IT'S ELEMENTAL: Part 2

What fun! Against sense or justification I find myself with time to continue a trawl through some more of the elements. I am intrigued by still how potent a source of lyrical stimulation the periodic table is proving, even as we leave the everyday names behind. Naturally the temptation to use some of the more arcane names of elements for band names, especially if ‘heavy metals’, is too much to resist, for example the well-known(?) bands Nobium, Cobalt, Xenon, C(a)esium 137 and even Barium, hoping the latter haven’t made too much of a meal of it. Sorry to any of them, hoping for a tag to their latest, but I am sticking to the words in songs.

Buy Titanium
First off is dancemaster David Guetta, who, in 2011, produced this little number, featuring go-to girl in this genre, Sia. I find it fascinating that the video seems to display a girl with supernatural forces running from the Police, not least as the opening bars of the tune seem a lift from Sting’s finest? All a bit generic and by numbers for me. Understandably not in the Greatest Hits that crept onto my shelves last year.

Buy Vanadium, but you will need i-tunes
Unbelievable! Vanadium I had never even heard of, yet clearly a part of the essentials for this gloomy and never more industrial gothic sounding outfit, from their 1983 album "Zeichnungen des Patienten O.T.", or Drawing of Patient O.T., which isn’t a huge help. The name of the group I knew, but this was my very first earburst of them, reading that their thing is the use of non-musical machinery as part of their instrumentation. Resisting the obvious cynical riposte, I am minded of the more recent Fuck Buttons, who similarly invoke noise as music. Oddly I can see an appeal, but maybe I have had too many MRI scans. Erstwhile member Blixa Bargold, guitar/vocals, later became a member of Nick Cave band The Birthday Party and then a Bad Seed.

Buy Chromium (electric)

The Church are, of course, world famous in Australia, with a lineage stretching back decades up into the present day: they have recently performed a few bijou gigs in the U.K. I think they should and could have been better known, tending towards a tuneful jangliness, reminiscent of Teenage Fanclub.This is the 2^nd version of the song, appearing on a 2005 acoustic rehash of back-catalogue, ‘El Momento Descuidado, an LP I picked up cheap in Melbourne, whilst visiting my daughter, a couple of years back. I prefer it to the electric version here.

Buy Iron
Who could resist and who does not know this song? An astonishing 45 years old, or will be in a month, astonishingly simple and astonishingly effective. I forgive them for the successive waves of noisy tosh produced within their invented genre, if only for the joy of air-guitar aged 13. And all still alive and squabbling. Wonderful.

Buy Nickel
So, as stated, no room for Nickelback, thank the Lord, or Nickel Creek, mores the pity, here, so it’s the marmite man himself, Tom Waits. Fabulous songwriter, of which I have no doubt, it’s just his unusual corncrake grate of a voice. Sometimes, just sometimes, it works for me, and, by jingo, this is one of those times, the contrast with the strings imparting a pathos I didn’t know he had in him. OK the odd guttural hawk as it continues, making me wince and the front row of any audience duck. Nearly as good as Over the Rainbow.

Buy Copper
Confess I only know the W.O.L.D.(ee ee ee) song for this lauded writer, deceased many a long year. Not my proverbial, I fear, being too M.O.R. (ah ah ah). Cheap gag, move on.

Buy Zinc
I wanted, I really wanted to give this a chance, trying to forget the years of horror when T. Rex were a fixture on UK TV chartshow 'Top of the Pops', my mother unfailingly asking me who he, Bolan,  was, with my stock answer being that I didn’t know. In case she though it indicative of my taste. Best thing, as ever, is the Taylor/Volman backing vocals, fresh from their stint with the Mothers of Invention, with me never understanding quite why. Shame the Turtles never sang a song about, o, I don’t know, Tungsten. (Is tungsten even an element?)

Buy Arsenic
Unfamiliar with these guys, and, at my first wiki I was pleasantly surprised, preparing to give this formulaic pop-punk a second chance, mistaking the noughties Philadephia “punks”, the Loved Ones, with the Australian garage band of the same name, 40 years earlier. What is yawn now would be somewhatground-breaking in ’65. But it wasn’t to be. File under old lace.

