Sadly, the music world seems to have people passing away all too frequently nowadays, something to do with the age range of that golden sixties generation I suppose, that generation whose music shaped everything that has evolved ever since and therefore, for the most part, has remained timeless. But then there are also, all too often, reports of someone from a younger generation falling too soon and that, for obvious reasons, feels like a whole other kind of tragedy. A life cut short, the thoughts of what might have been. And then there are deaths like that this week, of Jaimie Branch, who has left us at the horribly young age of thirty-nine to causes as yet unreported. A death like this is a strange one, I can only liken it to, as far as its similarity in shock and sense of immense loss, to the that of Elliott Smith. That feeling in the moment you learn of their passing of, oh shit, we’ve really lost someone quite special there, a genuine one-off. The music world is going to be a lesser place without this person in it from now on.
That is how I instantly felt when I learned of the death of Jaimie Branch this week. Even though I had not taken a deep dive into learning about her personal history, the music she had released had left a serious impression on me, especially the two ‘Fly Or Die’ albums released under her own name in 2017 and 2019. These were albums that had firmly grabbed my attention, Free Jazz albums that were not only innovative and explorative but accessible too, ram-packed with hooks that were exciting and stimulating to the ears and the head. And Jaimie’s personality seemed to smash through the complexities within the grooves, she seemed like an in-your-face left leaning activist who understood the shades and contradictions of the human condition and that sometimes, even those who thought of themselves as the good guys could be “assholes and clowns” who needed some love.
I’ve been listening to her a lot this week, trying to uncover the collaborations she worked on as well as the headline slots. Not entirely successfully either, apparently, she played on some Spoon tracks but, thus far, I have been unable to find out which ones. But my-oh-my, she was so good, she had such a good ear for melody and, maybe without my even being aware of it, had entered that space in my musical consciousness whereby if she’d been playing in my part of the country, I’d have gone to see her; if she’d been playing at a festival I was at, I’d have gone to see her; whenever a new release was announced, I’d have been on to it immediately. But I hadn’t even heard of her until 2019 and so, in my head at least, I was just on the first step of the ladder in terms of my musical relationship with Jaimie Branch. And now she has gone and the feeling of loss is tangible but, if I can find one thing to hold on to, it is by reading the numerous online tributes this week and realizing that there were many, many others who heard the magic in her music too but still, you know, whatever; gone way too soon.
There’s a trio of Jaimie Branch tracks kicking off the September playlist:
I’ve been away, exploring the Scottish Highlands for a couple of weeks. Presented with a chance to escape the relentless dry, England summer 2022 heat you would assume, surrounded by vast natural beauty, gently rolling waters drifting out ahead of me framed by dramatic, hillside scenery that the last thing on my mind is checking out any local towns I can come across and seeing if I can uncover some vinyl gems for the collection. Well obviously you would be wrong about that, the prospect of a town off the beaten track having a charity shop that has just taken stock of a rare Jazz collection from a recently cleared house or some cases of weird and wonderful 60s / 70s folk recently offloaded by some grandchildren with no interest in their recently deceased relative listened to. Sadly, it can still be the case that people assume the things us vinyl hunters are after are Queen albums and they wrongly assume records they do not recognize are of little or no interest to anyone.
If you do not look you will not find, but please be aware that the days where something exciting is discovered have to be offset against the many occasions when all you will flick through are Jim Reeves and Ken Dodd albums. Nowadays there are regrettably fewer charity shops that bother stocking records and it is those aforementioned musical criminals who are a big part of that decline, them and the likes of James Last, Engelbert Humperdinck, Andy Williams or the landfill fodder of Top Of The Pops LPs and horrible budget Readers Digest compilations. You see what happens is that these collections have been dumped on charity shops in massive quantities over the years, often by record dealers who know they cannot shift them even at giveaway prices, only for them to sit taking up space on the shop shelves. Nobody buys them and eventually the management decide that they will not stock vinyl anymore because nobody buys it.
So, what I am trying to write is that, despite my best efforts, I did not find any real vinyl treasure on this particular excursion. I did find records that I am pleased to welcome back into the collection though, ones that for various reasons have disappeared or were only ever purchased on CD the first-time round. Little audio delights at the affordable end of the second-hand marketplace by names like Paul Simon, Tanita Tikaram and Elvis Costello. The rarest thing I found was a great little late sixties album by Harry Nilsson, one which features his classic cover of Fred Neil’s ‘Everybody’s Talking’; it’s lyric about “going where the weather suits my clothes” encapsulating my trip away perfectly. I have always been more of a jumpers and beanie man rather than a summer clothes wearer; I am well and truly back in the shorts now though!
