Category Archives: Music

Brimful of Ashes

Ash

Today is Ash Wednesday, a day of fast for many Christians and a reminder that Easter will be upon us in six weeks. It’s been decades since I took part in the rituals associated with the day, but for the last few years I’ve been using it to remember the musical trio from Downpatrick in the county of Down in Northern Ireland. Ash formed there 21 years ago and have released half a dozen albums since. They haven’t released any original albums since 2007, though, as the band has decided to focus exclusively on singles instead of the lengthier format. So, today I’m going to look at a couple of songs that appeared on singles by the band and also a couple of singles from a time when singles ruled. Punk Boy is a song by a Welsh band that formed in the same year as Ash and are named after their lead singer. Ash’s version of the Helen Love song appeared on the filp side of their 1995 single, Petrol. Who You Drivin’ Now? was originally released in 1991 on Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge, the second album from Seattle grunge band, Mudhoney. Ash’s version is taken from a 1999 EP that also saw the band performing songs by Ween and Nirvana

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Reg Presley Blues

The Troggs

The English singer and songwriter Reg Presley (above, far right) passed away last night at the age of 71. He was born Reginald Hall in the county of Hampshire in 1941 and became a bricklayer upon leaving school. In 1964, he formed a band called The Troglodytes, lopped a couple of syllables off his first name and took on the alias of a contemporary American rock & roller for his surname. The band’s title also became monosyllabic, just as the music they would make remains amongst the most primitive ever committed to vinyl. The Kinks’ manager, Larry Page, signed The Troggs in 1965 and the group released Lost Girl as their first (unsuccessful) single the following year

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Know Your Onions!

French-Onion-Soup

Apparently, today is International French Onion Soup Day. I’m a big an of French culture, onions and soup, but I’ve never drank evan a spoonful of french onion soup. It doesn’t look like it would be too difficult to make, so I guess it’s something to add to my list of things to do in 2013. A while back, I noticed I’ve got over three dozen songs named after this useful vegetable, but only one about onion soup. The late Vic Chesnutt‘s Onion Soup may or may not be French, but he does refer to it as “exquisite” in the song from his 1995 album, Is the Actor Happy? Pixies founder, Black Francis, has been pursuing a solo career as Frank Black for some time now. His Dog in the Sand album from 2001 includes a song called Richard Onion, which is about an American aerospace engineer named Robert Zubrin

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The Old Man’s Back Again

Scott

One of my favourites singers turns 70 today. Scott Walker was born in the United States, but moved to England in 1965 and became a British citizen five years later. He’s lived there ever since and has continued to release a series of increasingly more experimental-sounding albums that bear little relation to his earlier, more commercial work. He was born Scott Engel in Ohio and changed his last name to Walker when he became one of the co-founders of The Walker Brothers. They were brothers in pseudonym only and their decision to base themselves in England led to a number of successes in the UK. Make It Easy On Yourself and The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore both reached the top of the charts in the UK and were the band’s only single to make it into the Top 20 in the US

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Chain Reaction

Rosanna & Chris

A headline in yesterday’s Evening Herald newspaper about a tree surgeon cutting his leg with a chainsaw at Chris de Burgh‘s home got me thinking about the Irish singer and his daughter, Rosanna, which then brought the band Toto to my mind. There are many acts from the eighties that I chance upon now and then and I don’t mind admitting that these encounters make me want to check out their music again. Chris de Burgh is not one of those acts. I’m actually embarrassed to reveal that I once owned a number of the Irishman’s albums on cassette. In my defence, your honour, I was young and foolish and only beginning the long process of learning about music. De Burgh was on the radio a lot at the time and I picked up some of those tapes in a secondhand shop. It’s true, nobody forced me to buy them or subsequently listen to them. And I must have listened to them a few times because lines from songs I haven’t heard in decades have been popping into my head over the last few hours. I don’t have any of those tapes anymore. I don’t even remember when or where I got rid of them. Fortunately, I don’t have any of his stuff on CD, vinyl or mp3, either, and I’m relieved to announce that I had absolutely no desire to check him out on YouTube

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Got To Have Rock & Roll

Here are my 12 favourite albums of 2012 (so far). You can check out some older covers from nine of those acts below. Click on the images above to make them larger and click on an artist’s name below to go to their website. The final dozen (in no particular order):

Cat Power – Sun
Rumer – Boys Don’t Cry
Diana Krall – Glad Rag Doll
Aimee Mann – Charmer
Alabama Shakes – Girls & Boys
Heartless Bastards – Arrow
Dexys – One Day I’m Going to Soar
The Lumineers – The Lumineers
Bob Dylan – Tempest
Richard Hawley – Standing at the Sky’s Edge
Bill Fay – Life is People
The Avett Brothers – The Carpenter

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Frankly, Mr. Turner

Frank Turner Galway 2012

Last Wednesday night, I went to bed earlier than usual as I had a big day ahead of me on Thursday. I had to be up before 9.00am the next morning to try to buy tickets for the Cork leg of Bruce Springsteen’s visit to Ireland next year. Across the city, my friend John was going to try to get tickets for Limerick and later that day the two of us were travelling to Cork to see Wessex boy Frank Turner play Cyprus Avenue on the opening night of a short trip around Ireland. We’d already seen Frank play a storming set at Wembley Arena in March this year and we caught The Boss in top form in Dublin in July. Unfortunately I awoke at four in the morning with a terrible pain in my stomach and made a few journeys to the bathroom to talk to God on the great white telephone before somehow managing to secure tickets for Springsteen in Cork. John got the tickets for Limerick as well and then I told him about my eventful night. We agreed that I’d go back to bed and would only make the journey south if I made a recovery. I didn’t

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Tattoo You

I went to my local record store on two occasions last week to enquire about Cat Power’s latest album and whether a sampler CD of this year’s Mercury Music Prize contenders had been released. The store’s range of CDs only made up a tiny percentage of its floor space and was easily dwarfed by the massive amount of DVDs that make up most of the product sold in the shop. The CDs were arranged vertically in alphabetical order rather than the usual horizontal fashion that used to be the norm when record stores actually sold music. I couldn’t find Cat Power under either “C” or “P”, so I asked one of the well-groomed floor staff if she could help me. She hadn’t a clue who I was talking about, but returned from her computer to inform me that there should be a few copies of it in stock. She pointed out that new artists are often hard to find and she eventually located it somewhere between The Carpenters and Cat Stevens. Despite the sales assistant’s lack of musical knowledge, I still picked up Chan Marshall’s ninth studio album as Cat Power. My other enquiry to a different staff member about the Mercury Music Prize CD led to me giving her a brief history of the musical equivalent of literature’s Booker Prize. This staff member came back from her computer to tell me that it was two years since they had one of those albums in stock

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