Here's a video of Presidential Suite (featuring John Cale).

What I love most about the Super Furry Animals is the range you get with them. Hard & soft, nice & nasty, folk & techno sometimes all crammed into a single song.
When they first arrived, some lazy music writers described them as being like 'The Beach Boys on acid'. Surely the Beach Boys were the Beach boys on acid.

As good live as recorded.

Why do I love them? It's my Dad's fault. He used to to play The Crossing in the car on the way to school and then to school sports, and I loved "In a Big Country" and 'Lost Patrol'
I then just kept adding to my collection - Steeltown, The Seer, the worse-than-usual Peace in our Time. And I fell away for a while. Until I saw them at De Montfort University; it still remains one of the best concerts I've been to.
That prompted the resurgence, and getting the Buffalo Skinners and reappraising the band, and the Skids.
I saw them with Dad in London, which was, for sentimental reasons, a great occasion.
'Driving to Damascus' came out, and I reappraised again.

That's my Big Country chronology, which doesn't really explain why I 'love' them. I appreciate some other bands' music more, but I don't love them as much. I always felt that they were an honest band - most of their material was about ordinary people. They, like Dad, came from Dunfermline, and were local boys made good. I saw them as underdogs and underappreciated, unfairly stereotyped. And I love the music; it may not be complex, although I still really rate the guitarists, but I can play it loud in the car and sing along.

Liking stuff can be a rational process. Love is fundamentally irrational. There's always a magic ingredient in love that's impossible to explain wholly and truly; that's how I feel about Big Country.

It's the Summer of 2000 and I've been married for the second time for a few weeks. My 16 year old daughter and my new wife get on like sisters and for my daughter's birthday we take her into London for a posh lunch and shopping at Harrods. After the lunch we get into seperate taxis, the girls going to Harrods, me to HMV, and arrange to meet up later. The lunch has been long and boozy and, as I walk into HMV, I'm buzzing nicely. I turn left, down the escalator, to the Country & World Music section. I'm leafing through the CD racks when I'm aware of this music playing.

The voice is so laid back and the music just washes away all my fears (of which there are many) for a few moments. I am aware that I have been standing still for several minutes, in the middle of the aisle. As the music ends I do something I never do and ask the guy behind the counter what's playing. He points to the CD cover and I hand over my credit card.
Over the following 11 1/2 years I have bought everything Josh has recorded (some 15 albums.) It's the voice, you see. It does something physical to me which I can't explain. He has made songs that make me smile, songs that make me laugh and songs that make me cry. I will always cherish the memory of that day and his voice will always be a part of that memory.
Unfortunately the relationship with my daughter, influenced by her mother, was never the same and we haven't seen her for several years. But I will always have that day and Josh's voice.

Here's my fave. A sad song that is so uplifting and has just the best pedal-steel solo.....

Here he is post Any Trouble but utilising the old rhythm section on one of their songs and with the help of some beardy bloke doing the tricky guitar parts up the dusty end.

Because Pingu-in-chief Simon Jeffes wrote this and sometimes I believe it may be the greatest piece of music ever written.

The only vaguely interesting thing that I know (apart from how much I fancy both Helen Liebmann and Annie Whitehead) is that this (allegedly) isn't inspired by a harmonium that was found in a skip. Nice idea though.

The Lost Girl In The Midnight Sun

The Lilac Time are a band I've loved for nearly 25 years. They're probably the band I have turned most people onto when I've played their records.

Why do I love them? Well, it's that word "love" and the songs they weave around it, both in the music and the lyrics. Their songs are predominantly poetic vignettes about love in all its guises: from the intimate, physical and sensual to the unrequited, unobtainable and painful. They sing of love as salvation and love as damnation, of the way love mends and breaks hearts and of the way it drives our passions and desires sometimes for good, sometimes for bad.

Then there is the love they show in their music for the craft of song-writing and of musical arrangement. A romantic and bohemian undercurrent meanders through their albums, you always come away from the listening experience certain in the knowledge that the world is a better place to the one it was before you played the record. In the world of The Lilac Time the beauty and innocence of The Garden of Eden can still exist in our minds even if it cannot exist in the real world. The Lilac Time love to love and music is the best form for expressing that love.