Even though there is not much indication of it in my July playlist, where the only McCartney track is ‘Soily’ from ‘One Hand Clapping’ found on the Archive Series edition of Wings ‘Venus And Mars,’ Paul McCartney has been in my head again this summer. Set aside the playlist selection, all that shows is that my listening explorations have finally arrived at his Wings period, after years of paying it little or no attention believing it to be his weakest period. Still, the past twelve months have definitively re-positioned Macca in my estimation, he really is the genius that his status implies so why all the previous media derision? Well, that is mostly due to the fact that he has survived, rather than offer the musical historians a neat ark of decline or fading from view, or even an ending, he has just continued for decades writing superior, melodic pop music. And he does it without trend chasing or grasping for coolness by dampening down is natural, never-ending exuberance; he just raises those thumbs, points into the camera lense with a look of mock surprise and then plays Paul McCartney songs that rock, roll, and seduce. What else would we want him to do?
It is kind of ridiculous that I am even writing this, after all The Beatles are my favorite band and Paul is, more or less, the only member of that band still active in 2022. He also happens to be one half of the legendary songwriting partnership at the center of their success, why would listening to him even be open to question? Maybe I should get back to when I first got into the Beatles myself in the late 1980s. It was John Lennon who drew me in and to a teenager, he did have the most obvious, cutting edge, rebellious appeal. McCartney at the time had acquired a bit of a reputation for putting out schmaltzy, very middle-of-the-road solo albums and with those terminally jolly public appearances, he still somehow came over as the strait-laced, do gooder for Lennon apologists to react against. No doubt I was conveniently ignoring the fact that I unconditionally loved everything the Beatles put out and Paul McCartney is a massive part of that. In fact, dig a little deeper and by the time of ‘Abbey Road,’ it is Paul who is leading the charge, Lennon had fallen behind relying on occasional flashes of brilliance to keep his contributions afloat. This was brilliantly illustrated in last years ‘Get Back’ movie in a scene where Paul gently leans on John for more new songs; all John can do is bat it away with a vague promise that when the pressure is on, he can produce the goods. In so many ways, that film re-positioned Paul McCartney’s mis-aligned place in the story back into proper, representative order.
Still though, through the 1990s my music collection consisted of everything the Beatles released, the entire John Lennon solo output, almost the entire George Harrison solo output (truly patchy after 1974) and maybe a couple of McCartney albums. I have spent the past two decades catching up however, maybe finally accepting that Wings were more than the still hard to love ‘Mull Of Kintyre’ and the punch in an Alan Partridge joke (“Wings were very much the band the Beatles could have been”) is my last step to enlightenment? I certainly enjoyed watching his headline Glastonbury set a whole lot more than I was expecting to. Again though, it was the residue of the McCartney machine that perhaps tarnished it for me last time around in 2004. At that time, I knew one of the media presenters working at Glastonbury and they confided in me their disgust that Paul’s team had spent two days in preparation on television camera angles and just 28 minutes on sound. My reaction to that broadcast in 2004 was lukewarm, I felt it was too much of a big production job rather than a live, televised concert performance direct from a field. I did not feel that this time, even though I suspect the logistics were probably similarly under tight control, I just enjoyed the privilege of getting to watch our greatest living songwriter (Bob Dylan aside arguably) playing material from his whole six-decade career. Then he brought Dave Grohl on for his first live appearance since the death of Taylor Hawkins, then Bruce Springsteen joined in, then later Paul, thanks to vocal isolation wizardry from Peter Jackson, got to sing ‘I’ve Got A Feeling’ with John Lennon once again; by that point, the emotion of it all tipped me over the edge.
