Spilling Wine with Lauren Laverne

Today while driving Lauren Laverne played "Spill The Wine" by Eric Burdon and War on 6Music. This is the third song this week that has been the main song in my blog posts.

I first heard this song from 1970, when I got hold of the compilation "All Good Clean Fun" and the music is recognisable as the War of "Low Rider" fame topped with Eric Burdon's perfectly matched vocals. I recently reacquired the vinyl record, although it also appeared on the vastly expanded 3CD set which is now fairly expenses but a great snapshot or the Liberty / UA (United Artists) label imprints from the late sixties and early seventies.

Lauren has been including a lot of great sixties and seventies music recently, mixing with excellent contemporary sounds on her show. One of my slight problems with 6Music is the semi stagnation of shows,  and the number of ex muso's DJing , but the result is an incredible mix of new music to discover with reminders of stuff that you have forgotten or missed along with some great fun and audience interaction. And really that is a good thing.

I wasn't intending to write many posts this week or this month but this is the eighth so far and  I only need to average ten a month to hit 2K posts on this blog since I started it.

Anyway check out Lauren and any other 6Music show , and you may discover something new or something you had forgotten.

Rock Samplers

I've been meaning to write this, as I discovered, or got access to a lot of great music from the loss leader rock samplers in the late sixties and early seventies. I have been looking on Discogs and a lot of them can be picked up at very reasonable prices.

While I am semi tempted by some of them , the reality is that I have all the music digitally and the reason that these albums were put out was to tempt you to actually buy the albums. THe prices were as little as 50p with some of the double albums maybe hitting £1.99.

Sometimes these albums contained previously unreleased songs such as "New Age of Atlantic" which contained "Hey,Hey, What Can I Do" a stunning Led Zeppelin non-album song (although it did appear on later compilations, and a take of Simon and Garfunkel's "America" by Yes, ten minutes of it.

I'm going to put up ten covers of some compilations that I either have or have had, I still have a copy of the Island compilation "Nice Enough To Eat" which I loved so much I put together my own CD compilation so I could listen to it digitally as well, but the vinyl copy is downstairs and that will always be part of my collection.


Another favourite was the United Artists double compilation "All Good Clean Fun" which also had a booklet with it, but I have forgotten what was in it so need to track that down at some pome point.

The were many double sets such as Island's "El Pea" and "Bumpers", Vertigo's "Suck It And See". Harvest's "Picnic:A Breath of Fresh Air" (containing the , at the time, Pink Floyd rarity "Embryo")

Many of these are now available digitally and there and now often free digital downloads available to tempt you to buy more, but these all hold a lot of fond memories for me. The images link to Amazon but you can probably track them down on Discogs.

These are just a very small sample and you will probably have your own favourites but delving into these can bring some wonderful music into your life.