Japanese Music I Bought in November 2014

In 2006, pop-rock group The Royal Guardsmen released Snoopy vs. Osama, 40 long years after their original hit, Snoopy vs. the Red Baron.  They didn't trouble to explain to everyone what they had been doing in the meantime, and I am no different. "Snoopy vs. Osama" was just what America needed in 2006 and this post about some records I bought from a day and a half digging in Tokyo last year is exactly what America needs right now.

 

Go ahead, press Play. You are in for a real treat.

I used to live in Japan but never got a lot of Japanese language records because:
a) I knew nothing, and;
b) a lot of Japanese record stores don't let you listen before you buy, and;
c) I had no damn money in the first place.

Nowadays we have YouTube, so with a couple of hours homework I was able to figure a few names to look out for and this mix is the result of me splashing my yens around Yokohama, Shibuya and Ikebukuro.

I only had about a dozen records to work with but I took a stab at making it into a proper mix anyway. Monkey apologizes for the bizarre transition into his theme song.

What a cocky, saucy monkey this one is!

Tracklist:
Tatsuro Yamashita - Merry-Go-Round (1983)
Tatsuro Yamashita - Love Talkin' (1982)
Toshiki Kadomatsu - Take Me Away (1983)
Godiego - Monkey Magic (1978)
Pedro and Capricious - Carnival (1972)
Hiromi Iwasaki - Osharena Kanjyo (1976)
Hiromi Iwasaki - Kiss Again (1980)
Sandii - Zoot Kook (1980)
Kimiko Kasai - Use Me (1975)
Tatsuro Yamashita - Touch Me Lightly (1979)



Interludes and drops are taken from these two albums:

That's all, seeya next time!

Farewell from "Pedro and Capricious"!

 

Headband, "The Laws Must Change" (1971) - EDIT

Okay well I guess I missed NZ Music Month 2011 (AKA "May") by about a hundred and thirty years, but I've had this one waiting in the wings for a while so I figured I better just fire it out there before New Zealand itself finally succumbs to entropy.

Headband were an Auckland-based group that basically started out as a John Mayall tribute band playing in a club down on Durham Lane where I think there is a noodle house now. Like many bands in the '70s, on their first album they found themselves trying to spread twenty minutes worth of songs over forty minutes worth of plastic. To their credit, rather than throwing a perfunctory ten minute drum solo into their least favourite song, they went back to their roots and jammed out a cover of John Mayall's ode to politely-achieved marijuana reform: "The Laws Must Change"

As a live recording, this has a lot more slap to it than everything else on the album and is considerably more energetic than the original (albeit sloppier I'll confess). I've edited out eleven minutes of soloing to get it down to just the "song part" and Dick Hopp's incredible flute solo. Enjoy.



Headband - The Laws Must Change (edit) by doggziller

Bill Summers & Summers Heat, "Jam the Box" (1981)

I love hand-drawn album covers. Homeboy definitely got his roller-ruler out for this one.

For track 1 side 1, percussionist Bill Summers and his dream team the "Summers Heat" attempt to lay out a manifesto for the album, first addressing the question of "what is the box?" before proceeding to "jam" said box for the remainder of the LP. Naturally, this is accomplished over a crunchy drum machine beat and wonderfully nasty synth bass.

On the other hand, their thesis is not expressed with a great deal of conceptual rigour:

We gave you a beat, dance and call it what you want to

La la la la, this is what you're dancing to

It does have a name, after all

It's The Box, that is what we call it

(chorus)

We call it The Box,

Makes you jump right out your socks

Don't stop

We've got a lot to saaaaaay

Summer Heat, if it takes you eight lines to inform me that I'm dancing to a box, I'm not surprised you got a lot to say.

Bill Summers And Summers Heat - We Call It The Box by doggziller

This track is a heater but it does get a bit repetitive and I would normally mix out half-way. So if you get bored, do make sure you fast forward to the five-minute mark where Bill Summers at last gets down to brass tacks and defines the meaning of "the box".

I guess it's some kind of outer-space box? Bill doesn't explain it all that clearly, really.

Sonik Omi, "Sawan Bhadon" OST (1970)

As the lady waits without enthusiasm, the gentleman, struggling against the after-effects
of a stroke, attempts to grab her tit.