This month’s playlist does feature a splattering of artists I enjoyed watching through the excellent television coverage of Glastonbury, in among the other selections. There is nothing wrong with a home festival weekend, something I have grown to quite enjoy over the years. Especially now that you have some control over the performances and stages you tune in to; gone are the days of cursing the BBC for repeatedly switching to Basement Jaxx whilst David Bowie is playing a spectacular headline set on the main stage. It is easy to forget there was once resistance to the presence of TV cameras pointing at a festival stage. I saw the Wonder Stuff headline at the Feile Festival in Ireland in 1992, during which Miles Hunt took exception to the cameras showing his band on the large video screens and got them turned off; one of numerous decisions that probably ensured his bands descent back into the indie rock margins. A decade later Mike Scott of the Waterboys sent the cameras packing from a headline set at the Cambridge Folk Festival, offering by way of explanation “I thought we were here for a gig, not a video shoot.” My first Glastonbury was actually the first year, 1994, when the festival was broadcast on TV. Saturday nights headliner, Elvis Costello & The Attractions, did not appear on Channel Four though, filming not allowed on the basis that Elvis would not “play for armchair hippies.” It should be noted that this was one of many opinions Elvis would later dial back on, his non-headline Glastonbury sets years later allowed full coverage on the BBC. Elvis Costello of course (great songwriter incidentally, also appears in the playlist) is the polar opposite to Paul McCartney in his media appearances, where he often offers forthright opinions seemingly intent on starting a fight. Could it be McCartney suffered for just being too damn agreeable? More like he was too damn good for the critics to manage, as Elvis Costello once observed, music critics are nothing more than failed musicians. Enjoy the playlist…
So, it is a bank holiday and the propaganda encouraging us all to celebrate the Queens jubilee is now a barrage. We, in the UK, have been given an extra bank holiday to help get us into a happy partying mood, everywhere I look I see people caving in under the pressure to toast this occasion, so up goes the Union Jack bunting with a sense of can’t beat them, let’s join them compliance. Or maybe these people around me really believe in this farce, maybe they are massive royalists? Well, each to their own I guess, as long as they return that respect and don’t expect me to exchange in platitudes as to how indefatigable the Queen has been for seventy years. I will mingle at some stage this weekend and check out the free beer; I went at it a bit hard last night and the supplies are already quite low. I mean, if the royals want us all to have a party in their name why don’t they dig into their deep piles of obscene wealth and give each citizen fifty quid to get more alcohol in? It isn’t getting any cheaper you know? Also, by doing that, they would show a tiny degree of awareness that there are millions of people in this country who cannot afford to lose a day’s work. Holiday pay is not a compulsory thing in the modern world of the gig economy and zero hours contracts. If this family want to endure beyond this current monarch, they need to drastically shift position, stop being the ingrowing toenail of the UK.
It is not as if I can meet the royal family on a musical level, I mean they let Brian May play amplified guitar on the roof of their house. Do I need to say more? If that poodle permed poser tried plugging in on my roof, he would be splattered on the pavement outside quicker than you can say “flash a-haaa.” Talking of freaks, one of my cultural highlights of the month has been Judd Apatow’s comedy drama from 1999-2000, ‘Freaks And Geeks’. I confess to being unforgivably unaware of Apatow’s acclaimed name in movies but, in my defense, my attention does overwhelmingly focus on music, other art forms get less attention than they deserve. Anyway, I became aware that Apatow was someone I wanted to pay a bit more attention to last year when I tried a Netflix series called ‘Love.’ That too had the Apatow name attached and I went to it because I had a thirty-minute window each day ideal for comedy drama, ‘Love’ fit the criteria. On paper it can sound a little too light, a three series portrait of two young people who fall in love. The genius was in the phenomenal number of times the writing captures a moment in loves journey we all go through. Seemingly unimportant occurrences that might only show fleetingly in your life then vanish forever forgotten, Judd Apatow bottles and writes about so believably.
One of my favorite early episodes in ‘Love’ shows the lead male character irreparably distracted at work all day, checking his phone every few minutes to see if his love interest has replied to a message. She does not and he is barely able to function as every aspect of the happiness he had been sailing on slowly ebbs away until late on, elation as the text arrives with an apology and an explanation for the delay. He is punching the air with joy as closing credits play out to Elvis Costello’s ‘Lovers Walk,’ making for a drama and music combination that has a simple, effective punch. Surely anyone who has had a meaningful relationship has lived that moment? This is what Apatow does so well, he understands the nuts and bolts that make us all tick and present them in a brilliantly entertaining way.
