Extra Classic - Your Light Like White Lightning, Your Light Like a Laser Beam

Not A Classic, Yet

San Francisco based dub duo marry reggae rhythms to psyche pop vocals to produce this entertaining album. Being honest, I would have liked more psychedelic input into the Jamaican core - as the album cover and pic below suggest - but that's just because my musical preference dictates aural desire, as ever. I think a lack of any absolutely stand-out tracks will prevent this from ever gaining widespread appeal, but it is distinct enough as a a whole to be worthy of note. Perhaps a promise of more to come when songcraft can push above the successful idea.

Surprise Songs

Lonely Woman - Ornette Coleman, The Shape of Jazz to Come

I'm not surprised that this opening track on Coleman's iconic album is superb: I'm surprised because I have heard for the first time the melodic line that forms the saxophone solo in the Manfred Mann Chapter III track Konekuf. I had never made the connection, loving the MM cut and not really knowing Lonely Woman. So is it a simple rip-off? Homage? I couldn't find any references and/or explanations online, but I did get another surprise, which may or may not be accurate, when I read that Konekuf spelt backwards was Mann's caustic comment on racial attitudes and policies at the time - and for those of you who don't get it because of your age, it alludes to the Conservative MP and racist Enoch Powell and, presumably, his infamous rivers of blood tirade.

Incredible how I will now listen to a song I have known and loved for over 40 years with an entirely new set of markers. More shock than surprise really.

Raymond Carver

Late Fragment

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

Ghost Voice

It is that time and I hear you call but it is a

ghost haunting ahead of its moment, a voice

that urges and implores before the need is even

more. Each night I will pause and listen and

hear: sometimes it is the shout that pierces,

or it is just shadow, the dark echo from before

rounded out to an almost sound as if real.

And I respond. I rise and wait and listen and

hear the eventual silence like some blessing;

and blessed, I take my place back in the

queue to await the sound of your actual call,

whenever there is the impulse of your need.

And as the time comes for your sharp appeal

it is a call I am so well rehearsed to heed.

Rusty Anderson - Until We Meet Again

Living The Life With Sir

I wrote recently and enthusiastically about watching Paul McCartney playing on the BBC Electric Proms, Camden, and being impressed with him and his tight band. Lead guitarist and excellent supporting vocalist in that band is Rusty Anderson, and this compilation of his two solo albums is a fine reflection of the talent McCartney so clearly noted and wanted with him.

Opener Help Myself is a sound enough song with Sir Paul playing a different kind of supporting bass. It's the second track Born on Earth that really showcases Anderson's songwriting talents and excellent array of guitar riffs. The song has its many influences - the Beatles being one of the least surprising - and I hear a little bit of Squeeze as well as Electric Light Orchestra. There are string arrangements which reflect the influence of the Beatles/George Martin, and these occur throughout this song and the whole album, but I do like the varying guitar layers, and it is overall quite a complex song that ends strongly with its orchestral peak. Anderson provides a gritty vocal on this track too.

Third track Baggage Claim is a clever enough pop ditty, enhanced by another pert guitar solo. Fourth Where Would We Go is a strong song, an acoustic number with that Beatlesesque jauntiness which enhances rather than detracts. It has enough shifts and sweet electric guitar above the acoustic to flesh it out to a hummable tune. Fifth Julia Roberts is a song seeped in sixties pop psyche lyrics and tune, an imagined meeting with the fantasy of his fancy. It's perhaps a little too pretty for me, but I'm feeling quite inclined to liking the whole of this guy's journeyman offering when so much from more popular and feted bands - take Coldplay's latest for example - nauseates by comparison. This is followed by an even more psyche pop track in Electric Trains where the sunshine harmonies and fuzzed guitar echo those late 60s songs where something a little more incongruous than a train is prefaced by the adjective electric! Seventh These Are The Days has a little of the John Mellancamp about its opening and main riff, but as the more ostensibly ballsy of all songs with its referencing of cocaine and shit to go down, it is surprisingly the least successful. Rock credibility is resurrected in subsequent number Devil's Spaceship with slight vocal distortion and heavier, near-metal guitar. Ninth Catbox Beach is an instrumental homage to bands like The Ventures and The Shadows, and foregrounds Anderson's fine guitar playing again, including an odd reggae insert.

Eleventh and penultimate Damaged Goods is an echoing, harmonising ballad. The album closes on the upbeat Until We Meet Again, but it is a song that could have been sacrificed to end more strongly on an earlier choice. But as I said, this is an album to be judged as a whole and I have been entertained by a guy with genuine talent who really must be living the life by helping McCartney, and others in that fine band, to represent so much astonishing music.

Kris Kristofferson and Rita Coolidge - Help Me Make It Through The Night

They Didn't Need Any Help

I have just finished watching the Duets on BBC programme and it showed - had to show - the sublime Old Grey Whistle Test performance of these two singing Kristofferson's great song.

It is an intimate and sensuous duet. The singing is superb; the chemistry simmering. If you haven't seen, do check it out.

The programme also showed Cher singing with Gregg Allman, a performance I hadn't seen before, though I do have the album Allman and Woman they recorded together when married. Not as hot, but good stuff too.

Pablo Neruda

Tonight I Can Write The Saddest Lines

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example,'The night is shattered
and the blue stars shiver in the distance.'

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me sometimes, and I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is shattered and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight searches for her as though to go to her.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another's. She will be another's. Like my kisses before.
Her voice. Her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her. 

Now and then I think I will post some of my favourite poems, and I'm going to start with those that were important to me as I was growing up, both as a person and a writer. I bought Neruda's wonderful collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair on the 10th April, 1973

Top Fifty - Blood, Sweat & Tears

Blood, Sweat and Tears – Same

As the horns announce the distortion of their other entry into the mix, you know that after the opening flute tranquillity of Variations on a Theme by Eric Satie [1^st and 2^nd Movements], this is an album getting ready to launch.

And second track Smiling Phases also announces the great voice of David Clayton-Thomas. A Winwood/Capaldi/Woods song, Blood, Sweat and Tears tear it up with some wonderful horn arrangements by Fred Lipsius before transferring into the jazz middle with piano [by Lipsius] and some strutting Jim Fielder bass. The horns return to yank the song back to organ and Clayton-Thomas’ key vocals: the consummate B, S & T’s song.

This is followed by the schmaltz and lite jazz of Sometimes in Winter with writer Sam Katz on vocal. But those sweeping horns try to sustain fully the sound. This isn’t the strongest track in the band’s second outing, but it sets us up nicely for what’s to come next.

Fourth More and More reminds us of why we want Clayton-Thomas at the vocal helm. Drums and horns provide a more staccato rhythm in this song, and the funky bass with stabs of organ lead into the Katz guitar solo, one of the few rock guitar with effects contributions on the album, and a snatch from a similar sound on their excellent debut album with Al Kooper leading the band.

Fifth And When I Die, written by the brilliant Laura Nyro, keeps the clever song choices supporting the band’s progress. Its cowboy interlude lightens the mood and is fully in keeping with the jaunty bass and overall rhythm. The song’s gospel roots get played out in the lovely ending to this upbeat version.

Another superb song choice gets placed at number six with the Holiday/Herzog classic God Bless The Child.  The Clayton-Thomas vocal again carries this great track, perhaps a requisite when covering such an original. The song is arranged by Dick Halligan, and his organ into Latin piano-led interlude with swirling horns [Winfield/Soloff/Hyman] and saxophone [Lipsius] reminds me of the Buddy Rich Big Band and provides that lovely nuance to such a famous number.

Seventh Spinning Wheel is perhaps the peak on this big band vehicle. The cowbell introduces the beat, and Clayton-Thomas again controls from here on in, employing some distortion effects on an otherwise quite conventional playing. I love the squealing horns around the trombone drag, but could have done without the circus recorders at the end – a twee finale that prompts someone to say that wasn’t too good! But perhaps this is all part of the fun.