Back there in the early '00s a fad sprung up for Bollywood soundtracks among record collectors with an ear for groove. I still remember being stunned the first time I listened to a Bollywood mix put together by this guy (who hasn't updated his site since 2003 I note). I had to stream it with RealAudio 'cos those were the times and I was gob-smacked by the incredible eclecticism and exuberance of the music from composer/arrangers like RD Burman and the brothers Kalyanji Anandji. (Later, when I actually got my hands on some vinyl, I was gobsmacked again to realize that the audio quality was exactly as bad as that turn-of-the-century RealAudio stream, but I can live with that)

One of the nicer things about collecting Bollywood soundtracks is that they're actually not that "rare" - these are mainstream films for one of the world's largest populations after all - so getting hold of the heaters isn't as hard as you might expect, though during the peak of the fad e-bay prices for some soundtracks did get pretty silly. When Method Man and Busta Rhymes spat over "Dum Maro Dum", us diggers thought we would be riding this Bollywood shit all the way to the Grammys -  but even in nerd circles, fashion is fickle and soon enough attention moved on to the likes of Turkish psych-rock, Welsh acid-folk and harmonica music recorded by meteorite-riding bacteria that scientists believe may hold the key to understanding the origins of life on earth.


Sonik Omi - "Ankhen Meri Maikhana" by doggziller

Ah my darling, I tire of putting our faces real close but never actually kissing.
Let us consummate our love at last, by dancing together in front of a spurting fountain! 

Bollywood-style vocals are maybe an acquired taste for newbies - I built up an appreciation over long exposure when I owned a used car that had a radio locked on Hindi AM radio (also that car had but the one tape in it, which was Kool G Rap and Polo "Live and Let Die" - formative years for Yours Truly!)

The singer is of course Asha Boshle, because it is always Asha Boshle. I'm going to make up a statistic which is probably true - Asha does lead female vocals on 99% of all Bollywood songs from 1970-1990, which is also 14% of all songs, ever. She's now a granny and doesn't record quite so often - maybe only 50% of all Bollywood releases - but she still makes time to pop up in tracks like this one in which she displays a matronly concern for Aussie fast bowler Brett Lee's love life (shame for Brett that he was just a couple of years too early for AutoTune by the way - ah-cha!)

Finally, because we live in the Age of Wonders, you can also watch the pretty amazing scene that this song is used in:

Elvis Presley, "Change of Habit" (1969)

This is the title track from Elvis' last movie, in which he plays an "idealistic ghetto doctor" who unwittingly employs three undercover nuns and, in the original draft of the script, attempts to enslave them Enter the Dragon style with daily doses of methadone-laced chitlins (hence "Change of Habit" - the scriptwriter was furious after the studio removed the drug-slavery sub-plot to achieve a general audience certificate, stating it had "ruined a pun that had undoubtedly been the highest achievement of my career").

Like all successful pop artists, Elvis moved with the times and this track is very much on the vibe of '69, a surprisingly tough-sounding effort from normally countrified backing band the Jordanaires, with fuzzed-out bass and frenetic drums hit hard to tape and bursting almost obnoxiously out of the left channel.

Elvis Presley - Change of Habit by doggziller

By extension, I suppose had Elvis lived to sip our modern air he would probably be doing weird remakes where Justin Bieber is skate-boarding around the city and when he looks up at a billboard, old-ass Elvis is inside the billboard, shuffling around singing an Autotuned version of "Suspicious Minds" and then there's a rap verse. The Reaper takes each at his appointed time and though the King suffered the small embarrassment of gasping his last upon the toilet he was perhaps spared the greater indignity of living on to suffer celebrity in the 21st Century.

He also missed the corny and overdone 2003 remix of "Rubberneckin'", another song from the Change of Habit soundtrack - I like to imagine that a surviving Elvis might've been grumpy enough not to authorize this but then again, it did make a lot of money and a guy who shoots televisions always needs some spare change.

The entire film is up on YouTube - I gave up watching shortly after Elvis mistakenly assumed the nuns all wanted illegal abortions and then said some pretty marginal stuff about rape, but I did stick it out long enough to witness Elvis and his apartment full of inauthentically "ghetto" buddies somehow perform "Rubberneckin'" on three acoustic guitars and a tambourine.

Merryweather and Carey, "Five Days on the Trail" (1971)

Neil Merryweather and Lynn Carey shall live long in my heart for releasing this album containing the absolutely incandescent slab of treacle-thick fugitive blues that is "Five Days on the Trail", a song that damn near breaks my neck any time I drop a needle on it:

Merryweather & Carey - Five Days On The Trail by doggziller

Merryweather and Carey have both had long and varied careers in music (mostly independent of one another, though they were apparently lovers when this album was released) - and with more than a few brushes against  giants of popular culture. For instance, one of Neil Merryweather's earlier bands, the Mynah Birds, was fronted by a young Rick James (not sounding much like his Cold-Blooded era self back in the mid-60s).

Lynn Carey belted out vocals for fictional group "The Carrie Nations" in the Russ Meyer/Roger Ebert collaboration Beyond the Valley of the Dolls - very loosely dubbed over actress Dolly Read's lip-syncing (Roger Ebert - these days notorious for his endorsement of 1997 Jamie Foxx vehicle "Booty Call" - would later claim this and all other flaws in the film were intended for comic effect).



Although Russ Meyer evidently considered her "too flat-chested" for the silver screen, Lynn Carey nevertheless appeared in Penthouse a couple of years later to promote her and Merryweather's new band Mama Lion (a band most famous for a minor scandal surrounding the cover of its first album - Lynn seemingly not especially shy at this point in her life)

A number of young men were to profess a keen interest in Isaac Asimov's article on immortality.

Penthouse December 1972 is also notable for containing "Xaviera Hollander's first advice column", which was to run for about 35 years. Xaviera will of course be familiar to you as the author of the best-selling saxophone sex mystery, Yours Fatally!

Oh Fausto! Your legacy lives on.

Song Chang Sik, S/T (1976)

I'm always wide open to foreign-language LPs, possibly because the capability to understand the lyrics of most songs often reveals how silly they are. I was pleasantly surprised to discover a couple of heaters on this suspiciously weepy looking album from South Korea.

The "sad clown" outfit was nearly a deal-breaker.

Production and mixing is a bit ropey but the bass at least sounds thick and that first moment after the "Slow Jam" intro when your boy's voice floats in is just haunting. Some nice progressive elements pop out of left field on these tunes also with unexpected synthesizer chirps, fuzz guitar and flute soloing all thrown into the mix.

Song Chang Sik by doggziller

I have no idea what the real names of these tracks are I'm afraid nor any clue to the content, but given that South Korea was under military rule at this time I like to imagine these songs circumspectly criticise the regime  through allegorical ballads about the shy, pretty girl-next-door being curb-stomped by riot police.

Silvio and Fausto

Been a bit lax with updating of late I confess, for those occasional readers who don't know me personally, I should explain that much of my time has been consumed by moving house and also organizing my impending wedding... such time available to me has been spent yelling at the ducks on my lawn.

(Turns out shrieking "DON'T YOU DARE SNEAK OUT YOUR BIRD TURD UPON MY LAWN YOU CRETINOUS MALLARD" tends to have the opposite than intended effect - more efficacious: sidling up to whisper the scientific name "Anas platyrhynchos" in their stupid little lizard-hole ears, they pucker right up and they don't come back)

So anyway after Silvio Berluscone's narrow victory in a confidence vote of the Italian parliament last week I had planned to photoshop a picture of him being orbited by a cyclone of Fausto Papetti album covers as a mildly entertaining and semi-racist salute to Italian lechery, but I couldn't get it looking right.

You escape the skewers of my satire for now, Mr Berluscone!

The other problem is that the only Fausto Papetti LP I actually own has just a dumb old saxophone on the cover:

Wah wah wah wah...

Fausto founded his very career on exploiting every permutation of the sax/sex pun to its outermost limit, whatever drove him to sign off on such a bland and bosom-less cover I do not know. Or indeed this one:

Everyone's tired of these nude models. I think the public really just wants to see my face at last.

The "A Saxy Portrait" album itself is nothing special but it does have one track that in the hey-day of my record collecting fever (the early '00s) would have been described as having a "DOPE LIBRARY-TYPE SOUND" and also containing "ILL STABS AND LOOPS".

Fausto Papetti - White Lady by doggziller

I welcome links to your favourite Fausto cover in the comments.

I'm Not Joking About These Albums With Big Shoes On The Cover

Look at this mess.

