The Drones are a noisy but very interesting group from Melbourne, Australia. They’ve put out four albums. They tour a lot. Some say too much. Well, they say too much, anyway.
The Tammys / Egyptian Shumba
When this came out in the late fifties, it must have sounded completely insane, chiefly because it does to this day, still. Three young (presumably innocent) girls screaming, screaming and SCREAMING through this hundred-mile-an-hour freak out about Egyptians or something.
Traditional / Carrickfergus
This traditional Irish ballad is enough to make the hardest of men weep until their stout glass runneth over. The last wishes of a dying man to be beside the grave of his one true love: ‘But the sea is wide, and I can’t swim over’. Poor, poor bastard. I heard an old man sing this once in a hushed-up pub in Ennis, Ireland. It had just as much power and soul as twenty Iggy Pops and fifty Nina Simones.
Maurice Ravel / Bolero
One of the most satisfying climaxes of all time (apart from the obvious). If ever anybody makes the mistake of asking me to play records at their party, I usually opt for this as the closer. There’s about five minutes of abuse I have to endure at the start, but by the end, all of my friends are sort of having sex with each other. Ole.
Louis Prima / Just A Gigolo
This recording is one of the most electrifying four minutes and forty-two seconds in the history of good-time music. David Lee Roth was aware of it, but his version compares to Louis’ in the way that picture of the all the dogs playing cards compares to Picasso’s Guernica. For the life of me, I’ll never understand how people lost the knack of making records that sound this good.
Alex Chilton / Walking Dead
Sometimes I feel like listening to something that would make all those dull, boring and straight people in the world feel confused and ill, because that’s what they sometimes deserve. This demented song from the Big Star vocalist, comes from his first solo album, Bach’s Bottom. A completely unhinged and beautifully deranged recording, which gets many a spin from me.
Karen Dalton / Something’s On Your Mind
She died early and left us with not nearly enough recordings, but this song from her LP In My Own Time manages to do what most can’t over a long career. She sings like a hillbilly Billie Holiday. Cracked and broken-hearted. I listen to this song when I’m fed up with feeling happy.
Suicide / Suicide
I’m including a whole album here. This is one of my favourite all-time albums. Released in 1977, and sounding like it came out next week. It’s one of the greatest American works of art, really. Hard to explain. Listen to it.
Van Morrison / You Don’t Pull No Punches But You Don’t Push The River
This comes from his album, Veedon Fleece, which contains nothing resembling a hit single because people were allowed to make things like that in the olden days. We listen to this album a lot. Pastoral, meditative, soulful and the perfect antidote to the raucous racket we make of a nighttime.
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