🎶 Mix from May 2006

One of my friends recently stumbled across a mix CD that I put together back in 2006, filled with songs that I had been listening to at the time. Through the marvels of modern cloud services, I’ve recreated it as a Spotify playlist. I think the tracks and the sequencing both hold up pretty well.

There are videos of the tracks along with a bit of commentary below.

Flying — Faces

I’d been a big Small Faces fan since I was a teenager. But I hadn’t explored much of their post-Steve Marriott work, when they rebranded as Faces and brought Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood into the band. Flying is the first track on the ’best of’ Faces compilation Good Boys… When They’re Asleep…. It’s such a different-sounding song to the rest of the compilation that including it as track one made sense. Maybe that influenced me into including it as the first track here. I put the studio version on the CD, but this live version is a cracker.

Wrap It Up — Sam & Dave

Sam & Dave’s greatest hits became familiar to me when I explored 60’s and 70’s music as a teenager. But I probably first heard this song via the Eurythmics cover version on their album Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This). The original is clearly the best, with an incredible sound. I can’t believe that this was just a B-side.

Coconut — Fred Schneider

Being a B-52’s fan led me to Fred Schneider’s solo album Just Fred. It’s much punkier and thrashier than the B-52’s albums. Despite getting very familiar with this song, even after all these years I still feel that the record is on my ‘to listen’ pile. When I heard the song Coconut, I had no idea that it was a cover of a Harry Nilsson track. I think I still prefer Fred’s version.

Somethin’ Else — Eddie Cochran

I love simple, catchy rock and roll. There’s something about this one where the sound is propelled along by Cochran’s singing. It feels so heavy by the standard of the early rock and roll songs, and hits like a punch. This video from 1959 is amazing, a chewing-gum sponsored TV programme where everyone in the audience seems to be clapping and masticating to the sound of the music.

Gin & Juice — The Gourds

Probably included on the compilation to raise an unexpected smile. If you don’t know what you’re listening to, it probably takes a few bars to realise that it’s a cover of a Snoop Dogg track. This cover was built for YouTube reaction videos, like the one below. It’s great fun, but it’s not something that I reach for or get excited about when it gets randomly thrown up on a shuffled playlist.

Rene — The Small Faces

We started the playlist with a Faces track but now go back to 1968 for a song from their incredible Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake album. I love this song, with its cheeky cockney singalong lyrics and brilliant outro that takes up two thirds of the track. The box set of this record comes with both the stereo and mono mixes which are very different to each other; the mono has an overall better sound but the vocals on this track are buried and more difficult to hear.

Out The Blue — John Lennon

The Beatles were my first musical obsession as a teenager and I spent (or rather, am still spending) many years afterwards digging through their solo works. Mind Games isn’t Lennon’s finest album, but this song became an earworm for me. It could easily have been a single.

Old Man — Neil Young

A friend introduced me to Neil Young’s Harvest album while I was at university in the late 1990s. It’s a fascinating record, with more straightforward pop songs next to tracks that have much more complicated structures. This is the one that I latched onto. The live acoustic version below misses a bit of the delicate instrumentation and backing vocals of the album track, but it still gives me goosebumps.

Get Thee Behind Me Satan — Ella Fitzgerald

Of all of the songs in this playlist, this is the one that I’ve found myself singing over and over since I re-listened to it all. This is a beautiful song, written by Irving Berlin, about trying to resist the temptation of someone you’re attracted to. The reference to the devil in the title and lyrics probably means that it isn’t as frequently played or as well-known as it could have been, and hasn’t turn up on many ‘American Songbook’-type albums. I first heard it sung by Harriet Hilliard in Follow The Fleet (1936) as I made my way through all of the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers films. An introduction on the DVD told me that for the UK release of the film, the frames where she sings the word “satan” were jarringly cut out. So the title of the song must have been controversial even in the 1930s.

Years ago, my friends bought me a copy of The Complete Ella Fitzgerald Song Books as a birthday present and it’s a cherished possession. Her version of this song is outstanding.

He Needs Me — Nina Simone

My discovery of Nina Simone was through the re-release of My Baby Just Cares For Me when it shot up the UK charts to number one in 1987. I was ten years old. Simone is still on my list of artists to spend more time with. Here she is being amazing with her singing of He Needs Me in 1989, 40 years after she first recorded it.