Buy Molybdenum, sorry, Nobelium
Mindful of 3 spiteful comments in a row, I really need one to like, and this, I thought, was definitely the one. The sheer unlikeliness of a song called Molybdenum automatically excused any need to consider its value. But, frustratingly, not on the youtube……. But, they did do one called Nobelium, which is, even if straying from the order I had been seeking. In fact they have more, with songs Iodine, Uranium, two Oxygens, another Titanium, Selenium and Nitrogen, all on a 2000 LP called, with little surprise, elements. Who they? Noxious Emotion is the name. I applaud the idea more than its fruition, but it’s OK. Clearly a leader in what amazon call EBM. (No, me neither, so back to wiki….) Whatever. It's OK. Really.

Buy Iodine
Now I can imagine Leonard Cohen stumbling down a track on some obscure greek island, knees smeared with iodine, having fallen from a scooter after a liason with his latest olive hued muse. Which seems actually to fit the gist of the lyric. Maybe not his pinnacle. Produced, doncha know, by Phil Spector, giving some down time fun imagining the same song sung by the Ronettes. (Works for me!)

I think we are both tiring……

Radio: Midnight Radio

Dar Williams: "Midnight Radio"
[purchase]

As a middle-school youngster, I used to listen to Harry Chapin’s Greatest Stories Live like an addict—sometimes multiple times per day. The second track, “W.O.L.D.,” was never my favorite on the album, but that didn’t stop me from memorizing every word of it by heart. Regardless, fellow poster Retropath has already contributed more commentary about the song that I would have, so I’ll move on to another radio tribute.

“Midnight Radio” is a song from the rock musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch, written by Stephen Trask. The version above was first covered by pop-folk artist Dar Williams a decade after Hedwig’s premiere as the penultimate track on her 2008 album Promised Land. It’s a moving song of reminiscence for those who have sentimental emotional memories of feeling connected with the world in a new way because of the radio (which, it would seem, applies to most people who read and write about music).

The lyrics illustrate the narrator becoming a star vicariously through the strong female voices on the radio: “Here’s to Patti / and Tina / and Yoko / Aretha / and Nona / and Nico / and me.”

RADIO : REX BOB LOWENSTEIN

Mark Germino - Rex Bob Lowenstein

Buy the record

Having read the entries so far, largely essays on the sadly diminished role of radio in any musical education, I thought it better to take a different tack. Back when radio was king, and truly the chart powerbroker, a time honoured approach to gain airplay was to reference the DJ, hopefully inducing it to be played by a presumably grateful and flattered jock. The list is endless, and I have not the space to reference them, but these guys have made a good start. Gradually, however, as the power of the usually sponsored playlist crept in, so too entered a wistfulness for the lost freedoms of those early pioneers. There were 2 songs that I always thought of a pair, the one referenced here, in 1987, and the better known one by Harry Chapin in 1974, W.O.L.D. (ee ee ee ee), and it is only as I researched this piece I realised they were a decade apart. Indeed, whilst the latter was a minor hit, the former virtually sank without trace, apart from in the U.K., where it was relentlessly played on Capital Radio, then the biggest commercial radio station in the country. Mark Germino was more a songwriter, in Nashville, than a singer, with a fairly short lived  recording career, bookended by this song, the above version and an electric version in 1991, which I find to have dated way more than the original. Neither seem available in download.

I shamelessly identify with each of these mythical  guys, Rex Bob and WOLD jockey, both true to the spirit and ethos of their cause, fighting increasingly pyrrhic victories all the way down the schedules. My childhood ambition was to be on the radio, preferably late at night, playing what ever I fancied. My choices here over these past weeks should perhaps please you I never made it. John Peel was the obvious template, but the UK has been blessed with a number of excellent and interested in music presenters over the years, if not also overburdened with facile grinning idiots . I would include Johnny Walker and Bob Harris as 2 who certainly influenced my listening, with tastes less obviously discordant to the moving ever onward from any mainstream Peel, both being unashamed afficionados of what I guess might now be labelled as americana. I have never realised my ambition and it has never gone away. Hey ho.

So what is the future for radio? Will "streamers" such as Spotify render the need for a curated selection redundant? I hope not, but would agree the conventional format has weaker and weaker legs. The only radio I ever listen to now is in the car, and is largely news and speech based, so called Talk Radio, (but at least it is the esteemed BBC Radio 4.) But there seems to be some sign of life wriggling on the sidelines, in the format of podcasting and internet radio, largely taking away any necessity to tune in at the required time, and allowing the listener to pick and choose when and what to listen to, with, rather than the randomness of pick a song any song, but through the ability and reliability of knowing and trusting a "brand" to point your listening diversions up the alleyway of your appeal. Radio is dead, long live radio??

P.S. Clearly and by the way, should any media moguls be looking for a man just like me for their major network, I can be contacted easily enough here......;-)