Just dreadful!

Jump, S/T (early '70s?)

This is one of those albums that winds up in the dollar bin because, in all honesty, ain't nobody want to buy an album with a big old shoe on the cover.

BUT WAIT A MOMENT MY CHILD, WHAT'S THIS???

Why, it's the four disembodied heads of  "Jump", flying out of the shoe on a rainbow!

This catastrophic design decision is probably the reason why an allmusic.com search for Jump contains no mention of this band whatsoever (and instead reads like a team of brain-stormers with lexical constipation were trying to come up with the name for a Christian music aerobics festival).

My initial guess was the the long-hair rockers from Jump never saw this cover until it was too late, and that shortly after they emerged stinking from the studio, someone in the Janus label art department was sent home bloody-faced and weeping to their family. But then I noticed a detail in this posse shot:

Jump: just a fun bunch of guys.

LOOK CLOSER AT THE FEETS

Digitally enhanced image.

Yep, I do believe that's lead guitarist Dennis Tracy sporting the ever-so-distinctive shoe from the cover, and its twin. I think "Jump" were doomed from the first - just imagine if the cover for "Appetite for Destruction" featured Axl Rose's head flying out of one of his nasty old Chuck Taylors and ask yourself whether you'd know the name "Guns'n'Roses" today.

(You would not).

As this is ostensibly a music blog and not a dang old design blog, I should point out that the quality of music on this LP is far better than that ghastly glam-rock-looking foot apparatus would suggest - my fave on here is "Bank of Love", which is about one time when a lowly teller from the Bank of  Love decided to rob the Bank of Love (OMG alert!)

Jump - Bank of Love by doggziller

Vanity 6, "If A Girl Answers (Don't Hang Up)" (1982)

The main thing to understand about Prince is that he is very great, amazing, the best.

Back in the '80s, music was just foaming up out of Prince, it couldn't be checked. If he was down at the dry-cleaners on a Thursday morning having his lavender banana sling cleaned and pressed in time for the weekend, and he started drumming his fingers on the counter while he waited for fifteen seconds, by the time he pulled up the purple Honda 400A into the big driveway at Paisley Park he would have that shit worked up into a dancefloor banger, then lay down and mix all the tracks before lunch and just turf the master tapes atop a huge pile on the back lawn. Followed by an entire afternoon of sex, topped off with coconut rum mojitos by the pool at sundown. 

Warner Brothers weren't trying to release nine Prince albums every weekend, so the man generally had a few side projects on the go under the pseudonym "Jamie Starr", just dashing off classics like 777-9311 for The Time. Reportedly Prince not only composed and produced this tune but laid down all the tracks except Morris Day's lead vocal and Jesse Johnson's guitar solo - not that they couldn't have played it themselves, the band having been put together by Prince primarily so that he could go on tour with a support act that was capable of competently playing the songs that he wrote for them (you get the sense that there's not really any such thing as "collaborating with Prince").

Pretty sure Prince drew this too.

Today's track is from another Prince side-project, "Vanity 6"... this LP includes the excellent "Nasty Girl" but I'm featuring the little-heard "When A Girl Answers (Don't Hang Up)", built around an entertaining call-and-response quasi-rap in which a couple of "party girls" bitch each other out over the phone - save that one of the "girls" is transparently Prince just affecting a sassy voice. Oh Prince, you delightful little faun!

Vanity 6 - If A Girl Answers (Don't Hang Up) by doggziller

Sarolta Zalatnay, "Zalatnay" (1971)

Eerily enough this is the exact look that most women will give any time I start to explain about records.

I'm back from my travels and, courtesy of a record store in Budapest that was savvy enough to install a diorama in one of the main subway stations, I was able to smuggle a few of Hungary's national treasures away with me.

This pile of trash is as the most beautiful ikebana to a dude like me. 

I ventured out to this place on my last day in town (getting drenched by the rain in the process), and quickly discovered something astonishing - Hungarian records are not rare in Hungary. Moreover, this place had a decent selection of records from the whole Eastern Bloc and, heaven of heavens, actually allowed the prospective buyer to listen to stuff (in my experience so far this is rare outside NZ - in London, that great Sodom of a town, stores don't even keep the records inside the sleeves, you just have to flip through all these flopsy old empty sleeves, the digging equivalent of having your palm tickled during a hand-shake). I could've easily used another day in Budapest just to go through this place properly - I still have this itchy feeling at the base of my skull like I ought to drop in there again later this week, (despite hundreds of dollars in air fares and hours of travel now being in the way).