Wavering horns, drum roll and organ introduce eighth track You’ve Made Me So Very Happy. Listening to this and the whole album in 1968, its consistent jazz orchestrations, as on this beautiful romantic track, had a huge impact. These songs are essentially pop numbers and/or classic standards. There is very little rock guitar, apart from the one solo already mentioned, and even less in terms of sound effects. It’s the jazz that made it raunchy and heavy and so cool because as well as listening to rock we were all listening to jazz to find that ‘alternative’ sound. The band Chicago went the heavier and at times psychedelic route – and I love that – but this album and these songs retained a simpler but nonetheless distinctive sound that became a template for so many other jazz rock bands that followed.

The band’s self penned and penultimate track Blues-Part II lets members solo and perhaps gives its nod to rock blues and improvisational moments to align it to the more experimental. A fine Lipsius alto sax solo dances above a simple repeated bass line, then slows to a melancholic layer before the bass picks up on Cream’s Sunshine of Your Love riff – a lovely surprise - and then there’s one other subliminal of a rock guitar lead, as two bars of Spoonful are played. Oh the homage and humour. It’s Clayton-Thomas who takes the song out on a crescendo of his soulful voice before segueing sweetly into the echoing flute of Halligan on the 1^st Movement from Variations on a Theme by Erik Satie where it all began – until we hear a door close.

Black Bananas - Rad Times Xpress IV

Psychedelic Bananas

Here’s an album that wah wahs and fuzzes and samples and distorts and synthesises and phases in and out and all about. The mish-mash of genres is given a heavy or trippy treatment throughout and that’s what entices and entertains. I don’t know what it is. Post-rock? Nu-rock? Rude-rock? It is funk and groove too, and more influences than I have the energy to identify – if that were possible – and then transcribe.

This is Jennifer Herrema post-Royal Trux and post-RTC, and whilst I knew a little about the former band I have no experience of the latter. I recall Royal Trux in the late 80s into 90s with their dirty rock and blues which was so refreshingly basic and brutal, recalling but renewing sounds from the 70s.

This latest endeavour is as brash and bold but seems to experiment with many more styles and presentations, including the Prince-like funk [because I’m listening to it now] of Do It, with elements of computer game battle sounds being fired within. The vocals are usually enhanced and altered and synthesised in some way, and the overall impact is of an electrical rewiring of fundamentally conventional songs that merge with the bubble and gurgle and voice-overs of other sounds and orchestrations. Then you get a track like My House that resurrects the Royal Trux sound: gritty female vocal and screeching guitar over a pounding beat – with mellotron? Then there’s the Hawkwindesque spacedirge of Earthquake; the rock and sax noise of Overpass; the ambient/industrial pop of Nightwalker; the punkrock and Hendrix of closer Killer Weed.

The cover is a perfect representation of the whole: all colour and splash and psychedelic attitude. Superb. 

Gregory Porter – Be Good

He Can Be Bad Too

Porter’s second release after the excellent debut Water arcs again across the soulful to explosive jazz in a collection swelled with beautifully sung ballads to the scat blitz of his wilder moments.

Opener Painted On Canvas is as tender as touch, the vocal caressing around gentle piano chords and playing lyrically with the colours of what makes us who we are. Title track Be Good is playful too in its simple tune and the lyric she says lions are made for cages just to look at if you like/you dare not let them walk around cause they might just bite/she knows what she does as when she dances around my cage and says her name/be good, be good – the metaphor of the lion teased and tamed in this relationship bolstered by a seductive alto sax solo by Yosuke Sato.

Third track On My Way To Harlem is an upbeat homage to the influence and inspiration of Duke Ellington, Langston Hughes, and Marvin Gaye: I so could use some of those blues from Langston Hughes. His supporting band plays an energetic set for this spirited track. Fourth song Real Good Hands has a wonderful spoken opening that evokes soul numbers of the sixties, and the sung assurances to the parents that he will look after their daughter seem equally anachronistic but totally believable in their polite promises, including I wanna make your daughter my wife.

Seventh, the Webster/Fain Imitation of Life, is a classic piano-led jazz ballad that presents Porter’s vocal in all its simple and gentle eminence. This is followed by another sweet offering, Mother’s Song, which is a warm and heartfelt tribute invoking traditional sensibilities of honour, trust and blessing. Ninth Our Love keeps the mood mellow and romantic.

