Bush of Goats

Things I should be doing today include writing a pitch, moving the downstairs cooker and laying the stones around the chicken yard.

Things I shouldn’t be doing include dicking about making mix tapes. But seeing as I have…

Harsh Words In Savage Times 

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We saw some very old friends for the first time in the best part of a decade last weekend. Will and I are of similar(ish) ages and careers, and we both have wives with dark hair, neither of whom really seem to have the time or the inclination to listen to the stupid mixtapes we are both still (it transpires) spending days at a time tinkering with and fine tuning for their benefit.

That’s OK, I guess: they’re busy; we made them have children  and Facebook isn’t going to update itself, is it? So Will and I are going to continue to amuse ourselves with mixtapes, but now also each other. It’ll be like mutual mastu- I’m not going finish that. You know what I mean. Will sent me a spotify mix which was good ,but I was bemoaning how Spotify can’t give you all the little bits of found sound that form an integral part of a really obsessively-crafted mixtape, and would have to carry on creating zips of iTunes playlists and uploading them. Which is what this is.

Backstory – read only if desperate.
This is a Valentine’s mix from 2007, featuring my first few interesting edits (particularly pleased with the segue into Gypsy Man) and Daisy, aged 3, sounding bored on the potty.

Gareth Pitmann was just this guy I knew.

The Artwork was from the side of his van.

Some girl at the local college on the hairdressing A-level did it.

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6 Beloved – The Sun Rising

In 1991 I joined a caravan of hippies and deadbeats and found myself on Dartmoor at a free festival. It was the best kind of insanity: on the first night, someone crashed their car into a ditch beside our tent and just left it there with the engine running and the lights on. On the second night, Spiral Tribe turned up with a rig and I found rave. As the night gave way to the day, they played this and I watched, open-mouthed (and wide-open-minded) as a man climbed on top of a VW camper van with a large ring and a tray of liquid. He then proceeded to send long, worm-like tubes of bubble mixture into the air, with the sun coming up behind him. Cosmic, as a word, is used to take the piss out of hippies, but I can’t really think of any other way of describing what I felt at that moment.

There aren’t many moments or places in my life I wish I could go back to, but to be on Dartmoor watching the silhouette of a man catch the sun in a slow-mo pearly worm would be a mighty fine way to die.

Beloved – Sun Rising

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5 The La’s – There She Goes

Depsite a moment where ‘String of Pearls’ was challenging for all categories, this was one of the easier ones. I was about 20 when my first proper girlfriend – as in, we lived together – left me. We were both young and really just playing at being growed-ups. We were lazy, messy, screwed a lot and wondered what it would be like to have real responsibilities.

Then I somehow ended up in student politics and we started drifting into different worlds. The break-up was brilliantly written: I came home too late one night to find a letter and her stuff gone. I wallowed in a scene: I sat with a bottle of Jim Beam and played this record 42 times in a row. That’s how long it took me to finish the bottle.

Twenty years later , whenever I hear this, she’s right back in my mind, along with the taste of bourbon, folded and refolded paper, lifting the needle and starting over.

The La’s – There She Goes

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Laura Marling – Goodbye England (Covered in Snow)

A few months back, a man of about my age was killed not far from here. He was hit by upwards of four vehicles on the road between Shepton Mallet and Glastonbury. It was dark and he was trying to herd some cows which had got onto the road back into the field. None of the cars stopped. The cows weren’t his.

He was buried at the church opposite by his wife and four children and several hundred people from here and about. The sense of injustice done to the family of a hard-working man who was helping a fellow farmer can’t be easily described, nor can the wailing anguish of his parents, or the cold hard set of his wife’s jaw or the confusion of his children as they were herded into the car and away, or the hundreds (literally, hundreds) of people consoling one another in the crisp cold afternoon sun. I stood at my window and I watched all this happen and this song played and I cried at how unfair fate can be and how some song’s played at certain times become indelibly linked to events you don’t want to think of every day.

Laura Marling – Goodbye England (Covered In Snow)

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3 Steely Dan – Reelin’ In The Years

‘You’ve been telling me you’re a genius since you were seventeen,
in all the time I’ve known you, I still don’t know what you mean.’

*And* Jimmy Paige’s favourite riff – all in the one song. Epic win, dude.

Steely Dan – Reeling In The Years

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2 – Aqua – Barbie Girl

I used to just dislike this song, but then I had children. Specifically, daughters. Before I could ignore it; now, I have to deal with it. There’s no MP3 for this as I dislike it so much. Instead, and in order that anyone mercifully unfamiliar with it can at least get the jist, here are the lyrics. The song is sung by a man and a woman; the male vocals are italicised:

- Hi Barbie!
- Hi Ken!
- You Wanna Go For A Ride?
- Sure, Ken!
- Jump In!
- Ha Ha Ha Ha!