To some they're a throwback to hippy airy-fairy twaddle and of style over substance but I think Stephen Duffy's trials and tribulations both in and out of the music industry render his stories too compelling and personal to be merely nostalgic dusting downs of a rose-tinted scrapbook of memories, both imagined and real. He may hanker for an England of the past but he can cast a witty and urbane eye over his contemporary settings with a vitality that matches his love for a pastoral yesteryear.

First band I obsessed about...all on my own. In the age of "punk" it was Buzzcocks that won my heart. I probably (as if) had a big schoolboy crush on Pete Shelley (when he looks at the camera at 2:40, I thought "Oh crap, Marc Almond!"). I loved his runaway love songs crammed full of lyrics, the words tumbling over one another, always with a terrific melody. The singles were brilliant: I Don't Mind, Love You More, Ever Fallen In Love? Promises, You Say You Don't Love Me, etc etc. But the albums would have cracking tracks on them as well, like this one, Sixteen Again.

Gawd, I'm gushing.

There's a bit of an interview afterwards in which Steve Diggle wants to tear apart the London music scene with...Flag of Convenience (...tumbleweed...). Quite sad to see his enthusiasm. And what about those rumours that Buzzcocks are getting back together again? That'll be a yes, then.

The National - Apartment Story

I got in to this band beacuse of a flight delay.

Me & a couple of friends were going to Lanzarote for a week of relaxing & had a 7 hour delay going out. As I had already read that months word from cover to cover I ended up buying another music mag & Mr November from Alligator was featured. It was pretty much love at first listen - I went into an internet cafe there to order Alligator so it would be waiting for me when I get home! When I finally got the album it did not leave my CD player for over 6 months & at some point each song was my favourite.

Although I like lots of other bands the National are the one that I will love more than any other. I have seen them live about 14 times & I think they are an outstanding live act. They do different versions & I always feel that a song is never finished for them & is always evolving.

Anyway, at the risk of a restraining order I will stop here. They are amazing - that is all.

Bear in mind that this extraordinary piece of work was actually released by Elektra as a single, with the even less penetrable "Laughing Stock" on the flip:

Why I love them? Hear above. Note the sour-faced lyric sung in Arthur Lee's none-sweeter voice:
"I'd like to understand just why
I feel like I have been through hell
but you tell me I haven't even started yet..."

(recognise that feeling...?)

Note also the complete change of tack halfway through. And the stinging John Echols solo towards the end.

Remember that Lee and Echols were both mixed race, growing up in a rough neighbourhood in LA, at the same time as both the Civil Rights Movement and the hippie era unfolded around them. That the entire band spent much of its time living communally in Bela Lugosi's old mansion in Beverly Hills, tripping virtually all the time.

I encountered all this when I'd virtually given up on much new music at the fag end of the 80s. I was more than happy to escape into the murky depths of obscure psychedelia.

But Love are more than just a bunch of hippies in brightly coloured clothes, out of their minds and preaching peace'n'luv. There's a meanness, an aggression. And in Lee's lyrics, a sardonic, clear-eyed mistrust of hippie pieties, and a barely-concealed disdain for the events he was witnessing first hand.

"The news of today will be the movies of tomorrow..."

Seeing Barry beat me by three minutes (a lifetime on the Word blog) I'll go with Green on Red. Here's someone you all know introducing them on Whistle Test. Me I gotta keep on moving, indeed. Later, Mad Dog.

Father Cannot yell...Great track from the Monster Movie Album. Interesting fact...On "Halleluwah" Damo Suzuki is actually singing "Searching for my black dope!...Halleluwah!" because he lost it apparently.

Interesting fact. Beyonce's sister Solange is a huge fan. So much so she has recorded vocals for their tune Left Hand Drive, and here it is...

With Brian Eno

The sound of the waiting, mysterious adult world... Peel played this (1980 I think) and next day at school everyone seemed to have heard it. I never knew so many people listened to him.

This wasn't on the original "My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts" but it was one of two b-sides for 'Regiment' on the 12". It took some finding in rural Bucks so in the end I tracked it down in London - Ladbroke Grove in my recollection.

Its on the remastered - and excellent - CD album now because a number of people objected to the presence of the Qu'ran on the original LP vinyl pressing - that's a beautiful piece (though you can understand the furore) but Very, Very Hungry should have been there from the start - it is still one of the best things I have ever heard.

I don't recall any previous record in the rock or soul/R&B sphere that used cut-ups like this. A very beautiful, crazed, spooked collection of music.

Rare footage of them live at Glastonbury in 2007.

