Seven Songs for the Week #75 - 11th Sept 24

After much consideration, I decided to reverse the order of this weeks playlist. I mean, it works in either direction, I think.

Godley & Creme have a weird place in my psyche. I vividly remember the tracks Under Your Thumb and Wedding Bells from when I was a kid and found them to be unique concoctions. Pop music but by men. As the 80s rode by Godley & Creme delivered the track Cry which seemed to be everywhere when it came out. The 80s explosion of pop videos would usually have them lurking in any news story or documentaty on the topic (check out the MTV documentary on YouTube of Yes making their Leave It video. G&C are amusingly stoned and winging it)

After they called it a day in 1988 the left behind a body of work that is still quite unique and curious . Sometimes it is pop of the finest mettle, sometimes it’s more concept then melodic. Either way, it was never boring.

This track is a standalone signal from 1980 so tends to fall between the cracks. I urge everyone reading this to see the video , because it has some fantastic analog effects that predate later videos from people like Michel Gondry. The saxophone is Roxy Music's Andy McKay. The reason I came back to this week is because I noticed a little guitar riff also appears in the next song...

[Side point: In 2020 Kevin Godley appeared on the Nothing Is Real podcast and was very generous giving us two hours of his time as we quizzed him on his career and Beatle connections. If you listen to the episode now you can hear how excitied I am at the start of it. KEVIN GODLEY!]

I bought every Wilco album up until the sixth, Sky Blue Sky. After that I just fell off the Wilco wagon. It’s partially due to streaming - I realised I wasn’t listening to the Wilco albums that I owned, and more albums they put out, the more I thought when I can always listen to them on streaming, and then you just find yourself not listening to Wilco at all. I went back to this earlier this week. First of all, it suffers from CD bloat, the album is too long really. Two of the 12 tracks account for 25 minutes of the album's 67 minute running time. One of them, Spiders, is a good Krautrock work out, and worthy of its 10 minute time. The other, Less Than You Think, is 15 minutes long, the vast majority of which is an ambient noise designed to be (a rather accurate) recreation of a migraine headache. A worthy experiment, but not something designed for a repeated listening pleasure. Maybe if this album was coming out today, this track would be sidelined as a standalone streaming-only single in order to show their experimental bona fides. The majority of Wilco albums ever since have managed to hover about the 40 minute mark.

Anyways, when I was listening to this song this week I realised it has the little guitar motif from Godley & Creme. And here we are.

I recently found myself watching Pop Star Academy: Katseye on Netflix. A six-part documentary/reality show following 20 girls/women being put through the gruelling process of K-Pop indoctrination in order to form a six piece global band. They worked so hard, the approach seemed to not make much sense, but in the end they got a new group, KATSEYE. This is not that group, this was one of the songs they performed in the knockout stages. Good tune.

One of my favourite current listens is The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast, where they breakdown an SNL Digital Short week-by-week. I learned that their 2007 short, I Ran, was based on a sample of this Aphex Twin track. I did not know that. I also didn't know that Apehx Twin has tracks like this.

I was listening to Sly & The Family Stone's There's A Riot Goin' On this week and I have to say, I find very early drum machines fascinating. If you like the murky drum machine vibe of ...Riot... there's more of it here. This compilation is full of it!

I haven't connected with The Smile, although I've made no effort. This track from their forthcoming third album is more like it. Very Frippy guitar noises, very David Byrne lyrics and delivery, so it's still the sound of the future...

The rear of Lou Reed's New York tells you to listen to it all in one sitting, and although `I got the CD when it came out, I don't recall sitting and listening to it straight through until this week. On this track you're struck by Lou shit-talking about Trump and Giuliani in 1989. Not sure if this is prescient, or just history repeating, or just nothing ever changing...