Just a brief post, as I can't get round to writing my next full-length missive, which, thrill to end all thrills, will be called 'The Alt-Country Middleweights' ... oh, what a tease I am.
This is just a little note about how the music world is full of glorious little footnotes and coincidences - three of which I'll bring to your attention now.
1. Eminem's 'My Name Is' takes its main sample from 'I Got The'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKISdd2mKzU (from about 2.20)
, a song by black, gay singer-songwriter Labi Siffre, most famous for writing 'It Must Be Love' and 'Something Inside So Strong'. Labi Siffre was born in Queen Charlotte's, Hammersmith, like yours truly, and also attended St Benedict's, Ealing, as I did, but the least said about that place the better. But the best bit, who were the session musicians on 'I Got The' so with their fingerprints all over one of the biggest hip-hop hits of the 90s - none other than Chas and Dave.
2. After Nick Drake's debut album 'Five Leaves Left' his producer Joe Boyd, (who wrote a tremeondous memoir called 'White Bicycles'), looked into exploring the commercial potential of Drake's superb material, so set up a session with an up-and-coming young pianist called Elton John (this is late 60s) where he covered various of Drake's songs, including this one
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGG1N6uryCI
Not bad at all, actually. And one further little titbit, the guitarist is Caleb Quaye, Finley Quaye's much older half-brother.
3. I had a long held fascination with the great American singer Paul Robeson, most famous for 'Ol Man River' - Robeson was one of the most famous men in the world in the early 1900s, a star of stage, screen and record, a great athlete before that, and even in 1948 mooted as a possible vice-presidential candidate. Imagine that, 60 years before Obama, 15 years before 'I Have a Dream', a black vice-presidential candidate. But Robeson has mainly been expunged from American history, because he was a communist, who made various trips to the Soviet Union. He was victimised, punished and died a broken and forgotten man.
The Manic Street Preachershad a song called 'Let Robeson Sing' on their otherwise highly disappointing 'Know Your Enemy' album. You may remember, 'Know Your Enemy' was the one where they played a concert for Fidel Castro in Cuba. 'Let Robeson Sing' is all about Paul Robeson, it's actually musically lovely, one of the few high points of the album, though lyrically it's a spectacularly clunky treatment of the subject (I'll write in full about the shaky greatness of the Manics in a later post).
I only found out yesterday that the idea originally was that Gruff Rhys (who as you all know is a man higher in my estimation than Paul Robeson, Nick Drake, even Ryan Giggs) was originally intended to sing this number with the Manics for Castro in Cuba. In the end, he sang it with them at the 02 in 2011
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUZU_ILHFjk
and then in a solo gig he did later that week
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cw8lxDvk1PE
Beautiful! Who couldn't listen to Gruff talking for hours and hours ....
Anyway, hope those are reasonably enlightening, interesting and entertaining. Back to the alt-country middleweights soon ...
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