With Paul Waring in there on Front Row vocals. Woah-oh-oh-oh-oh!

Craig Finn's new solo album has just been released - I'm still digesting it. Initial thoughts are that whilst it's lyrically excellent, it's just a little bit flat musically. He needs Tad alongside him.

(Can't Beleive In You from 1994's 'Get A Life')

After splitting up, Jake Burns became a producer at Radio 1. He knew it was time to leave when he found himself in the pub defending the virtues of a Jason Donovan record.

The band reformed in 1987 because they wanted to go home to Belfast for St Patricks Night.

The album 'Now Then' contained a cover of 'Love Of The Common People'. SLF were touring with the Q-Tips, and Paul Young asked if they had any plans to release it as a single. If not, would they mind if he did.

The reformed version of the band is still touring, due to release a new album this year (possibly), and have been in existence 5 times longer than the original incarnation

were MY band, they're the band that mattered most to me in my late teens. Every gig was an event, none more than the Crystal Day supporting the Ocean Rain album in 1984.
A tour of Liverpool (for those who needed a tour), a bike ride, a recital in the cathedral, breakfast at Brian's Diner (which I had to do twice as our kid was going to Chelsea on the day - worthwhile as we won the League. Again.) A banana fight on the Royal Iris and ending with a storming 3 part live set in the glorious St George's Hall.
Support SHOULD have been from Ken Dodd but obviously Mac chose the day before to publicly query Doddy's tax arrangements and political leanings. The fingerprints of Bill Drummond all over the concept but the music stands alone as immense

Nico's first record was a single on Stones manager Andrew Loog-Oldham's Immediate label from 1965 and features Jimmy Page. Her voice generally is other-wordly, maudlin and mysterious, and a little frightening perhaps. I remember first playing The Velvet Underground's debut album and being intrigued by Andy Warhol's odd chanteuse, with her slightly masculine voice. The experience of that album as a whole was mind blowing I have to say.

Morrissey once said that for him his life was comparable to the sound of Nico's Marble Index - no wonder he's not a happy bunny. Her albums, Chelsea Girls aside, are unquestionably hard going in the main.

Nico is one of those fascinating characters that you find in rock history - living in a different way to the rest of us. Makes Gaga look like Cliff. Songs They Never Play On The Radio is a book about her and one of the most remarkable, rock biographies ever written.

This song is from Desertshore and is rather beautiful and sad. It's pretty good I think. It's called Afraid.

By all accounts, including his own, a troubled, weird and deeply unpleasant man. Here he is, in all his vanity and glory, singing Frank and Jesse James in a garden shed.

The first ten seconds of this clip are very telling: "You know who I am?...You know who I am right?...Yeah, I'm the guy!"

Sorry, the video falls out of sync toward the end.

Brilliant. Just brilliant. One of the most imaginative and creative bands of all time. Joyous. Consistently great live. It's an absolute pleasure to be their representative hear at Word.

The Flaming Lips The W.A.N.D.

I first stumbled across Toronto's Jane Siberry in 1989 when I heard her being interviewed on Radio 1 (!) by, I think, Roger Scott. They played a couple of songs from her then-latest album The Walking, and I was hooked from then on. The best description of Ms Siberry that I've ever seen was in Rolling Stone when they once called her "an ethereal space-folkie".

I saw her live 4 times in 1989 - firstly in the Acoustic Room at the Mean Fiddler - I must have been keen; wandering into downtown Harlesden to see her at my young age - and then a couple of times whilst travelling in Canada that summer (including at the Edmonton Folk Festival!), before finally with a full band at the Bloomsbury Theatre back in Blighty - all shows were different, all completely enthralling. I try and see her whenever she's back in the UK.

Over the years I've tried to enlighten several friends & my GLW as to the power of Jane, but they've mostly remained unconvinced - before coming across a couple of believers on here, my brother-in-law was the only other person who'd heard of her, let alone owned music by her.

Maybe her best known song is the duet with kd lang, "Calling all Angels" - it has been in various films & TV programmes - listen to it - or indeed, "Love is Everything" on the clip above & then explore her world some more.