I didn't actually expect to have access to a trove of carefully sorted and reasonably priced Hungarian heaters so I felt a bit short on homework - however I did recognize the name Sarolta Zalatnay from some recent exposure in compilations and re-issues.

Zalatnay Sarolta, "Zalatnay" (1971) by doggziller

"Késő Esti Órán" is probably the standout track on the album although it is marred by some shockingly ill-advised backing vocals (SERIOUSLY what is going on with the guy shrieking in at 2:24, was he a commissar's nephew and the engineer didn't feel safe muting him or what). "Hiszed-e Még?" is perhaps less catchy but on the other hand your ears don't have to dodge anything and you get not one but two fine Hammond solos for your trouble.

Listening in the shop, when the needle dropped on "Késő Esti Órán"and I first heard that riff kick in I had a sudden urge to try to ingratiate myself with the taciturn fellow in charge of the place. I took the headphones off and announced "ALL THIS MUSIC IS REALLY GOOD!" to which he flatly replied "yes" without glancing up from his game of Minesweeper (put a Hungarian behind a counter and they seem to don a nigh-impenetrable armour of scorn).

This wasn't all misplaced flattery on my part however as the hit rate seems to be very high among Hungarian 70s music, in the weeks ahead I will doubtless write up a couple more of my Budapest finds in between the backlog of other tracks I have earmarked for attention.

The English leg of my trip also resulted in a few finds, mainly fairly well known 80s dancefloor cuts that I was missing (since I couldn't discover anything by listening) - to which, I should acknowledge, I am indebted to the help of reader Dom of Team Yours! who was amazingly kind enough to write up a guide to London record stores for me, what a real dude.

Team Yours! receives the 2010 Cowabunga Award for Achievements in Realness

September Service Interruption

I doubt anyone much would notice given my usual erratic update schedule, but I'm going out of the country for most of September so there won't be any updates for a month or so.

I don't have a great amount of time or money to devote to record digging while I'm gone but I don't doubt that when the man and the hour come together, I'll distract my handlers and duck into a store .

When I am in London I'll try to find this:



And when I'm in Hungary I'll try to find this:



Though I don't much fancy my chances of finding either - but we'll see what I do find instead.

Frank Hatchett, "Body Shots" (late 70s?)

This seems to be one of a number of records put out by the obscure "Statler" label to provide soundtrack for dance classes. Frank Hatchett is not actually the recording artist but instead a dancer/choreographer who worked on the kind of Broadway stuff where numbers end with everyone freezing with their arms held out and then they yell "JAZZ!" on the final beat - or at least so I imagine, being deeply unqualified in such matters.

Here's what the liner notes say:

Sensational - that's Frank Hatchett! All across the country he has left his mark. Once you've seen him you're a fan for life. No one works with such electricity and warmth. His highly successful Springfield, Mass. school, The Frank Hatchett School of Performing Arts is a testimonial to his genius. 

Among his outstanding credits are the choreographing of off Broadway musical comedies, including "Reach for the Sky" and "Cartoons", the MacDonald TV Commercial, Black Miss America and Miss Universe. On his International agenda are choreographing for the Queen Elizabeth Hotel night club in Montreal Canada and the musical production of "Frick Frack" in Vienna Austria.

If you can catch him it will be at his school in Springfield or in New York where he teaches at Jo Jo's Dance Factory. 

Neither the Austrian production of the intriguing-sounding "Frick Frack" nor the other shows mentioned seem to have survived in popular imagination long enough to dent the Internet, but I suspect that this may be the McDonald's commercial that he choreographed (gotta have some sympathy for Frank given the portly white dudes he had to work with - okay guys, just uh, just line up in a row and march on the spot would you? okay let's try it one more time). There isn't a lot of information available on-line but Frank seems to be still hard at work and inspiring new generations of jazz dancers.

