Loved Tracks

I was recently asked to provide a list of 6 of my favourite songs of all time for a PR thing with STP, and the following are my choices along with explanations. It's very hard to narrow down to just 6 songs, I think I'd like to say that these are all up there but there are so many others that deserve to be mentioned, its impossible to name them all! Here we go anyway.

1. December Will Be Magic Again - Kate Bush

I love Kate Bush, she may in fact be my all time favourite recording artist. I also randomly live two roads away from where she grew up so I feel especially close to her.

This particular track was always one of those songs I'd hear when I was kid, more often than not at Christmas and I'd wonder what the hell it was. It didn't really sound like a Christmas track, in fact it didn't really sound like any kind of track I’d ever heard before, when I eventually worked out it was wonderful Kate I was onto the rest of her stuff like a mad ma

n. She is insane but amazing all at the same time. I have to admit some of her music is plain awful but at its best she scales heights no other artist has ever come close to.

The chord changes are typically strange and unusual making the song sound weird and ethereal, the instruments and sounds she uses conjure up a magical backdrop on which she warbles dramatically floaty yet dynamic and indeed epic vocals. I think its one of the most amazing things you can ever allow your ears to hear. The track is bonkers, she's crackers and I love them both for it.

Favourite lyric - "Come to sparkle the dark up" we reference this line in 'The Shining'. Not sure if Dan intended to, but I love that its in there.

2. Ashes to Ashes - David Bowie

David Bowie is another of my all time greatest artists and he also holds my personal ‘best gig ever’ trophy. I saw him live at Glastonbury in 2000 when he played all his singles from Space Oddity to I'm Afraid of Americans straight through one after the other. It was absolutely spell binding. I remember him appearing on stage wearing this white/gold

long jacket, it felt like the king of all the world had just arrived and everyone was just speechless and in awe of what was about to happen. It was tremendous in every sense of the word. Ashes to ashes is my joint favourite Bowie track along with Lets Dance because for some reason they just connect with me in a way that no other songs do. Again, this one is a bit of a weird sounding offering with its jerky bass, weird piano effect and guitar stabs making it the most exciting start to a track you can ever hope to hear. And then the whole Major Tom thing kicks in and you feel like you’re in Bowie heaven. It’s another completely crazy track. Chord changes just feel so right and every time I hear it makes hairs stand up on the back of my neck. Probably my fave song to get ready to go out to, it seems to sound even better when you've had a beer or two. I love it.

Favourite lyric - "I'm happy, hope your happy too".

3. Vampire Forest Fire (live KCRW radio version) - The Arcade Fire

Arcade Fire are my favourite band of recent years. I discov

ered them when a friend of mine (Crazy Ian for Cupertino in California) sent me a package with Funeral and an Eagles of Death Metal album in, the latter didn't get a look in after I'd heard the Arcade Fire's debut. I don't think I had ever been more astonished by a record on a first listen before, it was and is sublime in every way. I'd never heard violins used to such dramatic effect in a pop record. Magic.

Vampire Forest Fire is a track that was released on their first EP, I was sent this version by another friend in the States and I fell in love with it instantly. Its melancholic, optimistic, crushing and uplifting all at the same time. How can he be a Vampire in a forest fire? I don't get it but I love it. I love the Arcade fire and I cannot wait to hear some new material.

Favourite lyric "If I let where I'm from burn, I can never return".

4. Intro medley to San Quentin concert (Big River/I Still Miss Someone/Wreck Of The Old 97)- Johnny Cash

This is a bit more simple; my girlfriend bought me the San Quentin album on Valentines Day of the first year we met. And it brings back all those memories of our honeymoon period and what we used to do, where we used to live all that good stuff but it’s also more than that. Listening to this record on virtual repeat for a year made me fall in love with rockabilly guitar and Travis picking which is prevalent on every single track of the album, I think its Carl Perkins or one of the Tennessee Three (I should really know that!) I remember first sitting down to try and replicate the technique on my guitar and failing miserably. It took me a whole lot of practice to master but its one of my favourite ways of playing the guitar these days. On 'Wreck of the old 97', it actually sounds like the picking and of course the magnificent solo, is the train itself screaming down the tracks towards its impending doom! Woo woo!!! Fantastic.

