Revolutionary Dreams

 

Apologies for those who tuned in yesterday expecting a revolutionary post.

Apologies also to those who tuned in today and thought " oh no another bloody revolution post". I forgot to post this yesterday. My head is clearly in the revolutionary clouds.

This series is slowly petering out and I think it is safe to say that despite our best intentions the revolution is not coming any time soon.

There are still two songs on the Reggae Revolutionaries folder that Ernie very kindly sent me. It makes sense (to me at any rate) to feature these this week and next week to bring this series to a conclusion.

Ernie's offering is even going to feature first this week rather than third. Revolutionary Dream is the title track of an album by Pablo Moses from 1975 on the Jigsaw label

Revolution Earth is a track from Good Stuff the sixth studio album from the legends from Georgia that are the B-52s and which was released on Reprise

Revolution Blues is a song by Neil Young on the 1974 album On the Beach .According to the Genius website the song is a harrowing,spooky comment on the murders committed by the crazed hippie Charles Manson and his cult of followers in 1969. Rick Dando and Levon Helm from The Band and David Crosby all contribute to the song.

It is the second time that this song has featured with a cover by  the Waco Brothers having appeared on The Revolution Starts at Closing Time the second post of this series way back in January.

The Revolution concludes next week.

Pablo Moses - Revolutionary Dream 

B52's - Revolution Earth

Neil Young - Revolution Blues

Music of the Year 1982

 

JC currently has a monthly series on the go called Don't Look Back in Anger which is concentrating on music from the year 1983. Being slightly older than him I am going back to 1982.

Yes the year of the Falklands War, the film Ghandi, the birth of Prince William and of Aston Villa winning the European Cup beating Bayern Munich 1-0 in Rotterdam. 

I shall write that again - the year that Aston Villa won the European Cup 

Released on the Spectrum label in 2001 I suspect it may be part of a series although I have no evidence to support this theory. It just seems unlikely that it is a one off.  There are some big hitters on it who will have graced the pages of not only CCM but many of the other excellent blogs on the right hand sidebar - Dexys, Soft Cell,and ABC to name but three of the eighteen acts . The tracklist is here but I'm not sure that I would necessarily fork out £8.74 for it.

Today I'm starting off with a big hitter namely The Jam who haven't appeared here nearly as often  as they should. The same sentiment could equally apply to Squeeze and King Creole & the Coconuts.

I feel that sharing these with you makes me A Wonderful Thing,Baby.

I shall spare you David Essex, Charlene and Captain Sensible.

The Jam - Town Called Malice

Squeeze - Black Coffee in Bed

Kid Creole & the Coconuts - I'm a Wonderful Thing, Baby

Hits of the 70s

 

I'm taking a wee break from the Debra Haul to feature a couple of cheap and cheerful compilations  that Mrs CC brought in the other day

I can't find any information about Hits of the 70s Disc Two other that it is on the EMI label. I suspect it may well be part of a larger box set. Also I couldn't find anything on Google Images so you will have to make do with a photo by me.

There are 18 songs on the CD  a few of which have featured here before. Of the 18 I am familiar with 14. The songs by Kandidate, Congregation,Lee Garrett and Brass Construction I may well have heard before.If so they have been erased from my memory.

If the tables were turned and this was the hits of any decade of this Millennium I very much doubt that I would be able to identify 4.

If I was on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (unlikely as I wouldn't trust myself not to lamp Jeremy Clarkson) and any "hit" songs appeared as part of the £200 question I would have to ask the audience because I suspect that anyone I nominated as a friend would not know  the answer anyway.

Would you be able to tell who these three were by or would you be asking the audience?

Similar fayre from the 80's tomorrow

Bobby Goldsboro - Summer The First Time

George McCrae - Rock Your Baby

Maxine Nightingale -Right Back Where We Started From

The Debra Haul - Wild Things Run Fast

 

2023 Charity Shop Purchases #37 - Joni Mitchell - Wild Things Run Fast

Another artist to have more than one album in the Debra Haul is Joni Mitchell.

Wild Things Run Fast is her 11th studio album from 1982 on the Geffen label and represents a departure from Jazz to a more accessable 80's pop sound. Indeed it's predecessor the obviously Jazz influenced Mingus is one that I struggle to listen to. 

She claims that the album is inspired by hearing music from the likes of Steely Dan, Talking Heads and the Police at a disco in the Caribbean in 1981. It was reasonably well received with reviews in the 3 and 4 out of five region.