The music itself is late '70s sounding instrumental jams played by session musos, many of the tracks don't hit the spot but there are a couple of nice grooves, bedroom joint "The Lover In You" and the more up-tempo "Shamballa", presented here for your jazz-dancing pleasure:

Frank Hatchett - Body Shots by doggziller

Hard Stuff, "Bulletproof" (1972)

I was thinking about writing up an '80s slow jam today when I glanced down and noticed the hairs on my fore-arm quivering as they slowly retracted into their follicles at glacial speeds... this little understood depilatory effect is thought to be a consequence of listening to too much music like this. If unchecked it can leave a man completely smooth and shiny with all of his hair pointing inwards, curling into fanciful shapes such as love-hearts or stylized flamingos and saxophones.

The most effective antidote is tough 70s rock, so, time for some of that.

Hard Stuff - Time Gambler by doggziller

Hard Stuff were refugees from Atomic Rooster and Quatermass who fled those bands' increasingly fruity prog inclinations to devote themselves to strictly the whiskey-gargling real deal. The album title "Bulletproof" is a reference to their earlier band name, "Bullet", which they abandoned under threat of litigation from an American band of the same name. Prior to that they were also called "Daemon" for a while, which leads me to conjecture that they ultimately settled with the questionable though evocative name "Hard Stuff" out of exasperation.

Lyn Collins & James Brown, "Babystabbers" (1975)

First thing to know about this song is that it's called "Babystabbers".

There it is, right on the label.

 James Brown and Lyn Collins were, I believe, the first musicians to ever explicitly take a stand and speak out against babystabbing, and they did such an effective job that nobody has ever really needed to mention it again since.

This is a really tough, soulful, beautifully arranged mid-tempo jam with James and Lyn singing  just the dumbest lyrics with utter commitment and passion. James Brown was famously incomprehensible, but this is a special effort even for him. Launching with a baffling monologue, he trades increasingly meaningless sentence fragments with Lyn until by the end he's intoning "Ga-gun. Ga-gun. Ga-gun." as we careen into the fade-out.

It is a truly riveting listen. RIP, James, I still think of you every day.

Lyn Collins & James Brown - Backstabbers by doggziller

Cosmic Sounds revisited

By reader request, here's three more Zodiac-themed tracks from the "Cosmic Sounds" album - Sagittarius (the Versatile Daredevil), Capricorn (the Uncapricious Climber), and Pisces (the Peace Piper). All selectable from the player below:

the zodiac - cosmic sounds by doggziller

Condolesences to the Sagittarians out there, you got the dumbest poem on the album. Maybe this is not a universal thing but I just can't respect anything circus-related.

I'm sorry, Sagittarius.

The Hassles "Hour of the Wolf" (1968)

I recently enjoyed a romantic dinner in a restaurant which featured a pearl-white player piano that jangled out five or six Billy Joel hits in or loop (no, not the raw dancefloor shit like "We Didn't Start the Fire" or "Uptown Girl", just the real sexy deals such as "Piano Man" and "Honesty" that you know you wanna hear with your meal). Anyway it put me in mind of this Hassles record since Billy Joel was in this band (calling himself William Joel at the time) and do you know what, I think that Billy used to smoke pot.

That thump you heard was me just being crash tackled by Billy's press agent. But I gotta dust myself off and post this anyway 'cos that's the extent of my commitment to both Truth and things that are just possibly True.

Fact of the matter is, the title track of this album is roughly 13 minutes of fairly pointless noodling and features a dramatic interlude in which Billy can be heard transforming into a wolf in a windy old forest and I guess he'd left a dictaphone going in his pocket from reading out some great ideas for lyrics that he'd come up with earlier that day. And if that's not some bullshit dreamed up by stoners then we can only assume that Billy Joel really is a were-wolf - here's what it sounds like:

Billy Joel's Transformation into a WERE-BEING by doggziller

So if I were his press agent I'd go with the story that's not going to get my client shot in the face with some melted-down cutlery - i.e. BILLY JOEL BE BLAZIN' THE CROP.

Billy celebrates as 1983's "Tell Her About It" hits #1 on the Billboard charts.

Apart from that remarkable passage there's not too much on this album that stands out, other than the excellent "Four O'Clock in the Morning", a laid-back groove about walking around town in the middle of the night when it's all quiet and peaceful which, now that I think about it, is also kind of a werewolfish sentiment. It's very much what you'd imagine a late '60s Billy Joel song to sound like if you wanted it to be good.