Favorite lyric "Hello, I'm Johnny Cash, alright". The man's a flippin genius.

5. Sealed With A Kiss - Brian Hyland

This song sounds so tragically sad, from the picky notes of the intro to the more optimistic end its heartbreak in a song. It’s not about breaking up of course, but more about longing. I feel like I've been through it and felt exactly what this song is trying to put into sounds and my God it does it perfectly! The chord changes from major to minor, the modulation half way through, mountains of reverb on the main vocals and close harmonies just send this track straight to the win department in my brain. This is a master-class in song writing and I tip my hat to it.

Favourite lyric "let us make a pledge to meet in September". Heart wrenching.

6. FBI - The Shadows

FBI is one of those tunes you hear as a guitarist and always want to play live, but you never get the chance. It puts a smile on my face every time I hear it, the melody is phenomenal and just the atmosphere of the track makes my imagination explode with images of men in suits with cars and guns. It just works. The way it resolves after every time the main tune comes to an end is scintillating. It's one of the coolest sounding pieces of instrumental guitar music you will ever hear. The Shadows are fantastic.

No lyrics.

Into Air

Into Air was the first track by The Alps to gain any attention in the UK. After not knowing what the hell we should sound like for a year or two and playing a bunch of Danny's old songs which were borrowed from his previous band, we started hitting something that felt better than anything else we'd cobbled together before. This was the first real Alps song written and performed by the core line up ever to see the light of day as a recorded track.

We submitted an mp3 to Claire Sturgess on Xfm unsigned and to our delight it won unsigned band of the week which in turn kicked everything off for us and led to management, a small indie record deal and all the rest of it. I remember being so amazingly excited when it was on the radio for the first time. We got everyone to ring in and vote for us, fun times. I think I was sat behind my desk back at Capcom when they played the track for the second time one Friday afternoon. I was so thrilled.

Strangely, we dropped the song from our live set shortly after this point at the recommendation of various A&R types that were sniffing around. I remember some dude from a major coming to our practice room and telling us how much he loved our music, the only thing stopping him from offering us a deal was that he thought none of our songs had real choruses! He told us to give him a shout back when we'd written some proper songs. What rot.

Into Air was the first track on which I played both guitar and keys live, that was hard let me tell you. I was pretty ropey on both guitar and keys in those days having spent the previous 7 years playing Tenor Sax, so it was a tricky task, but it was also awesome fun and it sounded great. The song itself is torn between a stomper and a ballad as you will hear. The verse is raucous with bendy guitar lines and ripping vocals but the bridge/chorus is etherial and light... airy in fact. You can choose whichever bit you fancy as the chorus, I don't think it matters.

I think this track is a real marvel. True it doesn't posses an epic chorus but this is more than made up for in the other sections. Or maybe I just like it and the A&R guy was right. Whatever, it never got its proper shot so I thought I'd post it here as the first track of 10 that never saw the light of day. I'll be intermittently posting about the rest as the mood takes me. Watch this space for more soon.

Into Air by elusivemusic

This is me at what I think is most likely The Metro, probably playing Into Air whilst fighting with a guitar, organ, piano and microphone. Glorious days. But I don't miss carrying all that crap around. My amp was flippin heavy too. No wonder I was such a skinny bugger! I think I maybe wearing flared jeans and Adidas trainers...

Life under Mars

Did you see President Obama's announcement regarding new manned Mars missions by 2030 this morning? What's the deal? He tooketh our moon landings scheduled for the 2020's away and now he giveth back Mars missions by 2030's? It’s not enough! It's too long to wait and I could be flippin dead by then.

