Ten songs for today, old, new, and not quite so new…this is the way it flowed on the iPod at the gym today…hard to fault really and noth­ing to do with me….blame prov­i­dence or some­thing like that…

  1. Claude Von­stroke – Who’s Afraid of Detroit (Paul Wool­ford mix)…I have to admit I’ve had this for a month or three but not really lis­tened to it as it really got lost in a rush of new things around that time….which is sur­pris­ing because the orig­i­nal is such a big record for me. Dirty, punky, wob­bly, lay­ered techno that drags you around for over twelve min­utes tak­ing you on quite a jour­ney, espe­cially when the tread­mill is seem­ingly drag­ging you for­ward ever faster…which goes absolutely per­fectly with…
  2. Siouxsie & The Ban­shees – The Stair­case (mys­tery) (Poly­dor 1979)….an almost pro­to­typ­i­cal techno record in my ever so hum­ble opinion…the way the almost unreal elec­tric gui­tar slith­ers vio­lently from speaker to speaker, with the dou­ble hand­claps accen­tu­at­ing the col­li­sion is pure rave. It just needed a siren….
  3. The Ronettes – Par­adise (recorded 1965, released 1975)…one of a bunch of lost Spec­tor / Ronettes tunes that have turned up over the decades on var­i­ous col­lec­tions, this was orig­i­nally an unre­leased acetate, and fits squarely into the River Deep era PS sound (it was recorded shortly before that epic). Ronnie’s plain­tiff, entranc­ing I’ll wait for a day when he takes me to Par­adise is unfor­tu­nately ironic con­sid­er­ing the pain she was expe­ri­enc­ing in her mar­riage to Spec­tor, but nev­er­the­less absolutely dev­as­tat­ing (isn’t she always). What is less ironic is the later repeated phrase I’ll Die for Him…by all accounts she was lucky not to do so; luck­ier it seems than that poor girl forty odd years later. A genius Spec­tor might well be, and I absolutely crave his pro­duc­tions, but if it wasn’t for the lib­eral in me, I’d say fry the bastard….
  4. Metro Area – Soft Hoop (Env­i­ron 2002)…a record that evokes, more than any­thing else, the ghost of the late, very, very great Nu Groove label…a sim­ple groove; a very tight but tough snare; a sub­tle blue, under­stated per­cus­sive lead; a live bass player and the vague aura of NYC circa 1990…
  5. Iggy & The Stooges – Gimme Dan­ger (CBS 1973)…and that is noth­ing like this…I think Raw Power is Iggy’s least dan­ger­ous sound­ing record, at least until the bad Arista, and A&M ones a few years later. The snarls are all car­toon­ish, the threat so obvi­ously contrived…but, hell I love it, and my signed copy is a trea­sure. The cow­bells that open it are funky as phuck and I love the way it explodes half a minute later, although, unlike, say any­thing on Fun­house, it’s a per­fectly con­trolled explo­sion. This was Main­man after all…
  6. The Jam – Ghosts (Poly­dor 1980)….perhaps the pret­ti­est song ever recorded by Weller with The Jam, and from the won­der­ful, and under­rated The Gift, when it was scream­ingly obvi­ous that Weller had out­grown the band. Sadly, to my mind, despite an extended series of killer Style Coun­cil sin­gles, and a few tracks as a solo act, he never ful­filled the promise he showed on those last four Jam albums, and on tracks like this.
  7. Eddie Kendricks — Body Talk (Motown 1975)…not the Imag­i­na­tion song of the same name, although I love that, but the even bet­ter track from the ex–Temp­ta­tion’s album The Hit Man. I used to have this song going around in my head, not know­ing who it was, until my friend, Mur­ray Cam­mick put me right. Absolutely per­fect in both arrange­ment and performance…..I weaken at the part where Eddie’s voice rises to a falsetto on the third cho­rus, and falls into a loose scat…vocal genius…and then…
  8. Bobby Wom­ack — An Amer­i­can Dream (Bev­er­ley Glen 1984)….the first song to sam­ple MLK’s Dream speech..slow, sul­try and utterly gor­geous, with that tow­er­ing Wom­ack voice express­ing what is both a dis­arm­ing love song, and a work of pure opti­mism that never comes close to cloy­ing patri­o­tism. The Poets, both Vol­ume I & II were, and still are, huge records for me.
  9. Roxy Music -Three and Nine (Island 1974)…what per­plexes me about Roxy Music is how quickly and badly it all went wrong. The first four albums (this comes from the 4th) have vary­ing degrees of bril­liance about them. The cru­cial input they had in what was to dom­i­nate the rock’n’roll planet for the next two decades is indis­putable. From album six (the fifth had its moments, albeit few) it all turned increas­ingly to MOR mush. Three and Nine, on the other hand, is dis­arm­ingly charm­ing with­out the slight­ness of their lat­ter catalogue…it still car­ries the hint of deca­dence that their best records still evoke…..damn that sounds pre­ten­tious, but I don’t know another way to put it…
  10. Magik John­son – Scan­ning For Viruses (Claude Von­stroke mix) (Made to Play 2006)…and so we go full circle….I really like the low down grunty bits on this..pure, sim­ple but effec­tive dance­floor, but works well on a tread­mill, as I dis­cov­ered (now that sounds sad). Oh, and I really like Dick John­son’s radio show on George FM, on the rare occa­sions I get to hear it…

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