Commit To The Bit

Somewhat to my surprise, it seems like it's been a couple of weeks since the last official music post. What with all the posts about the music I've been making myself, I'd have kind of thought it would have been a lot more recently than that but I checked and it seems not. I do have a couple of other topics - game-related - to talk about but they could certainly do with some more time to cook so let's go with music instead. Not that I need any persuasion for that.

Of course, there is the awkward question of whether I have anything I want to share. Or that's worth sharing. These past few weeks, all the time I'd normally have spent trawling for tunes has been given over to making them instead. Still, I think I can probably come up with something...

I'll tell you what. Instead of going straight to the music, how about first we hear from someone who knows what they're talking about, explaining how it's done. Charli XCX (For it is she.) won something at the Novellos last night and she gave a speech that deserves to be shared as widely as possible.

First, though... the Novellos. What a sham that is. They are. Whatever. 

I managed to go through most of my life without knowing the Novello Awards existed, even though I've been obsessively interested in popular music since I was about twelve years old and the  awards go back before I was even born. If they ever got reported back when I was following the music press like it was holy writ, I don't remember it. 

I think the first time I ever really noticed the awards was when Noel Gallagher started banging on about them a decade ago. I figured if they were his kind of deal, they were probably best avoided. 

As Harry Styles' win in 2021 suggests, Noel was talking through his hat. Or through something, anyway. Now I'm more familiar with it, it still seems like a proper ranshackle nonsense of an event to me, with very little indeed to do with song-writing as such, so it was a pure joy to wake up this morning and read Charli putting the whole thing into context. She walked away with what I have to assume is the top award, Songwriter of the Year and here's what she said in her acceptance speech:

“To me as a songwriter, but above all, as an artist, conviction is everything. It separates the frauds from the greats, the good singers from the trendsetters. It’s Duchamp’s fountain. It’s Denniz pop, it’s David fucking Lynch. It’s an undeniable sense of style and personality, and of course, it’s embracing the idea of daring to suck, in my opinion, from writing songs with no fear and no agenda other than making something totally reflective of who you are, come the best songs. Songs that can soundtrack a night out, a summer, or possibly even define a moment in time.”

“To all the songwriters in the room, I would just say, do it for your fucking self. Make what you want to hear, not what an A&R person has requested of you. Make something for the niche and not something broad. Don’t try and be clever. Be dumb. Have fun and play your songs to your friends and, above all, don’t be afraid of yourself or of your own internal language, because it’s the thing that makes you distinctly you.”

She said a load more completely true and immensely sensible things, too. I wish I could find a video of the whole speech but so far I can't see one anywhere. Also, I'll just say, not only is it great to hear such excellent advice and self-analysis, it's just as great to hear someone able to articulate it all so clearly and concisely. Many of my favorite songwriters, breathtakingly clear and lucid as they may be in their lyrics, seem to have been sandbagged the moment before they open their mouths at any event like this.

At which point we really ought to have a Charli XCX tune I guess. Is there a new one, though? No, there is not. But there is an old one made new again. By TikTok, naturally. So let's have that.

 party 4 u - Charli XCX

As far as I can gather, this five-year old track blew up on TikTok for reasons unknown (To me, that is.) and Charli went out and made that video for it. Which, I think we'll all agree, is very much "committing to the bit".(That was in a part of the speech I didn't quote, in case you didn't click through the link and read it.)

My problem with the video is I can never watch something where someone runs around outdoors with nothing on their feet without wincing. And that surface looks really dodgy. Do they have some kind of protective spray they use? Or does she have soles like leather?

I hadn't thought of it until this moment but I'm betting the couple of singer-songwriters coming up next have won Novellos too. Hang on and I'll check...Yep. Both of them. Although not, it seems, Songwriter of the Year, so still some work to do there, I guess.

 Got To Have Love - Pulp

This is another video that's exhausting to watch. I'm also not a fan of huge, declarative, not to say didactic titles all across everything. Those were on the video for the last single from the forthcoming album, too, and I didn't rate them then, either.

As for the song, If I'm honest it goes on a bit, doesn't it? I mean, I'm not going to come  over all Pink Pantheress about it and disco anthems do generally just keep on going but I reckon I could make do with the three minute radio edit and leave the long version for the clubs. 

Then again, there's the question of dynamics to consider and this is a real end-of-set stormer that's been constructed with just that in mind so I guess it's as long as it needs to be.

 Pinball - Paul Weller

This is an interesting choice, if I say so myself. I respect Paul Weller as both a songwriter and a performer but I don't actually own a single thing he's done since the Jam and I only ever bought one album by them.

Still, I was oddly excited to read he's got an album of covers coming out and even more excited when I saw the track-list and found he's picked two of my all-time favorite one-hit wonders - this one and Journey by Duncan Browne. Weller is exactly my age so it's not really all that surprising to find he remembers these two songs the same way I do, as something that stood out among the usual pop fare of the 1970s. I don't listen to an awful lot of music from that era now but I keep coming back to these two songs again and again.

The problem with such idiosyncratic and memorable one-offs, though, is that there's really nowhere to go when you decide to take them on. They're generally too odd to turn inside out so you just end up trying to stick as close to the original as you can, which is something I never really see the point in.  Paul's gone for that option and it doesn't do much for me, other than make me want to hear the much superior original again.

Still, I'm sure Brian will be pleased with the attention. And the royalties. He's 80 now and he's probably been more of an actor than a singer for most of that time. He did the voice acting for a couple of characters in FFXIV, which was certainly news to me when I read his Wikipedia page for this post.

Dudu - yeule

At this point I was going to have yeule doing Skullcrusher on John Mulaney's Netflix show Everybody's Live, mostly so I could talk about the show itself. Watching it again, though, I don't actually like it. The song, that is. The performance is amazing and so is yeule but this is not my favorite among their work. By all means go check it out if you're a metalhead though. 

 Luckily, they have another fairly new single out that's much more my kind of thing. No video but it does have a really big cat.

Real Power - Golomb

If we're going to have something heavy, as the hippies used to say, this is much more my scene. They used to say that, too. Uh... we're not the hippies, are we? (No, we're not. This is a hippie.)

I think this is their first single. I have no idea who they are. They know how to make a racket, that's for sure. Also no video. Just use your imagination.

Egypt (Remix) - Westside Gunn feat. Doechii

And concluding the "Heavy" portion of today's program...

I love that rolling chaos sound. Like a junkyard falling down a hill. Don't hear nearly enough of that kind of thing.

 Hollywood Cemetery - Tiger La Flor

I think I'll give up any pretense of presenting anything new this time around. It seems everything I've bookmarked is an old favorite of some sort. Or a new favorite. Let's just go with it.

 Silver Ford - Sunday (1994)

No apologies for yet another from Sunday (1994). They make 'em, I post 'em. There are two more tracks on the EP and I'm not promising we won't have all of them here, eventually.

 Pussycat - Mulu

I don't have any actual (1994) in stock. How about some (1997)?

Utterly forgotten by me until a few days ago, when I came across a mention of it in my own back pages, and most likely forgotten by anyone else who wasn't in the band. Does it hold up? I think so but then there's so much 'nineties in everything I hear right now, it's hard to be sure.

 What's True? - sweet93

Speaking of the 90s... 

For once, Jarret Wolfson gets the sound right! Worth including for that alone. Mostly I just use him as a kind of belweather to find the names of people that might be interesting so I can go elsewhere for something they've done that's actually audible. In this case, though, his live recording is as clear as the studio version. 

And with that I think we may have reached the bottom, if not of the barrel, then certainly of the bag. I'll see if I can't do better next time.