In case my first entry came across as a little too existential, or just directionless and annoying, I would like to assure my (so far purely theoretical) audience that there's more to my repertoire than cod-philosophy and vague ennui.
I also make mixtapes themed around Fruit.
1) Strawberry Swing - Frank Ocean
And kicking us off is a cover of one of Coldplay's better latter-day tracks (I imagine - I lost interest after the disappointing "X & Y", and now only ever overhear them on the radio or when they play the stadium next door to my house). Frank Ocean blows the original out of the water, by preserving the sugar-spun guitar parts and Graceland-esque rhythm, and simply by not being Chris Martin. Even the latter's unwanted appearance towards the end only serves to emphasise how much better a singer Ocean is, thus bolstering the cover's worth even as it nearly derails it completely. Not sure how this ties into the whole fruit theme beyond the title, and I'll be buggered if I know what a strawberry swing is (an All Bar One cocktail, perhaps?), but the smooth soul and concluding alarm clock sample make it a worthy opener to "Now That's What I Call Music About Fruit Vol. 1 (of 1)".
2) Lime Tree Arbour - Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds
Nick Cave appears to be in some sort of orchard in this low-key ballad, which isn't very Nick Cave of him. A boatman is having a go at him, and "a lone loon dives upon the water" as he tries gamely to chat up the girl he's with. The limes seem almost incidental. In fact, if I didn't know any better, I'd say that Nick Cave is just using the lime trees as window dressing for another heart-stopping vignette of bittersweet love and desire. It's shocking false advertising, but it's also a nice song and "Raspberry Beret" isn't available on Youtube, so in it goes at track number 2.
3) Lemon - U2
When God gave Bono lemons, he turned them into a seven-minute future-disco epic (and a 40-foot mirrorball). "She wore lemon", he coos in outrageous falsetto, at the height of his MacPhisto post-modernist bollocks (actually my favourite U2 era by some distance - I'll defend "Pop" to the death if need be). Brian Eno chimes in with something about moving pictures, and the Edge reminds us all that "midnight is where the day begins". Larry Mullen Jr. plays it cool from behind his drumkit. It's utterly fantastic. 4) Peach Plum Pear - Joanna Newsom
Three fruit for the price of one from famed East End market stall-holder Joanna Newsom. An abrupt about-turn from the cutting-edge Eurofunk of Zooropa, this song features just a run-of-the-mill antique harpsichord, hammered with merry abandon, and strident vocals which even the staunchest of Newsom-ites would concede are a little... eccentric. Still, it's a rousing little ditty, offering glimpses of the genius later to manifest itself on "Ys" and "Have One On Me", and it contains all the makings of a decent fruit salad. 5) Tangerine - Led Zeppelin
The band whose legacy lives on in the pun-tastic title of this very blog, Led Zeppelin were a very popular blues rock outfit from the late '70s (and also gave us "The Lemon Song"). Though they were known for their rock 'n roll lifestyle, thundering riffs and endless drum solos, Led Zep were often at their best when breaking out the acoustic guitars and getting all gooey on us. Case in point is "Tangerine", a lovely three-minute tune about lost love and citrus fruit, featuring a melodic solo that I never Jimmy Page had in him. There's more to this lot than just "Stairway" and indecent acts with mudsharks, you know. Plus, this song means I don't have to include any Tangerine Dream, for which we should all be grateful.
6) Step On - Happy Mondays
"You're twistin' my melon, man"
7) Strawberryfire - Apples in Stereo
Possibly the fruitiest song there is, "Strawberryfire" is by Apples in Stereo, and seems inspired by the Beatles' "Strawberry Fields Forever" (actually it's more in the "Rain"/"Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" mould, but that doesn't fit the narrative, damn it). A veritable farmer's market of produce all in one four-minute burst. It's also considerably more cheerful than the other "apple" songs I considered, including "Rotten Apples" by the Pumpkins and "Rotten Apple" by Alice in Chains, who should both lighten the hell up, frankly. This is meant to be an uplifting fruit compilation after all.
8) Coconut - Harry Nilsson
Unlike Nick Cave, Harry Nilsson isn't one to take limes for granted. Or coconuts for that matter. He built one of his best-known tracks around those two fruits (is coconut a fruit? It had better be), just the one chord and some silly voices - the rest is history, by way of Reservoir Dogs, which is where I first hear it. A brilliantly silly song which will stay attached to your head, facehugger-like, for days after you hear it.
9) Bowl of Oranges - Bright Eyes
Conor Oberst is another lime enthusiast, but for the sake of variety I've chosen another of his fruit-based works, and one of my favourites songs on "Lifted". I love the intricate wordplay of the lyrics and breezy simplicity of the folky backing, especially compared to some of the more arduous tracks surrounding it (having said that, I'd forgotten what a tune "Don't Know When But A Day Is Gonna Come" is...). "Our still lives posed / like a bowl of oranges / like a story told / by the fault lines and the soil": doesn't really mean much, doesn't even rhyme particularly well, but it's a great way to end a song.
