After The Jam and The Style Council (the former the biggest band in England in their heyday, the latter an oft-misunderstood genre-hopping collective who released records to declining returns in the ’80s), Weller decided to go back to roots.

Roots for Paul Weller means the ’60s. Mining the guitar licks of The Small Faces and Traffic, and marrying it to lyrics about pastoral yearning and changing seasons (influenced strongly by Nick Drake), Weller created a career resurgence that broke the rules for aging ex-rock stars.

1993’s Wild Wood album brought Weller a whole new generation of fans, and as those fans travelled backwards (as was the style in the retro-worshipping mid-90s), they too discovered The Jam. And to a lesser extent The Style Council. Wild Wood‘’s themes of rural escape (mountains, sun, hayfields, etc.) struck a big chord with a generation raised on the ‘greed is good’ philosophy of Thatcherite England, and paved the way for the coming Britpop explosion.

‘Sunflower’, the first single off of the album, starts with a descending guitar arpeggio, which is a common theme of Weller openers. The theme is lost love and the quest to recapture what was once pure but now lost, as Weller remembers days of innocence:

I’d run my fingers through your hair,
Hair like a wheat field I’d run through

Musically, it’s a hundred light years away from the antiseptic karaoke soul that Weller was peddling in the late 80s. For a man so involved with the left wing of British politics, Weller’s music latter half of that decade was awful.

The Style Council started out promisingly, but albums like The Cost of Loving and Confessions of a Pop Group were out of step with what The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, The Smiths and other decent indie groups of the time were doing. Their last album, A Decade of Modernism, was just a collection of directionless acid house tracks with minimal involvement from Weller. The album was so bad that The Style Council were dropped by their label.

So Weller picked up the guitar again and went back to his old records for inspiration – and it shows. Everything is acoustic, organic, real. There is no synthesised drum machine, no twinkling little keyboard rinky-dink, no heavily processed guitar. Just Weller and his mates rocking out.

Whether as a reaction to the self-indulgent whingery of grunge, or as a reaction to the androgynous glam-racket stompings of Suede and their ilk, Weller’s comeback worked brilliantly, and paid off in spades. Always at his best when swimming against the tide or under some external pressure (see All Mod Cons), Weller delivered the goods.

Here’s the video to ‘Sunflower’, Weller’s soft crooning replaced by a gruff pleading voice that seems like the reminiscing of a man from the bottom of a bottle. If you like this song, check out the Wild Wood album, and also the Paul Weller solo album that came before it.

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The White Stripes are one of the most consistent bands around today. Each of their albums contain at least three excellent songs, and at least that many slow burners.

Hello Operator’, ‘Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground’, ‘Fell In Love With a Girl’, ‘7 Nation Army’, ‘Hardest Button to Button’, ‘Blue Orchid’…and really, those are only the cream of the singles off of their first five albums. So I had high expectations coming into the Icky Thump album. Turns out they’ve trumped all of them.

Built over a lot of noodling, almost-out-of-control guitar set through a feedbox that would shatter glass, along with a thumping drumbeat courtesy of Meg White, the song comes straight from that late 60s/early 70s era where garage rock met the blues. Jack White is almost AC/DC-like in his pursuit of “the perfect riff”, and the riff to ‘Icky Thump’ is a stonker. Led Zeppelin themselves would have been proud.

The song is a lot more complex than their early singles, though it’s definitely a progression from the ‘Blue Orchid’ single. This time, however, the tempo changes are more noticeable, and are driven more by Jack’s guitar playing. Several times, the song slows down to draw attention to a change in the riff, while the drums underline what’s being said.

What is being said? My understanding is that the song is about the eternal US-Mexico border debate, and how a drunken, ne’er-do-well protagonist (possibly Jack White) can barrel into Mexico on a Tequila-fuelled lost weekend with relative ease, while salt of the earth, hard-working, God-fearing Mexicans can’t get a ticket in the opposite direction.