Compounding my ongoing disappointment with the current Nasa space program is the fact that they are still talking about this rubbish life raft technology idea. Starting from the International Space Station they'll fire a capsule off to sail the solar winds until it reaches Mars… How incredibly dull. And the BBC make it even worse by posting a picture of the most boring looking space craft you've ever seen.

Why can't they design something new that would capture everyone's imagination? They’ve built a stealth bomber yet still they still persist in designing new crafts to look like something out of the 1960’s. Why? I have decided its time we should have a word with the estate of Gene Roddenbury and borrow the specs for the Starship Enterprise. You can't beat that design. It just works on so many levels. And its got warp engines so we could be there in a few seconds...

1960's Tin can with sails (The Orion Space craft)

Starship Enterprise

Which one would you rather go into deep space with?

But seriously, if you could build something that didn't look like an escape pod from star wars with a couple of sails cellotaped on it everyone would be properly excited. Or I would anyway. And we don't want to wait. I want to see a man on the moon asap. Nothing brings the world together like a bit of space action. Plus we could actually make some astonishing discoveries impossible to achieve from orbit.

Nasa need to get on with it and invent some kind of cold fusion hyper drive. Surely it can't be that difficult? Do they realise we're in the 21st century now? I'm pretty sure I'm supposed to have a hover board and a flying car. Instead i've got an Xbox 360 and a Volvo that looks like a square boat (See below).

Flying Car

My Volvo

Bah. Why can't they just get on with it? Plus I reckon they will definitely find life on Mars under the surface. So they should bring that little landing mission forwards too. They've found life on earth that doesn't need oxygen and this only provides more evidence that the clouds of methane emanating from below the surface of the red planet are probably swarms of algae around underground hot vents. Or in a better scenario it might be an underground city of methane breathing super men. How cool would that be?

Ok this has been exceedingly geeky. This blog is supposed to be about music and other fun stuff. But I do love space and physics so I may occasionally express my ongoing disgust at the lack of progress being made at the final frontier of human exploration.

I feel for the likes of Lovell, Armstrong and Cernan and if I feel like this imagine how disappointed they must be. Poor buggers. Come on Major-General Bolden and Mr. Obama, please lets go back to the moon. I’m bored of firing random stuff into it. Lets go make some real discoveries.

Ta,

Mule x

I See The Moon

A dear old friend who recently got back in touch after a 10 year gap sent me an email the other day which simply read, "here's a thing"... And a thing it was. Not sure what anyone else might make of this old record but I remember my Nan singing it to me and it's so ridiculously marvellous that I thought I might share it with you. Enjoy...

The Mule?

So why the Mule I hear you cry? Well, it's a short story.

Once upon a time I went to a university called Rose Bruford which is actually a school for actors and the like. I joined shortly after they had incorporated a music technology course into their list of thespian disciplines much to the disgust of the acting students and staff. We were stealing their budget and they didn't like it. I was in the second year of its existence and I had a wonderful time accruing massive student debts, playing lots of music and generally avoiding going to lectures. The larks were seemingly endless.

In that time I met a man with floppy hair from Bridlington called Dan. I sat next to him on the first ever day, when we signed up at Lamorby Park campus in Sidcup. I immediately noticed he was possibly weirder than even myself. And you have to consider, I was wearing bell bottom flares in combo with a skin tight stripy top from Dorothy Perkins and had long hair that I could easily grab hold of by simply putting a hand around my back. I must have been a real fright.

However so was he. Anyway I digress. After about a year of working together on various projects he started calling me Mule, derived from the second half of Samuel, clever eh? Not really. I hated it. However, everyone started using the bastard and I became affectionately known as 'The Mule' to all my closest friends.

So now you know.

That's me, I used to look like this all the time. Seriously, what was I thinking? I have no excuse.

Below is a picture of Dan how he looked when I first met him. I'm betting 20 pence he'll make me take it down when he sees it... He never used to like having his photo taken, the big hand is coming towards the camera in an attempt to make me stop. Too slow buddy.