Sunday 31 January 2016

Wednesday 27 January 2016

New Order - Tutti Frutti



A bit late, but the video for New Order's best single in ages is a masterpiece!
Featuring Ricky Tognazzi.

Tuesday 12 January 2016

David Bowie - Stardust 1964-2016


When I was like 10 years old I knew nothing about his importance, I knew nothing about punk and new wave, but I did know Ashes To Ashes was one of my favourite songs and that has been essential in shaping my taste opening my ears to the music he was influencing. He has made masterpieces and he has made crap albums but when at his best he was absolutely essential. We've just lost Lemmy (from Motorhead) and now this even bigger hero. But when you die at 69 and you've been Bowie you know you have spent your life well.
In this playlist there's at least a track off each of his many releases.
David Jones, born in 1947, started his career at 17 with short lived beat bands though the songs already showed huge talent for great tunes and sound.
He changed his surname to avoid confusion with a member from The Monkees and released at 20 a debut solo album of psychedelic pop, somewhere between a pop version of Pink Floyd and The Beach Boys, but honestly to me it doesn't sound that inspired.
It was two years later, in 1969, that his huge inventive talent finally exploded with the futuristic semiacoustic and orchestrated ballad of Space Oddity. It was the first of a string of unforgettable glam classics which had an amazing peak with Ziggy Stardust, thanks also to Mick Ronson's fantastic guitar skills. Bowie was 25 and a superb stage animal, the world was conquered.
It was in 1973, with the avant jazz piano of Aladdin Sane, that we had the first serious hint of Bowie's will and power to truly experiment. Not content with success, he wanted to push the barriers and move music much forward, and managing to do that keeping a melodic pop attitude, avoiding to fall into the pretentious self indulgence of progressive rock. 
Actually he never lost his love for the basic alternative rock of Velvet Underground and the Stooges, and you can hear it in his best singles of the mid Seventies, Rebel Rebel and John I'm Only Dancing, an appropriate bridge to punk. 
By 1976 Station To Station he already had decided he wanted to look even further, the album's title track is basically what The Clash will do years later in Sandinista and yes, post punk in his supernatural mind was already born when it was punk's dawn for us humans.
Then Bowie reached his true artistic peak in his Berlin collaboration with fellow genius Brian Eno. Low in 1977 was the first new wave album, opened by the futuristic pop of Speed Of Life it still sounds totally ahead of anything today. Weeping Wall and Subterranean are not the ambient of the mid 70s, they're the ambient of the future, and extremely touching melodies as well. Not content with that, Heroes had in its title track a true anthem for the post punk generation, sounding like a magnificent mix of Velvet Underground and Roxy Music, and then more emotional experimental music like Moss Garden and Neukolln. 
Of course he couldn't keep up those divine standards, but Lodger gave us great songs like DJ and Repetition and his most beautiful song comes from Scary Monsters in 1980: Ashes To Ashes is an absolute masterpiece, with that final part where he sings "My mama said to get things done, you better not mess with Major Tom" and that moving keyboard. Excellent video as well.
Maybe he thought he had given everything he could to the cause of experimental pop. In a decade, he had totally changed the shape of music, after all. That could be why since then, for the next dozen of years, he has been content with doing quality pop hits: Under Pressure with Queen, China Girl, the underrated masterpiece of Loving The Alien (pity the album Tonight wasn't up to that standard), This Is Not America with Pat Metheney which is melancholic pop delight, Absolute Beginners.. 
Of course people was just expecting a lot more, and by the just decent enough pop rock of Never Let Me Down they turned their attention to the stars of the time. After inventing the wheel, in the late 80s Bowie simply couldn't compete with Madonna or Michael Jackson though these two never did anything groundbreaking like he had. Bowie decided to spend the time of this creative decline with a band, Tin Machine, which wasn't half as bad as reviewers pretended it to be. It was still decent enough, actually, and better than most of todays bands, but at the heigth of acid house, shoegazing and grunge, Tin Machine looked like trad dad rock, and that's what they probably were (they were all 40somethings after all), just not that bad.
Just when nobody was expecting it, Bowie's creative flow returned. The soundtrack of The Buddha Of Suburbia sparked the delicious Strangers When We Meet. Bowie was in his mid-40s, and ready to dare again. He had nothing more to prove, nothing to invent, he had just time to spend well, and he did. Black Tie White Noise had the strong title track influenced by acid jazz, Pallas Athena sounded like a great Massive Attack track orchestrated by Craig Armstrong. Gone were the unimaginative efforts of the end of the 80s, Bowie was on top form again, ready to experiment that little more, and so reunited with Brian Eno for his last true masterpiece, Outside, in 1995. 
It was followed by a string of albums with mixed inspirations and results, but we couldn't have asked more from him at 50. He even explored drum'n'bass in Little Wonder, while I find Hours a bit weak he came back in 2002 with the more inventive Heaten, opened by the emotional Sunday. The tepid Reality followed the year later, after which he retired from the scene after having heart surgery.
He has been able to surprise us once again at 66 with the excellent return of The Next Day featuring great alternative rock songs like The Stars Are Out Tonight. This year was opened by the wonderful album Blackstar, recorded while battling cancer, focused on superb sounds and inspired tunes like Lazarus, his farewell video.