There was no show today and therefore no playlist, tweets or podcast to accompany it. For our NZ audience the reason is obvious, but for the literally tens of listeners overseas who may not be aware, Christchurch was hit by an earthquake today. We’re all hunkering down bracing ourselves for the magnitude 6 after-shock we’ve been promised.
Personally I think it was my promise / threat to play country music on yesterday’s blog – there’s nothing the genre likes better than some misfortune, tragedy or epic event to get it’s teeth stuck into.
Just a word of warning ahead of tomorrow’s edition of The Joint – for most of the week I’ve been listening to NPR’s Spotlight On Country podcast series.
It’s too early to say how exactly this will affect my choice of songs in Saturday’s playlist, possibly in the form of a Merle Haggard threesome or a Waylon Jennings Sesh.
Or maybe I’ll just play George Jones‘ “He Stopped Loving Her Today” whilst quietly crying in the studio. Am I alone in thinking that one of the This Mortal Coil line-ups could do a fantastic cover version of this song, maybe as a bonus track on the forthcoming 4AD boxset?
Lovely new single from Tommy Ill – “Robot”. Catch Tommy Ill at Goodbye Blue Monday on Saturday 11 September. Fingers crossed we can get him into the show for a quick chat.
Simian Mobile Disco have been busy. Their new Delicatessen & Delicacies singles series features food in the titles. The first two singles are Aspic/Nerve Salad and Cazu Marzu/Thousand Year Egg. Casu marzu (Sardinian sheep’s milk cheese riddled with insect larvae) could well be the world’s deadliest cheese.
This one almost slipped below The Joint radar. It’s the match-up we’ve all been waiting for as Australia’s answer to Chris Morris takes on John Safran’s British mentor.
By match-up I mean invites on Sunday Night Safran as a guest, and by takes on I mean cordially interviews about his film Four Lions.
The head to head starts at about the 31 minute mark.
The NME reported yesterday that Domino Recordings are set to release an Orange Juice 7 disc boxset on the 8th of November, possibly due to overwhelming public demand after The Joint played the title track of Edwyn Collins’ new CD “Losing Sleep” last Saturday. Possibly.
Entitled “Coals To Newcastle”, the release will comprise their entire discography plus video footage.
I’m particularly looking forward to the latter because it will include the official promo for “What Presence?!” – which I reckon to be the best Orange Juice single and a piece of video I’ve never seen. Derek Jarman directed to boot.
That’s when Tricky released his debut album “Maxinquaye“. At the time it was released it was a dark, brooding, decaying and paranoid affair. I listened to it the other day and it has aged quite well.
The closest I have ever heard anyone get to its moodiness are the M.I.A., Burial, and Kode9 albums. Tricky is also the only artist I have ever heard cover a Public Enemy song (“Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos”) and match it (and arguably surpass it).
In a way, Tricky seems like an impossible artist to cover.
But you’d be wrong. I was.
The other day I was lurking around bandcamp.com and noticed that secrets aka Fraser Austin had done a cover version of “Hell is Round the Corner”. Damn well shat myself when I discovered that it was true in spirit to the original. Must be something about the Christchurch winter that lends itself to paranoia. Or secrets is taking lots of cough syrup at the moment.
*ERRATUM: Curses. As ever I got the lyric wrong. Instead of “Seduce me, seduce me…” it should have been “Reduce me, seduce me…”. THX Hairdresser on Fire for inadvertently alerting me to my error.
Download 12pm – 1pm here (m4a / aac file) - Technical difficulties for the second week in a row. So, apologies, no spiffing m4a / aac formats. Scroll down to get the mp3 version instead.
Shawn Lee feat. Princess Superstar – Christopher Walken on sunshine
Download 1pm – 2pm here (m4a / aac file) - Technical difficulties for the second week in a row. So, apologies, no spiffing m4a / aac formats. Scroll down to get the mp3 version instead.
Alternatively, this is the raw, unpasteurized version of the show in mp3 format. No chapters, pictures or links. Slightly less quality. Otherwise the audio content is the same as the two files above. The choice is yours…..
Technical difficulties also meant the first song on today’s show is missing from the podcast.
On the show last Saturday I was being a little bit cheeky when I described the new Mount Pleasant LP “The Flood” as being the perfect soundtrack for David Lynch’s remake of “American Psycho”.
In hindsight I don’t think I was too far wrong. This album pushes my buttons. Jonathan Phillips is sneaky like that. “The Flood” comes across as more of a sketchbook than the final, finished article and that’s why I like it.
With woozy cover versions of songs that I really hated in my childhood (Bruce Springsteen’s “On Fire”, Stevie Nicks’ “Sara”, and Phil Collins’ “Sussudio”) but now sort of like (not in an ironic way – it’s more like Stockholm Music Syndrome), lots of loud/quiet dreamy pop (“In The City”), dropouts and cutouts, glitches, snares and keyboards this is my kind of (un)easy listening.
The kicker for me is the final track on the album – a cover of Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” – one of my favourite songs of all time. I can still remember the first time I saw Dean Stockwell camply and menacingly mime the song in Blue Velvet. I was terrified and had strange dreams for weeks afterwards. It was my initiation into the weird universe of David Lynch. I have a hunch that Jonathan Phillips resides in a corner of that same universe.
