Everyone's dancing and feeling fine
Aug. 19th, 2005 03:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ventaIt's Friday! It's three o'clock! It's time to Boogie At Your Desk!
Friday afternoons need a little something. I think they need a Top Tune. Something to make you shuffle in your seat and, if possible, Boogie At Your Desk. I'll be endeavouring to fill this gap on Fridays this year.
I'm not claiming that any track provided to enable At-Desk Boogying is one of the world's best or most profound pieces of music. It will, however, be a tune which makes me smile, and which has at some stage made me surreptitiously Boogie At My Desk.
Desks are not compulsory, of course. Feel free to boogie through your office, in your bedroom, round your lab, across your classroom, on the train - wherever you find yourself on a Friday afternoon.
If you like the track, go out and buy the album it belongs to - I'll try and recommend a suitable CD to purchase for any BAYD track.
This link will expire at some point in the future.
Today you were invited to Boogie At Your Desk to:
Blyth Power - Summer Song
(If you don't want to download a file with an mp3 suffix, click here to get a zipped verison.)
Blyth Power are one of those bands like Half Man Half Biscuit who have just been quietly chugging on for years, pushing out a prodigious number of albums and wending their own cheerful way. I suspect there are hundreds of bands like that - some, like Chumbawumba, stick their head above the parapet briefly and then scuttle off again. Most never bother.
Penny, who has been mentioned before, provided my introduction to Blyth Power about fifteen years ago with a very cobbled together tape. It had Alnwick & Tyne on the A-side, The Barman and Other Stories on the reverse, and a couple of songs (annoyingly cut off half way through) filling the gaps.
I listened, liked it, and decided they were probably one of those bands you'd never hear of again. This is pre-interweb, remember :) Then, at university, I located occasional other fans. And realised the band was still going.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
neilh and I once found (it was more difficult than you might think!) a stray Joseph Porter gig (Porter is the main singer, er, no, vocalist with Blyth Power) and there I managed to acquire a CD of Alnwick & Tyne. Neilh very kindly copied me a stack of out-of-print albums, which I'm only now really getting to know. (phlebas, you're right, The Bricklayer's Arms is great, and - woohoo - it's got Blow The Man Down, whose title I've never known, on it. That's going on the buy-it list.)
In sound Blyth Power are kind of folky, with nods to punk and rock'n'roll. One of the nods is not always managing to be in tune :) However, in describing them, the one word I'd rely on is: English. It's not the folk roots, though, it's the lyrics. They are unremittingly English.
The words for the songs are often woven out of scraps of proverbs, quotations, bits of the King James Bible. They sing about events in English history, about obscure places in England, and about the weather. Shift, which was only narrowly beaten by Summer Song to be this week's BAYD tune, even begins with the gentle burbling of the shipping forecast (before going on to rant about St Augustine). They occasionally break out into old-school hymns, cheerfully have a bash at the church next, then wind up singing about the cricket. Really. There's a lot of cricket.
For the quickest way to get a feel for the whole thing, read the band's own description of their annual music festival. It involves music, trainspotting and, of course, cricket.
If Radio4 listened to music, this would be it.
The lyrics for Summer Song score around 0.79 Debasers of Impenetrability, which isn't unusual for Blyth Power. But with phrases like "Norfolk tweeds", "tarnished shilling" and "crupper" cropping up, you can at least be sure it's good, home-grown impenetrability.
Blyth Power albums, particularly the older ones, are not terribly easy to find these days. If you can locate it, grab Alnwick & Tyne (and Alnwick's a lovely place, too. It's pronounced "Annick", by the way. It's on the River Aln. Alnmouth, just down the road, is pronounced "Allnmouth". Yes, we do it to catch southerners out).
The band's own website offers a selection of recent CDs for sale. The Bricklayers Arms seems like a good bet, but I'll have to leave the floor open for proper recommendations as I don't know any of the other albums they've got in. Better still, go and see them live, enjoy the mayhem and buy something.
Did you spot the brief guest appearances of the two-note guitar solo from Boredom, anyone ? No ? Ah, that'll be just me imagining it, then.
