have to hope not.
Crucial Track for 24 April 2025: Leonard Cohen
"Leonard Cohen" by boygenius
'What is your favorite song from last year?' I am asked by the daily prompt from Crucial Tracks.
'Favourite,' I say. The 'favorite' spelling reads like a made-up element from thirties SF, or some such.
But I'm avoiding the question. The thing is, what this tells me is, I don't listen to much new music these days. Or, when I do, it doesn't impinge, doesn't resonate with me, become something I go back to.
I spent a chunk of 2024 listening through a list from The Guardian, of the 50 best albums of 2023, in order to check out what was good and recent. I had already heard the PJ Harvey, the Gina Birch, and the Boygenius albums, all of which I liked.
None of the others made enough of an impact to count, sadly. That is, none of them got a second play. One, I think, I gave a decent chance, but couldn't even finish.
And anyway, they were all new works from the year before last, not last year.
So for the purposes of this prompt, I'm allowing 'new to me' to count. And while I love PJ Harvey, so you might expect one of hers to make the cut, I Inside the Old Year Dying is too much an album. It's its own unique thing, but I don't recall a specific standout track from it.
So I'm going with Boygenius and, in another acknowledgment of my lack of new-music-attention, their one that namechecks an old singer — one of my favourites.
Crucial Track for 23 April 2025: Paradise by the Dashboard Light
"Paradise By the Dashboard Light" by Meat Loaf & Ellen Foley
I did not sing along to anything today, as the daily prompt asks. But I did find myself singing this Meat Loaf ditty, at least in my head. Maybe aloud, who knows?
Interesting that it appears as by Meat Loaf & Ellen Foley. Entirely appropriate, as it's a duet. But I don't think it was originally billed that way, and the modern approach would be to include 'Feat Ellen Foley' right in the title text. As I wrote about several years ago in Little, Feat...
One to One: John & Yoko, 2024 - ★★★★★
Oh my god, this film. This film is so, so good. Fantastic footage and sound from a gig that I've never even heard of before (though I think I've seen some of the footage). Great extracts from TV news broadcasts of the time, all sorts of great stuff.
Turns out there was an asylum/hospital/children's home kinda place where hundreds of kids with learning disabilities and other problems were kept in horrific conditions. Seeing the footage of it, I was reminded of the Romanian orphans that led JK Rowling to set up her Lumos charity.
John & Yoko learned about the place back in the day and set up the titular One to One benefit concert, raising money to help to provide better lives for those kids.
The strangest thing is that I've never heard about this concert before.
I will be watching this film again, you can be sure.
Crucial Track for 22 April 2025: No More Heroes
"No More Heroes (1996 Remastered Version)" by The Stranglers
Today's prompt is 'Share a song that changed your perspective on music.'
I'm gonna have to go back to 1977 for this one. That year may not surprise you, being as it was the core of the original punk days.
I was 13, as of August. 'No More Heroes' came out in September, Wikipedia tells me. I can't tell you when I first heard it, but I do know it was on a Sunday afternoon, after a week in which my friend Brendan had strongly urged me to get into punk.
It came on the radio, and it was the first punk song I heard.
The Stranglers were less punky than the Pistols, Clash, Damned, etc, of course, being older and to some extent, bandwagon jumpers. But who gave a fuck about that when they made a song as good as this?
Operation Mincemeat, 2021 - ★★½
This has a slightly interesting connection to home for me. Just last week we were walking past St John of Hackney churchyard, a common route from the Narrow Way home, when we stopped to look at a plaque outside the Hackney Mortuary. It describes the top-secret military operation the film is named after. The dead body that was used to deceive the Nazis was stored at the mortuary for three months. You can see a picture of the plaque at the Wikipedia page for the mission.
So why not watch the film? It's an interesting story, it's got an impressive cast, and it's on Netflix.
Good thing about that last, because we'd have been mildly annoyed if we'd had to pay extra for it. Trouble is, it's not very good.
It's not terrible. Two-and-a-half stars from me means it's OK, but just barely. On another day I might have given it three. The problem might be with us: knowing the story in advance could remove all tension, except from the romance subplot. But no, I think that was OK. I think it's more that sometimes the various parts of a film — which is a complex thing to create, after all — don't come together well enough, for reasons that are hard to define.
Crucial Track for 20 April, 2025: Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da
"Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" by The Beatles
My earliest musical memory might be this. I was well under five, maybe only three. My gran — my mum’s mum — was staying with us because she wasn’t well. I walked into her room with my big sister, singing.
Says gran, ‘Is he swearing?’ My sister had to explain that I wasn’t saying, ‘Oh bloody’ something.