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⫘⫘A Shadow of Herself⫘⫘
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Two Things only! April 18th, 2024
These are my thoughts after watching Ripley, and as we’re heading back to La Isla Mínima I thought I’d put an Instagram post from our trip last year on Five Things…
{ONE} Steven Zaillian and Robert Elswit’s RIPLEY (Netflix)
If you want to watch this series about an amoral chancer, you will pay for the pleasure. You will be put through the mill. You won’t cast off the deaths like in a two-hour…
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#Isla Mayor#Netflix Ripley#Patricia Highsmith#Robert Elswit#Steven Zaillian#The Talented Mr Ripley#Tom Ripley
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A song about Soho, bakeries and fathers
Why today? So, on my dad’s birthday (he would have been one hundred and two today), a song about our Sunday trips to buy bread in Soho. I was brought up on Charing Cross Road, on the edge of Soho, where everything we needed was: food shops, liquor stores, barbers, music venues (for my dad), the wonderful magazine shop where I bought comics, and various school friends. There was a bakery, hidden…
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At the Edge of Town / A Song for Richard Manuel
Every April, I think about Richard Manuel, born on April 3, 1943, in Stratford, Ontario. I still remember where I was in March 1986, when I heard that he had taken his own life — the magazine art department of The Observer newspaper. I remember feeling unmoored for days, which seems too much of a reaction for someone I hadn’t met or known personally, but The Band had been such an important…
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Saturday, March 9th, 2024: “I’m Your Puppet”
I was reminded of James & Bobby Purify’s wonderful track by a nice interview with Dan Penn in The Guardian this week by my friend Garth Cartwright. “I’m Your Puppet” was the only song cut at Muscle Shoals by James and Bobby (their record label sent them to Moman’s American Studio in Memphis for their follow-up), but I’ve always had a soft spot for the song, mainly for its rolling melody line,…
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To the memory of Alexei Navalny
“Joe Hill ain’t dead,” he says to me,“Joe Hill ain’t never died…Where working men are out on strikeJoe Hill is at their side,Joe Hill is at their side.”
Listening to Alexei Sayle’s Desert Island Discs a while back, it was interesting to me that he chose “Joe Hill” as one of his eight discs, recalling that it was performed at his mother’s funeral. I first heard “Joe Hill” on the Woodstock…
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Wednesday, 20th December
Season’s Greetings & a Christmas Song | All the best to all Five Things readers — I’m going to get back into posting more regularly in 2024, promise. In the meantime, a few days out from the 25th, here’s this year’s Christmas song. It’s that old chestnut, “Winter Wonderland”, which was written in 1934 by Felix Bernard and lyricist Richard Bernhard Smith. Smith, a native of Honesdale,…
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Thursday, August 22rd | Six Robbie Robertson Songs & Performances for the ages
{ONE} RONNIE HAWKINS, THE LAST WALTZ | “COME ON ROBBIE, LET’S TAKE A LITTLE WALK…”Robbie still has to count Ronnie in … but the sound of his newly-bronzed Stratocaster summons up the rowdy rockabilly that Ronnie Hawkins traded in. “I didn’t know whether it would be a bad idea, but I decided to have the Stratocaster bronzed. It was a bit tricky, you know, finding somebody to do that. One of the…
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#Across The Great Divide#Barney Hoskyns#Bob Dylan#John Simon Ritchie#King Harvest (Has Surely Come)#Lang Lang#Laurence Gonzales#Martin Scorsese#Men’s Journal#New Orleans#Robbie Robertson#Ronnie Hawkins#Storyville#The Band#The Last Waltz#Van Morrison#Woodstock
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Five Things, Saturday, August 5th
Some thoughts on A.I., Sinead O’Connor, Marvin Gaye, Vini Reilly, Serge Gainsbourg and The Parsons/White B-Bender.
