Kerraway » Music

Sam Cooke on the campaign trail

Michael Kerr — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 10:03:42 +0000

Music to lift the tone of an election campaign? Laura Barton, in her Hail, Hail, Rock’n'Roll column in The Guardian yesterday, suggested Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are a-Changin’ and Robert Wyatt’s Shipbuilding (with music by Clive Langer and lyrics by Elvis Costello). I’d add Sam Cooke’s contribution to the Civil Rights struggle, which itself was inspired by Dylan’s Blowing in the Wind: A Change Is Gonna Come.

House music with Daryl Hall and Eli

Michael Kerr — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 20:18:46 +0000

When I was a boy, my father, a plasterer who in his spare time played fiddle, banjo and accordion, would regularly invite his fellow musicians back to our house — often after the pubs had shut. Having had a drink and a bite to eat, they would sing for their supper.
Daryl Hall has a similar habit. He invites home his heroes and his contemporaries and younger players whose music he’s taken a shine to. The big difference is that Daryl Hall is the Hall of Hall & Oates, the duo behind such hits as Rich Girl and Private Eyes, and so his supper guests include Smokey Robinson, Nick Lowe and K T Tunstall. Those three are among the names that pop up in the archives of Live From Daryl’s House, a monthly podcast that Hall generously puts up online so everyone else can enjoy the fun. The latest, which went up yesterday, features the man I missed at the 100 Club on Wednesday: Eli “Paperboy” Reed. Eli at Daryl’s is not quite as electrifying as he was when I saw him on stage in London last year, but it’s still worth hearing.

And here he is live in a gig earlier this month in Mallorca:

Football songs: MacColl’s the winner

Michael Kerr — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 09:19:24 +0000

The Today programme on Radio 4 this morning, with the footballer Tony Adams as guest editor, had an item on football songs. They were all even more tuneless and witless than they seemed when first released. The only football song worth listening to, of course, was written by a woman: England 2, Colombia 0, by the late, great Kirsty MacColl:

The Duke & The King

Michael Kerr — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 20:54:36 +0000

What Jools Holland calls “the marvellous harmonious sound of The Duke & The King”. And it is. I’d never heard of these guys – “a glam-soul-folk quartet from New York” — until I found them mentioned in a column by Laura Barton. See ‘Great music for great railway journeys’, below.

Desert Island Discs – the Jan Pienkowski way

Michael Kerr — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 08:59:37 +0000

Desert Island Discs is a programme that encourages introspection and self-indulgence. The illustrator Jan Pienkowksi turned it on its head this morning. His first disc was the Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby, chosen not for what it meant to him but for “all the lonely people on all the other desert islands”.

Great music for great railway journeys

Michael Kerr — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 20:44:01 +0000

Once a fortnight — shame it’s not more often — Laura Barton writes the Hail, Hail, Rock’n'Roll column on the back page of The Guardian’s Film & Music section. Last Friday she was reflecting on what the river, the road and the railway have given to rock music.
That set me thinking about what I’d choose if I were able to add a soundtrack to Last Call for the Dining Car: The Telegraph Book of Great Railway Journeys, which is due to be published by Aurum next week. I’ve put a few possibles on a playlist, courtesy of the wonderful site Grooveshark. Feel free to suggest more.

The top 40 travel songs

Michael Kerr — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 19:43:40 +0000

The top 40 travel songs of all time? There are quite a few of my favourites in the selection by the team at World Hum. But what did they throw out so they could keep in two by John Denver? Come on, guys! Still, plenty to enjoy as well as to argue with. Here’s their No 2, Arlo Guthrie’s The City of New Orleans:

Eli Reed – a paperboy who’ll prosper

Michael Kerr — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 20:40:03 +0000

In an age when newspapers are folding or turning into multimedia “content” providers, there can’t be much of a future as a paperboy. Unless, of course you’re Eli “Paperboy” Reed, who with his band the True Loves played support to James Hunter at the Arts Theatre in Covent Garden last night.
What a voice! Reed’s a 24-year-old white boy from Boston (and most of the band, if I heard his introductions right, are from Massachusetts), but his heart, and his soul, are in Memphis, in 1966. Listen to a few tracks from his album Roll With You, and then consider that those are not covers of old, forgotten Stax numbers; they’re his and his bandmates’ own compositions. Backward-looking? Who cares when it sounds this good?

Arctic Monkey’s way with words

Michael Kerr — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 20:01:37 +0000

At an editorial meeting this afternoon, one of my colleagues, for a reason I can’t remember, had us reeling off names of the greatest lyricists in rock. Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Randy Newman all got mentions. But what of the younger ones? What of Alex Turner of Arctic Monkeys, whose writing was championed recently in one of The Guardian’s series of pamphlets by the poet Simon Armitage? Turner deserves a mention for this alone, in From Ritz to the Rubble: “And one of em’s alright / The other one’s the scary one / His way or no way, totalitarian.”

Springsteen scores on video

Michael Kerr — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 08:51:09 +0000

That Springsteen goalscorer’s slide I mentioned in an earlier posting — here is it is on YouTube: