Seven Songs for the Week #73 - 28th Aug 24

Put on Apollo 18 this week, an album that I wore out back in the day (yes, I think I can wear out a CD). There's a lot to love on Apollo 18, this week it's this track. "Just a guy made of dots and lines"

Back in the day I would call the TMBG dial-a-song line in Brooklyn and one of the tracks they would play was this chinzy spy-like instrumental. You can hear it faintly in the background as the song fades out.

You know how it is, right, when you have an accidental Yaphet Kotto movie festival in your house? Last weekend after watching The Running Man, we put on Live and Let Die. Then I decided I wanted to learn everything about Yaphet Kotto. Turns out there was a 1990s punk band called Yaphet Kotto but none of their music is on streaming... but it appears the man himself dabbled in proto-hip-hop beatnik jazz poetry in the 1960s. Bring it on.

[NB: This song is absent from Spotify]

My wife and I were moving a table this week, true story, and I referenced this song. She had not heard of it, so annoyingly I had to rectify that. People need to know that Right Said Fred is not a dirty word!

I remember first seeing this song as a kid in the 1980s on an awesome tv show called Windmill. In a time pre-YouTube and pre-internet, the premise of Windmill was that Chris Searle the presented would raid the BBC archives in Windmill House and show funky old clips of songs and shows. This was a kids show! They showed a neat animated movie of this song, so much so that when the band of the same name appeared, I was in the know.

What's useful to note about this song is:

• It's from 1962
• It's in stereo, beautifully mixed
• There are expertly recorded and deployed sound effects
• It sets up a story, an audio movie of the mind ... so maybe it's not a surprise that this song was produced by George Martin on the Parlophone record label that he ran. The month this song was released what when he first got wind of The Beatles. He had the skills.

Phil would've been 75 last week. In Dublin, he is still a presence. I quite like his second solo album as he tries on loads of different pop styles and is quite adept at all of them. On this track he is joined by Mark Knopfler and to my ears Phil has decided that this is what Dire Straits songs are like and the whole thing sounds like Phil almost taking the piss doing a DS knock-off. If you expand that thought, you could imagine Phil in a parallel universe finding his groove in the mid-eighties delivering a track like Money For Nothing or So Far Away. Brothers In Arms would have been so much better if it was a Phil Lynott album!

Alas this is near the end of the road for Phil, he would only release one more record in his lifetime, 1983's Thin Lizzy Swan Song Thunder & Lightening. 14 albums in 12 years from one man reeks of bad management and he just wasn't minded. I remember his death in 1986, and it is so sad how people saw him as washed up at the time. He was 36.

The pop happening of the week! Nice track this. Hard to believe it took five people to write, but that's modern pop for ya!

NAIHF, for short, has always been an album that should be brilliant/amazing/perfect but just isn't and having been an 1990s REM kid, it still frustrates me that the successes of the Warners years crashed and burned here. It didn't have to be. I think it's too long. I think the cover and the title are too vague and off-putting. I think the mixes are best when they are not mixed with that live ambiance. Over the years I've tweaked it and used playlists to create the best version. Even the reissue is frustrating - you recorded non-stop on the road and we're not getting CDs loaded with alt takes (This meal is terrible! And such small portions!).

This week I listened to it on double vinyl - the 25th anniversary edition. It certainly works better as 4 EPs and the vinyl sounds less compressed.

You might not have noticed, as I never did, but Stipe sings about eating the Lotus here. It speaks volumes that a throwaway line is stretched to a whole song on the next REM record.

I saw someone mention this online, and I had never heard of it, or her and it took a couple of listens but it's quite beguiling. Guess the year...