Seven Songs for the Week #51 - 27th Mar 24

This came on a Dublin radio station last week, can't remember when I last heard it, but it sounded rather great.

To date it's the only "proper" Damon solo album, released when Gorillaz were on hiatus. Could it have been a Gorillaz album if Albarn and Hewitt were getting on at the time? Could it have been the start of Damon as full-on solo artist if Gorillaz hadn't resumed business. Who knows? It's an album that sticks out in his back catalogue and I think it's great.

I'm on holidays at the minute. Ergo...

Since I've been listening to a lot of LedZep recently, I've been reading about Zep and bought Mick Rock's bio which is a hugely frustrating book and would not recommend. Anyways, for the longest time I know of Jimmy Page/Zep's tendency to rewrite songs as their own but usually in the pretence of them being derivations of derivations of the blues. What I didn't know was that they were just lift contemporary songs written by peers, and such is the case with Dazed & Confused. It took until 2010 for Jake Holmes to get his credit/money. Which seems crazy. Jake Holmes has done well for himself, he wrote the "Gillette? The Best A Man Can Get!" jingle which on French tv goes "Gillette! La perfection au masculin!" which is funny. The whole album is great, by the way.

Classical Gas wanders into my head every couple of months, I listen to it, it goes away. It's really a one-off. Mason Williams is now 85 and Classical Gas got its break on The Smothers Brothers Show when Williams was in the writers' room with, amongst others, Steve Martin. Williams also co-wrote Cinderella-Rockefella. The fantastic drumming is Jim Gordon who did hundreds of sessions before joining Derek and the Dominos. You can Wikipedia what happened next.

On some days, my favourite Bowie song. He was on the Top Of The Pops repeat this week performing it in the studio. Was stuck between the original version from 1993's Buddha of Suburbia album, which was Bowie's grand reset, or the big 1995 version, because Bowie obviously knew how good it was and didn't want it to disappear.

I was in a French railway station this week and that sound happened repeatedly which some years ago had been turned into this kinda annoying song. I wasn't sure whether to keep it on the playlist or not, but it is evocative of my week, so it stays.