It has been a real pleasure to see how twenty years ago, on one of his earliest pieces ‘Freaks And Geeks,’ Judd had already tapped into those aspects of his work. The series is set in a high school around 1980 and stands as a charming meditation on the anxieties, traumas and golden moments of teenage life, without ever falling into the syrupy or judgmental. Just as with ‘Love,’ you start to believe in these characters and understand their development. The laughs are consistent and the acting is of an unbelievably high standard, especially when you consider that only twelve of the eighteen episodes made were aired before cancelation in 2000. So many of these names went on to glittering acting careers; Linda Cardellini, James Franco, Seth Rogan, Jason Segel, Becky Ann Baker, there was even a young Shia Labeouf in one episode.
So, there you have my jubilee recommendation if you are, like me, motivated to enjoy something a little more worthwhile than toasting a family largely out of work yet funded with ridiculous amounts of wealth just so they can look at the rest of us and say, “we’re better than you, now bow down.” If you want to toast someone who really has shown resilience and dedication to her craft, why not look at Nina Nastasia, who makes a more than welcome return to new music making in 2022 after too long away. Her story really is one of stoicism and endurance (for further reading on Nina’s return follow the link here ( https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/may/12/songwriter-nina-nastasia-abuse-grief-psychosis-john-peel-steve-albini-laura-marling ). Nina features in the monthly playlist, along with the usual 74 other selections which can all be enjoyed here:
Former Prime Minister Theresa May demonstrates the correct way for an ordinary female to stand when meeting a royal, nothing weird going on here at all is there? (Photo Chris Jackson/Getty Images)
I have been working as a music journalist for nearly twenty years now and in all that time have never seriously tried to make it the main focus of my occupation. Most of the time my interest in music discovery and collecting are my primary driving forces, wanting to write about it is a by-product, although I will admit the urge to write can sometimes be overwhelming. But writing about music? I can’t help but think that this is a very silly thing to do, surely the thing to do with music is just go off and listen to it? Music is so much like magic in the range of responses it conjures, and you don’t bother trying to describe magic, you experience it. But there it is, the frequency in which music discovery inspired me to want to write and spread the word is too ever present to ignore, it’s pretty much a daily thing and so, I have spent two decades regularly finding the time to put pen to paper on the subject.
In the early days I did go for it a bit harder, a few published reviews in national magazines pushed me to accepting any writing opportunity that came my way, for a time. Composing enthusiastic recommendations for artists you love is a great feeling, especially when you get a little feedback (mostly indirect but occasionally first-hand) that the artist themselves enjoyed and appreciated your efforts. But as the album reviews in particular began to snowball, inevitably I would have to write about records that I was not so keen on, or even on occasion downright detested. The sour taste this left in my mouth is the reason that, nowadays, I mainly just put my efforts into championing the things I really rate and get excited about. There is nothing clever about slagging off someone else’s work, people have their lives wrapped up in their creations. Why should they be pissed on by someone like me, who has never had people part with money to hear him perform? Someone who has never written a song, let alone mastered an instrument or created an albums worth of music? My only qualification is an avid listener with a fairly wide range of tastes; someone who would quite like to share with people with a similar ear, but that is all I have. I quickly realized that I did not feel comfortable pouring cold water on someone else’s dreams, particularly if their only crime is their music did not meet with my own tastes.
My turning point came around 2005 when I wrote a critical review for a singer-songwriter artist making his debut. I have blocked the episode out sufficiently to have forgotten his name, all I can remember was that the Waterboys leader Mike Scott had discovered this chap busking on the London Underground and offered him words of encouragement. Let me be clear, I would never suggest that I know more about music than Mike Scott, one of the greatest songwriters to come out of the twentieth century and still very much in possession of the spark of genius to this day, but you would not know that from my review. I also recall that the singer had a day job as a teacher, so I tackily ended my review with a condescending comment of the “must try harder next term” variety. Seeing that in print did not feel good, it felt even worse when a few weeks later I went to a gig at the Cambridge Corn Exchange and found that this artist had been the support act. I had missed his set but saw him standing there on the merchandise stand, looking friendly and welcoming, basically just a nice bloke who did not deserve a snide little two hundred word take down from me. And no, I did not bravely go over and introduce myself either.
So, from that moment on, I had a bit of a lukewarm attitude towards writing bad reviews of people. What is the point? I mean, if you actively dislike them why put yourself in a situation where you need to listen to their album more than once or stay for a whole performance? Far better to just put your time and efforts into the things that inspire and lift you. That said, if everything you write is all just praise then that does cheapen the positive words, I guess? For that reason, I do still occasionally kick down, in writing, at someone who I think is over praised or enjoying success that is out of kilter with the measure of their talent. Yes, I am looking at you Ed Sheeran and Coldplay. But these people aren’t going to even notice what I say, let alone be hurt or damaged by my words.