10) Grapefruit Moon - Tom Waits
Tom Waits doesn't strike me as someone who eats as much fresh fruit as he should, but his Vitamin C loss is the music world's gain. He's seemingly well enough acquainted with the stuff to mention it in his lyrics, although again, I'm not entirely sure what a grapefruit moon is supposed to be. Still, it sounds good alongside lines like "Every time I hear that melody / Something breaks inside" - basically, it's early-period Tom doing what he does best and being all lovelorn and down on his luck in the coolest way possible. Honorable mentions:
Peaches En Regalia - Frank Zappa
Raspberry Beret - Prince
Strawberry Wine - Ryan Adams
Lemonworld - The National
Orange Appled - Cocteau Twins
Banana Co. - Radiohead
[So I've decided to start a blog - I would like to say this is due to an irrepressible urge to share my incisive wit and wisdom with the rest of the world, but if I'm honest it's mainly because I haven't got a lot on at the moment. I have, however, bothered to come up with an overarching format, or gimmick if you like, to keep things interesting and at least vaguely coherent. I am only equipped to talk about two things, music and myself (and restaurants, I suppose); bearing that in mind, I'm going to talk about myself, but dress it up as being about music. Each entry will be a ten-song themed mixtape, with accompanying Youtube clips and general rambling. Songs about tea, songs about Mao Zedong, bossanova songs, that sort of thing. Ten songs - no more, no less - because Ian Brown once said that's the best length for an album, and I base all my major life decisions on the words of Ian Brown. The plan is that it may just come across as trenchant, well-structured commentary that way. Stranger things have happened!]
Since this is the first entry, the logical theme is Beginnings, and beginning the mixtape about beginnings is...
1) Begin the Begin - REM
There are literally thousands of contenders for Side 1 Track 1 of this compilation - most bands usually stick their best song there, and a lot of them reference new beginnings, or fresh starts, or going back to the drawing board, because bands are lazy like that. I'm struggling not to immediately start referencing Nick Hornby here (like when I started doing a show on university radio and couldn't help but lapse into Alan Partridge impressions), but I always liked the bit in "High Fidelity" about top ten Side 1 Track 1's.
But that's another mixtape for another day; this one's about songs specifically relating to beginnings, and this one just edges it because the title uses the word twice in quick succession. Plus, it's one of those songs which just feel right in front and centre on an album, or concert - bristling guitar and wild organs, coupled with Michael Stipe suddenly ditching the cryptic mumbling of old to actually SING raucously about Myles Standish and how he has no rhyme for "begin". A worthwhile change, I'm sure you'll agree, as I now know all about Myles Standish, and have also been prompted to seek out the delightful "Begin the Beguine", which presumably inspired the song's title if nothing else.
2) Hello There - Cheap Trick
Big fan of instances where bands have written a song that's clearly designed solely to open their concerts, blow the audience away and make them look cool onstage. These tracks often only consist of one chord, so the guitarist can make devil horns and gurn like a maniac, but rudimentary songwriting can be overlooked if it succeeds in giving the crowd an adrenaline rush, like the Pavlovian dogs they are.
Cheap Trick have provided us with a prime exhibit (basically an extended "Hello [city where concert is taking place!"), as have the Rolling Stones and Spinal Tap, while the title track to Sgt. Pepper's offers a slightly more sophisticated twist on the standard - the Beatles having given up touring at this point, of course, only to bloody-mindedly recreate the live experience on their next record.
3) Genesis - Justice
While "Hello There" had but one humble and fairly realistic aim - to introduce Cheap Trick audiences to the notion of rocking, should they be that way inclined - "Genesis" aims to equate the start of Justice's debut album with the very creation of life, the universe and everything, using just the power of programmed beats and some distorted synths. It pretty much pulls it off too.
One of my fondest memories from Glastonbury was when they started testing out the speakers on the Other Stage one morning by blasting this out at full volume - among the mud-splattered falafel tents and the hordes of hungover unwashed, it genuinely sounded like the end of the world, or the beginning of a new one - a better one, where everyone smoked Gauloises while nonchalantly nodding along to electro.
4) December 4th - Jay Z
A rich and always-rewarding subgenre of our "Beginning" theme is the hip-hop origin story. Now I don't know much about hip-hop - just wait 'til my hip-hop themed mixtape for definitive proof, or visit "Stuff White People Like" now and save yourself the wait - but I'm always fascinated by musician's accounts of how they got started, even/especially if it's mostly made up, like Robert Johnson or Drake. And the lives of hip hop artists tend to be slightly more interesting to listen to than, say, Alex Turner's or Tom Petty's. Kanye West's "Last Call" is a good example; "The Fresh Prince of Bel Air", less so.
"December 4th" is such a detailed account of Jay Z's first steps, literally, that his mum guest-stars in between verses, recounting his birth, his childhood, his first boom box etc., while Hov goes on about his parents conceiving him under a sycamore tree (which, somehow, made him "a more sicker MC"). It's overblown, it's entirely too much information and I think at one point it samples Gladiator. "Swann's Way" to the Black Album's "In Search of Lost Time", if you will.
