Seven Songs for the Week #163 - 20th May 26

Twenty years ago I had moved to London, my CD collection was in boxes in Dublin but came into possession of a 1980s Sony set up with a turntable. So I went back to vinyl. As it turned out, I was an early adopter of the re-adoption of vinyl. Back then you could still get very cheap second-hand vinyl, e.g. an immaculate early pressing of Tusk for £6. New records were starting to be routinely put out on vinyl, some would come with the CD in a paper wallet inside, the best of both worlds.

I don't believe that vinyl is better than CD, it's not. It's just different. I'm a fan of both, and over the past 8 years or so, I've extricated the CDs from boxes and have them back in circulation. Last year, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd got a long awaited reissue and overhaul, and I bought the 4CD super deluxe edition, and a Rhino High Fidelity vinyl pressing. I try not to double-dip on purchases, just pick one format, but in this instance both were justified. The CDs offered the original album plus another 4+ hours of alternates, instrumentals, 2025 mixes all of it in perfect sound forever. The Rhino High Fidelity is not just a sales pitch, it's a heavy sleeve, heavy pressing, analogue cut of a first gen master tape. I put in on again this week and it is the best the album has ever sounded.

It's also the first popular music to feature the synthesizer, heard on Daily Nightly and Star Collector. Which brings us to...

...the first synthesizer music to be popular. Kraftwerk played Dublin this past weekend - the show had been announced at the end of 2025 but I hadn't got a ticket. I had read Uwe Schütte's Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany after Christmas and gone back to all the albums so had wanted to somehow get to the gig. On Sunday afternoon a half-price fifth row centre return ticket popped up and after three failed attempts I managed to secure it. Turning up at the gig I saw people walking around with VIP tote bags - turned out my ticket entitled me to one. Good times, couldn't have planned it better, best seat in the house, wonderful show.

If the Monkees begat Kraftwerk, then Kraftwerk begat this. The late 70s/early 80s synth pop boom is fun, particularly when musicians like Phil Lynott got involved. Cue visions of tumbling, neon-coloured vinyl.

Paul "Macca" McCartney was the musical guest on the season finale of SNL last weekend, and it seemed like a good idea to get up at 4:30am and watch it live in my time zone. Man alive, you forget how many ads US network tv has. Anyways, Paul did three songs, and his usual band (of the last 25 years!) had been tweaked for some reason: Chad Smith was on drums (adding an enjoyable heftiness to Band on the Run) and a new addition who turned out to be Ingrid Michaelson on backing vocals. Whether she was there to cover missing drummer Abe's usual backing vocals, or to shadow Paul's older voice is uncertain. Maybe she was there for both reasons.

The internet loves a mystery, so "who is that woman in Paul's band?" led to finding this 20 year old single of hers which has a fun reverse-gender Addicted To Love video attached to it. Can we historically define mid-00s music now from that environment of collapsing CD sales/ iTunes MP3s / iPods / pre-streaming / Starbucks-has-a-record-label? This is where this song fits in...

...As does this record by Feist.

I put on the RSD version of Stop & Smell The Roses, which is a great record when you're in the mood for it. On the bonus tracks was You Can't Fight Lightening, an enjoyable drone-y jam with McCartney. It's not available on streaming, so have Blindman instead. One wishes Ringo would have done more of this kind of stuff, where his Ringo-ness gets subsumed into the music. You could easily imaging Beck doing this song.

This year I have been going back and listening to Elvis Costello's catalogue chronologically. Trying not to rush it. For about a decade, I listened to little else, and know a significant amount of his music inside out. Also, depending on how you count, I've seen him live nearly 30 times. That's a lot of gigs. However you can drift away from things and I couldn't really remember when I last listened to EC for pleasure.

I can viscerally remember hearing Beyond Belief for the first time. I became an EC fan in the slipstream of Spike in 1989, saw him in concert that May and then set about getting all his albums in some kind of order. I was given a copy of Imperial Bedroom for the family summer holiday, and I recall managing to hold off until sitting on the runway waiting to take off to press play. Beyond Belief is magic. He's singing different, a torrent of words but there isn't an attack, yet it has more angst and stress than his more explicit polemics. The Attractions are just creating this magic wash of noise behind him. It's still the best, imagine being able to conjure this up. And listening to Imperial Bedroom from front to back for the first time in a while, man it's good.