Most weekdays when I am not listening to Songbirds, Norwegian Dance Crew, Nathan Barley, and superhero Ken on Radioshuttleworth, I used to listen to Shaun Keaveny’s show on 6 Music. Brilliant. I imagine somehow he soldiered on with his grandad and his mate filling the studio with smoke (dispatching fireworks at the trading estate opposite) and doing a daily Aboriginal singalong ‘Teatime Dreamtime’.
These are the songs that accompany the books.
Now
Elvis “Black Star” (can see what David Bowie was poining to).
Book 3
I’d love to know the song that accompanies The Shield episode ‘Hurt’.
I guess historically/‘litera-raily’ I should say anything by The Curfew and Norwegian Dance Crew, but below is up to the present stuff.
Irish kids on Youtube – We found Love in a Hopeless Place. (Their astute answer to Adam Curtis’s Guardian article).
Macklemore and Ryan Lewis – Same Love (saying what’s not generally allowed to be said in the genre).
Akua Naru – Poetry How does it feel now (Sounds like Archie Shepp’s saxophone …)
Dinosaur Jr. – Freak Scene. The soundtrack to meeting up with Boots.
Elmore James – Lost Woman Blues
Bob Dylan – I threw it all away (didn’t I just)
Baby Bird – Sad old man
Nirvana- Where did you sleep last night. As far as I know, this tribute only exists as a live version.
Sonic Youth– Get into the Groove
Cornershop – Waterloo Sunset
Mazzy Star – Fade into you
Placebo – Every me and every you
K-Flay – Carry On (her song to her alcoholic dad)
Wretch 32 – Unorthodox (you said it)
The Clash – Armagideon Time (as on Jarmusch’s film Ghost Dog)
Neil Young – Old man (old git what costs …)
Leather Nun – A thousand nights
Savlonic – Tiny Japanese girl (great animation)
The Kinks – Deadend Street
Passenger – Let her go (the romantic sentiments are one thing, and the painful realization, but actually true love is knowing when, for the sake of both of you, it is time to let go, to move on)
Madonna – Like a prayer (sometimes it is stronger to stand together)
Katie Melua – Just like heaven (sometimes, like Ellie Goulding’s version of Your Song, the copy is so much better than the original that it becomes the definitive version by default)
Irish kids on Youtube– We found Love in a Hopeless Place. (Their astute answer to Adam Curtis).
Kate Bush– Sexual Healing
Luther Ingram– If it’s all the same to you babe (my sis’s influence)
Wonk Unit– Go Easy (music that makes you happy to be alive- the Only Ones for the 21st century. And there’s the acoustic version… ) A nicer Southern Version of The Sleaford Mods.
The Indecent– 25 Steps (the right twang to her voice)
Withered Hand– Religious Songs (Genuinely astonishing-so calmly throwaway at the same time as (speaking as an ateist) reflecting on where he’s come from and transcending it- saying the unsayable and never spoken of in an almost casual way. Profoundly clever).
Johnny Cash – Hurt (it would make anybody religious)
The Silver Shine – Amiga a mutato korbejar (no idea what this is singing about but …)
Bee Gees – Staying Alive (not quite the same as their contribution to London film Melody)
Nick Cave – Nobody’s baby now
Macklemore – Same Love (saying what’s not allowed to be said).
Can – Paperhouse (Holger Czukay as a Japanese Mark E Smith)
Tiger Army – Wander Alone
The Sleaford Mods – Tweet Tweet Tweet et al (The aborted fetus that is a mix of Half Man Half Biscuit, Jake Ecclestone doing Chicken Town and Wonk Unit. But brilliant).
Passenger – Scare away the dark (Dunno about the singing but the lyrics are spot-on).
10000 Maniacs- My mother the war
Book 2
Needless to say, me and Boots had a very different musical taste. She was much more The Birthday Party whereas with the Joy Division influence I was very much The Cure Siamese Twins. By the 1990s I was lucky enough to go to what was supposedly the last gig of Huggy Bear.
Joy Division – could be almost anything, like Means to an End, but it has to be Heart and Soul (the Peter Hook biog is fantastically illuminating but it’s the Stephen (Knockabout comics) Morris one that I want to hear.
Bronski Beat – Smalltown Boy (played on the tiny record player in the corner of the student hall room feeling very alone at this vast new beginning …)
Misty in Roots – Live at the Counter Eurovision (the greatest reggae album of all time – blasted out of the basement window in Herne Hill on bright sunny days – which seemed to work)
Aswad – A New Chapter of Dub (a slab of monumental-ness)
Golden Earring – Radar love
Bad Brains– Re-ignition (they were awesome at the Astoria)
Nico – obviously Peter Hook’s fave These Days but count in Frozen Borderline too.
