Seven Songs for the Week #50 - 20th Mar 24

Paul Simon gave a pretty good interview on Stephen Colbert last week, with Colbert in full Dick Cavett mode. The online YouTube version is over 30 minutes long, and Paul was in relaxed form. He looks old though, because he is old: 82. Asked what was the first piece of music that piqued his interest, he chose this song that he had heard 70 years previously, when it originally came out in the dawn of rock and roll. And that's how old Paul Simon is.

Another key piece of tv this week was the Microdisney documentary on BBC on the Friday night of the St Patrick's Weekend. The pre-publicity had promised a documentary about the greatest band you'd never heard of, but I'm guessing most people watching had heard of Microdisney. It was hard to get away from the profound sadness that ran through the whole thing, as Sean and Cathal spend the 80s/their 20s skimming the possibility of breaking through. By 1987 there was no reason why they shouldn't have had that moment. This track exists in a space between The The and Prefab Sprout, who were no strangers to the charts in 1986-1988. There were a lot of bad bands that bubbled up in Ireland in the 1980s post-U2 universe, Microdisney were not one of them, but that didn't matter because they weren't in Ireland, nor did they bother hanging around A&R-friendly Dublin at all and instead went to London where the Irish were not loved. Then it seems the exhaustion and belligerence took over until they imploded. The documentary starts with the reunion 30 years later in 2018 and ends with that wrapping up in 2019. Some people would call it closure, but it just seemed to make things more sad, before Cathal dies in 2022 at the too young age of 61.

Not the best PSB song, but it is the best one this week.

I recently downloaded the late 90s Chris Morris radio creation Blue Jam and decided to listen to it late one night. A lot of the music on it is Warp label electronica, but then Missing turns up in the middle of one of Blue Jam's eerie reveries. It's a great song, even though it's been blunted by ubiquity. This is the less familiar original version, before the Todd Terry remix took over the world.

Paul Simon on Colbert Part Two: As part of the interview, Paul Simon methodically goes through the entire lyric of this nearly 7 minute song from 2000. He did this to demonstrate how he wrote it linearly and when he'd hit a cliché, he'd swerve the other way. It's quite something to be smooth and jarring at the same time. If you are unfamiliar with the song, just go listen to it now.

This album is famous because it's unavailable. Out of print following its original release in 1971, there was finally a 2CD reissue in 2017 from the original tapes on the Domino label. Then Domino were sued because they were told they didn't have the rights to put it out, and then it disappeared again, before someone noticed that it had appeared on streaming sites. I think it's a reasonable song to bridge Paul Simon and Led Zeppelin.

I am having a bit of a Led Zeppelin moment. They were on last week's playlist and here they are again, I think I might finally be into them. I bought this last year, on a 1980s original CD, listened once, put it away. This week I've listened to it about 4 times. It's probably the best LZ album: none of the straight blues, more variety, a sense of humour ("where's that confounded bridge?"). The Ocean is the last track on the album and Plant's "Oh it's so good!" right at the end is the perfect exclamation.