Category: music
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Crucial Track for 1 May 2025: Mario Y Maria
“Mario Y Maria” by Butch Hancock
It’s annoying that the song I want to use for the prompt, ‘Share a song that tells a great story,’ isn’t found on Apple Music. It’s sitting right there in my music library being fantastic, ever since I ripped it from a Cover CD from Uncut magazine, back in 2002.
It tells the tale of a pair of lovers that we might describe, in the clichéd form, as ‘star-crossed’. But it’s not a tale of young lovers. Rather, the titular pair are experienced, world-weary (certainly by the end), but they keep on keeping on.
I don’t know if creating this entry will even work with the song not found, but if it doesn’t, I’ll create the post manually. (It didn’t; I did.)
📗 Books 2025, 8: The History of Rock ‘n‘ Roll in Ten Songs, by Greil Marcus
I got this as a Christmas present some several years ago, and read bits of it. It’s episodic, though — a separate essay on each of the songs, plus an ‘Instrumental Break — so I dipped in and out of it. I was encouraged to pick it up again recently because of the name-similarity with a great podcast I’m listening to and keep meaning to write about here: A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, by Andrew Hickey.
Marcus’s title is overconfident to the point of arrogance by calling the book the history. As if there was and could be only one. To say nothing of the idea that it could be encapsulated in ten songs. Hickey’s is more aware, and he makes the point repeatedly that his is only a history.
But Marcus is a terrific writer, and, like Hickey’s, the title is not literal: when discussing any one song he’ll touch on several others, plus various events in the lives of the artists and the goings-on in the world.
I can’t honestly say that I learned much from this, or retained much of what I may have learned, but it’s a joy to read. The pleasure is in the journey more than the destination.
Memories, Facebook, and The Clash
It seems Facebook still has the odd use, apart from keeping in touch with family and friends who still use it. I popped in late last night, and it told me I had memories on this day. It seems the 29th of October has been a day on which I’ve often posted in the past, because there were several. But the one that really caught my eye was this one:
15 years ago, it tells me, in 2009, I wrote:
Jason Ringenberg doing The Clash’s ‘Ivan Meets Gl Joe’: a thing of rare beauty. Spotify URI: http://is.gd/4Hcr7.
Now that’s quite telling, in several ways. First of all, remember the is.gd URL shortener? Remember URL shorteners that aren’t t.co?
Also, I haven’t used Spotify in a long time, being a happy Apple Music subscriber. But that doesn’t matter. What’s really weird is that I have absolutely no memory of Jason (out of Jason & the Scorchers, as I’m sure you know) doing any Clash song, much less a surprising choice of Sandinista album track.1 And back then was probably still in the time when was listening to Jason quite a lot.
Obviously I quickly searched for it on Apple Music. To find that it’s part of an album. Not one by Jason, though. The Sandinista! Project2 is a compilation album of covers of the entirety of Sandinista by different artists.
Why was I not told such a thing existed?
Of course, it’s entirely possible that I was told of it, one way or another. Some passing mention, a mental note, quickly forgotten… maybe it was mentioned in Jason’s newsletter or some such.
I mean, it’s not a totally off the wall idea. It’s subtitled ‘A Tribute to The Clash’, and I’ve had or listened to things like it before. I had something called London Booted once, which was sort of techno-ish covers of some or all of the tracks from London Calling. And I remember listening to a reggae version of that album, or tracks from it, at least.
But this is every track on what is famously a triple album. Yes, including ‘Career Opportunities’ (though not, to be fair, ‘Blowing in the Guns of Brixton’). And the great thing about it is, almost no track is a carbon copy of the original. We get jazz instrumentals, ska versions, rocked-up versions of ones The Clash took slowly, and everything in between. Most of the performers are little known, or unknown, to me at least. But we get Katrina of Katrina and the Waves, Jon Langford of the Mekons, Wreckless Eric, The Coal Porters, and of course the aforementioned former Scorcher.
It is really, really good. Highly recommended if you’re a fan, and even if you’re not, I imagine you’ll find something to enjoy. Go on, find it on your favourite service here.