And the reason I have written this today? Well in the last week I was, in a situation out of my own control, exposed to a song by the band Stereophonics, in which they were singing about some graffiti on a train. Despite my ongoing mission to only write about things I love, I still made a mental note to myself that if ever there was a band sounding audibly bored with their own music, this was surely it. Who knows what the graffiti on the train was saying? With sludge-like music like this death-crawling its way to an exit, surely no one could bring themselves to care. It might have been something profound, but unfortunately the crowded room I was in were clearly not all feeling it either. Before too long someone shouted, “turn that shit off;” in my mind there is no way the graffiti on the train could have put it more succinctly than that!
One of the many wonderful things about record collecting, in contrast to say collecting art or decorative homeware, is that vinyl records were the ultimate mass-produced product, especially in their 60s, 70s heyday. There are millions of these things still sitting in people’s cupboards, hidden in their lofts, tucked away under some shelves in sheds (running the risk of damp frustratingly) or even still being enjoyed in living rooms for their intended purpose. As I am doing right now as I write this (with my early seventies UK Charisma pressing of the Genesis progressive thrilling Nursery Cryme if you are curious). So, unlike many other areas of collecting, where the chances of stumbling upon that bit of true buried treasure will be so limited as to represent a once in a lifetime occurrence, with records you can, if you’re prepared to put the time in hunting around, really expect to turn up something truly exciting and revelatory every single week, or daily if you’re able to build your life around it.
I might be making this all sound too good to be true, but I am speaking from personal experience built up over thirty years so there is some substance to this claim. If there is a downside, well maybe it is the amount of crap you must plough through to hit those jackpots. Yes, you will become over familiar with the record covers of Jason Donovan and Jim Reeves, just go and flick through the vinyl at your local charity shop for proof of this. If you, as I do, run adverts for purchasing peoples unwanted record collections, you will answer the phone to many a caller informing you they have masses of records from the fifties and sixties, “you name it it’s in there somewhere, way too much to tell you about over the phone”. So off you’ll go, dreaming that this is the day you’ll be returning home with those original issues of ‘Village Green Preservation Society’ and ‘Odyssey and Oracle’ under your arm, already planning to set aside the evening for a good bottle of wine as I drop the needle on potentially long sought after hot collectables from the fifties and sixties, only to be presented with the actual big sellers of the period. Yes, it is often said that the good stuff can rise to the top slowly, there is no better evidence of this when you consider the albums that are today regarded as the essential classics of the period against the albums people bought by the truckload at the time. The Sound of Music soundtrack, cheap sound-a-like Top Of The Pops compilations, Readers Digest box sets and if that is not bad enough the ever-present artists you find are, far more than the Beatles and Rolling Stones, they are Ken Dodd, James Last, Tom Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck and the aforementioned Jim Reeves.
But if the downside if having to look through a lot of rubbish, the sweetener is that there is always a chance of something wonderful popping up, even among the collections like I just described. There can be many reasons for this, or no explanation at all beyond random luck. Older people selling a collection pulled out of a dark corner of their attic may have had children, and offspring rarely share their parents’ musical taste. So it is that some hard-to-find Reggae or C86 Indie can crop up among the Andy Williams and Tijuana Brass dross. Sometimes an album way off the regular listening habits of the receiver may have been given as a gift, which is exactly how an unplayed fifties Blue Note Jazz original could appear inside a box of predictable Trad Jazz, folk rarely play gifted music that is not to their taste. But to return to my mass-production thread, there really still is an abundance of this stuff hiding out there waiting to be discovered and you genuinely cannot predict what will turn up. I mean, even limited-edition private pressings generally had at least 500 or 1000 copies produced, which is rather a lot when you think about it.
This is on my mind because in the past week I had one such wonderful find. Browsing through a collection of, admittedly unusual but still, quite uninteresting seventies UK middle-of-the-road country, mainly privately manufactured by performers without distribution deals who sold their product around the pub circuit (which is why most of these records turn up signed by the artist with a personal dedication), I found a lovely 1980 album by Mandy Morton on Polydor called ‘Sea Of Storms’. Despite the year, it is a delightful bit of mildly psychy freak folk with its sensibilities firmly rooted in the decade just passed rather than the one already commencing. It surely represented the original owner making a mistaken purchase outside of their usual comfort zone, or this was a speculative present from a more musically clued up relative trying to fight the good musical fight like we all do, us who love to share the good stuff about. You can imagine it, “let’s get him off the Don Williams and open his eyes with a bit of Mandy Morton, he’ll be thanking me for years.” Anyway, the immediately found its home on the Fruit Tree Records shelves and one of the many superb tracks on the album appears on this month’s playlist.