I'm posting this track because it might have been the first Jonathan Richman track I knowingly heard, probably on the Dave Fanning RTE radio show in the early 80s while I was supposed to be studying for an exam of an evening. In hindsight I'd probably seen Legs & Co. or Pans People dancing to Egyptian Reggae in their hilarious camel and pharaoh costumes. Also in the early 80s I saw him on the Hepworth/Ellen era Whistle Test doing (I think) Chewing Gum Wrapper and Vincent Van Gogh with his two guitarists singing along behind him. In a nutshell it was the sheer joie de vivre and fun of his songs that caught me. A few years later, when I moved to London I went to see him in the Mean Fiddler in Harlesden as I lived around the corner from it and I'd heard of him. When I went around to get my ticket, he was there guitar case in hand, no doubt having got off the train and strolled up. He was trying to convince the doormen that he was the act for the evening. The show was fantastic, like some joyous cult where everyone seemed to know the words, bar me. It seemed like he played for hours and did 20 songs or more. I was hooked and have seen him every opportunity since then. Live is still where he shines. His albums can be hit and miss and the live recordings never quite capture it. He also does many a song live that never seems to end up on a recording.

The sound of his voice and the ability to picture his still youthful features always brings a smile to my face. He can be dismissed as lightweight and juvenile - the evidence is there but he can do serious too, from back in the early days with Hospital or more recently with While My Mother Lay Dying, but he always comes across as treating the normal experiences of life in an honest and emotional way. His divorce album "Surrender to Jonathan", isn't self-indulgently miserable. He writes of how she didn't want to be "Plus One on the Guest List Anymore", and how it caused him to face up to his parental responsibility. Mostly he's still just fun - a ray of sunshine with a curious guitar technique, some great dance moves, an endearing contrariness and his own slant on the human condition.

So don't dismiss him as that bloke from Something About Mary or the creator of "novelty", songs like Roadrunnner, Pablo Picasso or I Was Dancing at a Lesbian Bar. There's so much more to him...and see him live!

It’s an overused word, but Frank Zappa was truly unique. His music, while existing happily within the mainstream rock infrastructure was, in truth, somewhat removed from just about any accepted genre you care to name.

His scattershot approach covered all the bases from 50s doo-wop to heavy metal, from modern classical to jazz fusion, from outrageous comedy to blasphemous, paint-stripping blues guitar solos and a whole lot more besides.

His bands (which he changed regularly) were drawn from the best in the business and Zappa always surrounded himself with the most technically gifted musicians. They needed to be good to play Frank’s dense, impossibly complex music and most of the time, only sight-reading, music school graduates needed to apply.

And yet this wasn’t po-faced, shoegazing jazz fusion, or straight-laced modern classical posturing and it certainly wasn’t Zippo-waving, fists aloft, stadium rock. This was joyously indescribable music drawn from all styles and coming from all directions.

Best of all, though, underpinning the jaw-dropping technical stuff, Zappa’s music was never less than thought provoking, unrelentingly iconoclastic and genuinely laugh-out-loud funny in equal measure.

Perhaps more than any other musician of the 20th Century Zappa took popular music to places it never dreamed of going. It may have needed to wash its hands and wipe its feet before leaving, but it was invariably changed for the better.

Frank Zappa – simply the best

With close-on 100 albums to pick from it's impossible to choose a representative Zappa track. Almost at random, here's a quite remarkable live version of City Of Tiny Lites from 1981.

That's a 21 year-old Steve Vai over on the right of the stage btw.

I never claimed any band. Just wanted to say how much I'm loving these posts.

I first heard PS when I borrowed a friend's copy of Swoon. This would have been just after the album came out in 1984. I knew it was good, but it took a few plays to realise just how good it actually was. For a lot of fans, it's the best PS album, but perhaps the most interesting thing is that most of the songs were new. McAloon had his eye on a career in music, and knew that most acts had years to write their first album, and months for the next. He wrote a raft of songs specially for Swoon, and thus was able to rely on his (not inconsiderable) backlog for Steve McQueen. Like Prince, PM appears to be an artist who writes songs/albums the way most of us breathe - naturally, with no seeming effort. Almost all of McAloon's songs have fabulous melodies, and never less than interesting lyrics. His singing is not everyone's cup of tea, but for me personally, I haven't yet heard another singer do the songs justice.
I've picked 3 tracks - early, mid & most recent.

If anything good can come from his death it will be a widening of awareness of his beautifull music.

Scooter are notorious for their techno infested pastiches and cover versions bellowed in heavily accented English. So here's one of their rare German songs, and an original.

The lyrics translate as 'Let's dance or f**k or both, for tomorrow we're dead'. That pretty much sums up why I love them. They don't try and be anything they're not. A great party band who love what they do.

