To Disco With Love

I've gone a bit Disco recently.

In part, this was kind of inevitable. After all a lot of the bands I've written about on this blog had their Disco phase, so why shouldn't I have one too? And the truth is, I've always been more than a bit partial to some Disco. I was 10 years old in 1979, and I reckon that you'll find very few people who were that age in that year with free access to a radio and Top of the Pops whose souls aren't momentarily lifted whenever they hear the intro to Funkytown.

But my recent phase has been influenced by David Hamsley's To Disco With Love, a book that  collects together some of the Disco era's album artwork, grouped into different themes (with the mid 70s dominating, there's a lot of golds, browns and sunburnt finishes), The covers are often pretty much as bad as you would expect, but then again, so what? As a Black Sabbath fan, I'm perfectly comfortable with the idea of great music coming with dreadful covers.

And a lot of it was great. Chic and Giorgio Moroder get a lot of the attention these days, but at the moment I prefer the mid 70s period: less glitter more strings plus a sprinkle of high camp (which, let's face it, gave flavour to most of the great pop from the 70s). Disco's borders with Funk and soul were pretty porous, and the book finds space for Kool & the Gang, Philadelphia International and even Ramsey Lewis.

The older I get, the more I like this stuff. And I like it without irony, this is no guilty pleasure, where the Salsoul Orchestra albums are tucked safely away from view. I think it's because it's all upbeat stuff. I find dark and edgy music overrated these days, I'll take the Beach Boys, Stevie Wonder, AC/DC or ABBA any day.

10 Random Thoughts About the Bohemian Rhapsody Film

1 .This whole "Live Aid saved Queen" schtick doesn't wash. They had four hits the previous year (and played two of them during their set). On Now 4, released after the summer of 1984, they're Side 1 Track 1 (Radio Ga Ga): what more scientific proof do you want?  

2. It's hard to think of a pop star who lost their muse so comprehensively. He wrote all of Queen's big hits during the 70s, and then none during the 80s. How do you go from "Killer Queen" to "Man on the Prowl" in 10 years? Conclusion: don't grow a moustache.

3. I can't believe they didn't do the "Ah Mr Ferocious" scene with Sid Vicious.

4. I enjoyed the scenes of them recording A Night at the Opera in the countryside. Somebody should write a book about all the albums that were recorded at various farmsteads during the 70s.

5. Gwilym Lee really was Brian May. I don't think I've ever seen a better resemblance between an actor and a character in a biopic.

6. But Ben Hardy really wasn't Roger Taylor. Roger was a good looking guy, but in the film he looks like a squad member of the 1974 West Germany World Cup team.

7.  I have a slight suspicion that one of the motivations of the band for making this film was to get back at Paul Prenter.

8. The film has John Deacon as being about halfway between Derek Smalls and Balderick and I think this is a bit unlikely. I can't imagine he took too much nonsense from the others after "Another One Bites the Dust".

9. There's a scene where Brian May is taking the band through We Will Rock you and Freddie walks in. With a moustache. In 1977! This is madness. If you're going to be paying so much attention to detail that you make sure that he wears the right brand of trainers, you shouldn't be making these errors. 1977!

10. It's a pretty good film, and I speak as someone whose heart sank like a stone when I heard that they were making it.

Wedding Songs

What music did you play at your wedding?

As someone who has recently left behind his bachelor days, I'm curious. When my wife-to-be and I were shortlisting the songs we wanted to be played at the march-ins, it had seemed to be a pretty simple task. We knew that they would be 70s Soul songs, as that's the genre where our musical tastes overlap the most. Outside of that, she likes Air Supply, while I like Black Sabbath. She says Tomato, I say Rat Salad.

So it should have been pretty easy to find a couple of nice slices of Philadelphia or some Stax tracks, right? But once we started shortlisting, it turned out to be a bit more difficult than we thought, as favourites started tumbling at early hurdles and sent off to the UHU factory. "Didn't I (Blow Your Mind This Time)?" by the Delfonics was an early frontrunner. We both love the song, and that beautiful introduction sets the stage for a soppy old love song, right? Wrong; he's leaving her, and the title is his kiss-off (and it's a surprisingly mean-spirited one at that. This is a Thom Bell song, remember).

Next up were Earth, Wind & Fire. "Reasons" doesn't quite have the romantic lyrics you might expect from its lovely arrangement, while for "After the Love Has Gone" we didn't even need to look at the lyrics.