Given the horrendous unfolding world events at the start of March 2022, just sitting here writing a blog post to accompany the monthly playlist feels a rather privileged position to be in. People are fighting for their lives, losing their lives, refugees are fleeing across borders while property and architecture is bombed and obliterated at this very moment. With all that going on in the background, everything else we fill our time with, especially writing about music collecting and discovery like this, feels rather indulgent.
Still, we are all carrying on as normal because that is all we know. As someone who approaches his playlist curation as sonic diary entries, just as much as they are intended as wide-ranging journeys of discovery for those with similar tastes in melodically rooted thrill seeking, I had to resist selecting too obvious tracks nodding towards current events. With the fear of nuclear attacks feeling more real than any time in my lifetime, I kept thinking the obvious opening number should be Bob Dylan’s ‘A Hard Rains-A-Gonna Fall’ and perhaps following that up with Sting’s ‘Russians.’ I played Phil Ochs feeling certain that many of his sixties political songs would speak to me directly reflecting current fears and travesties. And they did, Phil remains one of the most undervalued topical songwriters that ever lived, but like the man himself in his classic ‘I Ain’t Marching Anymore,’ I chose to turn away.
Why did I make that choice? Well, if there is any point in sharing a few hours of music in March 2022 the only effective use I can settle on is that it might open a window of distraction, as well as maybe offer a bit of a lift. Let us try and not forget that is what music can do, I always believe the magic in the range of feelings and reactions it can spark is what makes it so endlessly addictive. And as always, there has certainly not been a shortage of supply in music for me to get excited about lately. It is not all upbeat, it never is with me I am afraid, you always need a bit of mellow calm introspection to contrast the louder faster stuff, but I believe it is all worth hearing and certainly never dull. Inevitably these days, there are a couple of nods to giants of the music world who left us this past month, news arriving of Procol Harum’s Gary Brooker and the far too young Mark Lanegan’s passing on the same day.
By the time I write the entry for the April playlist will things be better? We all live in hope, the idea that in the 21st century human nature has not evolved far enough to have learned to tackle any dispute without death and destruction does not fill me with hope. Yes, there are millions who do know a better way, but the universal truth is that those people are rarely the ones in power. As Phil Ochs once sang, “it’s always the old who lead us to the wars, always the young to fall.” Peace talks are continuing while bombs and aggression rain down on Ukraine from all sides. Watching on the news footage of an entire country’s architecture and cultural landmarks being obliterated should make us all appreciate the fleeting nature of all the culture we assume to be permanent. It is not, this is all just a temporary thing. So, whether you are attending a musical performance at a historical venue like the Royal Albert Hall, hustling to secure your tickets to see Paul McCartney at Glastonbury this year or simply filing your vinyl collection alphabetically on shelves at home, enjoy what we have right now for a little way east across the globe is the reality, this can all be gone in seconds.
Firstly, for those who are following my albums of 2021 features, please understand the time I am taking in writing about my twenty favorites is simply down to the fact that this is how I like to do it. They are all worth spending some time with; proper listening undistracted by other goings on so that is how I am approaching it. They were my stand-out LP discoveries of the year and I maintain the philosophy that a great album is worth spending time with and digging in deep. Not only that but it has been a busy month getting back into action after my Covid experience.
The monthly playlists I compile have always been presented on Spotify, mainly because that was the streaming service I signed up with first eleven or so years ago and I just stayed with them. But this month two of my top artists, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, pulled their music from the platform in protest at a podcast spreading Covid vaccine misinformation. It is not a podcast I have heard and it does not sound like something which would appeal, but regardless I cannot argue against the ethics of the stance. If this podcast is supporting any anti-vax nonsense, then that is an opinion that should not be supported as it could potentially cost lives. And let us not overlook the fact that Spotify deserves more dissension than that received around a dubious Podcast it hosts. Yes, they have provided musical convenience and ease of discovery for all of us but artists routinely complain of not being paid adequately whilst Spotify get rich off their intellectual property.
