Category Archives: Music

Pig’s Ear

Music, , ,

Niall Anderson has listened to to all of the Now That’s What I Call Music Albums so you don’t have to

now-4-cover-001
The Now! pig, imaginatively named ‘The Pig’

The saddest and most interesting place I’ve ever been in London is the Old Vinyl Factory in Hayes. In its 1950s salad days, when it was owned by HMV, it employed 10,000 people, producing and packaging the label’s roster of recording artists. When I visited the site in 2008, it was owned by EMI and employed just four people: two of them part-time. A 17-acre site occupied by a maximum of two people daily, all there to manage the EMI archive. With its empty concrete offices and effusively strewn barbed wire, it was like visiting a post-apocalyptic prison camp.

I asked one of the archivists what he spent his time doing. ‘We’re only really busy around Christmas when the compilation albums get made,’ he said, and with that took me around the archives. Master reels of Beatles albums, signed gold and platinum discs by The Beach Boys, Scott Walker’s hesitant signature on a two-album contract in 1981 (only one album appeared: 1982’s Climate Of Hunter). Gold-dust for the archivist and pop aficionado. I happen to be both.

So as a tribute to the discouraged archivists, I decided I’d listen to EMI’s own historical effort at canonising pop: the Now That’s What I Call Music series. All of it. Currently running to 83 volumes (or 10 days of continuous listening), it has valid claims to being the biggest selling compilation series of all time. The Top Of The Pops albums aren’t pop enough! The Motown Chartbusters comps didn’t bust enough charts! Even unimpeachable pop blockbusters like Thriller and ABBA Gold haven’t sold in the quantities that the Now! series has. We’re talking about a collection of songs popular enough and deep enough to be worth an extended trawl. Ladies and gentlemen, this is it. This is pop.
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Mostly Noise – the best of 2012 (“this one time, on Bandcamp…”)

Music, , ,

by KasperHauser

"So, do you think Biggie and 2Pac are in Heaven?"
“So, do you think Biggie and 2Pac are in Heaven?”

It’s January and, by now, you’ve probably read enough year-end lists to last you until, well, the end of this year. So here’s another one. The only difference is that all of these 2012 releases are available on Bandcamp, and some of them are even free. And if there’s one thing I can’t refuse, it’s free music (even bad free music; you don’t want to know how many Lil B mixtapes I downloaded in 2012).

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Mostly Pop January 2013

Mostly Pop, Music, New Releases, , , , , ,

by MrMoth

David Bowie
Where Are We Now?

This month on Mostly Pop – old people! Well, some of them are merely getting on a bit in pop terms (ie they are now in their 30s), but some are proper old. Like David Bowie! Remember David Bowie? Ask your granddad etc. Anyway, as Jim touched on in his Music For Old People column last week, Bowie’s back after ten years of, I dunno, playing Call of Duty and wanking. This is his first single since some single literally no-one gave a toss about, and it’s my duty to review it because people apparently give a toss now, plus January is just the worst month for singles releases and I need material. Sorry, Jim, I do know he’s your turf.

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The Music of James Bond

Books and Movies, Music, Uncategorized, ,

by Victor Field

There are very few screen productions to have had entire books written about their music; Peter Jackson’s The Lord Of The Rings,Tim Burton’s Batman, Star Trek (but not Star Wars or Doctor Who, ha ha). The Music Of James Bond sees the world’s most famous spy added to that short list.

The appropriately initialled Jon Burlingame (no stranger to writing about spy music following his liner notes for FSM’s excellent The Man From U.N.C.L.E. albums) covers Commander Bond’s musical history from the late ‘50s US TV version of Casino Royale* to almost the present day – press deadlines mean Thomas Newman and Adull (er, Adele) don’t get a look-in with Skyfall – with a minimum of musicological textwork and a maximum of revealing information. Just as Burlingame’s TV’s Greatest Hits is an essential for anyone interested in small screen music, this is a must for those who have every Bond soundtrack from LP to download.

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Mostly Records, January 2013

Music, , , , ,

By Jim Eaton-Terry

Dido
In retrospect maybe Tuesday wasn’t the best day for Dido to announce her comeback

Obviously there’s only one story this week.  Like everyone (OK, like everyone over about 35 with an interest in pop music) I woke up on Tuesday to find my Twitter feed melting with the news that Bowie had reappeared with a new single, something I’d given up on years ago.  In the time since it seems that pretty much every music writer worth reading has held forth on the subject[1] so I’m not sure there’s much to add.  The single is lovely, the video deeply peculiar, the cover is awful, and I’ve already ordered the album.