He's fantastic live, bitter and twisted, but romantic and funny. He can do rock, soul, jazz, r'n'b and classical.

He's also got the music business sussed:

This is the song that got me hooked on them; I spent most of the summer of 1987 with "Swamp Thing" going through my head. Curiously, its parent album "Strange Times" didn't have the same effect at the time, but I gave it a fresh listen a few years later - and it suddenly clicked. They're just one of those rare instances where I find something to like in pretty much every song. IMHO they never bettered this, though many fans say the same about their first album.

The Housemartins gave us silly dancing, silly hair, silly videos with plasticine people in them and silly album titles.

But they gave us so much more. Because they were in love with pop music - deeply in love - even while they ripped the piss out of it. Because they sneaked subversive and even murderous sentiments into the lives of millions by using angelic voices and snappy tunes.

Pd Heaton's supposedly Marxist lyrics were actually hilairiously all-purpose grumpiness, as in Adrian Mole's remark "I think I am becoming radical. I am against almost everything". Not that there isn't some subtlety there too. Lyrics that change direction in a pretty surprising way become a feature of Pd's work with The Beautiful South, but I love what happens here with "Sitting on a Fence". It begins with a bit of predictable finger-wagging, but then goes into an arresting first-person bit about falling apart and lying to yourself and it's not clear if we're hearing the internal monologue of the fence sitter or, more interestingly, the finger-wagger of the verses.

They also inaugurated the great, now lost, British tradition of performing on Top of the Pops in an anorak (see also Mondays, Roses, Charlatans, Oasis, Space, Lightning Seeds, Super Furry Animals, er, Beautiful South)

Interesting facts: Only one of the London 0 Hull 4 line-up actually come from Hull - ace sticksman Hugh Whittaker.
They often described themselves as the fourth best band in Hull - the others, in order, were The Gargoyles, the Red Guitars and 3-Action. ALL unclaimed.

My son is four ( 'and a half' he insists on adding). That the dame managed to catch the exact cadences and thought patterns of a four year old's speech - yet managed, in the midst of all the idyllic reverie, a knowing nod at a familial darkness lurking showed how deft a songwriter he was even at such a tender age. ('I wonder why my daddy cries and how I wish that I was nearly five.') Love the camp Kempisms in this vid.

Strange fact: well, what is it that people don't already know? I was very taken by a nugget recounted in the Bowie Black Book from the mid-80s: when the coke-addled Bowie was filming The Man Who fell to Earth, he insisted taking a trailer to new Mexico with his 'personal Library of 15000 books.'
Wow!, I thought..

YouTube please? :)

Very slightly bonkers but as great talent and great fun live;

If only real groups were like this.

Alternate Title (Randy Scouse Git). It's about the Beatles.

Big Sky, from The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society.

There is nothing else I wish to say. It's all there.

Such a diversity that I couldn't keep it to one clip:

(The Old Man's Back Again - Scott 4)

(Rosary - the legendary appearance on Later)

Three reasons - the voice obviously; the lyrical themes (The Old Man's back again isn't just a simple condemnation of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 68 - he sees things from the perspective of the Russian conscript); and the fact that his music never stands still.

The Jools clip gives you a bit of background on his career as an intro - what it doesn't show is that Jools is desperately filling as he waits for his director to tell him if Scott is going to appear or not, since his stagefright is notorious.

I've chosen this as it's the winner of a competition, held a couple of years ago, to create a video for the song.

It's creepy & ace & it's one of the 'Head's best songs. Hope you enjoy it.

Brett hurt his foot by kicking a full water bottle into the crowd at the Shepherds Bush empire on the A New Morning tour. He had to perform a number of subsequent shows on crutches if my memory serves. My sore shoulder, brought about by collision with said high velocity missile, went largely unreported.

glorious B-Sides are the way to go with Suede, so here we are

There is something spiritual about her music, and I love the heartfelt feeling of it. Somehow she ended up saddled with the reputation of being way out in the left field of jazz. I listen to her more than I listen to John, and I love him dearly too.

Any of her Impulse! albums are great. Here's the title track from Ptah The El Daoud

(part 1)

(part 2)

An art project which changed music as we know it, and they are the Official Music of Cycling. an interesting fact? Lots of English-speaking people think that Kraftwerk means something like 'Craft Work'. It actually means 'Power Station'...