THE INTRONow we’re all getting fully signed up to the future — it’s Philip K. Dick’s world after all, we just live in it — this week, Five Things touches on A.I., a spooked and possessed Marvin Gaye song, a world of music newly discovered, a video that is so French it should be required viewing at Customs and an extraordinary guitar modification. The saddest news was the passing of Sinead…
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#Aaron Rapoport#B-Bender#Bob Dylan#Bruce Mitchell#Clarence White#Gene Parsons#Marvin Gaye#Nathaniel Murphy#Piece of Clay#Serge Gainsbourg#Sinead O&039;Connor#The Durutti Column#The Fence Magazine#Vini Reilly
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Monday, June 26th
Trying to use words, and every attemptIs a wholly new start, and a different kind of failureBecause one has only learnt to get the better of wordsFor the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in whichOne is no longer disposed to say it. And so each ventureIs a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulateWith shabby equipment always deteriorating— T. S. Eliot, East Coker
{ONE} BILLIE’S HOUSE:…
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#Billie Holiday#Bob Dylan#Born in Chicago#Braids#Caitlin Rose#Elvis Presley#John Legend#Michael Gray#Mick Gold#Rufus Wainwright
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“I Think I’m Going Back…”Five pieces of music that moved me in 2022
“I Think I’m Going Back…”Five pieces of music that moved me in 2022
Son Little / Like NeptuneIt’s as if Shuggie Otis walked into a recording studio in the middle of a nodded-out Sly Stone session and found Bruce Langhorne in the corner making his sound tapestries for Dennis Hopper’s The Hired Hand. It sounds like the 60s, now, as modern as tomorrow, as old as yesterday. I bought ten copies to give to friends I thought might like it. It’s that good.
Aimee Mann…
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#Aimee Mann#Allison Russell#Bob Dylan#Bryan Ferry#Harry Styles#Like Neptune#Outside Child#Queens of the Summer Hotel#Sarah Jones#Son Little#Where or When
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Christmas Song/2022
It’s that time of year…
This year’s offering is a version of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”, written by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane in 1943 for the film, Meet Me in St. Louis.
It first appeared in a scene in which a family is troubled by plans to move to New York City, leaving behind their beloved home in St. Louis. In a scene on Christmas Eve, Judy Garland’s character, Esther, sings the song to cheer up her…
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Vagabond Shoes: New York Snapshots, August 3rd
Five Things Returns with a trip to NYC…
There was music in the air during the five days we spent in New York at the beginning of July. But first, a visit to Manchester in 1964, courtesy of our friend Rick. He and Liney had taken us to a favourite dive bar (the 169 Bar) on the Lower East Side. It has a leopard-print pool table — that may be all you need to know. We had a great conversation with the bartender, Dakota, about Ross…
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#Dion#Evan Sherman#International Center of Photography#Lou Reed: Caught Between the Twisted Stars#New York Public Library#PJ Clarke’s#Ricky Riccardi#Ross Macdonald#Sonny Boy Williamson#Spencer Davis Group#The 169 Bar#The Louis Armstrong House#William Klein
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A theme song for Poisonville
A theme song for Poisonville
On this day in 1929, Alfred A Knopf published Dashiell Hammett’s “Red Harvest”, which had been serialised in the pulp magazine Black Mask in the previous year. It became the template for the hard-boiled detective novel. Its hero is the nameless Continental Op (he’s an operative of The Continental Detective Agency) who is called to Personville by the local Press Baron. Personville is known as…
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A Christmas Song for 2021
A Christmas Song for 2021
Rather late, a seasonal song. I record one most years, usually a version of a traditional Christmas song such as “In the Black Midwinter” or “Love Came Down at Christmas”. This year I decided to revisit my Pandemic Dirge™ from last summer, retooled as a Pandemic Christmas Dirge. Enjoy!
If you enjoy (!) this one, previous years’ songs can be found at…
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Welcome back, friends…
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#Aaron Connor#Eagles#Elisa Susini#Greg Wise#Martin Colyer#Northeast Corridor#Spotify#Steely Dan#Steuart Smith#Strictly Come Dancing#Succession
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Welcome back, friends…
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#Aaron Connor#Eagles#Elisa Susini#Greg Wise#Martin Colyer#Northeast Corridor#Spotify#Steely Dan#Steuart Smith#Strictly Come Dancing#Succession
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“If you just smile…”
“If you just smile…”
https://vimeo.com/652819186
For fun, a slow-burn version of “Smile”, written by Charlie Chaplin, and based on the instrumental theme that he’d composed for his 1936 film, Modern Times. Inspired by Bob Dylan’s use of strings and pedal steel on his Sinatra album, Shadows in the Night, I’ve incorporated those elements, along with the usual curdled guitars.
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