Babes in Toyland – any tracks off the first album – which is the one we went to see, all over each other, in Notting Hill
ULU gigs
Walking in the air – (as a pointer to magick)
Poison Girls – Persons Unknown
God (the Hackney version, as seen in the back of a pub there)
My pirate radio mix tape of this emerging acid house thing
Iggy and the Stooges – Dirt (feeling there really is a fire)
Motown influence of the new family
The Leather Nun – Desolation Avenue (remember trying to teach the lyrics in Japan – pretty unsuccessfully, it has to be said)
The The – This is the day (all the money in all the world)
The Mob – No doves fly here
Ciccone Youth – Into the groove
Divine – Shake it up
Mory Kante – Yeke Yeke
The Pogues – Hell’s Ditch
Hawkwind – Angels of Light (think I’m there somewhere bopping up and down)
Rollins band – My War
The Mob – No doves fly here (Andi’s recommendation)
Huggy Bear- Herjazz (I came to this riot girl’s thang bit late, videoing what was supposedly the last gig at some London hall).
Stone Roses- I wanna be adored (when I met Boots I played her my Acid House mixtape with its bits recorded off pirate radio. Luckily she refused to go down the Acid House plughole and got me into Iggy Pop etc. Of course, Dr. Awkward managed to go to the famous big rave at Castle Morton in the countryside).
Brixton Squatt
Kisses sweeter than wine- The Waivers
Book 1
Though Musketeer nr.3 pointed out the wonders of John Cale and Robert Fripp, always in the background was the Velvets ‘banana’ album as I tried to imagine a mysterious future London and what it could possibly be like.
Nina Simone – My baby just cares for me (the last song of an evening at the Midnight)
Cabaret Voltaire – Just Fascination
Crass – Do they owe us a living (possibly they do…). Though always the seminal album was Penis Envy.
Section 25 – New Horizons (The video we tried to make sense of this Factory thang before heading to the Midnight)
Rip rig and panic
(last track on Neneh Cherry’s Rimbaud-by- pencil-drawing cover album)
The Sisters of Mercy – Heartland (Having billed them as the sisters of Mersey it seemed only fair to hear them in the night city of Berlin – seen through the window of a speeding car)
Echo and the Bunnymen – All my Colours /Zimbo (the Burundi drummers version)
One World Poetry album – Bought from Compendium, my favourite versions of Linton’s, Ferlingetti’s and Jim Carroll’s poems. Jim Carroll especially captures things from deep underwater but still remains defiant before befuddlement set in.
XTC – Making plans for Nigel
Bob Dylan – My back pages (The music that propelled us to London when we were so much younger …)
The Wake – I miss you (On the here comes everybody album)
The Smiths – Every day is like Sunday (which is how I guess Morrissey may have felt if he woke up in a deserted seaside resort the night after that early Midnight gig …)
Joy Division – Closer (The “I could have been dead haha” at the end of the record presumably Hannett’s addition??)
The Cure – Siamese Twins (a virginal imagining of a future world I would hopefully inhabit where sweaty bodies would writhe. In my dreams.)
Black Sabbath – Paranoid
Tunnelvision – Watching The Hydroplanes (after much consideration spent at Snupeas deciding on its merits – and then taking it back and swapping it for Paranoid )
B-Movie – Rememberance Days (at Armadillo Records – as a feelgood (simpler, singalong) counter-point to the stark austerity and complexity of Closer)
Roy Harper – Another Day (not the Kate Bush version – the chemistry between the two of them is unfortunately just not there. Roy communicates an important chance missed).
John Foxx – The Garden (a song I came across again when my mum died)
Rod Stewart – Sailing
Sudden Sway– Let’s evolve (listen to the Peel Session)
Book 0
Ranby
George Hamilton IV– Canadian Pacific- one of my dad’s favourite songs;
The Southlanders- I am a mole and I live in a hole (with respect to John Savage)
The Sweet– Blockbuster
Sam Cooke – Working on a chain gang
Eddie and the Hotrods – Life on the line
Kate Bush – pretty much anything (especially Those heavy people and Oh to be in love – and of course Ann Magnuson’s Wow) part of a New Wave that like a war you can only see from a distance
Martha and the Muffins – Echo Beach
Peter Sarson – Where do you go to my lovely
ELO – Mr Blue sky
Blue Oyster Cult – Don’t fear the reaper
John Denver– Country Roads (the song my dad would play nostalgically)
Johnny Cash– Ghost riders in the sky
Beatles – All my loving et al
Mike Oldfield – Tubular Bells (there in the background …)
Mano Pip-kin (A Lithuanian song about the wonders of having a pipe up on the shelf. And looking up and smoking it from time to time)
Abba – SOS et al
Beaufort
Buzzcoks– Homosapien
Althea and Donna– Uptown Toprankin
