Ain't nothin' holdin' me back nothin' / I'm truckin'

Ten songs for today, old, new, and not quite so new…this is the way it flowed on the iPod at the gym today…hard to fault really and nothing to do with me….blame providence or something like that…

1. Claude Vonstroke – Who’s Afraid of Detroit (Paul Woolford mix)…I have to admit I’ve had this for a month or three but not really listened to it as it really got lost in a rush of new things around that time….which is surprising because the original is such a big record for me. Dirty, punky, wobbly, layered techno that drags you around for over twelve minutes taking you on quite a journey, especially when the treadmill is seemingly dragging you forward ever faster…which goes absolutely perfectly with…
2. Siouxsie & The Banshees – The Staircase (mystery) (Polydor 1979)….an almost prototypical techno record in my ever so humble opinion…the way the almost unreal electric guitar slithers violently from speaker to speaker, with the double handclaps accentuating the collision is pure rave. It just needed a siren….
3. The Ronettes – Paradise (recorded 1965, released 1975)…one of a bunch of lost Spector / Ronettes tunes that have turned up over the decades on various collections, this was originally an unreleased acetate, and fits squarely into the River Deep era PS sound (it was recorded shortly before that epic). Ronnie’s plaintiff, entrancing I’ll wait for a day when he takes me to Paradise is unfortunately ironic considering the pain she was experiencing in her marriage to Spector, but nevertheless absolutely devastating (isn’t she always). What is less ironic is the later repeated phrase I’ll Die for Him…by all accounts she was lucky not to do so; luckier it seems than that poor girl forty odd years later. A genius Spector might well be, and I absolutely crave his productions, but if it wasn’t for the liberal in me, I’d say fry the bastard….
4. Metro Area – Soft Hoop (Environ 2002)…a record that evokes, more than anything else, the ghost of the late, very, very great Nu Groove label…a simple groove; a very tight but tough snare; a subtle blue, understated percussive lead; a live bass player and the vague aura of NYC circa 1990…
5. Iggy & The Stooges – Gimme Danger (CBS 1973)…and that is nothing like this…I think Raw Power is Iggy’s least dangerous sounding record, at least until the bad Arista, and A&M ones a few years later. The snarls are all cartoonish, the threat so obviously contrived…but, hell I love it, and my signed copy is a treasure. The cowbells that open it are funky as phuck and I love the way it explodes half a minute later, although, unlike, say anything on Funhouse, it’s a perfectly controlled explosion. This was Mainman after all…
6. The Jam – Ghosts (Polydor 1980)….perhaps the prettiest song ever recorded by Weller with The Jam, and from the wonderful, and underrated The Gift, when it was screamingly obvious that Weller had outgrown the band. Sadly, to my mind, despite an extended series of killer Style Council singles, and a few tracks as a solo act, he never fulfilled the promise he showed on those last four Jam albums, and on tracks like this.
7. Eddie Kendricks - Body Talk (Motown 1975)…not the Imagination song of the same name, although I love that, but the even better track from the ex-Temptation’s album The Hit Man. I used to have this song going around in my head, not knowing who it was, until my friend, Murray Cammick put me right. Absolutely perfect in both arrangement and performance…..I weaken at the part where Eddie’s voice rises to a falsetto on the third chorus, and falls into a loose scat…vocal genius…and then…
8. Bobby Womack - An American Dream (Beverley Glen 1984)….the first song to sample MLK’s Dream speech..slow, sultry and utterly gorgeous, with that towering Womack voice expressing what is both a disarming love song, and a work of pure optimism that never comes close to cloying patriotism. The Poets, both Volume I & II were, and still are, huge records for me.
9. Roxy Music -Three and Nine (Island 1974)…what perplexes me about Roxy Music is how quickly and badly it all went wrong. The first four albums (this comes from the 4^th) have varying degrees of brilliance about them. The crucial input they had in what was to dominate the rock’n’roll planet for the next two decades is indisputable. From album six (the fifth had its moments, albeit few) it all turned increasingly to MOR mush. Three and Nine, on the other hand, is disarmingly charming without the slightness of their latter catalogue…it still carries the hint of decadence that their best records still evoke…..damn that sounds pretentious, but I don’t know another way to put it…
10. Magik Johnson – Scanning For Viruses (Claude Vonstroke mix) (Made to Play 2006)…and so we go full circle….I really like the low down grunty bits on this..pure, simple but effective dancefloor, but works well on a treadmill, as I discovered (now that sounds sad). Oh, and I really like Dick Johnson’s radio show on George FM, on the rare occasions I get to hear it…