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MostlyFilm’s Best Of 2012: Pamyu Pamyu Revolution

Best of 2012, Music

We’re gonna need a bigger head

by Spank The Monkey

Even an old fart like myself can appreciate the sterling work that Mr Moth has been doing for Europe’s Best Website with his Mostly Pop pieces. He’s got a genuine appreciation for the genre, and it comes across even when he’s slagging it off. But pop is like heroin: after a while, you come to realise that the regular stuff simply doesn’t do it for you any more. One day, Moth will look at his Girls Aloud records, sigh, and realise that he needs something stronger. He needs to go to Japan, basically.

J-Pop is the crack cocaine of popular music. Any impurities and unnecessary material have been refined out of it by years of scientific research involving men in lab coats. You know that old joke about why they don’t make planes out of the same material they use to make the black box recorder? J-Pop is the answer to the equivalent question about why they don’t make pop music entirely out of hooklines. It breaks down your natural resistance: once you’ve been exposed to it, nothing of standard strength has any effect on you ever again.

I’m a 49-year-old man, and my favourite record of 2012 is a J-Pop album by a 19-year-old girl called Kyary Pamyu Pamyu. STOP JUDGING ME.
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Mostly Pop November 2012

Mostly Pop, Music, New Releases, , , , ,

by MrMoth

image

Girls Aloud: Something New

Yay! It’s Nicola, Kimberley, Cheryl, Sarah and Nadine! They’re back! It’s an objectively-decided fact that Girls Aloud created the greatest pop music of the 21st century, possibly of all time. Yes, it is. And I know they came from a Cowell-inflected TV talent show, but it was back in the old days when the format was fresh and, crucially, they were launched with a sequence of tunes so astonishingly great they’re still pop benchmarks. Furthermore, their ratio of proper pop bangers to tedious ballads is a mighty 3:1 (yes, I did the maths), making them better than anyone ever. The songs are provided by ultraproducers Xenomania, of course, but Xenomania are behind lots of pop songs and none are as good as those performed by Girls Aloud. It’s kind of a perfect match. And one of their B sides was about the freaking Kronstadt* rebellion, because they’re a) awesome and b) really the last great working class band, now that you can’t be a musician on the dole. I haven’t really fleshed that argument out, but it’s 100% true. Who are our pop stars now? Mumford and Sons. Fuck’s sake.

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Mostly Covers: I Put a Spell on You

Music, , , , , , , , , ,

by theTramp

The greatest songs will always attract cover versions; artists just can’t resist singing them, you see. I Put a Spell on You is an absolute classic of a song, which is why there are so many versions available to buy, download or view on YouTube.  If you love this song as much as I do then I really cannot recommend enough spending a few hours trawling through them all and picking out your personal favourites.

Now in Mostly Covers I listen to many, many versions of a song to pick out the weirdest and most wonderful for you to enjoy. This is no exception, except for the fact that perhaps the weirdest and most wonderful is the original.

The original spell – Screamin’ Jay Hawkins

Usually it’s the cover versions that prove weird and wonderful, but not so with I Put A Spell On You. If your first brush with this song was the lyrics you might well expect it to be a soft, beautiful, bluesy jazz tune. But that’s not Screamin’ Jay’s style. Remember Baron Samedi in Live and Let Die? That’s more Screamin’ Jay.  His world is weird, wonderful and just a little unsettling – the witch doctor of early rock’n’roll. He wrote I Put a Spell on You in 1956, it charted but not particularly high. So here it is, Screamin’ Jay’s bewitching, unsettling spell:

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Mostly Pop – October 2012

Mostly Pop, Music, New Releases, , , , , ,

by MrMoth

Workout time at MostlyFilm HQ

Psy – Gangnam Style

Hooray, they let me do Mostly Pop again! I warn you – I like not a single song this month. Don’t blame me. If you want a nicer Mostly Pop, I advise you to go out there and make some great music – really you only have yourself to blame.

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Nitin Sawhney’s The Lodger OST

British Film, Classic Films, Music

by Victor Field

As anyone who’s seen silent movies on Sumo TV can tell you, vision without some kind of sound only works in small doses. So providing brand-new accompaniment for the newly spruced-up print of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger is the perfect way to keep audience attention, and with Nitin Sawhney being a fan of Bernard Herrmann we have… history sort-of repeating itself. See, The Lodger is a film about a serial killer running amok in London, and Frenzy – also about a serial killer running amok in London – also wound up getting new music when Hitch became the only director to ever throw out a score by Henry Mancini (Ron Goodwin replaced him).

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