This week I've mostly been listening to Goldfrapp's 'Rocket', the first single to be taken from their new album Head First. A return to electronic pop after an experiment with Wicker Man-esque folksy mysticism on their last album (Seventh Tree), 'Rocket' takes the Eighties preset keyboard sound of Van Halen's 'Jump' and hitches it to a high-energy beat and a singalong chorus to create a perfect pop track which could easily grate after a few weeks of repeated listening.
To stop that from happening I've also been listening to Wild Palms' '...Over...Time...' a single that was released on the Popular Music label last year. Wild Palms are a four-piece London band producing clipped, funky rock tracks with a whiff of Durutti Column, Devo or Talking Heads. A stellar cover of Bjork's 'Human Behaviour' is available for free download here.
At the weekend I watched the BBC Arena documentary on Brian Eno. Eno's 'Another Green World' is the title music for the BBC's long-running occasional high-brow arts documentary series, so it seems fitting that they would finally turn their attention to the enigmatic Eno and his wide-ranging interests. During the hour-long programme he spoke about his love of gospel music, choral music, Darwinism, art and science. I didn't get most of it, but it was fascinating to see Eno conjuring improvised ambient tracks effortlessly from his Mac.
I have an enduring love for Eno's music, but actually own depressingly little of it. However, I do have a number of records produced by Eno for other artists – the aforementioned Devo and Talking Heads, plus Bowie, U2, the last Coldplay album and James. James are still most famous for their massive hit 'Sit Down'. At school, when 'Sit Down' arrived in the depths of the Madchester / Baggy scene, I couldn't have hated it more. Everyone was wearing those ubiquitous James 'flower' T-shirts and it all seemed so irritating. Perhaps it was just because I wasn't in with the cool kids.
A few years later, my friend Rachael played me Laid when it was released. The jangly, semi-acoustic Laid was produced by Eno, and I really loved it. I was, in truth, most attracted by the production credit, having spent the previous couple of years borrowing CDs from Stratford-upon-Avon Library's seemingly limitless collection of Eno albums. The follow-up to Laid, the now rare-as-hen's teeth Wah-Wah was even more up my street. Essentially a loose collection of jams recorded during the Laid sessions and re-processed into complete tracks by Eno, Wah-Wah was a departure for James but utterly in keeping with the Eno spirit. Whiplash, which followed also saw Eno helping out on curiously electronic-embracing James (the track 'Go To The Bank' is one of my favourite, out-of-character James tracks), while Millionaires (another Eno production) was a return to the stately Eno rock productions of The Joshua Tree and "Heroes".
I really only fell for James big-style when I saw them perform three songs on Jools Holland to promote their Best Of compilation in 1999. They played 'She's A Star' and 'Runaground', both of which were overshadowed by the towering grandiosity of 'Sit Down', and after almost a decade of detesting that track I finally fell in love with it thanks in the most part to Tim Booth's vocals. This week I've listened to Gold Mother, which birthed 'Sit Down' to remind myself of just how good that song really is. A musician acquaintance once said to me that James tracks always have a plaintive, emotional quality because of the way their choruses use minor chords; I don't know if that's true, but 'Sit Down' now stands (or sits?) as one of my favourite tracks of all time to sing along badly to at high volume.
Vinyl corner
Space were a three-piece band from Marseille whose biggest hit was the instrumental 'Magic Fly' (1977), which I appropriated from my parents' music collection when I left home. Not to be confused with the band of Scouse reprobates who had hits in the Nineties with songs like 'Female Of The Species', this Space were exponents of a short-lived 'space disco' scene.
Led by the upper-octave monophonic synth melodies of Didier Marouani (also known as Ecama), along with bandmates Roland Romanelli and Jannick Top, 'Magic Fly' is essentially a Giorgio Moroder-esque high-energy disco track propelled by a thudding proto-techno beat. Sure, it's more Käse than Kraftwerk, but it's difficult not to like it. The B-side 'Ballad For Space Lovers' is more sedate and altogether more Prog-tastic.
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