Songs About Cities

I've done previous charts about London and songs about each of the US states  so I thought it was about time the rest of the world got a look in. So here's a music chart compiled from songs about some of the great cities of the world other than those of the UK and the US. The only other stipulation for this chart is that there are no songs by Mountain Goats, since they seem to have sung about every major city in the world in their prodigious discography.

1) Scritti Politti - "Asylums In Jerusalem"
A band supposedly chockfull of both political and philosophical references (They cited french philosopher Jacques Derrida as an inspiration) but I never quite got all that. They just seemed to write rather catchy and sweet pop songs about romance like this one.



2) They Might Be Giants - "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)"
Barking mad and yet catchy. so catchy it's the only song of theirs I know.



3) Dub Syndicate - "Kingston 14"
Wonderful dub paean to Kingston Jamaica, in calling for an end to the drug and crime related violence.



4) Ultravox - "Vienna"
Overwrought, overblown like bad opera, but then that's what I thought of most of the New Romantic output. Just my opinion mind. This is also why Freddie Mercury's "Barcelona" won't make this chart. I forgot they were so big at the time of Live Aid. Let's conquer world famine by wearing our foppish dandy clothes and playing music that echoes royal pageantry to raise money.



5) Pere Ubu - "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo"
Ah that's better, something a bit more edgy and under-produced. You can sing about pizzicato strings as above, or you can sing about a pilot about to drop an atomic bomb over Japan...



6) Rush - "A Passage To Bangkok"
Rush, there's a band you didn't imagine would appear on this blog, but there you go. Drummers who wear headbands to keep the sweat out of their eyes, you know you're talking heavy rock, even when the drummer's hair has all fallen out. You'll have to take my word that this song is about Bangkok, because Geddy lee's vocals are unintelligible to my ear.



7) Test Dept - "Gdansk"
Named after a city that symbolises Europe's history of empire and conflict as it's been known as Danzig when owned by the Germans and Gdansk when Polish and of course the wellspring of the Polish Trade Union Solidarity that began the slow journey to democracy and liberation from the Soviet yoke. Sorry about the lousy low in the mix sound quality of this, but the studio version seems to have gone from YouTube.



8) Durutti Column - "Bordeaux"
So Marc, why isn't this treated the same as that Ultravox song you gave such a panning to?
Well fair blog visitor, because it's not pompous and it's musical is considerably more fragile and delicate methinks.



9) Scott Walker - "Amsterdam"
Okay something considerably less controversial, Scott Walker's voice. Nuff said



10) The Fall - "Bremen Nacht"
From the sublime to the ridiculous. Scott Walker to Mark E Smith. You always know a band is reaching the end of its useful life when they are so busy touring they experience nothing else in life and so pen songs about stays in hotel rooms and apparently amusing incidents backstage. not the Fall though, Smith's still going strong with his social observations on life.



11) Lou Reed "Berlin"
Lou reed RIP



12) Martha And The Muffins - "Saigon"
It's funny, after the interesting instrumental opening (including a keyboard lick I just realised was ripped off in one of my favourite hip hop songs), the music basically reverts to "Echo Beach" their most well known hit.



13) New Fast Automatic Daffodils - "Stockholm"
There were so many bands of this ilk in the 80s, but their guitar based indie rock was rather eclipsed by the preference for the synthesiser. I must admit they sort of passed me by too.



14) The Stranglers - "Goodbye Toulouse"
Not the run of the mill lament for leaving some favoured city, but an apocalyptic evaporation of the city through nuclear destruction. Wonder why they picked Toulouse of all places?



15) Joy Division - "Warsaw"
The earliest Joy Division release, coming after a brief flirtation with Warsaw as a band name in homage to David Bowie's song "Warszawa". The elements of what they would later become were all present here, if a little raw, but the references and the cover art also display a disconcerting Nazi fixation.

Dreams - a Music chart

Well if it's good enough for Shakey (William, not Stevens) then it must be a subject rich for the arts. here's a music chart of Dream themed songs (but not David Essex's "Silver Dream Racer")


1) Sonic Youth - "I Dreamed I Dream"

An early SY song this, before their layered sound had really started to cohere. But it's still brooding with menace and the husband and wife swapped vocals is really effective. Kim Gordon's book "Girl in A Band" has just come out. She was anything but that in Sonic Youth.