Friday afternoons need a little something. I think they need a Top Tune. Something to make you shuffle in your seat and, if possible, Boogie At Your Desk. I'll be endeavouring to fill this gap on Fridays this year.
I'm not claiming that any track provided to enable At-Desk Boogying is one of the world's best or most profound pieces of music. It will, however, be a tune which makes me smile, and which has at some stage made me surreptitiously Boogie At My Desk.
Desks are not compulsory, of course. Feel free to boogie through your office, in your bedroom, round your lab, across your classroom, on the train - wherever you find yourself on a Friday afternoon.
If you like the track, go out and buy the album it belongs to - I'll try and recommend a suitable CD to purchase for any BAYD track.
This link will expire at some point in the future.
Today you were invited to Boogie At Your Desk to:
Blyth Power - Summer Song
(If you don't want to download a file with an mp3 suffix, click here to get a zipped verison.)
Blyth Power are one of those bands like Half Man Half Biscuit who have just been quietly chugging on for years, pushing out a prodigious number of albums and wending their own cheerful way. I suspect there are hundreds of bands like that - some, like Chumbawumba, stick their head above the parapet briefly and then scuttle off again. Most never bother.
Penny, who has been mentioned before, provided my introduction to Blyth Power about fifteen years ago with a very cobbled together tape. It had Alnwick & Tyne on the A-side, The Barman and Other Stories on the reverse, and a couple of songs (annoyingly cut off half way through) filling the gaps.
I listened, liked it, and decided they were probably one of those bands you'd never hear of again. This is pre-interweb, remember :) Then, at university, I located occasional other fans. And realised the band was still going.
neilh and I once found (it was more difficult than you might think!) a stray Joseph Porter gig (Porter is the main singer, er, no, vocalist with Blyth Power) and there I managed to acquire a CD of Alnwick & Tyne. Neilh very kindly copied me a stack of out-of-print albums, which I'm only now really getting to know. (phlebas, you're right, The Bricklayer's Arms is great, and - woohoo - it's got Blow The Man Down, whose title I've never known, on it. That's going on the buy-it list.)In sound Blyth Power are kind of folky, with nods to punk and rock'n'roll. One of the nods is not always managing to be in tune :) However, in describing them, the one word I'd rely on is: English. It's not the folk roots, though, it's the lyrics. They are unremittingly English.
The words for the songs are often woven out of scraps of proverbs, quotations, bits of the King James Bible. They sing about events in English history, about obscure places in England, and about the weather. Shift, which was only narrowly beaten by Summer Song to be this week's BAYD tune, even begins with the gentle burbling of the shipping forecast (before going on to rant about St Augustine). They occasionally break out into old-school hymns, cheerfully have a bash at the church next, then wind up singing about the cricket. Really. There's a lot of cricket.
For the quickest way to get a feel for the whole thing, read the band's own description of their annual music festival. It involves music, trainspotting and, of course, cricket.
If Radio4 listened to music, this would be it.
The lyrics for Summer Song score around 0.79 Debasers of Impenetrability, which isn't unusual for Blyth Power. But with phrases like "Norfolk tweeds", "tarnished shilling" and "crupper" cropping up, you can at least be sure it's good, home-grown impenetrability.
Blyth Power albums, particularly the older ones, are not terribly easy to find these days. If you can locate it, grab Alnwick & Tyne (and Alnwick's a lovely place, too. It's pronounced "Annick", by the way. It's on the River Aln. Alnmouth, just down the road, is pronounced "Allnmouth". Yes, we do it to catch southerners out).
The band's own website offers a selection of recent CDs for sale. The Bricklayers Arms seems like a good bet, but I'll have to leave the floor open for proper recommendations as I don't know any of the other albums they've got in. Better still, go and see them live, enjoy the mayhem and buy something.
Did you spot the brief guest appearances of the two-note guitar solo from Boredom, anyone ? No ? Ah, that'll be just me imagining it, then.
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no subject
Date: 2005-08-22 09:41 am (UTC)