It’s tenth Bling Bling that launches Porter’s scat attack, and as with similar vocables in Water it reminds me of that other expert of vocalese, Kurt Elling. The band again empathises with some raunchy playing, Tivon Pennicott’s tenor saxophone screaming its part in the conversation.

The album ends on two classics. Penultimate track Ned Adderly’s Work Song gets a lively workout, Pennicott and Sato again laying down some scorching sax strides. Closer is a gorgeous a cappella version of God Bless The Child. This is pure and perfect. No acrobatics here, but it is truly moving with its emotive delivery.

Porter is apparently most popular in Europe but particularly here in the UK. He appeared in the 2011/12 Jools Holland Hootenanny and was, for me, the most distinguished performer in a show that is getting a little tired, though Holland's Later is still brilliant at introducing acts on television, as with Porter when he released Water. Porter did receive a Grammy nomination for that album. Whatever the wider acknowledgements and accolades, he is without doubt a great performer and this latest release is a superb addition to his art.

Houston Called

Whitney Houston - My Love Is Your Love

Whatever you personally think of her music/singing, or whether you have any regard for her as a person and artist, Whitney Houston will have been a big part of many people's lives and thus her death will affect a significant number worldwide. It's not about worth or value when compared with other people and/or artists and their deaths: it's just a fact.

I bought Houston's 1998 album My Love Is Your Love having been genuinely engaged by its newer sound for her, especially the title track which was written and produced by Wyclef Jean and Jerry Duplessis. This track funks-up Houston's more familiar soul/pop balladry in the style that made The Score such an instant success for Wyclef's Fugees. I'm not a fan generally of Houston though I think she has an amazing voice. The vocal acrobatics don't always impress - and the When You Believe duet with Mariah Carey as well as a few others on this uneven album reflect this - but her range and clarity of tone are phenomenal.

Others in an appealing funky vein on this album are It's Not Right But It's Okay, Heartbreak Hotel and Oh Yes, part penned by Missy Elliot. These are the songs I have enjoyed today in remembering Whitney Houston.

Sea Today

We saw the sea today - still there – both of us in the cold,

facing up to its challenge in the winter wind and

walking in that slow uncertainty which still accounts for

progress. How does this simple endeavour also amount

to a calculation, and can I find enough to keep going

in its measureable pace? Easy enough in consideration of

our time before and more to come, however filled, if

we can at the very least keep moving forward together.

We’ll need to see if it can carry and create, which is all in

belief and believing, and I again must count and calculate

how much to lose myself in the ebb and flow of such a hope.

We were there today, but tomorrow can become catastrophe

and what was disappears in less drama than what a word

connotes, or in the seabed mine waiting to detonate.

A Blessing of the Hounds - Michael Madsen

A Woof And A Bark

I enjoyed watching Michael Madsen on this year's Celebrity Big Brother [I'm a big fan - get over it] not that it did him any good, either for his sense of well-being and purpose, or from a viewing public perspective who knew little about his career and judged him entirely on his abrasive behaviour in the house. I guess some would explain that's the point. I wouldn't say I'm a massive fan because I haven't really seen that many of his films. I've watched Reservoir Dogs and Donnie Brasco once, but a favourite that Madsen just happens to be in is Mulholland Falls.

I didn't realise that Madsen wrote poetry. This emerged when the housemates were given the task of writing their own poems with Michael as judge, and when he read his aloud it was clear that this wasn't a first. To cut to the chase, I ordered a secondhand copy of his collection A Blessing of the Hounds from the States and I have enjoyed reading it. As the fine poet Gerald Locklin states simply on the backcover blurb, Very clear and honest work. Dennis Hopper is more hyperbolic, claiming I like him better than Kerouac.

A nice little surprise was that as I was typing this post and dipping into the book to read a few I noticed for the first time that the book is signed by Madsen. It is addressed to Pablo, but that's me now.

Madsen is clearly influenced by Hemingway and Kerouac and Bukowski and that simple connective which links these to his American voice capturing day to day reality in the simplest of language and unadorned imagery. Of course, Madsen's experiences which provide the storylines are far from ordinary, and the name-dropping could seem bloated if it wasn't so common as to simply be just how it is in his life. Most of the poems are diary entries of his daily observations, very often enlivened by the extraordinary people and places occupying these. Many are recordings of the barking of hounds and what they mean to say.

I said 'unadorned' but there is obviously an affectation in the American voice he uses, but that is what makes it poetic, and it is also to do with simple but certain structuring on the page. I'm not going to try an analyse it any further. It's straightforward and accessible and engaging. Yes, it's very often macho and brash, but there are sweeter moments - not that there needs to be, but there are - and at times he is inclined to ruminate and gesture seriously. Here's the last stanza from an early poem in the collection called Paper which is about writing,

I just burned some hairs
off my arm with a cigarette.
Yeah, think about it.
I wonder what Earnest was thinking
when he loaded the gun.

Surprise Songs

Perry Mason, Ozzy Osbourne - Ozzmosis

Obviously the brilliance of this song is no surprise to metal heads and/or Sabbath sycophants, but I stopped listening to Ozzy after the fourth Black Sabbath album, and if I'm honest, I confined myself almost exclusively to their first superlative outing. Listening to Planet Rock is re-educating me in its narrow narcotic of classic rock, and I have been hearing a lot of Ozzy lately with his undeniably charismatic voice. I think I initially heard this song as a live recording at the first Ozzfest in 1996, which is stunning, especially the guitar shred. The album track played with the volume on afterburn is an explosion of metal pomp and power, thundering its neatly neanderthal riff. And as the title playfully puns, I have absorbed it fully. Spliffing.

PFPR

Slash [with Myles Kennedy], Sweet Child O' Mine, acoustic version

Tonight is the first time I have listened to Nicky Horne's Amps Off programme on Planet Rock and the acoustic selections are superb: Neil Young; Crosby, Stills and Nash; John Martyn; Roy Harper; Joni Mitchell and so on. Right up my nostalgia.

It was also an appropriate discovery because I was napping [as I have posted about before] in preparation for staying up to watch tonight's NFL Superbowl. When I finish typing this post, I will be making my requisite monster meat pizza. The ice is in abundance and friend Jack has been hanging around ready to join me later. The 'appropriateness' of discovering this programme by chance is that in the early days of Channel 4 showing the Superbowl over here on TV, Nicky Horne was the presenter.

Back to the music, I was woken - before I wanted, to be honest - by Slash's acoustic version of Sweet Child O' Mine with Myles Kennedy. I hadn't heard this version before and had no idea who it was so had no prejudices/preconceptions or any other aural baggage. I thought the vocal was knock-out. There you go.

Amongst the classics I have already noted, I did like also the following two acoustic numbers: The Answer Nowhere Freeway, and Black Stone Cherry Lonely Train. This is a programme I will be listening to again.

Gretchen Peters - Hello Cruel World

Felicitations To The Pain

If mature self-reflection and classic American confession is to your taste, then this is an album of both, augmented by cover-to-cover musical confidence.

I had the pleasure of seeing Gretchen Peters playing live locally a few years ago and she is simply a great artist. This album is distinguished by the intelligence of the lyrics and the assured strength of Peters' vocal. I played this on a recent walk and the performances had a power to make me concentrate and hear rather than just listen. I hope that deceptively pat line carries the true weight of its simple but heartfelt message.

The Matador is heated in its storytelling with the haunting accordion and metaphor or real killing; Dark Angel is enhanced with the accompaniment of Rodney Crowell and the hardly original but convincing oxymoron of the lyric and if there's no hereafter/oh and there is only here/life is still a beautiful disaster, and the Bobby Gentryesque string-infused southern blues of Paradise Found is as sultry as a swamp.

Setting Standards

Paul McCartney - Kisses On The Bottom

I watched Paul McCartney's Camden BBC Electric Proms performance the other night and I was blown away by its brilliance. He has it honed to the spectacular bone with a tight band and a set of classic songs that suck in, like a wondrous black hole, all of our nostalgia and worship for the music as the performance generates its excellent immediacy but also this history. For me - hey here's a platitude - it's the Beatles' material that soars, yet I can utter this because there are plenty of Wings fans, but that's not my real interest.