Luckily, in the end we had Stevie Wonder and The Stylistics to step up and deliver the goods. "You are the Sunshine of My Life" may not be the most original choice, but I'm damned if I care: it's a beautiful song and performance, and I think that the fact that it's written by a blind man provides the lyrics with a melancholic coating that strengthens the song. And Thom Bell came good in the end with "Betcha By Golly Wow", though to be honest we could have taken just about anything from that first "Best of The Stylistics" album.

Joe's MAC

The photo above is of Joe's Music and Audio Club, a second hand record, musical instrument, book, magazine and well, who knows what else exactly shop in Kuala Lumpur.

Shopping for second hand records in places like Singapore (where I live) and Kuala Lumpur is always an interesting experience. As retail rents are high, and vinyl hunting is - despite its current trendiness - still very much a niche interest, you end up in far-flung shopping arcades and warehouses that don't tend to be in the Lonely Planet guides. You rarely find a record shop next to a Starbucks if you know what I mean.

Joe's MAC is a great place to shop in. It's a good bit bigger inside than it looks from outside, and it reveals itself gradually as you walk through it, a bit like the Alcazar in Seville, but with more copies of "A Hard Day's Night". Rooms lead into other rooms with crates of records labelled "New Releases".  In fact, it's a bit like wandering through a video game: you keep glancing for vases in the corner to search for gold coins. I liked that it was organised enough for browsing, but disorganised enough to spring a few surprises, such as finding the NWOBHM band Dark Star's debut album in the Motown section.

Anyway, I picked up Millie Jackson's "It Hurts So Good", "Slade in Flame" and "Now That's What I Call Music II". The Slade album is my favourite one of theirs: you can almost smell the mid 70s from it, and I reckon that all Rock drummers should look the way that Don Powell looks on the cover. The NOW album is from 1984, when pop music was on the turn, and it's patchy: there's still some good stuff on it ("Relax", "Michael Caine", "Radio Ga Ga", "What Difference Does it Make?") but they're distributed pretty sparsely across the two records. One interesting point is how late 1983 and early 1984 saw some big names from the 70s (Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Paul McCartney, Hot Chocolate, Slade) still having hits, but with songs that range from forgettable to dreadful ("Undercover of the Night", "Modern Love", "Pipes of Peace", "I Gave You my Heart Didn't I" and Lord help me, "Run Runaway"). It's the Millie Jackson album I'm happiest with though, I'd been looking for a it for a while and was pleasantly surprised to find it there.

Middle Age Lament '15

When do you stop buying the latest record from one of your favourite artists? I'm wondering if there's a helpful checklist or flow chart that I can follow to determine when it really is time to call it a day, remember the good times and have an amicable parting of the ways.

The question has been prompted by the news that Alice Cooper is about to release a covers album of songs by his peers from the 60s and 70s. Honestly, I don't like the sound of it. Covers albums tend to be the ignored stepchildren of artists' discographies, so why should this one be any different? To make things worse, it's got "special guests". Uh-oh.

The problem is that Alice and I go back a long way, about 30 years in fact. A long time that, one which has seen 5 Prime Ministers, 8 World Cups, 5 US Presidents and 256 Spurs managers. I've been listening to Alice longer than the guy from Smokie was living next door to him.

I must have over 30 Alice Cooper records. I've definitely got all the studio albums, this despite the fact that he's only made two really good ones since the 1970s: 1983's "Da Da" and 2003's "The Eyes of Alice Cooper". Having said that, there are surprisingly few clunkers in the catalogue: 1987's "Raise Your Fist and Yell" definitely qualifies: a shrill, Heavy Metal album which manages to contain music even worse than both its title and cover, while 2001's "Dragontown" and 2008's "Along Came a Spider" aren't much fun either. On the whole though, he's managed to keep going by constructing a discography using competent mediocrity as the primary raw material. And I've kept buying them.

Believe it or not, the music is worse than the cover.

But recently he's been testing my patience, with live album after live album recorded with the same band playing the same songs. I've stopped buying them and I really think I should do the same with the studio albums as well. At heart I realise that this is an internal struggle: do I let my irrational record collector side override my logical, decision-making side? Now, I've broken ties before; I've never felt any compulsion to own a Black Sabbath record that doesn't have Ozzy or Dio on it, and I gave up with Queen after "Made in Heaven". It feels like it's time to say goodbye here too.

What about you? I can't be alone here. How many long time Simple Minds fans found themselves in HMV staring at the cover of "Street Fighting Years" and thinking "Do I really need this?" John Peel stopped playing T. Rex records after realising that if "Hot Love" and "Get it On" had been recorded by other artists he wouldn't have been playing them. Ever changed your Facebook status with an artist?