I’m A Barbie Girl In The Barbie World
Life In Plastic, It’s Fantastic
You Can Brush My Hair, Undress Me Everywhere
Imagination, Life Is Your Creation

Come On, Barbie, Let’s Go Party

I’m A Barbie Girl In The Barbie World
Life In Plastic, It’s Fantastic
You Can Brush My Hair, Undress Me Everywhere
Imagination, Life Is Your Creation

I’m A Blonde Single Girl In The Fantasy World
Dress Me Up, Take Your Time, I’m Your Dollie
You’re My Doll, Rock And Roll, Feel The Glamour And Pain
Kiss Me Here, Touch Me There, Hanky-Panky

You Can Touch, You Can Play
You Can Say I’m Always Yours, Oooh Whoa

I’m A Barbie Girl In The Barbie World
Life In Plastic, It’s Fantastic
You Can Brush My Hair, Undress Me Everywhere
Imagination, Life Is Your Creation

Come On, Barbie, Let’s Go Party, Ha Ha Ha, Yeah
Come On, Barbie, Let’s Go Party, Oooh, Oooh
Come On, Barbie, Let’s Go Party, Ha Ha Ha, Yeah
Come On, Barbie, Let’s Go Party, Oooh, Oooh

Make Me Walk, Make Me Talk, Do Whatever You Please
I Can Act Like A Star, I Can Beg On My Knees
Come Jump In, Be My Friend, Let Us Do It Again
Hit The Town, Fool Around, Let’s Go Party

You Can Touch, You Can Play
You Can Say I’m Always Yours
You Can Touch, You Can Play
You Can Say I’m Always Yours

Come On, Barbie, Let’s Go Party, Ha Ha Ha, Yeah
Come On, Barbie, Let’s Go Party, Oooh, Oooh
Come On, Barbie, Let’s Go Party, Ha Ha Ha, Yeah
Come On, Barbie, Let’s Go Party, Oooh, Oooh

I’m A Barbie Girl In The Barbie World
Life In Plastic, It’s Fantastic
You Can Brush My Hair, Undress Me Everywhere
Imagination, Life Is Your Creation

I’m A Barbie Girl In The Barbie World
Life In Plastic, It’s Fantastic
You Can Brush My Hair, Undress Me Everywhere
Imagination, Life Is Your Creation

Come On, Barbie, Let’s Go Party, Ha Ha Ha, Yeah
Come On, Barbie, Let’s Go Party, Oooh, Oooh
Come On, Barbie, Let’s Go Party, Ha Ha Ha, Yeah
Come On, Barbie, Let’s Go Party, Oooh, Oooh

- Oh, I’m Having So Much Fun!
- Well, Barbie, We’re Just Getting Started!
- Oh, I Love You Ken!

(c) MCA Music Scandanavia AB

Hmm. Mostly, it’s  jibberish – despite the occasional stumbled-upon metaphysical truth (‘Imagination, life is your creation’? Whoa, dude.) but they’re basically espousing plasticised mass consumerism, which pretty much defines most 6 year-old girls’ fantasy worldview.

And it isn’t that it’s a lifeless, soulless piece of clumsily manufactured europop – if you’ve got children, you’ll know that description covers most of the music aimed at them.

I also know this is a popular hate tune for many people and the repeated refrain, ‘you can brush my hair, undress me anywhere’ is often cited as being the dark heart of the song. But children have no concept of the possible implications of being naked, or of making their dollies naked. The few Barbies the girl’s have, have been naked, bald (having had the hair brushed off their heads) lumps of plastic from the minute they appeared in the house. In fact, having issue with such an idea that nakedness as part of play – and by that I mean innocent, childish play – is somehow wrong or improper seems to say more about the objector than the child they profess concern for. No, the line I object to particularly is, ‘Kiss Me Here, Touch Me There, Hanky-Panky’ because it expressly blurs the line between children’s obsessions and adult knowledge.

The male singer manages to imbue this line with a meaning that cannot be misconstrued by adults and can only lead to questions that a teenager should be revelling in. I’m fairly sure I’m not a prude. I have no problem with sexual imagery in songs (I might find Lady Gaga a bit tedious musically, but she is talking to teenagers, not 6 year olds – even if 6 year-olds do listen to Lady Gaga, but they also know it isn’t for them or about things they understand). Aqua, on the other hand, with their play world parameters and co-opting of the games children play have made a song that sounds unpleasantly like entirely the wrong sort of grooming.

Trying to keep mass culture out of children’s lives is a near impossible feat, and frankly doesn’t create empowered children who are able to make their own decisions. They go to school and they hang out with other kids whose parents might not bother to care quite so much about fleeting fads. I remember the kids who were forced to live outside of mass culture. They were outcasts by dint of their parents isolationism. So I find myself in the awkward position of lying to the girls about why this is my least favourite song.

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1. The Glenn Miller Band – String Of Pearls

Wow. Nothing like starting out easy, huh?

Since deciding to do this little project, I’ve thought about little else than the 30 songs I was going to whittle this down to. And just about the last one on the list I decided on was also the first: my favourite song.

Clearly, trying to distill forty years of having ears into a single song is a pointless, meaningless task that reduces a great span of human endeavour to little more than a nubbin of trivia. You might just as well ask, ‘which do you prefer? Breathing in or breathing out?’ But as mountaineers are supposed to say when asked why they do it, I did because it was there.

My favourite song has also, of course, changed several times in my life, and will probably change again in what life remains. As a casual aside, here’s the long (and yet still not definitive) list of songs which have at one time or another struggled beneath the yoke of my portent:

Down At The Barber Shop – The Wombles
Wish You Were Here – Pink Floyd
Reelin’ In The Years – Steely Dan
The Lark Ascending – Vaughn Williams
Nessun Dorma – Puccini
To Blind To See It – Kim Syms
Could Heaven Ever Be Like This – Idris Mohammed
Thrasher – Neil Young & Crazy Horse
Shake It – Limbomaniacs
Alice Clarke – Baby Don’t You Care
Like Someone In Love – Bjork
Carceres Ex Novum – Black Dog Productions
Belfast – Orbital
Mario Man - Super Furry Animals
Lover, You Should Have Come Over – Jeff Buckley
Gypsy Man – JJ Cale
Doves – The Cedar Room

All great songs and had I been doing this at another point, it would have been one of those. Several of them make it onto the list in other categories, but others… Sorry, songs! There were just too many of you.

So why  ’A String of Pearls’? In the end it came down to choosing the song which was considered and pencilled into the most other categories. This one song manages to describe in me the greatest range of emotions and feelings, as dictated by the scope of the task. (And also some which weren’t: ‘Spaghetti’ for instance, as for some reason I cannot fathom, this song always makes me think of a plate of cooked spaghetti.)

So, here are the other categories Mr Miller’s and Mr Gray’s particular String of Pearls could have gone into:

A song that makes you happy
When I am feeling unhappy, this song can change my mood. By the time the saxophones commence their rhythmic croon at around 7-8 seconds, any frown has been smoothed away. By the 25 second mark, when the saxes repeat the same phrase with a slightly raised pitch, lines appear less wrinkled. By 53 seconds, when one of the saxes cuts lose and pulls off a cocky little solo, I am once again frowning, but only because I am concentrating on my very own air sax solo. And then at 1.55 as the cornet takes over from the sax, I am beaming from ear to ear.

A song that makes you sad
As with the previous category, this implies the song has the ability to change your mood. This song, as well as making me happy can on occasion have quite the opposite effect and bring tears to my eyes.
A quick point here: I like sad. Sad is great. I like it’s self-indulgence and I like knowing that when I have finished feeling sad, I will feel happy again; doubly so because I will have figured out what was making me sad and resolved it.

Having said that, ‘A String of Pearls’ reminds of my Grandpa, who is dead and I wish he wasn’t and I can’t do anything about that.

A song that reminds you of someone
Like I just said, Grandpa George. Tall, funny, brave, handsome, generous, honest and hard working.
Blimey, it must be getting smoky in here.

A song that reminds you of somewhere
The floor of my Grandparent’s dining room, on a Saturday night, cocooned inside the black, brown, yellow and orange patterned sleeping bags, with the sound of this song, blended with the dull chink of ice and laughing on cut glass whisky tumblers drifting down the bungalow hallway of the seventies.

A song that makes you fall asleep
This song is one of my oldest, probably the oldest, musical obsession I’ve ever managed. And lying in that sleeping bag, in that place, I distinctly remember waiting until I had heard it before allowing myself to sleep. Once it had started playing, I would relax and be asleep before it reached my favourite part.

A song no one would expect you to love
I can’t be certain that this is true, but I suspect it is. Although knowing what a Contrary Mary I can be, several people having initially appeared surprised might then concur that even that surprise had a certain predictability to it.

A song you listen to when you’re sad
Similar to, but  not the same as, making me sad about Grandpa, Pearls fits in twice here, as it also works to get me out of feeling sad, if I’ve got stuff to get on with.

A song that you want to play at your wedding / funeral
Important events, important song. Yeah?

A song that makes you laugh
I mentioned earlier the happiness this song creates in me, well at around the 2 minute mark, the smile bubbles out into actual laughter as Bobby Hackett rises, wiggles his valves, sets his lips and begins to play this short but spellbinding solo. I never cease to be amazed by the debonair insouciance of it: I don’t think there was ever a more stylish piece of play.

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Check me out, two post in a single day.

I am about to begin doing this. There will be MP3s.

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