A review on Amazon states that Wild Things Run Fast is such an underrated album in the Joni Mitchell catalogue. It rocks, it swings, it grooves, and more importantly the songwriting is still there. Rolling Stone magazine mentions that the word love gets a mention 57 times! With the exception of the first song the songs all pitch in at two to three minutes and all are pretty accessable 

AllMusic feel that Mitchell achieved more of a balance between her pop abilities and her jazz aspirations, meanwhile rediscovering a more direct, emotional lyric approach. The result was her best album since the mid-'70s. Somewhat worryingly, however, is that I have seen the frightening term jazz fusion mentioned in places!

There were actually a further two Joni albums in the Haul  (Mrs CC is abig fan) - the live Shadows and Light from 1980 and Dreamland (the essential career retrospective personally selected by Joni) from 1980. I am not planning to feature them for now as that would be overkill but I reserve the right to feature them in future along with a CD of music from the film Jean de Florette.

This therefore concludes the first Debra Haul. The second much shorter haul will be along shortly

Joni Mitchell - Wild Things Run Fast

Joni Mitchell - Underneath the Streetlight

The Debra Haul - Redwood Cathedral

 

2023 Charity Shop Purchases #36 -Dick Gaughan - Redwood Cathedral

We are fast approaching the end of the first Debra Haul and are now on the second albums of some of those already featured.

Dick Gaughan has already featured with his 2001 album Outlaws and Dreamers. Today is the turn of its 1998 predecessor Redwood Cathedral which is also on the Greentrax label.

In the sleevenotes Dick states that while he writes songs he regards himself primarily as an interpreter of songs and that the album is primarily a collection of songs writtern by highly skilled songwriters  and are well crafted songs which he loves and which he loves singing and exploring.Indeed of the 12 songs on the album only two are written by him

AllMusic writes that Gaughan's weathered brogue is enough to make a song memorable and that it is  clear that Gaughan has a gift for phrasing that puts the listener at ease.

As with Outlaws and Dreamers the album is a mix of folk standards and protest songs and these two incorporate both. 

Thomas Muir of Huntershill is written by Adam McNaughton in praise of the great revolutionary whose life stradled the 18th/19th centuries and who took part in the American and French revolutions before returning to Scotland and being instrumental in the agitation leading to the Weaver's Revolt.

Turn!, Turn!, Turn! (To Everything There is a Season) Pete Seeger's famous development of a theme from the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes surely needs no further introduction.

Dick Gaughan - Thomas Muir of Huntershill

Dick Gaughan -Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There is a Season)

The Debra Haul -London Calling

 

2023 Charity Shop Purchases #35  - The Clash - London Calling

I know what you are all thinking - surely he already has London Calling by the Clash?

Don't be silly - of course I have it. I got it on vinyl when it first came out and it is now worth a good few bob. Not that I would ever sell it of course.

I didn't have it on CD though. Well that's not strictly true. The picture above is one of the gifts I was presented with when I retired in July 2021. It does include a copy of the  CD behind the frame and the  perspex. Obviously I've never going to dismantle it just to get  access to the CD.

It is one I have been keeping an eye out for in charity shops for a while and so it was a no-brainer to include it as part of the haul.

I thought that I had featured most of the 19 songs on the album here over the year but it turns out that to date only 8 have featured with Four Horsemen being the only one to have appeared twice.

Three more then for you today.. Don't worry George I'll get around to the other 8 in due course

The Clash - Jimmy Jazz

The Clash - The Right Profile

The Clash -Death or Glory

The Debra Haul - By Request

 

2023 Charity Shop Purchases #34 - Eric Bogle - By Request 

Eric Bogle is a Scottish folk singer and songwriter who emigrated to Australia in 1961

By Request is a compilation album from 2001 on the Greentrax label.He  has recorded over 14 albums, most of the early ones are now deleted. This compilation contains songs from those early albums that have been requested by his audiences.15 of his most popular tunes and could be considered as his Greatest Hits.

There are a few novelty songs on the album alongside some more political ones.

Eric Bogle is responsible for writing two of the greatest anti war songs of all time which record the atrocities of the 1914 to 1918 war.

No Man's Land was written in 1976 and is also known as The Green Fields of France or Willie McBride. Bogle writes that it's a song that was written about the cemetries in Flanders and Northern France. In 1976 my wife and i went to three or four of these military cemeteries and saw  all the young soldiers buried there.

Although there were a few soldiers called Willie McBride  Bogle had no particular soldier in mind when writing this song. It is about the futility of war and the tragic waste of young lives - a musical accompaniment to Wilfred Owen's Anthem for Doomed Youth if you will.

It has been covered by dozens of artists but my favourite version is by The Men They Couldn't Hang which remains one of my favourite ever songs.

His secod great song is And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda which is particularly poignant to Australians gived the disasterous Gallipoli campaign. Again this song has been covered by countless artists with my favouite being the version by the Pogues.

Even if he never writes another song his place in history is assured

Eric Bogle - No Man's Land

Eric Bogle - And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda