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.

Anyone with the impulse to write about music, DJ or collect will essentially deal in the currency of “if you like that wait until you hear this”. If not that then maybe “if you think that tracks groundbreaking wait until I show you where they got the idea from”. We collectors spend our time, every day, wading through the acres of recorded music from the past hundred or so years and when we uncover something wonderful we want to share it around. Because music is such a personal experience, there is a tendency for us to appear dismissive of tunes that are being trumpeted elsewhere, especially in the mainstream. This is in no way down to an elitism, simply an awareness that while a small percentage of music with major label marketing budget hoovers up all the media attention, a multitude of equally worthy releases old and new are drifting along in the margins. This is nothing new, in 2004 John Peel told me that even though The Zutons were a great band, there was no point in him playing them on the radio when everyone else was doing it. Just like the rest of us, he wanted to show that thrills are found far beyond the limited selections held up as representative of current sounds.

Thirty years ago Dire Straits were about to release their ‘On Every Street’ album. It was the bands first release in six years, following the period when their last record, ‘Brothers In Arms’, had been superglued inside every CD player worldwide. There followed an inevitable backlash from everyone sick of having this middle-of-the-road mainstream rock shoved down their throats. The new album was slowly drip-fed to the world with all the usual marketing tricks that accompanied an “important” release; exclusive first plays on Radio One tickled up days in advance, blanket press coverage, that sort of thing. My recollection is that one of the weekly music newspapers concluded its review with words like “this is the most important album release of the year and it’s alright”.

For all the cattiness in that remark, it should be noted that it was fairly accurate. 1991’s ‘On Every Street’ didn’t offend the ears and neither did it hit the heights of the bands earlier work. It sounded like an album that had to be made to fulfil a contractual obligation, a release contriving to ensure it contained enough sonic reference points to leave the listener in no doubt that this was new Dire Straits. Listen closely and you can hear the sound of a band dutifully clocking on. You can forgive the music press their sniffiness; hardcore fans of a mainstream act on the rough end of the press will often dismiss this attitude as music snobbery yet it is anything but that. 1991 had already seen the arrival of classics like R.E.M.’s ‘Out Of Time’, Primal Scream’s ‘Screamadelica’ and soon ‘Nevermind’ by Nirvana. Creations by artists who were on the rise and bursting at the seams with inspiration. Two of this trio would one future day hit a similar state of creative dire straits (Nirvana tragically didn’t get the chance) but in 1991 they were making the music that would endure, music that you feel certain they’d have written recording contract or no.

In the six years since their crowning commercial release, Dire Straits had watched the arrival of the CD format and with it a huge proportion of their audience lock their vinyl collections into a cupboard and embrace the digital age with a purchase of one or two compact discs a year. The landscape changed beyond recognition in the late 80s and early 90s with many a Dire Straits fan vocally supporting the ‘keep music live’ campaign, spawned in reaction to Dance and Raps sampling culture. You can’t choose your fans obviously, but all of this would have firmly placed the band on the wrong side of the fence for the early nineties music press. I was firmly on the anti-Straits side of the argument too, I loved a Mark E Smith joke at the time asking “what do you get if you cross Dire Straits with Chris Rea? Diarrhea”. New music was far from a spent force as far as I was concerned, the eighties seemed instantly condemned the worst decade for music and I was pleased to see the back of it, the new developments all rather exciting. Nevertheless, if the journalists had trashed Dire Straits I would have felt it an undue kicking for the sake of it (something I never liked to read), but instead they seemed to call it right. This album was OK.

I have been thinking about all this because in the past month new music from Adele has arrived. It’s her first new music in about six years and it has been slowly filtered out to the public in stages. The first clip I heard was just a piano intro that lasted about 13 seconds. Within a couple of weeks you could not escape it, everyone seemed to be talking about this amazing return from Adele and how it was already nailed on to be one of, if not the, most significant releases of 2021. And for those brothers in arms who maybe only buy or stream one or two new albums a year, this is indeed going to be big music news. The trouble starts with people like me who have been listening to and discovering sensational new music all year long (and will round it all up in depth on these pages in December), we know that there is an awful lot of other music in 2021 equally deserving of these accolades. Yet when you voice these opinions you stand accused of music snobbery, an elitism that wants to dismiss something that everyone else is enjoying just for the sake of being different. And it’s not that at all. I have now heard the new Adele in full, it is indeed a very Adele sounding piano ballad beautifully sung. I haven’t included it in my monthly playlist but yes, you know, what can I say about the new Adele? Well, (shrugs shoulders), you know….it’s alright!

What I have done is front load the November playlist with a series of Pop jewels and ballads featuring the piano or electric keyboards as the lead instrument. After all I love a bit of piano and keyboard based music, especially a really well written song; it’s simply that, apparently unlike all the people currently celebrating the return of a sonic saviour, I’ve been going to that place with or without Adele for years, that’s all.  

The Beatles story is arguably the most enduring in music history and it always seems to keep on giving. At the centre of it all was the creative partnership between Lennon and McCartney which was pretty much completely over by 1969. Following their bust up and subsequent 1971 song attacks on each other a truce was fairly swiftly arrived at and a civility prevailed whenever they spoke about each other in interviews henceforth. But, other than McCartney’s 1994 Anthology contribution to Lennon demos, there would be no more Lennon / McCartney collaborations. And yet… (I am fully aware there are thousands of Beatle heads who already know this) I became aware this month that there was in fact one more event that had escaped me. On ’Let Me Roll It’ McCartney had admitted he’d made a track very much in Johns style. What I did not know was, maybe being made aware of this, Lennon for his next album had wholesale lifted the central guitar lick from McCartney’s song and inserted it into his own ’Beef Jerky’. Does this make it the final Lennon and McCartney composition of Lennon’s lifetime?

