Le Son

I'd lost my Bluetooth Emospeak headphones and yesterday I found them, so thanks to the milder weather I don't have to wear multiple coats and hats so the headphones are now an option once again. I wasn't sure what to listen to but I have a Disco playlist featuring Donna Summer , Lipps Inc , Marcel King , Janelle Monae and The Emotions although I have a hell of a lot of choice to listen to on my Google Pixel 2XL phone and it's still half empty so when I can be bothered I can add more from my collection.

This week one the original album series boxes that I picked out for listening was the first five albums by Little Feet , and though the albums are all under forty minutes and they are so good that they just seemed to disappear immediately . Steered by Lowell George they were on a similar level to The Band in terms of shaping the sounds of Americana.

I am quite shocked I have never mentioned Little feat before on this blog, but at leas this short post will rectify this and will share two live numbers from an Old Grey Whistle Test performance in 1975 , "Rock and Roll Doctor" and "Fat Man In The Bathtub" (maybe should be my theme tune).

#AprilSongs #29 Blue Monday

This is the second "Blue Monday" I've included in the #AprilSongs sequence the other was Buddy Holly's cover of the Fats Domino Song (written by Dave Bartholomew) , I wasn't going to include the New Order song because for many people you say "Blue Monday" and it is synonymous with the Manchester band, but the rhythm was set by the drum machine malfunctioning and that reminded me of other instances of musical instrument malfunction.

Arthur Brown's Kingdom Come were one of the first bands to use a drum machine in a live environment but at one gig their Bentley Rhythm Ace went on a twenty minute uncontrolled drum solo, usually the realm of bloat rock drummers.

When Giorgio Moroder was putting together Donna Summer's "I Feel Love" something happened with the synthesiser / sequencer and resulting in a faint echo doubling of the notes giving it it's unique sound and probably helping become the iconic dance hit that it was and is.

So this is the penultimate #AprilSongs post focussing on mistakes that have resulted in some great music, enjoy your Monday.

Grey

The sky is a uniform grey (or is it gray), surfaces outside still are covered in rain / dew, the lawn is finally looking very well but is obviously too we to be mowable and I am drinking decaffeinated coffee as I write this. I've taken the Grammarly spelling  / context checker off because it became too intrusive and was slowing down my typing everwhere. Maybe I should prepare my blog posts in Word to ensure  that it's reasonably grammatically correct and the spelling is correct.

It's my sister Yvonne's birthday tomorrow, which I knew was coming up, but last night my dad said he was worried because he couldn't remember how old she was going to be. I told him she probably wasn't bothered and she would just love a card.

It is amazing how you can miss words out but it still makes sense to you , but to someone else it may look as though you don't know what you are talking about.

I'm not sure if it's raining outside, so I'm not sure if I will be walking into work today.

This weather seems to create an oppressive quiet, though I will disperse that by leaving on my Donna Summer and Malcolm McLaren mix on my player. That's another thing, it now takes a minute to put together a Spotify / Deezer whatever playlist but in the seventies a live DJ had to do that in real time, then we got cassettes (I know there was reel to reel but they were hardly portable) and you could create your mixtape but a sixty minute tape took more than anhour to put together, and if you made a mistake it took even longer.

I'll leave you with Donna Summer's take on Jon & Vangelis' "State of Independence".

Have a great Tuesday

Walking Soundtrack

When I finally started the music as I walked over Nunsmoor, I'd forgotten what I'd set up to play. It was four of my favourite Donna Summer songs and Malcolm McLaren's "Fans" which is a wonderful album.

The four Donna Summer Songs are:

I Feel Love (Original)

I Feel Love (Patrick Cowley Remix)

Unconditional Love

State of Independence

People complain because I don't really rate "Hot Stuff" but life would be so tedious if we all liked the same thing, wouldn't it?

"Fans" is jam packed full of gems and I'm going to share Boys Chorus (La Sui Monti Dell'est) with you, some heavenly backing with Malcolm's cockney wide boy / Artful Dodger chorus of :

"All Work

No Joy

Makes Mac

A Dull Boy" 

Which is true for all of us, well it is definitely true for me. All of this music should be in your collection and given the capacity of our devices we cany carry huge collections with us.

So I will be listening to this for a while but feel free to enjoy.

Stay Free

I thought Iknew Newcastle, well the record shops in Newcastle. Today I was in Kazbat's Den talking Donna Summer, Giorhio Moroder, Human League , Black Sabbath and the las who was in tere said his favourite record shop in Newcastle was Stay Free. I'd just been to Beyond Vinyla and this week I discovered 586.

"Where's Stay Free"?" Quoth I
"Opposite Haymarket Metro, down the alley next to Boots, in The Antique Centre" Quoth He (Roughly)

So I wandered off across down before it got swamped with Blaydon Racers and Ed Sheeran fans. (I love Ed Sheeran as a person but find his music leaves me unmoved)

Anyway I tracked down Stay Free and wandered upstairs , also seeing signs for Meli Cafe which I visited briefly, and was well impressed with the warm welcome, interesting Greek Menu and incredible vies of Northumberland Street. I will be revisiting soon.