That said, the lyrics are hard to make out, and seem a bit stream-of-consciousness. But a key line here is:

White Americans, what, nothing better to do?
Why don’t you kick yourself out, you’re an immigrant too?
Who’s using who? What should we do?
Well, you can’t be a pimp and a prostitute too

As with all the best White Stripes songs, the initial focus is on the top-class guitar work and the overall sound, but the song then stands up to lyrical inquiry.

Any time the song feels like it’s about to break down under the weight of such heavy riffage, or the drums feel like they’re kiltering off, bursts of feedback and slashes of a very trebly, distorted synth come to the forefront, almost like a migraine headache. This is directly lifted from early Velvet Underground (see our post on this) and The Who, and has long been a part of The White Stripes sound, but for the first time they’ve really let rip with a single that veers between guitar-hero riffage and freakish atonality.

Here’s the video for Icky Thump, and here’s a blistering performance of the song on Jools Holland. It’s testament to this band that they can make music like this and still have it played on MTV (when they’re not showing vapid Californian reality TV shows) and on mainstream radio.

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I guess you could say that Audioslave could be termed a Supergroup on the basis that all members of the band were members of successful grunge and rock bands in previous incarnations. I don’t know about you but I was curious when I first heard of this band was forming, after all we had one of the most powerful voices in rock Chris Cornell (Soundgarden) and one of the most distiintive guitar players still giging in Tom Morello (Rage against the machine) but I wasn’t excited enough to go out and buy their first album and still haven’t.

The song is taken from their second album Out of Exile and is what you expect from this group of talented musicians and contains everything that’s good from Cornell and Morello – a strong, powerful vocal performance and some guitar wizardy from Morella. Lyrically the song is based on a low period in Cornells life and the lyrics reference doing some unusual things, anything really that takes his mind off thing. Check out the first verse

‘I walk the streets of Japan till I get lost
Cause it doesn’t remind me of anything
With a graveyard tan carrying a cross
Cause it doesn’t remind me of anything
I like studying faces in a parking lot
Cause it doesn’t remind me of anything
I like driving backwards in the fog
Cause it doesn’t remind me of anything‘

I usually take from the song an activity, energetic or otherwise, that will ease a bothered mind and relax a person. Everybody needs this every now and then. The remaining verses of the song continue in the same vain except the last where it seems to be directed at a lover that’s sung in a higher pitch than the rest of the song and just before the Morello trademark solo kicks in. I love the phrase ‘graveyard tan‘ because i think it’s a great description of an Irish person with our pasty white skin. Check out a video of the song here.

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Ah, the rock opera single. Much maligned, it has nonetheless had its enthusiastic exponents. Notable highlights of the genre include ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, ‘Good Vibrations’ and The Beatles’ ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’, a direct inspiration for this song. Radiohead updated the template for the late-90s with this tense, unsettling observation on fashion, culture and vapidity – and created a song that artistically rivalled all of the above.

While The Bends was an excellent album, with a top-rate set of guitar-based songs that dealt with isolation, paranoia and a general feeling of dread, 1997’s OK Computer was a revelation. The verse-chorus-verse structure was subverted, the lyrics tried to make metaphors of the daily commute, European integration, loud taling and German automotive engineering. Instead of talking about his own maladjustment, lead singer Thom Yorke widened the issue to include a general malaise in society, one that was directly linked to the way we lived.

For the millions of us on the comedown from Britpop’s hollow journey, this rang very true. Coming as the first single off of OK Computer, ‘Paranoid Android’ was one of the most unlikely hits of all time, while at the same time being strangely comforting in how weird and “far out” it was.

The song is split into four sections, starting with acoustic guitar and a soft guitar figure, with Yorke crying in a high-pitched voice about the “unborn chicken voices in my head”. The first of several great riffs has him dragging out the words “What’s that”. Feelings of impending dread and doom were never felt so keenly since Ian Curtis.

While the song shifts gears, with new riffs and tempos introduced and left behind, Yorke aims at familiar Radiohead themes like ruthless ambition, arrogance, egotism, business networking and so on, juxtaposing these targets with “off with his head”, “panic”, “vomit” and other disturbing feelings.