2) London Underground - "Dreams Are Better"

Spacy, dubby soundscape does conjure up a dreamy sensibility.



3) Mamas And Papas - "California Dreaming"

Infinitely prefer this version than the Beach Boys, even prepared to overlook the fashion faux pas.



4) The Fall - "Lie Dream Of A Casino Soul"

If you're going to include a Fall song in any music themed chart, chances are Mark E Smith's sensibilities are going to cut against the grain of the theme and sure enough, here the Hip Priest warbles his disapproval of the Wigan Casino's soul capital reputation.



5) Gang of Four - "We Live As We Dream Alone"

A quote from Joseph Conrad and I always want to put a comma after the 'Dream' and before the 'Alone'. Talking of fashion faux pas... Still one of my favourite songs by one of my favourite bands.



6) Fire Engines - "Big Gold Dream"

Here's a band that somehow haven't featured in a chart of mine before even though I really like them. The perspective is very odd here, the band look like tall thin giants compared to the dancers in the front.



7) Magik Markers - "Bad Dream"

I only discovered this band relatively recently and their album "Boss" has gone into my all-time top 20. Usually wig-out noise merchants, this shows an alarming degree of disturbia through a much lighter touch. Fabulous.



8) Pauline Murray & the Invisible Girls - "Dream Sequence 1"

Pauline Murray sounding just like she did when fronting punk band Penetration, though with more poppy backing than the thrash 3 chords of punk.



9) New Order - "Dreams Never End'

Fascinating track that shows the partial emergence of the New Order sound from that of Joy Division, but still with its roots very much traceable. They all look so tentative here.



10) Suicide - "Dream Baby Dream"

If there was ever a soundtrack of nightmares, Alan Vega provided it.



11) Eurythmics - "Sweet Dreams Are Made Of This"

I wasn't really a fan of the 80s, most of my favourite bands expired in the early 80s. I always associate this song with the grim politics of the era. A kind of corporate sponsored vision of nightmarishness.



12) Supertramp - "Dreamer"

Before punk came along, I used to listen to stuff like this. Thank god for punk I say. These days this sounds like Leo Sayer  to me. Crime of the century? That this type of music held sway for so long.



13) Television - The Dream's Dream"

This was probably around a similar time to the Supertramp and represented a precursor of punk and new wave that swept away the old rock dinosaurs. But these guys could still play their instruments, apart from Richard Hell obviously!



14) Nas - "Sweet Dreams"

I like Nas, but he really needs to get himself a decent artistic director to make his videos. they're all the same and universally awful.



15) Chemical Brothers - "Dream On"

They're called the Chemical Brothers for a reason. Spacemen 3 would have killed for this song.



16) Electric Prunes - "I had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)"

Dressed like choirboys yet their sound was a distortion, fuzzed up glorious romp.



17) Tricky - "Bad Dreams"

And we're back with the paranoia latent in dreams. or not so latent in this case. Tricky regarded all life as a bad dream.




18) Lil Kim - "Dreams"

Oh do get on with it! Once she's 43 seconds in it really locks in to a remorselessly mean vibe.



19) The Bug - "Thief Of Dreams"

Dubstep is supposedly an edgy dreamy urban soundscape and The Bug is all that and more. But the vocalist in this spins a terrifying narrative that is anything but dream like.



20) Minutemen - 'Dream Told By Moto"

Or the 4 minute warning till the bomb drops... no dream this for us in the 80s, we really had these thoughts and anxieties.

The Visible Spectrum Of Colour - Friday Flash

Deciduous Decisions

Gripping her shoulders she shuddered at her own touch. She stared out the window and saw the autumnal trees in her garden. The kaleidoscope of reds and oranges through to browns and yellows. She looked down at her wrists displaying the same spectrum of colours. Contusions and confusions. Maybe Mother Nature too was full of irascible rage. That she seized hold the limbs of trees and lashed them with punishing blasts. Grabbed outstretched branches and shook them insensible. The coloured bruised flakes there falling from the ligneous skein. And like her, they obligingly returned to the fold year after year.