So, my own response to this has been to look elsewhere for streaming as well. Whilst I suspect Spotify will ride this storm out, they may even coax Young and Mitchell back one day, those two alone leave so many holes in my various playlists that I have investigated Apple music and been quite impressed by the quality on offer there. From now on, the playlists will be available from both Spotify and Apple Music. Please remember though, the mission drive of the Fruit Tree Records website is to point readers in the direction of fantastic vinyl records for their collections, the playlists should really be viewed as try before you buy selections. As for Spotify podcasts, well there are many that I enjoy so I can hardly pretend that I am going to completely flush them away. One that is on the way out however is ‘The 500 with Josh Adam Meyers’. He is covering, album by album, the Rolling Stone Magazine top 500 albums list published in 2012. Admittedly he acknowledges that he has never been a music connoisseur, but this week he featured Richard & Linda Thompson’s 1982 classic ‘Shoot Out The Lights’ and gave it a kicking I cannot get on board with. Yes, he and his co-host did grudgingly give some kudos for guitar sound and a couple of decent songs, but the repeated calling Richard “Dick” and the general piss taking was way out of order.
They said Richard has a face you want to keep on punching on the cover, has Josh Adam Meyers not looked in the mirror lately? I know he would take me down for voicing this opinion and yes, maybe I am taking it all a bit too seriously as I agree that writing about music is a fundamentally pointless and unnecessary activity, just go and listen to stuff. And no, I am not defending Richard Thompson for cheating on and then leaving his heavily pregnant wife but they did take some shockingly inaccurate liberties with lyric analysis to further their Richard roasting agenda. The music is what the podcast claims to be discussing and the private lives of the artists should not be the main factor in assessing musical content. If we took wrongheaded domestic behavior into account, then music the sadly departed Ronnie Spector made with Phil Spector producing would be avoided like Gary Glitter. I am firmly on the side of Richard Thompson here as Josh Adam Meyers podcast got this one horribly wrong, even adding insult to an already infuriatingly ignorant position by mentioning Tears For Fears as a better call from the early eighties! Richard, with his boring looking 1980s geography teacher appearance, has struggled to receive the kind of acclaim his talent really does deserve so he hardly needs a bell end like Meyers putting the boot in. A shame because certain other episodes of his podcast had been laugh out loud funny, what a pity it was one of my favorite artists on the rough end of this shoddy treatment. Couldn’t he have saved that for the Red Hot Chili Peppers? (Maybe he did, I haven’t actually listened to that many).
Loving so much music from the fifties,sixties and seventies onwards does have a dark edge in 2022 because every month it now seems like artists who are beloved among the record collection pass away. Two of the great female singers have left us in January, Ronnie Spector and Norma Waterson, both were in their own way masters of the form in which they were most celebrated. Ronnie’s voice enriches the soul of that early sixties, post rock ‘n’ roll and pre-British invasion wall-of-sound pop era. For me and many others I am sure Norma was the authentic voice of UK folk music. It comes back to that word soul again as when Norma sang you really heard the heart of the song, these voices could move you tears then lift you back up again and believe me, they have frequently done just that and continue to do so with their indelible legacies.
I began compiling the Fruit Tree Records monthly playlists in June 2014 under some extremely challenging circumstances. In fact, it’s probably fair to say that the playlist compiling and the excuse to organize my monthly listening adventures into something regular, coherent and into a project that would span years and decades was something of a welcome distraction at the time from other life events and dramas that had, to put it mildly, left me with a fight on my hands. But music can give you a lot (not all) of the support you need to get you through times like that and so it did. It was only seven years later, in June 2021, when I began to share and write about these playlists because, by then, the project had started to form something like the grander, far-reaching project I had first envisioned. Over time I will post and write about the events and times surrounding all these monthly playlists going right back to the start, if nothing else there is a lot of compiling and curating work been put into these lists and there is indeed an overall style emerging.
I mention this as part of the introduction to the January 2022 list because one trend to evolve, which was not there immediately, is that the first collection of the year serves up a grand sweep of the pile of tracks un-playlisted from the year just ended. As such, it also is a first entry into the Fruit Tree Records review of the year. None of these pieces would have been excluded before due to any lack in quality or excitement, it is simply that this is not a project based solely on contemporary music, the source pool covers the entire history of recorded music and things do take time to listen to and appreciate. On that subject, I had previously stated an intention to write about the Fruit Tree Records of 2021 during December, but I have held that back until January. My reasoning is, why rush to settle on my final twenty or so absolute stand outs from the year. People do not exactly have a shortage of end of year run downs to check out in December and there is only one of me, so inevitably the various magazines and sites I check out have a habit of alerting me to something incredible that I previously missed.