Then I wandered into the Antiques Centre and straight into Stay Free which has a great selection of Vinyl , so great wall displays and is most reasonably priced. A record shop is good if you walk in and can immediately find somthing to buy, I managed to get two items . A 12" single of "Boops" by Sly and Robbie and "Should I Stay or Should I Go" by The Clash backed by "Rush" by Big Audio Dynamite II.

Tony the owner is great to talk to, and knows his stuff and is very helpful and the couple of customers who dropped in liked it too. This is another gem of a record shop I have found so below is my up to date list of record shops in Newcastle:

• RPM
• Reflex
• Beatdown
• Long Play Cafe / Empire Records
• Beyond Vinyl
• Vinyl Guru
• 586
• Stay Free

plus spectial mention to Oxfam at Jesmond ( I used to work there briefly and the manager Katie knows her stuff , Pop Recs in Sunderlan and there are record shops in Durham, Hexham and Gosforth,  and if you are pushed HMV is not bad for a high street shop.

Please comment with any I've missed.

So really there's only one song isn't there?

I Feel Love

There is a flying ant on the outside of my window pane, and the sky is a uniform grey. It is a Friday morning and 6Music is celebrating women in music with "Hear Her Day" with female-dominated playlists and female  DJs. However due to one thing and another I had to leave this unfinished, but I can now write about what I wanted to write about.

I keep thinking that my vinyl collection is close to complete and then there's always just one more thing, these one more things have included Cat Stevens' "Numbers" for the overal package and book as well as being a decent album, "True Colours" by Split Enz which I didn't know was actually laser etched, I have the single "History Never Repeats" that looks amazing when it's playing and I am looking forward to seeing the album, you don't get that with a CD or MP3 do you?

The third was going to be the Patrick Cowley Megamix of Donna Summer's "I Feel Love" all 15 minutes of it on 45rpm vinyl but even I shy away from paying twenty notes for a single. The thing is you can download Donna Summer's Greatest Hits (26 songs) for four pounds so that's what I did, and then ordered a double promo remix vinyl set for fifteen pounds so hopefully, that will satisfy me.

When "I Feel Love" came out in the mid-seventies for the rock and rock and roll cognoscenti, Disco was a dirty word, but me and friends were into German psychedelia and Giorgi Moroder's metallic rhythms on this single made a lot of people listen, who would have normally dissed Disco.

It turns out that the sound was stumbled on accidentally with the note on the synthesiser being played twice with the slightest delay resulting in an amazing sound. This was perfectly complemented by Donna Summer's voice and is perfect for remixing as it's both skeletal but more than powerful enough to stand on it's own. It's similar to the guitar delay favoured buy Pink Floyd and U2, and also the accident in the drum machine pattern that resulted in New Order's "Blue Monday".

So I managed to find the Patrick Cowley Mix on Youtube so I will leave that with you to enjoy.

Enjoy your Friday.

Disco Apocalypse

In less than a week we have lost two giants of seventies disco. First Donna Summer , and now Robin Gibb.

As part of the Bee Gees , Robin Gibb took the world by storm soundtracking the film "Saturday Night Fever" with the aid of a few other artists. But it was the Bee Gees who had the lions share of the song credits on the album with "Stayin' Alive" , "Night Fever" and "Jive Talkin'" among others. Their self reinvention was amazing , give that they were a white pop band who then took the disco dancefloor by storm. I have lots of favourite Bee Gees songs notably the afformentioned "Jive Talkin'" , as well as "Tragedy" and "Alone".

Apparently five Donna Summer singles have reentered the top 200 singles , and its a symptom of digital music that this can happen immediately. Watch out for massive sales of Saturday Night Fever and the Bee Gees Number Ones collections and it's re appearance at the cinema.

However the song that inspired this blog post is by Jackson Brown , see below:

Disco Diva Donna Summer Dies

Almost a newspaper headline. First heard of Donna Summer when her record "Love To Love You Baby" was banned by the BBC . I was into metal and electronics like Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk , so was totally knocked out when I heard "I Feel Love" . It was disco , but it was electronic , driven by Giorgio Moroder's almost Motorik , relentless synthesiser.

Almost everyone loved this record , my dad loved it , my mum loved it  , the most metal of metalheads loved it . Great music , a gorgeous body , Donna Summer went on to make loads of great  records although apart from "Loves Unkind", "I Feel Love" and "State of Independence" I wasnt to enamoured by the rest of her output. I believe the original version of "I Feel Love" stretched out to 17 minutes. How good is that.

Moroder continued ploughing his electronic furrow , notably with "From Here To Eternity" , "Together in Electric Dreams" and "Never Ending Story" . A sad day but we will be hearing "I Feel Love" a lot on the radio.........

Georgio was Italian and Marilyn Likes Greggs Pasties

Just picked up this months Mojo and was surprised to learn two new facts.

Firstly Marilyn Manson is a fan of Gregg's Pasties !! The purported quote is "What's that place in England , Greggs. They make the best pasties" . Don't know if they get pastie in America , can you imagine Greggs getting Marilyn to advertise . Though the natural projection is Homer Simpson - "Mmmmm Pasties".

The second is that Giorgio Moroder is Italian!! Always assumed he was German with a surname like that, and the fact that he worked out of Munich and was far more influential than the oft namechecked Kraftwerk in the spread of electronic pop music. How influential was Donna Summer's "I Feel Love":



on his own "From Here To Eternity":



And he even did Kiss!!



I rest my case....