Off Topic TV, Entertainment and Arts thread

This week's slightly unusual offerings featured a track from the unreleased Derek & The Dominos second album, an accoustic George Harrison demo of Beware of Darkness, Mudcrutch covering The Byrds, Stereophonics covering Neil Young, and a Graham Parker track with Springsteen on backing vocals.

Something for all the family ...

 

Sounds great, very well researched, sorry I missed it. One radio show I used to love was Benny Green on Radio 2. The man was a human encyclopaedia on jazz, and was probably the world's leading authority on plagiarism. Where he dug them out from I have no idea.

 

When I was overseas I bought loads of albums that I never really played through properly - it would be one spin and on to the next. I would go on spending sprees in UK, US, Japan or wherever I was visiting and buy far more than was sensible. I am now working through them and finding a lot of interesting stuff I hadn't really appreciated. I have about 140,000 songs in my collection so it's a long process but gives me lots of material.

 

Musicians complain about Spotify not paying them enough, but you can dip into all sorts of things that you wouldn't buy anyway, so I don't think it works against them in the long term.

 

I saw on Facebook the othyer day that Gary Numan (remember him?) had accumulated over a million downloads on Spotify. He got a reimbursement of 36 pounds. Hard to comment too much without knowing more about the system, but that sounds like a legitimate gripe to me!

 

If true, that's a poor return. Facebook has been known to be slightly inaccurate on the odd occasion though.

 

Spotify has significant issues with fraud as it pays on "market share". The top 100 artists make up something like 99.5% of all listens so are given 99.5% of the revenue.

The issue is that fraudsters have made fake music playlists and created bot armies to listen to it en masse, managing to secure £1000s from Spotify in the process.

Vulfpeck are a great funk band who managed to game the system a few years ago with a fake album

www.forbes.com/sites/hughmcintyre/2014/07/28/how-a-band-made-20000-on-spotify-from-5-minutes-of-silence/

 

Pre-match entertainment- Paul Gambaccini plays the top 20 from 1976 and 1989 between 1300 and 1500 hours this afternoon on Radio 2.

 

The BBC has put a warning on it's re-runs of Black Adder;

Look out Woke folk, this programme might have some funny jokes in it - and we know a sense of humour is likely to offend.

Here's their latest guide (last updated in 1983 by Ben Elton) of things it's officially OK to laugh at:

• The Tories
• erm... that's it.

 

WOKE has infected large areas of music. The Beatles' A Day in the Life- Woke up, got out of bed.
Blues- Woke up this morning, and I had the blues.
Folk- As I Woke up one fine May Morning.
Mountain Goats- Woke up new.
Alabama 3- Woke up This Morning
Robert Palmer- Woke up laughing
Deepend- Woke Up in Bangkok
Tungevaag- Woke up in India
Reuben and the Dark- Woke up a rebel
And plenty more.
The problem is, how to distinguish them, since the Woke look like anyone else.

 

A Day in the Life by the Beatles, I consider to be the greatest song ever written.
This despite it having what sounds like very disparaging lines about 'the War' (WW2 presumably) in it.
Although many were peacenik hippies by the late 1960's, I choose to believe now that the lyrics are actually aimed more at the jingoistic war movies being produced at that time, rather than the War itself.

Curiously, my second favourite song of all time; Wish you were here by Pink Floyd, also has anti-war sentiments in it's lyrics.

Just for information, Hung up by Paul Weller, Four seasons in one day by Crowded House and Sacrificial bonfire by XTC are my third, fourth and fifth favourite tunes of all time, but I'm not sure which one is which in the rankings.
Wow by Kate Bush is pretty good too, very atmospheric. I like the witty and un-PC Vaseline reference.

 

For anti-war songs try And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda, and Green Fields of France by Eric Bogle. Hanging on the Old Barbed Wire is a WW1 classic, Hill of Little Shoes by Coope Boyes and Simpson refers to the holocaust. These are all songs which are all the more powerful for having an understated message. The folk idiom is the place to look, although it's not everybody's cup of tea.

 

A little more mainstream perhaps, but Shipbuilding is a good anti-war song. Must admit I kind of like Tasmin Archer's version as much as the Elvis Costello original.
I did enjoy a bit of Billy Bragg back in the day too (don't tell @The Punter’s Pal )

 

There's a good video accompaniment to Elvis's version on You-Tube, + some background information to the song.
Another great song is Jackie and Murphy by Martin Simpson, about a man and his donkey who worked as an ambulance service at Gallipoli in WW1. They saved 300 lives before Jackie was killed and the donkey survived, and received the highest honour an animal can receive. Jacky was turned down for an honour by Whitehall bureaucrats despite being recommended by his CO as "The bravest man he had ever seen"

 

The title of "Folk Music" puts a lot of people off, but as Louis Armstrong said, "All songs are folk songs, leastways I ain't never heard no horse sing!"

 

I'll offer:

Gerry Rafferty - Tired of talking
John Mellencamp - Human Wheels
Jason Isbell - Go it alone
David Knopfler - Sometimes there are no words
Eric Clapton - Bottle of red wine

 

Few of my favourites

 

Avalon is a favourite of mine

 

Love the new Banksie of the escaping prisoner. Really gave me a chuckle.