The general impact on the listener is that the protagonist is having a really bad time at some event or other, and fantasises secretly about molotov-ing (verb?) the whole place, nay the whole world. Vintage Thom Yorke, in other words.

The video is a story on itself – check the Wikipedia article for the background on this. Musically, it’s amazing, especially with headphones on in a darkened room (which I always called “the Pink Floyd experience”). Guitars duel with each other over intermittent feedback bursts, the bass goes all over the register, and the drums switch tempo as the canvas for the madness.

So, then, truly a great moment in music – and OK Computer is the first time I heard an album and considered it a classic on first listen. Here’s the video for ‘Paranoid Android’.

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Creedance Clearwater Revival a.k.a CCR were a rock and roll band in the US during the late sixties and early seventies. Lead by John Fogarty, who was the singer, songwriter and guitarist in the band while his brother Tom was also in the band. They were credited with creating the sub rock genre called swamp rock or bayou rock which I alway’s associated with the Southern States of the US which is ironic as CCR were from California. Creating music associated with a different area, culture or background can either be a blessing in disguise or a curse for musicians with the biggest issue being the credability of the band. For me, CCR unequivocally succeeded in creating the swampland/bayou sound while maintaining their integrity. Sure there will be some knockers but you can’t please everybody.

The song Fortunate Son is taken from their fourth studio album Willy and the Poor Boys and their third album of that year (how come bands of that era were so prolific eh?) the song again deals with the Vietnam War but I don’t consider this a protest song in the same vein as Dylan’s Masters of War or Edwin Starr’s War as both of these songs, and protest song’s in general, criticise war itself and the generals that run the war. This song, to me, is more about American society, but could be generalised to most western world countries, and how if you have money you can be absolved from many things including the possiblity of going to war because you were born ‘with a silver spoon in hand’  or were a ‘millionaire’s son’ . One of the sadest things in modern society is the inequality of people based on money as well as race, culture and creed.

John Fogarty is solo these days and a few months back he appeared on the Jools Holland Show and while he looked a bit weather beaten, his voice remains as strong today as it ever was. Check out a video for the song live in 1969. I’m probably opening myself up for a public flogging here but I alway’s think that CCR were the American version of that great English band The Kinks. 

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Social Distortion are long running west coast rock/punk band from the west coast of America.  I initially found out about them by reading music articles about other bands who would throw in the name Mike Ness while being interviewed. It came to the stage where I had seen the name so often that I inquired about who the guy was from friends until I was informed that he was the guitarist / lead singer for a band called Social Distortion. 

About a year ago I then got my hands an album of theirs and today’s song is taken from that fourth studio album of theirs called Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell. I haven’t yet had the chance to check out any of their other albums so I can’t qualify what type of they are but from listening to the above mentioned album I just think that they are a high tempo, old fashioned rock and roll type of band although I have seen them being described as punk (I can hear some of that on the album), hardcore punk, rockability (what does that mean?) etc, I hope to get my hands on other albums of theirs soon and find out.

I don’t think this song on the album is any better or worse than any of the other songs on the album but for some reason this song just stuck in my head more than any of the others. I think the reason for this is the lyrics in which he talks about coming to the realisation that the girl he’s seeing is no good for him. Below are the lyrics to the first verse:

‘I believe I was wrong but baby know I know.
You and your evil ways gotta go.
Take the key and break away these chains of love,
And I’ll thank the good Lord above.
The radio’s playin’ a sad song…
Bye Bye Baby yeah yeah X2′

In all honesty I just like the way Ness sings Bye Bye Baby repeatedly over some thumping guitar work. Check out a video of the song , it would be a good choice of song to get a party going…

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I confess. I’m including this song primarily because of one line in this song.

Beefheart is an unusual character, and that’s putting it very mildly. His Trout Mask Replica album (sure, you’d know from the title) is one of the strangest I’ve ever heard, and puts Tom Waits to shame for sheer guttural weirdness.