The Hassles - Four O'Clock in the Morning by doggziller

Andy Pratt, "Records Are Like Life" (1969)

Leaving aside the expense of actually buying records, there's two main drawbacks to having a record collection, particularly if, like myself, you went through a few years of buying pretty indiscriminately.

One; these shits take up space and are they are heavy, they are a pain in the arse when you move house you have to allow space for the collection (as a rule of thumb they will use about the same amount of space as three and a half babies).

Two - and this is related to point 1 above - you never really know that it is "safe" to throw a record away or sell it. It may seem obvious that you should just sell the ones you don't really like (and they will be many), but the fact of the matter is that a man's musical taste will mutate, mature, improve, corrupt and/or degrade over time, so much so that you can never say with true confidence that something that sounds corny, boring or pretentious to you today will not on some future occasion have you throwing down like a stimulus-deprived gorilla. Keep records or don't - either way you are likely to have something to regret.

Case in point, I originally bought "Records Are Like Life" by Andy Pratt purely because the title track was about buying lots of records and I thought I would use fifteen seconds of it in a mix-tape or something. I very nearly got rid of it when I moved overseas some years ago, but fortunately did not since, in accordance with those processes just described, it is Right Now one of my favourite albums.

This music was probably too grown-up for me until two or three years ago. With the prominence of piano throughout, it's kind of "adult-oriented progressive cocktail lounge music" though I fear that pigeon-holes it rather too narrowly. The following three selections are a good indication of the level of variety and inventiveness on this album.

Andy Pratt - Wet Daddy

For someone who hobbies as a music writer I often find it quite hard to actually describe music. The song "Wet Daddy" has a guitar in it and some drumming. There are words, emerging as sound from a human mouth in a sequence of different yet mathematically related tones. I can really only encourage you to listen and see if you can get your own head around it. The shuffling of multiple layers of Andy's falsetto is characteristic of the album, as are the cryptic and whimsical lyrics.

Andy Pratt - Mindy

Another energetic song underpinned by the skittery drumming of Rick Shlosser (his invaluable contribution to the album was enough to earn him a slightly larger font in the back cover credits). "Mindy" starts from a bossa nova jazz premise and then just subverts it into whatever Andy Pratt felt like doing.


Andy Pratt - Low Tide Island

In a total change of tone, "Low Tide Island" is a melancholic folk song with haunting, acid-tinged vocals and zero percussion.

The face of  a genius (and his mates).

The remainder of the songs on "Records Are Like Life" are also unique and superb - and if you don't feel like lurking around in record stores for an unspecified number of months or years, you can get full, legitimate downloads from  It's About Music ("where it's about music, not about web design")

The Zodiac, "Cosmic Sounds" (1967)

From the 1970s through to the mid '80s, Zodiac signs were mainly referenced in music in order to help you decide whether you were sexually compatible with the featured musicians.  For a time it was rife, but ultimately the death knell rang for astrology in 1986 when Prince announced that he didn't care about it.  These days, astrology is half-remembered only as an antique barbarism, alongside such questionable practices as horse-riding, phrenology, and suicide by asp.

This album, conversely, dates from the glory days of hippiedom and celebrates the Zodiac purely for its own sake. It consists of 12 tracks dedicated to each star sign, each with overblown poetry spookily intoned over a psychedelic arrangement. Each of the poems is careful to reference a significant planet, number, colour and gemstone for the sign in question, e.g. 

nine times the colour red explodes like heated blood
the battle is on!
Mars, the master matchmaker, sulphurizes the sky
incendiary diamonds scorch the earth 

Probably a bit embarassing in hindsight, and not much help in picking your lottery numbers either. But the creative and varied arrangements do stand up well, being performed by talented sessioners and featuring excellent use of the Moog synthesizer (which in 1967 was about the size of a two or three large wardrobes). I have linked to my two favorite tracks from the album below, and as a monument to my immaturity, I include as a bonus "Aquarius, the Lover of Life" since it includes the passage:

in the friendly opal light of Uranus,
all men can blend
yet still be what they are 

(stifled giggles)

The Zodiac - Aries, the Firefighter
The Zodiac - Taurus, the Voluptuary
The Zodaic - Aquarius, the Lover of Life

I expect full compliance with the instructions on the back of the sleeve - "MUST BE PLAYED IN THE DARK"