Raise All Kinds Of Candy To The Stars

Posts

A Plug For This Leaking Boat: “Don’t Dream It’s Over” by Crowded House

The sense of a parallel and slightly hazier world prevails throughout the more intelligent Antipodean rock of 1986; think of the Go-Betweens’ “Twin Layers Of Lightning” or the Triffids’ “Tarrilup Bridge,” each bearing a heat so hazy it could make pizzeria store fronts seem like tablets from heaven. The haze of “Don’t Dream It’s Over” may have a lot to do with Mitchell Froom’s keyboards, but there is a subtle commitment in Neil Finn’s writing and performance which doesn’t have to underline the fact that this is an anti-capitalist protest song. It doesn’t make a fuss but quietly stands in the corner, incrementally making a difference. Date Record Made Number Two: 25 April 1987 Number Of Weeks At Number Two: 1 Record At Number One: “I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me)” by Aretha Franklin and George Michael UK Chart Position: 25

Threads Of Alligator Lizards In The Air: “Purple Rain” by Prince and The Revolution

The original idea was for a country-style collaboration with Stevie Nicks, to whom Prince sent a ten-minute instrumental backing track, asking her to come up with some lyrics. However, Nicks was overwhelmed by what she heard and feared that the task was too much for her to take on, so the song was reworked in rehearsal with The Revolution, utilising Wendy Melvoin’s guitar phrasing as a new guideline. The song appears to have existed before the film; Purple Rain the movie is best described as lucid hokum, but its soundtrack changed the atoms which constituted “pop,” far more so than much ostensibly radical music of the period. For many of that decade’s generation, Purple Rain the soundtrack was “our” Ziggy Stardust – better conceived, performed and produced in every way – and the title song, which closes the album, was “our” “Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide.” It is such a patient epic, the song, and about a lot of things, and people – each of the verses addresses a different su

A Disaffection, Or Fight Against Same: “Baker Street” by Gerry Rafferty

Even as a young teenager growing up in Lanarkshire, I was always listening out for music that sounded out of kilter, whether it was George Crumb’s Makrokosmos III (the closing section of which I heard on a Saturday afternoon on Radio 3) or anything which “irrupted” the top forty. From the first time that I heard “Baker Street” on the radio – I think it was Dougie Donnelly on Radio Clyde – I was immediately hooked, mentally noting that this song seemed to go as much against the grain of a standard pop record as anything coming out of punk or New Wave, and was probably just as angry, if not angrier. For forty years I harboured the notion – and this was from a time when visiting London, never mind living and working in it, was still a distant pipedream – that the song encapsulated the situation of the displaced Scotsman, marooned in a world he doesn’t really like or perhaps even understand. Make no mistake, this is undeniably a Scottish record, and seemingly all about someone

Slo-Mo Speed Dating: “Float On” by The Floaters

“Aquarius…And my name is Ralph…Now I like a woman who loves her freedom…And I like a woman who can hold her own…” It sounds like Studio 54’s in-house video dating agency. It teeters dangerously on the tightrope of tackiness, but its modes persist into contemporary R&B, even though its dual camp and experimental factors enable it to fly far beyond those particular boundaries. “Libra…And my name is Charles…Now I like a woman that’s quite…A woman who carries herself like…Miss Universe…” The Floaters were lucky to get their one moment. A Detroit soul group formed by James Mitchell, formerly of The Emeralds of “Feel The Need In Me” (again, in Britain they had to be called the “Detroit Emeralds”) and featuring his brother Paul as well as Larry Cunningham, Charles Clark and Ralph Mitchell (no relation), their full-length album version of “Float On” lasts for over eleven minutes, and “Papa Was A Rollin’ Stone” it is not – although what it could be is a belated sequel to

The Tales Of November Come Late: “The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald” by Gordon Lightfoot

In many ways, this is a strange and rather old-fashioned song for the mid-seventies, even though the events which it describes were then only a year old. The SS Edmund Fitzgerald was for over seventeen years a Great Lakes freighter, transporting pellets of iron ore from mines near Duluth, Minnesota, to iron works in Detroit, Toledo and other Great Lake ports. On the afternoon of 9 November 1975, under the command of its Canadian captain Ernest M McSorley, the ship set sail from Lake Superior, bound for Detroit. But an early storm broke the following day; the ship filled up with water and then capsized – or possibly split – and sank, and although the wreck of the ship was found a few months later, none of the bodies of its twenty-nine-strong crew has ever been found. It sank in Canadian waters. Lightfoot read an article about the disaster in Newsweek , which helped unlock his long-standing writer’s block and inspire the song. He tells the story as simply as possible, though acco

Classical Desolation: “All By Myself” by Eric Carmen

It’s odd how power pop, for all its alleged purity and perfection, never really became popular. Myself, I think it’s the charts’ loss, but the fact remains that when most people think of Alex Chilton they think of “The Letter” rather than Sister Lovers , to which “All By Myself” makes an unlikely companion. The song also reminds us of the age-old tradition of writing pop songs based on classical pieces; Barry Manilow had recently had a top ten hit with his Chopin adaptation “Could It Be Magic” and now it was the turn of Rachmaninoff. Again it is instructive to listen to the full seven-minute-plus album version of “All By Myself” since the long piano interlude in the song’s middle was actually the first thing that came to Eric Carmen’s mind. Working backwards, he then figured that the second movement of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor – “ Adagio sostenuto ,” no less – would form a good basis for the song’s verses, while the chorus was informed by, but did not