Seven Songs for the Week #53 - 10th Apr 24

"Whatever happened The xx?" I thought a few days ago for no particular reason. They seemed to be everywhere for a few years, and now nowhere. I then pressed my brain to remember some songs by The xx, and came across this one which I had forgotten completely.

Some lovely chord changes here. I'm old enough to remember when David Bowie used to put out albums and no one would give a hoot.

Going down an internet rabbit hole is one of the fun parts of our online world. So I decided I wanted to know more about early guitar synths (maybe this was an offshoot of listening to In Through The Out Door) and hit upon the Roland GR-500 which was a revolutionary device in the late 1970s. Then I wanted to see it being played and found stuff on YouTube from Terje Rypdal, who I'd never heard of, sop I had to learn ab out him, and he's still on the go...

Last Saturday was 50 years since ABBA won the Eurovision with Waterloo. BBC2 put on a whole evening of ABBA on the tv and there were some bits and pieces I hadn't seen before. Their 1979 tv special, ABBA in Switzerland was one of them, with special guests Kate Bush and Roxy Music. This was one of the new tracks performed and to be honest it was a toss of a coin between this and The King HAs Lost His Crown. Voulez-Vous: the album that has one foot in the early happyABBA camp and another in the latter day EmoABBA camp.

Speaking of Roxy Music... This song has earned Phil Manzanera more money than anything else in his career, including Roxy Music. It was sampled by Jay-Z&Kanye in 2011 for No Church in the Wild, the opening track on their hugely successful Watch The Throne album. Indeed the first person you hear on that record is Phil Manzanera. This is all new information to me.

Picked up a crackly cheap secondhand vinyl copy of Mind Games recently and have no recollection of this song whatsoever. Mind Games is not an album I know well at all. The upcoming 6 CD/2 Blu-ray Mind Games boxset coming in July (fingers crossed) should shine a light on this record.

New music from Kim Gordon. Not mad about that font, tbh.