When I'm in charge pt. 934

It's depressing, looking out of a train window for the last five minutes of a journey, as it pulls into any English town, certainly Sheffield.  They've obviously spent a lot of money tarting up the station and the bit of town immediately beyond its doors.  But what's the point if along side the tracks running into the station there's a ton of discarded crap - giant plastic paint tubs, other mangled bits of plastic, split sacks of cement, and those over-sized cardboard bobbins.

If I were in charge the approach to the station (for a distance of a mile or so) would be something along the lines of the hanging gardens of Babylon - with waterfalls and stuff.  In fact the train could drive through a waterfall!  It'd look cool and clean the train at the same time.

Well then I guess I'm going to Yemen

One of the tricky ones (along with Qatar) as, since the demise of Yugoslavia, the only game in town. So, looking at it another way, an easy one I suppose.

The internet threw this up pretty quick so I can't say my research has been broad, but I was so taken with it I decided my search was over. This is from Qat, Coffee and Qambus, another of those compilations put together by intrepid individuals armed only with a portable record player, a lap top and some vinyl to MP3 software. Not content with plundering your mineral resources, now we come for your pop music as well.

Anyhow, a classic boy/girl duet, do I detect a slight undertow of sass to her vocals?  The same kind of timbre to the strings as Nick Drake, otherwise utterly different. Which is sort of the point of all this - so this track is probably the winner.

Bolbol Al Hejaz & Soni Ahmad Mushtaq

Pay it all back

A quick change from the round the world antics, you remember a bit back I was going on about tracking down half remembered tracks? Well, the other day I was walking along with a friend and he only started singing one of them.  This is it.

Macka B Invasion

You can't really argue with that can you?

While my narwhal gently weeps

Every time Bjork releases a new album I read the reviews in the Guardian or whatever and they always say that it's revolutionising or subverting modern music as we know it. And then I listen to a track and it sounds like the same old same old.  This is an oddity.

Bjork Anchor Song

Spy movie car chase

I find most of the tunes on the above compilation a little anodyne, though to be fair the good tracks are very, very good. Like the one I've posted.  I think I'm just about getting over it now but a few months ago I was hitting repeat on this like one of those lab rats punching the button to get its next hit of cocaine.

J Girls Kiiro No Sekai

Song in the key of Syd

England isn't on the list of sovereign countries I've been consulting on wikipedia, because it's been subsumed by the UK as far as that kind of thing is concerned I think.  But for the purposes of this series of posts I'm breaking the UK up into its constituent parts (I need Wales for W) and this is the track I'm using for England.  I became aware of the gentle pop of The Doozer through reading Pete Um's blog.

On the the strength of the single Radio On I took a chance on his album Keep It Together (which, by the way,  doesn't feature Radio On). It flows so nicely it's one of those albums I listen to all the way through every time I put it on. The first time I played it the wife said, "Pffft! It sounds just like Syd Barrett",  and she was actually a bit outraged. My attitude was more, "This is great! It sounds just like Syd Barrett!" .

And it really does.  So, if you feel that Barrett's output was insufficient and you want more of that kind of stuff in your life, go to The Doozer's website and buy this album. It's on vinyl too.

The Doozer Fen Drayton

Vingt et un

My 21st birthday was a relatively mild affair.  I spent the day getting mashed in and out of the pubs of the delightful suburb of Broomhill. The day is chiefly remembered by pub quiz bores as the occasion on which the Grand National was declared void and by my friends for their beloved Blades getting tonked in an FA Cup semi final by their deadly rivals Sheffield Wednesday.  The revels ended at about 9.30pm when I fell asleep face down on a table in the Duke of York.

Not being much of a sports fan the high point for me was the record fair I attended earlier that day at the Leadmill.  It was my birthday so I was probably pretty lavish but the only record I can recall buying was a Francoise Hardy album, Francoise Hardy in English.  I bought it because I'd heard this song on the radio.

Francoise Hardy All Over The World

Possible test match special theme tune

Dashing ahead slightly, I'm posting this because I've been listening to it rather a lot over the last couple of weeks.  Probably a big reason behind this around the world thing is that I'm on a massive African music jag at the minute.  The Afro-Beat Airways compilation that features this track was delivered yesterday. I highly recommend it.  I got mine from Sounds of the Universe, and I think I bought their last copy. Today's post, representing the letter G, is brought to you from Ghana.

Apagya Show Band Ma Nserew Me

International musical alphabet pt1

To inject some life into the blog, on account of it becoming a bit moribund, I thought about doing one of these questionnaires. But I was slightly horrified at the amount of information the answers provided. Far better, I thought, to remain a shadowy persona, a fleeting impression of whom might be gleaned from my musings on beetles, pop music, haggis etc.

So I didn't bother with the questionnaire and you can't force these things so, despite the fact that blog worthy stuff is going on in my life, I reconciled myself to waiting until inspiration struck (it saddens me that I couldn't find the words to blog about the trolley bus exhibition at Fulwell Bus Depot back in May).

Anyway, the other day it occurred to me that the last two albums I'd listened to were by musicians from Argentina and Zambia respectively, and that gave me the only slightly desperate idea to do a round the world thingy about records. Alphabetically around the world in twenty six records.

I picked my countries from the first list I found on the internet, only to find that it's not very accurate  - for D I was all set to have Dhekelia on the grounds that I'd never heard of it and it looks a bit science fiction. But it turns out it's just a British military base on Cyprus, so that's no good.

I think I'll probably hop about a bit rather than do it in strict alphabetical order, as there are bound to be hold ups seeking suitable tracks from various territories. For a start I know I want to use a particular track from Peru for P, but I've lost the link and all I've got to go on is that it sounds like an old woman chanting, shaking some shells and someone hitting two bits of wood together.

And there's the matter of X. Not sure what I'm going to do about that one. Still, we live (as always), in turbulent times and perhaps a suitably initialled breakaway republic will pop up in due course.

So, A.  As usual I've no idea how I got on to this track (I do remember though that it was while I was watching a film called Perfume. God, that was a weird film, unrelentingly weird. I never really got used to what I was seeing).  Juana Molina gives us A for Argentina. I don't throw dinner parties myself, but I imagine she could be the next big thing in dinner party music. For all I know she already is. Or was.

Juana Molina La Verdad

Rip off corner

Snuffling about the internet I discovered this.  Nice sleeve eh?  Listen here (scroll down a bit).  Anyway, ignore the I am the Resurrection drum beat and wait for the guitar.  Released in 1991 and diabolically ripped off to great chart effect six years later.