Something In The Way She Moves — James Taylor

I think I picked up a James Taylor ‘best of’ CD off the back of having read about the probable inspiration this song gave to George Harrison to write Something. I never got into Taylor’s work very deeply — there’s something about it that is a teeny bit too syrupy for my taste — but I liked this track.

Superwoman — Stevie Wonder

In my teenage years, if you’d asked me to name my favourite album, Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions might have been the reply. Wonder’s albums in the first half of the 1970s are extraordinary and I loved exploring them. Superwoman is the second track on 1972’s Music of My Mind and it’s stunning. I am guessing that two songs have been stitched together, giving this track an epic eight minute runtime. From Wikipedia:

In essence a two-part song, there is a coherence in that it tells a story of the singer’s relationship with “Mary”. The first part covers her desire to be a star, and to leave behind her old life to become a movie star. The second part covers the narrator’s wondering why she had not come back as soon as he had hoped. The second part of the song is also a reworking of the song “Never Dreamed You’d Leave in Summer” from the 1971 album Where I’m Coming From.

The song, both in its sound and length, was a change of pace for Wonder, who was trying to establish his own identity outside of the Motown sound. Besides its floaty ambience, it featured the singer as a virtual one-man band.

Honeysuckle Rose — Fats Waller

Fred Astaire was my gateway into music from the pre-rock and roll era. (Well, that and my mum singing very old songs to me when I was little.) Many great songwriters such as Irving Berlin and George Gershwin wrote songs specifically for Astaire, and I can understand why; I love listening to those recordings from his films almost a century later.1 I’ve always thought that the fidelity of a recording doesn’t diminish a good band with a good song. This brilliant Fats Waller track is from wonderful compilation Hits of ‘34. I’ve got a few of these CDs from the Living Era label as well as many more on my want list. They are well worth checking out if you enjoy this kind of thing.

Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag — Georgie Fame

A cover of the classic James Brown song that I prefer to the original. My wife, some friends got to see Georgie Fame play at Ronnie Scott’s back in 2004 and he was still incredible even then. The final “bag” that he bends upwards at the end of this song brings a smile to my face every time.

Bust A Move — Young MC

For ages, iTunes told me that this was my most played track. After my wife and I got married in 2004 we bought a car and went hunting for a place to live outside of London. This song accompanied our journeys as we tried to bust our own move. I first heard this as I watched Uncle Buck (1989) in the scene where John Candy’s eponymous character is looking for his niece at a house party, spurring me to find out what it was. My boss of 20 years ago told me that the whole Stone Cold Rhymin’ album was worth hearing so I picked up a copy. He wasn’t wrong. I love ‘singing’ this one at karaoke.

¿Do the Digs Dug? — The Goats

Back in my teenage years I used to buy and read so many magazines, usually related to computing or music. Working as a paperboy, I got to see new magazines on the shelves when they came out and started picking up titles such as Mojo and Vox from their first issues. The ‘Bob Muslim Mix’ of this Goats track appeared on a Vox magazine cover CD in 1993, with hilarious album art that parodies Roxy Music’s Country Life . I loved this tune from the moment I first heard it.

The Goats were a politically-focused rap band from Philadelphia. The songs on their politically-charged first album, Tricks of the Shade, are superb, but I’ve had to create a playlist that excludes the ‘skits’ that feature inbetween many of the songs.

What’s Going On — Taste

I hadn’t heard of Rory Gallagher when I first encountered him on an Old Grey Whistle Test DVD at the turn of the century. His performance was electric. This song, What’s Going On is actually from his time with the band Taste. I think I mislabelled it as I heard it on a ‘best of’ compilation that I had bought and ripped to listen to on my iPod. Some of his music is borders on being too heavy for me, but I know that guitarists love him. This song is excellent.

Who Are You — The Who

If The Beatles were my first obsession, The Who were the second. Back when I used to drink we used to have people over our house for dinner and inevitably, if it was very late in the evening we were talking about music, I’d end up asking if they had seen the Won’t Get Fooled Again footage from The Kids Are Alright (1979). If they hadn’t, I would persuade them to retire to the lounge to watch it on my DVD copy. I think that this brilliant ‘rockumentary’ introduced me to Who Are You, a song recorded just before drummer Keith Moon sadly passed away.

The compilation Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers At RKO is superb.