So, I saw the new year in last night with the Hootenanny on TV. It has never been something I have particularly been bothered about missing, as good as Jools is there is invariably someone on who I would rather not be seeing a new year in with. But since five of the six people I live with have Covid, myself included, then Jools it ended up being. There is nothing to be gained by me knocking Ed Sheeran but whatever it is that he does that appeals to people goes right over my head, as it does everyone else in the house I have to say. Now I come to think of it, I do not think I know anybody who openly admits to liking this man’s music, how is he so popular? The same can be said for Rag N’ Bone Man, whose Human I had initially liked a few years ago but if ever a song died a death for me through repeated exposure it was this. His Hootenanny performance showed he does indeed have a bit of a soulful punch to his singing, but has he ever found the answer to what he does next after the success of Human? The lad looks a bit lost to me.
Talking about vocals with soulful impact, Yola was certainly my stand-out highlight of the evening. Her album does feature as one of the Fruit Tree Records of 2021 and she also appears in this playlist, so in no way a new discovery but a revelation all the same in how she took this TV show by the collar and gave it a thorough shakedown. Later in the show Yola took a run at Cream’s ‘Sunshine Of Your Love’ and absolutely catapulted it into the new year stars. Look back at Yola’s considerable music back story and it is clear she has waited too long for her time in the spotlight; sometimes there is nothing more satisfying than watching someone whose talent wholly deserves the attention finally getting some. The other saving grace was Joy Crookes, also featured in this playlist, who has returned to my radar some five years after I was impressed by her Winehouse-esque vocals and trip-hop style genre-mashing at a sparsely attended London pub supporting Benedict Benjamin. I predicted good things for her at the time and it is nice to occasionally see that my ear can still spot potential. Last night she even, apparently spontaneously, did a song with Ed Sheeran and made him seem momentarily less irritating. Mind you, it was extremely late by then and I was very fatigued from Covid. Happy new year.
December is typically the month where the music you hear coming out of shops, cars, radios or most public gatherings suddenly becomes a lot more familiar to the Fruit Tree Records ethos. That is to say, the air is filled with classic Christmas tracks that are pulled from an eclectic range of eras and styles. From pure nineties pop, to sixties wall of sound, crackly crooners from the 1940s, glam rock, indie-dance crossover sounds, electro eighties soul, warm fireside folk, feel good fifties rock n roll and even Bob Dylan, it all gets an equal billing in the soundtrack to the festive season.
I’ll admit to a gnawing sense of over familiarity to a lot of the ubiquitous Christmas songs we’re showered with but that’s not really the fault of the songs themselves. Only a deliberate contrarian would argue against the Pogues and Kirsty MacColl (like one of those buffoons who try and argue that the Beatles weren’t any good, cross them off the christmas card list) and even a murder conviction hasn’t shaken the essential status of the Phil Spector Christmas Album too far from the summit. But love them as I have, they are way too familiar now and even the sound of John Lennon asking “so this is Christmas and what have you done?” fails to lift in quite the same way as it used to. Of course, even the greatest of albums can diminish with over exposure, so don’t let me pour cold water over your enjoyment of the greatest festive recordings.
The one thing I can’t ignore is that the wide open, anything counts approach that the curators and listeners apply to music in December is exactly the same as my own philosophy with Fruit Tree Records all year round. That limitless ploughing through the recorded music of the last 100 years is a voyage that I’ve been on all my life and rewards me with audio surprise and delight every single day. Like everyone, my tastes have plenty of sweet spots and blind spots but overall, I’d say that genre and age are not limiting factors, essentially if something grabs me then I’m on it whether it was put out in the 1920s or last week, be it something deep and rootsy or groundbreaking and futuristic.
To quote Lou Reed, the posibilities are endless. So come on people, don’t just dive into the deep well of recorded music during the Christmas period, bathe in this endless river all year round, I guarantee you won’t regret it. Oh and just to be clear, the December playlist is not a Christmas selection in any way, just more superb sounds from across the ages to entertain and inspire! Happy Christmas.
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