Trooping The Colour

The Accounting Department sought to splatter the Human Resources team with their green dye. Colour co-ordinated with the green visors on their helmets that were the sole way of identifying which side you were on, with everyone attired in the same camouflage combat jackets. "Green for rookies" jibed the HRers as they were suiting up. "Yeah? well they gave you lot yellow for the cowardy custards" retorted Malcolm as he clipped on his paint cartridge with a satisfyingly resounding snap. It instantly elevated him to team leader. He turned to address them all as he clasped the flag in one hand. "If I see anyone marked with green paint, it means we've shot one of our own. There will be no death by friendly fire got it? Or there will be most unfriendly in-house firing back at the office" he winked and brandished the flag reverberatingly in the air.

While middle management were ramping themselves up to make action paintings of their genial foes, somewhere else teenage boys were putting coloured bandanas around their necks or foreheads. Or just slipping them into the back pockets of their uniform denim. These colours the only way to distinguish one coterie from another. The projectiles emitted from their weapons however were not colour coded. And uniformly they splattered red across the bodies of those that found their targets.

Painting By Numbers

How would the Bard have done it he contemplated? Of course he was assisted by the Jacobean beliefs about the human body. The Theory of Humours. Yellow bile, black bile, blood and phlegm. Choleric, melancholy, sanguinity and phlegmatic. What an artist's palate that made for. Dip your brush in the yellow pigment and mix with the carmine, to dilute the aggressive ambition, or inject a bit of urgency into the dilatory sanguine. Blend the jet black with a dab of that mucal green and the melancholic comes to more of an acceptance of the absurdity and cruelty of the world. Ready-made characterisation. If only it was all so easy to reduce the human emotional scale to such graphic formula. We've gone too far the other way now. Those four character types reduced to simple emoticons. A new simplistic graded happy-sad pH scale of emotion.

If neutral is zero, then the happy clappy adjectival parade all range positively in one direction. A heliotropic embracing and blossoming. Contented-Pleased-Delighted-Gleeful-Thrilled-Jubilant-Ecstatic. But this branch has been viciously pruned into fruitlessness anyway. Alas, not so for the sad shower. The abject adjectives. A phalanx, not tight-knit, but overlapping. Braced dyads of dark-shaded feelings. For every melancholic, there’s somebody jaundiced. Downcast/Discomfited - Sorrowful/Cut up - Morose/Bitter - Miserable/Stricken - Despairing/Repining - Anguished/Tormented - Suicidal/Baneful. The umbra resolutely wallowing, stewing in one’s own juices. While the penumbra, wrings its wagging and pointing fingers of blame at a gnawing external source. One which can be lanced to drain all suppurating feeling. The tenor of its march therefore, can only lead to a confluence with revenge. Revenge is not itself an emotion, but spliced with them like a gene therapy, becomes one in most respects. It does, after all, itself impart motivation for swingeing action and deed. The impulse for revenge, if successfully discharged, can actually turn the emotional pH scale on its head. It will launch you into the happy alkalis, as you recast over in your mind the exquisite piquancy of how it played out. No wonder Shakespeare wrote so many plays about revenge. His so-called comedies just weren't funny though.

Laser Colour Therapy

"The man slashed his wrists and bled on to the carpet in an echo of his own colour splotch art. Only it was figurative for once with his corpse lying in the centre of it. Of course he was depressed! They're not spiritual paintings. If anything they were cries for help. Black canvases expressing his fatally dark moods."

"And the coloured canvases? Shimmering, dancing hues oscillating in front of your eyes?"

"Unlike this divine soufflé, I think you're over-egging it somewhat!"

"Not sat down here enjoying a fine wine and some bourgeois dinner chatter. I mean in a gallery, stood up close, entering the painting. Getting sucked into its heart. Windows and fiery forges... crucibles of creative power."

"I thought you said his paintings represented contemplative stillness? Now they're dancing?"

"Only in comparison with Pollock. He was all about the gross materiality. The paint trails succumbing to gravity. Rothko expresses... the metaphysical. Grasping towards the ineffable."

"With slabs of paint? It's still fabricated from matter though isn't it? He's like a die cast machine, stamping a great big press on all figurative and landscape art that preceded him. The arrogance of the man, trying to eliminate the history of art altogether."

"He did employ his own style of pentimento. Conservationists of his work using ultraviolet light have revealed just how carefully he layered his paint tones."

"They're not forges, they're furnaces."

"Pardon?"

