song of the week
I'm quite bored of writing song of the week now.
If I'm honest, I've been finding it a bit problematic for a while. I have this annoying, self-imposed rule that if I've already written about a band or person in SOTW I can't write about them again, which means I end up cobbling together stray scribbles from various notebooks just so I can post a song. And to my mind, that's cheating too. So sorry, all seven of my readers. No more song of the week, at least not until I have a song to write about, or indeed anything else to write about. So this week, nothing, except the recommendation that you read Paddington's post on
Fleetwood Mac's Rumours; a beautiful piece of writing about a beautiful record.
Okay, I'm off to limber up ready for the CSS gig tonight...
dessert of the week: zabaglione @ marine ices
Yummm, Zabaglione
The combination of a job I love, sunny evenings, an attack of the sniffles, and, if I do say so myself, a social calendar to rival pre-rehab Lindsey Lohan has meant there has been, alas, no time for song of the week. Instead, I give you dessert of the week, best shared with a near total stranger after downing muchos vino, judging by my experience.
But, if for no other reason than it would annoy me if I didn't post a song this week, here's an old SOTW from a year ago, in honour of the anniversary of the bank holiday weekend when minifig and I painted the living room of our new little lurve shack. Here's to another grand year behind the white picket fence (or CCTV-heavy concrete council estate).
Song of the Week, around 15th April 2006 - Suzie
If The Killers were still making the sweaty, infectious electro-rock they thrilled me with on the release of Hot Fuss, it might sound almost as good as Boy Kill Boy’s Suzie. Considering the airways are flooded with keyboard-heavy Killers knock-offs and ‘80s throwback rock, I find it pretty incomprehensible that Suzie could have slipped so silently through the net and failed to break out of the XFM prison. It opens with a restless, fidgety punch-up of guitars, before keyboards like a playground jaunt begin a mock boxing match, colliding into a jeering chorus of rolling, shimmering synths and low-key, but sturdy guitar backing. A finishing cluster of stabbing guitar chords and bashing drums effortlessly collapses the song into itself. I’ve heard lead vocalist Chris Peck compared to Morrissey (really?), but this quivering, stuttering, boisterous performance comes in sounding like an addictive mash-up of Jackie Wilson and Simon Le Bon – and all the better for it. This song is agitated, impatient, petulant but lovable, like a spoilt brat with a pretty smile. I can only thank my lucky stars I am no longer sixteen, else there may have been a Boy Kill Boy t-shirt in my cupboard by now. Far and away the greatest song released by boys in tight trousers (in 2006) – I salute you.
song of the week: bette davis eyes (for monkey 2)
Bette Davis Eyes has to be one of the most underrated pop songs of the ‘80s. Whenever people ask me what my favourite song is, the answer varies from Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart to Madonna’s Like A Prayer or even the song I am currently obsessed with (this week; Big Time Sensuality). But in all honesty, standing heads and shoulders above those admittedly far better songs, is Kim Carnes’s Bette Davis Eyes.
Originally penned with a distinctly country-vibe in the ‘70s, Kim Carnes’s definitive version has a warm, hushed, blurry-eyed keyboard riff that sweeps me back to childhood, through my adolescence and into my twenties in a matter of seconds. All I need is that sleepy keyboard riff and steady heartbeat percussion, overlaid with gentle synth-strings and joined by that raspy, seductive voice, the aural equivalent of nails on a blackboard shot through with molasses and suddenly my entire life trips before my eyes.
The lyrics are a kind of sixth-form poem on the most gorgeous, sensual, enigmatic and terrifying woman to walk the planet, a woman who, like Bette Davis, could handle a cigarette, a man and a gun. She is a veritable femme-fatale, and if ever a song could be called the same, it's this alluring tease of a tune.
The song drifts dreamily through its moody opening verse, backed by muffled drums throbbing an anthemic beat beneath the tingling keyboard riff that restrains the song from ever really taking flight into a true disco track. Chiming jingle-jangle guitars are dogmatically strummed on the beat, kept in place all the way through the chorus, before stubbornly returning to the same opening riff. The distant clashing of the electro-drums and rippling guitars of the second verse are similarly kept in check by the same overpowering lullaby, the entire song built around the grip of those persistent keyboards, pop music’s equivalent of tinnitus. As the song progresses, gradually more instruments are permitted to join the party, until with the final chorus, Kim Carnes finally lets loose in a series of screams, sighs and rasps as those glittering guitars and flashy drums threaten to swallow the dominant opener.
And then, just when you feel the song may have escaped from those keyboards, the entire song shrinks and pulls back, leaving that crafty little riff, wispy strings, and that blasted crashing drum kit again, hammering the song into your soul. Everything in this tune conspires to fix that riff in your head, like a delicate yet vicious siren’s call, trapping you in its insipid prettiness until it steals all the good taste in your music collection and leaves you whirling around your bedroom to the dark witch of ‘80s pop.
Anyone who’s heard Mylo’s fantastically groovalicious In My Arms will testify to the hypnotic power of that alluring riff. The genius of Mylo’s mix is in the way he takes the cheesily exuberant Boy Meets Girl’s Waiting for a Star, whipping it up into a frothy, sugary repetition of the song’s climax before slamming the keyboard riff from Bette Davis Eyes right up against the vocal. And then, like the cruel trickster he is, Mylo fractures the riff of Bette Davis Eyes, breaking it against the echoing, distant repetition of that gooey, blissful ‘in my arms, baby yeah’ segment of Boy Meets Girl. Standing with my wonderful little sister in the dance tent at Glastonbury, exhausted and sunburned in a crowd of similarly sweaty daytime clubbers, we grooved our little hearts out as these two 80's classics traded punches, Mylo keeping the two apart for well over 2 minutes in a jerky mash-up. As the sun hammered down on us, life didn’t feel like it could get much better, and then it happened.
Mylo stopped screwing around and there it was, that timeless Bette Davis Eyes keyboard riff, and suddenly, all you could see were several thousand hands flung impulsively into the air as the crowd squealed, whooped and roared their appreciation.
Now, I don’t take requests, but my sister, Blonde Monkey 2 has been asking when I’m going to finally give Bette Davis Eyes SOTW status. So this week’s song is for her, as a ma-hu-sive thank you for getting Glastonbury tickets, and for all the car journeys where she’s been ‘treated’ to Bette Davis Eyes.