5) First Watch - King Creosote & Jon Hopkins
A lull in proceedings (I have a coherent, flowing mix to assemble after all, amid all this philosophising and general faffing about), and proof, lest we forget, that beginnings don't have to involve bombast, braggadocio, sturm or indeed drang. In fact, it's only in music (and major sporting events) that beginnings usually equate to gratuitous, over-the-top spectacle and blaring sax solos. In everyday life, most beginnings involve not being altogether sure what's going on, falling out of bed and staggering to the local greasy spoon in search of breakfast. Which is exactly what King Creosote and Jon Hopkins have managed to capture in two and a half minutes of sparse musique concrète, bless them.
Contrary to everything that's come before, I have a lot of time for songs - and album openers in particular - that take their time to establish a mood without really doing much, before building to a heart-stopping crescendo without you noticing (like "I Am Trying To Break Your Heart"), or not, and leaving the dynamics shift to the next track (like Guillemots' "Little Bear"). I also like songs based around samples of Scottish people being lovely to each other, although only this one springs to mind really (the Proclaimers don't count).
6) Afraid of Nothing - Sharon van Etten
Beginnings can be fairly scary too; fear of the unknown and all that. Sharon van Etten knows what I'm talking about; kicking off her latest, and typically wonderful new album with a stately torch song about facing up to harsh realities ("I can't wait 'til we're afraid of nothing / I can't wait 'til we hide from nothing"), or at least getting someone else to do it for you ("I need you to be afraid of nothing").
The music follows suit, switching things up when the drums come in, revealing a hitherto unsuspected time signature and tempo when you least expect it. The pendulum swings, the veils keep falling away, the tension ratchets up and dissipates into a fine mist or fog. And ain't that just like real life? (No, really, is it? I'm genuinely asking). 7) Start Again - Freddy Powys
This is one of my songs, but don't worry, I'm not going to be bombarding you with these on a regular basis (unless they prove to be really popular, in which case, who am I to deny the public what they want?). This one just happens to fit the bill for this mix, what with being about starting again - my "Just Like Starting Over", if you like, only definitely not written about Yoko Ono.
I'd like to say I wrote this when leaving university for the real world, as it would fit the theme and lyrics quite neatly, but I don't remember when it actually was, to be honest. My lyrics tend to just be a hodgepodge of phrases from various sources anyway, strung together just coherently enough to write a song around. But it does make for quite a handy set-opener (the old one-chord trick again, you see. No devil horns though), and I used to have a rather grand version of it kicking off Disc 2 of my debut double-album, following a particularly apocalyptic closer on Disc 1. Even if I had to pad the rest of Disc 2 with utter filler just to back up this conceptual gimmick. 8) New Day Rising - Husker Du
In which Husker Du posit that the best reaction to beginnings, with all their uncertainties, doubts and tricky track-sequencing issues, is to simply yell the same stock phrase over and over again, backed by buzzsaw guitars and sugar-rush drums, until you don't know who you are or what you're doing anymore. Listening to this glorious blast, opening the album of the same name, who would dare doubt them? They sound like they would kill you if you did, for a start.
Maybe the only way to confront new situations is to confront them head on, with unwavering singularity of purpose and conviction, and worry about the fall-out later. At least I think that's what Bob mould is trying to say, even though to the untrained eye he's just shouting "NEW DAY RISING" until his head explodes. 9) Stormy Clouds - The Verve
But then doubt creeps in; as is doubt's wont. "Stormy clouds / and new horizons" sings Richard Ashcroft, summing up the hesitancy of human nature in the face of unfamiliarity, or maybe just singing half-arsed platitudes over Richard McCabe's undulating guitar lines, depending on how generous you're feeling. "A Storm In Heaven"'s opener, "A New Decade" (perhaps the more obvious choice here) always sounded like "And you decayed" to me for years before the penny dropped. What does this mean? Does it matter?
Why am I asking you?
10) A New Career In A New Town - David Bowie
So what have we learned? Beginnings can be terrifying, exhilarating, confusing, low-key, high-key, medium-key, or other. Sometimes they're not even beginnings - this instrumental (possibly my favourite instrumental? That's a big call and I'd have to get back to you on that) appears somewhere on Side 2 of "Low" and doesn't even have any words beyond the title to suggest its subject matter. But you can sense Bowie's first hesitant steps in the seedy underbelly of Berlin from the keening harmonica and awkward bassline alone, before things go really off the deep end with "Warszawa"and its ilk. The title is a bit of a giveaway too.
Not to get all meta on you, but this blog is now in a similar position - a new beginning filled with hopes and dreams and uncertainty. If it were an animal, it would be one of those newborn foals you see sometimes, covered in afterbirth and trying to get the hang of its own legs. I don't really know where I'm going with it, or whether the theme thing will stick around, or what my next entry could possibly be about. I just fancied having a bit of a write. But if this blog had a theme song, I'd like to think it would be "A New Career in a New Town", harmonicas and all.
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