Big cymbal crash, and then the kind of music you’d hear Jabba the Hutt’s house band play on Return of the Jedi. One of the guitars plays the same dumb riff pretty much through the whole song, while the other one appears to undergo electroshock therapy. I don’t hear much of a bass. As an instrumental, it sounds like a band on either speed, or LSD, or (most likely) way too much of both.

Over that, and keeping absolutely no time whatsoever with the music, Beefheart roars, snipes, and coughs lyrics about some girl who has gone crazy from dancing. He throws out some great lines, the second best of which is

“I knew you were under duress, I knew you were under your dress”

Very cute. The rest of Trout Mask Replica is very similar to this, and is very much an acquired taste. But Tom Waits has cited this as a major influence on his classic Swordfishtrombones album – he had to, it was so obvious.

And the best line? It’s the one where he growls:

“You were afraid you’d be the Devil’s red wife”

Listen to the video on YouTube and you’ll understand. Always brings a chuckle.

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Between playing Latka on Taxi, sending up Italian stereotypes with his hideous Tony Clifton persona, wrestling women and getting slapped on the face by a famous wrestler on Letterman, Kaufman divided audiences across America. Those who got it thought of him as a genius of improvisational comedy, a Lenny Bruce for the ’70s and ’80s. Those who didn’t get it thought he was a dangerous nut.

‘I Trusted You’ is the best example of this comedy (although check out his famous ‘Mighty Mouse’ song, which is done very well by Jim Carrey in the Man On The Moon biopic). Set over an imbecilically simple guitar riff (A-Ab-G-Ab-A) and a bass line that echoes the main riff, Kaufman repeats the words over and over: “I trusted you, I trusted you/I trusted you, I trusted you” to the excited amusement of the crowd.

After about a minute of this comes the chorus, with the same “I trusted you” lines, this time shouted and screamed. It’s a tough one to describe how this comes across as funny – best just watch the video. If you don’t crack a grin, it’s time to have a little talk with yourself My favourite part is when he gets out into the crowd, shouting “I trusted you” and pointing at individual members of the audience. And what a great dance.

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The Rolling Stones were bound, at some stage, to make an appearance on thishereboogie . One could choose any number of songs to write about due to their long and successful career.  Indeed Cocksucker Blues is not by any means their best song but the reason I post about it today is because of the background to the song. The song was written specifically to fulfill the band’s contractual obligation to Decca Records and intentionally uses profanity throughout the lyrics of the song that intend to annoy studio bosses and this they successfully done as they refused to release the single.

On another note Cocksucker Blues is also the name of an unreleased  documentary that followed the band during their tour of America in 1972 which was their first tour in that country since their infamous visit there in 1962. If you want to find out more about the song or the film then check out the Wikipedia entry here. Also you can check out the song here

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Continuing the theme of favourite songs while heading to festivals as blogged about previously here comes another cracking song that will get you in the mood for a festival if you don’t already have festival fever and shame on you if you don’t. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, or B.R.M.C for short, hail from California in the US and at the time were associated with the whole garage rock craze that happened at the turn of century – Im thinking The Hives and The Strokes here.

I’ve only ever listened to two of their albums B.R.M.C  their debut album from which this song comes from and their third album Howl , which is actually my favourite album of theirs. In terms of music there seemed to be a big shift in musical style between albums. The first album contains a lot more distorted , electric guitar (which is always good for an outdoor gig) while Howl  is more folk and blues with the acoustic guitar being the central instrument with the harmonica thrown in for good measure.

Spread Your Love is laced from start to finish with distorted power chords that really light up the song. The lyrics ‘Spread your love like a fever, don’t you ever come down’  is repeatedly sung between 

‘She spread her love like a big fire 
I only saw it once 
She gave me love like a sister 
She’s bad, but not enough’

I know I’ve always enjoyed playing song when going to music festivals and also late at night at the festivals winding down from the day. Check it out.

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