The point of this brief intro is to presage the enthusiasm I therefore had for McCartney's latest release, an enthusiasm bolstered by ignorance as I didn't realise it is a set of musical standards [with two new songs that merge rather than shine within]. Have I been disappointed? Yes. That comes from [a] the expectation aroused by the Electric Proms performance [though I was shocked to realise it was 5 years ago in 2007....] and [b] the lack of character in the re-presentations of these songs. As 'standards' they aren't exactly obvious in the way that so many other similar artists have made their selections - which had potential - but the range in the performance is from lounge jazz to bedtime lullaby. Arrangements are stripped to the basic - which had potential - but McCartney's vocal takes on a light and indistinct tone that just doesn't sound like what I expect of him nor do the songs any particular justice. It's all rather one dimensional. The title is, in the end, as twee as the overall sound.

Malia - Black Orchid

And the point, therefore, of both of the above paragraphs is to presage the enthusiasm I do have for the new release by British jazz vocalist Malia and her selection of musical standards that get everything you want from cover versions: individual interpretation and a sustained high quality of performance. The songs and Malia's singing are underpinned by superb production and playing and it is a delight throughout. This production is also kept simple [some engaging percusive jollity on Marriage Is For Old Folks] with the occasional echo of Malia's African roots. The jazz venue for these is intimate sultry club and close-up, palpable performance. Glistening. Distinctive. Sensuous. Teasing.

PFPR

Van Halen - Tattoo, A Different Kind of Truth

I was never a Van Halen fan - the 80s in particular, as I so often say, having passed me by musically - so this new single being given the current runaround on Planet Rock could have been from that era. It is the sound I remember from those occasions when I did hear them long ago, probably on the radio, and it is fine enough: another AOR template dutifully applied.

I do have a David Lee Roth album somewhere on cassette and recall liking that. He is now the prodigal son, from what I know of their history, which isn't much. I have picked up on the handbags that has Sammy Hagger, another of the triumvirate of the band's vocalists over time, proclaiming his new incarnation in Chickenfoot as being in a better band than Van Halen. It has been wonderfully orchestrated for the release of both their albums. Roth is in consummate if cloned hard rock voice on this obvious single track from the album A Different Kind of Truth. There is also the requisite shredding that at times blows the socks; at others you just need to pull them back up.

I may well comment on the whole new VH album when I have assimilated it all. Fourth track China Town takes the band into heavier territory and fills a gap in time. Ditto Bullethead. Honeybabysweetiedoll too. Actually, I think I've just done the review. If it seems subdued, I think it's because I'm not playing the album loud enough as I write.

Four Old Poems and Music

4. The Great Spirit

Once
the spirits and I gazed
out of King Crimson,
Hendrix,
the Airplane
or some other purple haze.
We sang Oms,
ghost-voices prophesying peace.
We had our hair as strength,
bright eyes dreaming,
a harmony of faces.

Now
the spirits and I haunt
out of time.
We are balding,
eyes hollowing,
sing out of tune
in a darkness that has not changed.

[in a pique of vain defence, I'll just say that I still have my hair! I couldn't find a fourth from the sequence I had intended to post under this heading, but did come across this, written in 1990, which seems far more cynical at that time than the feelings I now have about music and nostalgia. As to a faith in hope for change offered by music in the 60s/70s, I think I have got over this fantasy twenty two years after that apocalyptic if dispirited recognition, and forty plus years after the initial idealism.]

Postings From Planet Rock [henceforth PFPR]

Chickenfoot - Different Devil, Chickenfoot III

I'm still enjoying the assembly-line of rock classics played on Planet Rock throughout my marking day, though the musical sushi display is beginning to repeat its specials a little too often. But that's another story.

What I am enjoying is aurally witnessing the current creation of a new AOR classic in the Chickenfoot power-ballad Different Devil. It's a great song of its genre - acoustic intro into solo rock vocal, then thumping drums and bass, rising to the crescendo of harmony vocal and the song's simple but effective hook - yet that treadmill repeat may make it wear thin for this listener if I stick with the playlist suchi bar for too much longer.

However, I do enjoy imagining in years to come this being played with all those layers of likeable listening nostalgia that come from a radio programme having championed such a song at its AOR inception.

re. photo of band: good to see Antony Worral Thompson, second from right, making music rather than making off shiftily from Tesco.....