Incidentally, I love that the label it’s on is called 00:02:59 Records. ‘The band went in/And knocked them dead/In two minutes fifty-nine,’ as ‘Hitsville UK’ says.3
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Not that Jason being a fan would be in the least surprising. ↩︎
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I don’t remember the the exclamation mark being part of the title. But the Wikipedia article renders it that way, and indeed, there is an exclamation mark right there on the cover. Still, I don’t think we wrote it that way back in the day. ↩︎
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Katrina’s version runs to 3:44, but then the original is 4:22 or so. ↩︎
… And Took the Road for Heaven in the Morning
In a way it was surprising that Shane MacGowan survived this long, considering his noted and dramatic habits. But it’s still sad that he’s died.
I count The Pogues as one of the bands I’ve seen live most of all. The only other one that comes close would be The Fall, and either could be the winner. Goes back to 1985, either way.
The Pogues were vey much a band of supremely talented musicians and songwriters. But Shane was the driving force. What they did was to meld punk with Irish folk music. The former, of course had helped me through my adolescent years and would remain a lifelong love. The latter: well, I came from a Scottish Catholic background, so it was pretty familiar, between Scottish folk and Irish songs sung at Celtic matches.
So on the instant that I first heard them — certainly on Peel, and probably ‘Sally MacLennane’, I’d say — they clicked. There was no learning curve, no adjustment to this new sound. It was just there, it belonged, as if it had always existed.
The Pogues may have been inevitable, but Shane was a genius. And his songs, as I wrote when Phil Chevron died were steeped in death imagery.
I’ll leave you with a couple of excellent screen grabs from Twitter (where, just to note, as I write, ‘Sodomy and the Lash’ is trending under a ‘food’ heading, which is just beyond weird.
First, this excellent mashups of the day’s deaths of noted figures:
And this typically topical ‘Fairytale’ reference (even if it does misspell his surname):
So it goes.
Suzanne on the Stage
To Cambridge, on Thursday just past, and to the Corn Exchange, to see Suzanne Vega. My one-word review: spellbinding.
I had never been to the Corn Exchange before (to be honest I’ve rarely been to a gig — especially an indoor gig — outside London these last thirty-six or so years). But it’s one of those places that feels slightly legendary to me, because I’d see it listed among the tour dates in Sounds or NME back in my youthhood.
Turns out it’s a lovely, clean, modern venue, with Old Speckled Hen on tap. We were seated in the balcony (on the balcony?), which was fine.
And as to Ms Vega: I’m not steeped in her work, so the fact that she essentially played a ‘Greatest Hits’ set was ideal for me. She even explicitly said, ‘I’m gonna play some of the well-known ones early, so people don’t worry that they won’t get them.’
This after she’d opened with ‘Marlene on the Wall’, followed by ‘Small Blue Thing’.
She had one accompanying musician, a guitarist called Gerry Leonard, who has worked with Bowie, among others. He was great, making heavy use of those sampling/looping pedals, making him sometimes sound like three or four players at once.
So, like I say, the whole thing was spellbinding.
Twenty Years Without Joe
I missed posting this yesterday, what with one thing and another. Twenty years ago yesterday, the 22nd of December 2002, my friend Tony texted me and the other members of our then-band, Burn, to the effect:
Nooooooooo!
Strummer’s dead.
I was at work, and immediately googled for the story. Joe Strummer, dead at 50 from an undiagnosed heart defect. We didn’t hear the reason at once, of course.
I wrote The Death of a Hero at the time. Not much has changed, in some ways. I still play his music, both The Clash and his solo stuff. I sometimes wonder what he’d have to say about the times we live in now.
Hard to imagine he’d have been 70 this year. Such is life, and death.
I was listening to The Specials yesterday because of the sad death of Terry Hall, of course.
I was mildly distracted by this text early in that Guardian report:
The pioneering 2 Tone band rose thanks to the support of Joe Strummer,1 who invited them to support the Clash live,2 and of BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel.
While not wrong, it ignores the fact that The Specials were bloody brilliant! The piece does make that clear later, to be fair, but it seems slightly the wrong way to weight it.