Blatant thieving is a slight hidden theme of this months playlist. I also learned this month how, following the Staples Singers unmistakable borrowing of an Upsetters intro for ’I’ll Take You There’, Lee Scratch Perry had vengefully placed a totally out of context Staples sample at the beginning of ‘Cow Thief Skank’.

Just as I was putting the finishing touches to the tracklisting, I finally ended my enforced 18 month gig drought with three in the space of six days. All three were pretty fantastic too, firstly a seated show to witness Martha Wainwright open her life up like a book singing mostly tracks from her new LP written after her divorce. The support band, Bernice, were pretty special too playing a kind of folk-club electronica. Two nights later John Grant once again mixed stunning, melodic electronics with aggressively honest singer-songwriter soul baring. Then I took a recommendation on The Lathums who played a winning mixture of Housemartins, Smiths and Arctic Monkeys style guitar pop. Catching a band whose debut album had just gone to number one was not something I necessarily expected to see at this stage of my gig going life but it was delightfully uplifting, one of the best gigs I’ve seen in fact. If a rowdy crowd singing ”UKs number one number one” to the tune of KC & The Sunshine Bands ’Give It Up’ for a band who are getting attention for no other reason than they are writing great songs doesn’t lift you….well just give it up.

This months cover star is Marizanne Kapp, a South African cricketer who really impressed during the first ever final of the women’s Hundred tournament this month. I thought it was a top drawer sporting spectacle really, no matter what all the Cricket purists might have to say. Kapp drove the Oval Invicibles to victory with a devastating opening bowling display, an especially notable achievement in a Cricket format that tends to be driven by the aggressive power hitting of the batters. The thing that kept me glued to the action was the intensity of Kapp, she was just so fired up and in the zone, so much in fact that even when she gained the upper hand by taking wickets she could not let a smile emerge, the only emotions cracking the surface were determination and a burning desire for victory. Even when the game was won it was clear she’d pushed herself so far into the cause that she could not wind down and celebrate like her team mates, she seemed wholly drained. A magnetically gripping effort in top flight sport and exactly what the Hundred needed in it’s debut year, personally I hope it sticks around.

Musically the big news this month has been the death of Charlie Watts. His passing followed shortly after he’d announced his non-participation in forthcoming Rolling Stones shows due to a medical issue, stating typically drolly that “for one my timing was off”. I kind of hope the Stones don’t continue without him, if ever there was a band that just wouldn’t be the same without the original drummer it is surely them? I listened to a lot of the bands big hits when the news of his passing broke and what strikes you is what an incredible back bone he really was. The beating heart of Rock ‘n’ Roll indeed. And if that news wasn’t bad enough, the beating heart of Dub has left the stage in the past few days, with news of the death of Lee Scratch Perry also being announced.

Still, let’s be glad that incredible new music talent continues to arrive and there’s plenty of fresh juice to enjoy in this months playlist too. By the time I write the notes for Octobers playlist I may have even been to my first gigs in 18 months. I intend to step up the content on the Fruit Tree Records blob from here on in. I launched it not exactly sure what I was going to focus on beyond my journey in music discovery and enjoyment, looking both forward and back and joining a few dots along the way. But the ideas are all starting to come together now and I am ready to take this thing forward. OK well it’s all over now for this month but I’m free for more of this very soon but for now, just get your rocks off to the September 2021 playlist.

As the country has effectively removed all Covid restrictions, the past month has seen some large crowds return to sporting events some of which have been particularly memorable. The England football team reached the final of a major tournament for the first time in 55 years, they lost on penalties inevitably but for a brief moment the country seemed united in support of the beautiful game which always makes happy inside. Arsenal’s 19 year old Bukayo Saka missed the crucial penalty and we all felt mortified for him. The only positive that emerged after some vile racist trolling in his and two other players directions after the game was the way players, fans and the general public united in support of this wonderful sportsman and infectiously likeable character. Then within a few days cricket launched it’s new Hundred competition with again, some large crowds in attendance. Seeing as the aim of the fresh, shorter format is to attract a new audience then it’s good to see this working. It has to be said though, every other cricket fan I know is actively against The Hundred but I am not ashamed to say I’ve enjoyed it so far. I think I am a London Spirit man, captained as they are by my favourite Eoin Morgan alongside the ever entertaining, always unpredictable Ravi Bopara, but the ladies Oval Invincibles side also caught my eye. I’ll have to work that one out, you can’t support two London sides, it breaks every rule in the sports fans handbook!

The playlist seems to, unintentionally obviously, reflect the other ever present concern from July 2021 which is the climate. News stories of heatwaves, temperature records being broken, flash flooding and wildfires are a daily, depressing reality now. Even the UK weather is noticeably altered. Was there really anything like a conventional spring time this year or just a perpetual period of heavy rain storms finally broken by a mini heatwave? Anyway, if my monthly playlists are any sort of reflection of what’s been occupying my headspace for the previous month, then looking back over the collection of songs I can see a little hint of it in the songs about seasons and fire, more blatantly in that I followed up Villagers song about summer with the Housemartins ‘I Smell Winter’. Like John Peel used to say, “I don’t just throw these things together you know!” I can’t get too pretentious about any concepts though, the monthly playlist is and always will be a bookmark rounding up the Pop, Psych, Blues, Soul, Country, Folk, Rock ‘n’ Roll, Americana, Jazz, Prog and many other styles of musically exciting records floating through the Fruit Tree Records orbit at the present moment. So this is what I have in August 2021…