"You're both in error. They're furnaces. In which human beings were burned. What you call pentimento are the remains of the human fat inside the furnaces. Clearly the paintings are windows on the Holocaust."

"Um, more wine I think..."

               

taken from the flash fiction collection available to buy from Amazon Kindle

'B' Is For Better - Some top B-sides

Remember vinyl records? Remember 7 inch singles? The ones you could put into a jukebox. Usually with an A-side backed with (B/W) a B-side. Or as the Americans referred to it, a flipside. In the days before EPs, 12" singles, CD Singles with limited editions, remixes and everything that undermined the art of a B-side.

Well sometimes, just sometimes, the B-side was actually far superior to the A-Side. Here's a list of 10. I've inverted with B/W with a F/B for fronted by.

Enjoy.

1) New Order "In A Lonely Place" F/B "Ceremony"

There was huge anticipation for the first post-Joy Division release and while Ceremony is good, "In A Lonely Place" is mean, moody and magnificent (helped in this video by Bernard's irritation with Steve Morris' slow tempo). But turns out both songs were actually penned by Joy Division after all, before Ian Curtis' death, since this one appears on some of their live bootlegs. Still great though.

2) The Jam "Butterfly Collector" F/B "Strange Town"

When they weren't rehashing old Motown numbers as B-sides, The Jam actually put out some great value singles because both sides were of high standard. Weller's ropey hitting of the falsetto in "Strange Town" put me off that track, but the B-Side is creepy, unsettling and lyrically quite brilliant.

3) The Birthday Party "Kathy's Kisses" F/B "Nick The Stripper"

"Nick The Stripper" is fairly routine BP sleaze fare, but when you scroll past the bog standard "Blundertown" which opens the flipside, you are caught completely off guard by the jazzy scuzz of "Kathy's Kisses" which hints at Cave's future solo direction. This track shows Cave has a fine sense of humour which BP die hards would not have permitted at the time, demanding music to shoot up in venue toilets by. I know, I saw them... I was at a joint headline gig of The Fall & BP. Half the audience were Nick Cave homaging in their look, the others all had Mark E Smith wonky bowl cuts. The Cave fans were complaining about the Fall fans slavishly resembling their hero; the Fall fans were moaning about the Cave clones. I kid you not...Me I liked both bands

4) The Cramps "You Got Good Taste" F/B "Faster Pussycat"

I love this track for the tease that permeates it top to bottom, in the music, in the lyric and in the delivery. Wonderful and burlesque.

5) The Ruts "Love In Vain" F/B "Staring At The Rude Boys"

If Staring was all Chart acsending tribal bop, Vain displayed The Ruts' other string to their guitar, of really rather noble white reggae. Added to that this is the song of singer Malcolm Owen's confession to his ultimately fatal battle with heroin and it's a criminally hidden masterpiece that always brings a tear to my eye.

6) Spizz Energi "Virginia Plane" F/B "Soldier Soldier"

Everything Spizz did was a bit throw-away, a bit jokey. But this is a wonderfully tongue-in- cheeky punk tribute to he who is the most far removed from punk, and Spizz does a fair Brian Ferry impression. Way better than the A-side.

7) The Clash "Armagideon Time" F/B "London Calling"

I like London Calling, but it's not as great as it's B-Side, even though it's a cover version of a Willie Williams song. The theme and sound of paranoia is common to both, but is so much more held under in Armagideon, that it is a far richer and denser song.

8) The Specials "Friday Night Saturday Morning" F/B "Ghost Town"

Ghost Town was obviously a seminal track for the Thatcher riot-blighted Britain of the 1980s, but The Specials never did a bad song and Hall's wistful delivery counterpoints the 'there must be more to life than this' tone of the lyrics here. This really is a hangover comedown song, but with such aplomb you know you'll go out and do it all again the following evening.

9) The Fall "Fantastic Life" F/B "Lie Dream Of A Casino Soul"

The Fall did honour the 7" format with many fine B-Sides, so it was quite tough to pick one, but I think the jaunty, sweep-along organ of this just clinches it for me. "People tend to let you down/ It's a swine". Quite.

10) Monochrome Set "Alphaville" F/B "He's Frank"

From disorder comes a really tight lead guitar riff and rhythm section. The vocal is pleasingly plaintive as well. Knocks the socks off the A-Side.