I also listened to some Fun Boy Three, and they were far better than I remembered, too, both with and without Bananarama.
Next Songs, Elon Musk, and Joe Strummer
Since Musk’s takeover of Twitter has been confirmed, there has been a lot of chatter about free speech. Musk, we are told, describes himself as a ‘free speech maximalist’, and there are fears that he’ll have Twitter reinstate the accounts of Trump and other white supremacists.
But I’ve been thinking about Joe Strummer.
More specifically, I’ve been wondering why his ‘The Road to Rock ‘n’ Roll’ was popping into my head so often. It wasn’t a problem: getting an earworm of a song I like doesn’t bother me. But I wondered what was triggering it.
I can often work out why I get a song in my head. I knew, for example, why I often had The Clash’s ‘The Prisoner ' in my head through the summer. The words ‘The Prisoner ' are written on the whiteboard in our kitchen, along with the titles of the other serieses we’re watching.
And in fact I sing ‘The Prisoner’ every time I hang out the washing, owing to its line referring to ‘hanging out the washing and clipping coupons and generally being decent.’
It clicked today, though. You know how — if you’re an old-school album listener (or just old) like me — when you play an album, one track’s ending often triggers the expectation of the next? So that, when you hear a song in isolation, on a playlist or on the radio or something, and the wrong song plays next, it can be quite jarring?
The song before ‘The Road to Rock ‘n’ Roll’ on Rock Art and the X-Ray Style is ‘Techno D-Day’. Joe’s celebration of illegal raves ends with the line, ‘And this is about free speech!’
So it turns out my head was just playing the next song whenever the phrase came up.
Wednesday Night is Music Night
God, I have missed this so much. Live music FTW.
I get emails from the Joe Strummer Foundation . The most recent one told me that their artist of the month for September was someone called Gemma Rogers. I hadn’t heard of her, but was interested when I read that she’d had an album launch at Paper Dress Vintage. That’s a place just down the road from me on the Narrow Way. It used to just be a second-hand clothes shop, but now it’s more, I guess.
Anyway, the thought that she might be a local piqued my interest, as well as the JSF recommendation, so I gave her a listen, and liked what I heard a lot.
She was booked to play at a place called Folklore, on Hackney Road, so I thought, why not? In support was Gabi Garbutt and the Illuminations , who I saw once a few years back, because Sean Read, whom I know from round these parts, was producing them and playing in the band. Back then. Not anymore. Not tonight, at least.
Going to a gig in a small venue? No big deal, right? Except… this is the first gig I’ve been to since I saw Glen Matlock. At the end of February 2020.
It felt like quite a step.
But after a bite to eat across the road, we made our way in through forbidding, castle-like doors. Inside is a smallish bar area, and a classic pub backroom. The stage made of two layers of forklift pallets topped with hardboard. It was smoky. Visually, it was like being back in the eighties. But of course, it was stage smoke-machine smoke. Exactly why it filled the air before anyone had taken to the stage escapes me.
Unless it was to show the lasers. It looked like this:
Anyway, Veronica Bianqui brought her Hollywood-fuelled LA tones to Hackney Road. Though it turned out she had been on the bus with us down from Clapton.
I probably enjoyed Gabi Garbutt’s performance most of the three. Because at times? At times they sounded a bit like late-period Clash.
They sounded. Like. The Clash. Combat Rock-era. I think it was mainly the bass player sounding a bit like Paul Simonon. Whatever, I can pay no higher compliment. No higher compliment can be paid.
But Gemma Rogers was also great, with the singalong of ‘Rabbit Hole’ being the highlight. Not often you get the band applauding the audience.
But yes: I had missed it so much more than I realised. Just getting together in room with a hundred or so people, while others make rocking sounds up the front? How could I have forgotten?
The Title of The Smiths' Third Album
I’m a republican, but you’ve got to acknowledge that old Queenie had a good run. Apparently the direct descendent of Mary, Queen of Scots, which I didn’t know.
My favourite story about her is the one about the landrover and the Saudi crown prince.
The weirdest thing about the change of monarch for me? The King’s Speech is an Oscar-winning movie, not something to ignore on Christmas Day.