Seven Songs for the Week #149 - 11th Feb 26

One of the offspring was listening to this song so I dug out my 2016 vinyl reissue of Discovery and had a listen. Discovery is an interesting record. Arguably ELO had reached its apotheosis on the previous album Out Of The Blue and the subsequent Big Night Out world tour. The band were unbelievably huge at that time, and I think the BNO tour was the highest grossing tour of all time when it had finished. Looking for new lands to conquer, Jeff, like Benny & Bjorn from ABBA, looked at disco and went "yeah I can do that". Hence the title Discovery, a pun that would also be used as the title of a Daft Punk album. Jeff & ELO didn't tour Discovery, instead they made a video-album, which was pretty ahead of the game in 1979, two years before MTV launched. Like a lot of ELO stuff, it would be nice to get Atmos remixes of the catalogue.

I hope Jeff is well, he hasn't surfaced since withdrawing from the final two ELO shows last summer.

I am due to see FF later in the month and made a playlist of songs to prep. They have had a lot of excellent singles. Like this one.

There has been a lot of rain in my part of the world in recent weeks, so it might have been a cosmic joke that Apple Music played this for me in the car in the middle of a damp, slow, traffic jam. I mean, the song does not sound like the feeling of rain at all. The Beatles' Rain does sound harsh and difficult, like rain. Anyways...you may or may not know the Beatles connection to this song. George Harrison apparently told John Bonham that as good a Zep were, they couldn't do ballads. Bonham relayed this to Jimmy Page who went off and wrote The Rain Song in response. That's why the first two chords of The Rain Song are the same as Something, you can sing "Something in the way she moves..." over them.

I dug out this Squeeze album, again in preparation for the new Squeeze album in March. It's very good. I had forgotten this track, it made sense to put Sunny after The Rain Song.

With Record Store Day on the way I undertake my annual reassessment of old RSD purchases and spin them again, to ensure value for money! Tomorrow's eponymous album, their only album, released in February 1968, was unfortunately the sound of 1967. It got a very nice RSD vinyl reissue about 10 years ago, and regularly gets a spin. Bizarrely, in 2023, Steve Howe rejigged and reissued it as an album called Permanent Dream in a cover that looked very 1986, and not psychedelic ar bith.

This cover of Strawberry Fields Forever (originally recorded by The BEATLES), is really very well done, and gives a great live template for a song that rests in the mind as a studio concoction.

Top pop fact: Tomorrow recorded the first ever John Peel session.

Played a lot of albums at the weekend. It's odd how in 2021, after releasing many unfulfilling records in previous years, Weezer dropped two classics within four months of each other: OK Human, a Harry Nilsson-esque pop collection, and Van Weezer, a tribute to 80s metal with some of the best Weezer tunes since the Blue album.

I mean, how could I not have Bad Bunny in the playlist this week? I enjoyed his half-time show a lot and here's the track he closed it with.