Happiness Is Easy

It’s a cold a dreary day, and the recession blues are biting everyone to the bone. The grey gloom clouds of fiscal misery hang over every head around here and amidst the layoff’s and cut backs the ugly face of greed has risen from the sewers.

Take away a mans overtime and he tries to screw the company for cash any other way he can. It’s a really sad sight to see and can pull down the happiest of souls and the biggest of companies. What ever happened to dignity?

So solemn the weather and sad the mood, something is needed to raise the soul to a higher place.

Get back to the office, plug in the headphones and search under Talk Talk for the track “Happiness Is Easy’.

Most people think of Talk Talk as an early eighties pop band, with a couple of edgy high viz pop tracks scraping the charts. The real fans tend to appreciate more what they did after that phase. Several deeply intuitive albums showing a mastery of musical styles. Somewhere between these two extremes is the album “The Colour of Spring’ which captures the best of both their worlds and swings between pop and anthem.

Tucked away on this album, ‘Happiness is Easy’ is one of the only tracks I have ever heard where the use of a childrens choir didn’t turn it into total cheese. A fantastic baseline intro promises something dark and then the chorus lifts it somewhere divine.

All better now.

Listen to this track!

Ultra Modern Nursery Rhymes

When you are looking for that right combination of melancholy with an uplifting melody there are few better places to look than the rich back catalogue of Terry Halls work.

Sad songs sung to a very bouncy melody are his stock in trade and each has a certain place at a certain time in any ones life.

So, stressful and sad news has been the order of the day this week, and regardless of how people deal with such news there is always a need to actually deal with it.

REACTIONS

I have always thought I react to news rather distantly, or in poor proportion to the closeness of the News. It’s just my way. It all boils to the surface in the end, be it in song or poem or TV rant. I am often more effected by the loss of someone I respect but have never met than someone I am related to but don’t respect.

So needing to be uplifted without making whimsy of serious news I turned to Terry Hall and his collaborative album with Blair and Anouchka and track number 2 ‘Missing’

‘The kids are crying, the dog is dying, and I just got the flu…….. because we’re missing you’

Blissfully dark irony.

Not Being Boring

It’s raining again, and I am driving again (not that this blog will be Top Gear with Music you understand, it’s just the way the thoughts have fallen this week). Actually its country lanes as well on the tail end of the school run picking up my exhausted cherubs after a hard days work and they are not in the mood for chat. Isabelle wants to stare out of the window at the rain while Holly no doubt plots her escape.

LUCKY MAN

So the request for music arrives at my ears yet again and I apologise that, once again, it’s a bit dated.

Trevor Horn once said he liked working with the Pet Shop Boys because they use all of his favourite chords, and this tune is a case in point.

The beautiful chimed subtleties of the chord progression at the beginning of Being Boring roused a chorus of approval from the rear seats. ‘I love this one’ they almost said in unison.
And this is where I am the lucky man. I am pretty sure I was not as open to the stuff my Dad would have listened to when I was that age. Kids now despite having more music to chose from than anyone in the past have, seem to have to capacity to give everything a shot. Is this because there is so much out there these days that they no longer differentiate between old and new stuff?

I am jealous that they are growing up in an age where their access to music far exceeds anything we had when we were young. Anyone can get their music out there these days and that only enriches us.

Now, when their musical tastes are forming deep within their subconscious, they hear everything with more choice and colour than ever before.
I am sure this will turn them into broad minded, balanced musical beasts in their future.

‘Things can only get better’

Moments in Love

So it was Saturday evening and Holly had just had her 13th Birthday party with her friends in Cardiff. Being a Dad I was entrusted with the safe delivery of two of her male friends back to their rather dodgy abode in one of the rougher parts of Llantwit Major (cars on bricks, boarded up houses, you know the sort of thing).

Having made polite conversation with two outlandish lying thirteen year olds I was looking forward to a bit of piece and quiet on the 30min journey to Tesco (for drink, God did we need it that night) and then home.

I decided on a country lane short cut crossing the back lanes of Cowbridge to the A48. Front fogs illuminating my way through the dark and misty lanes I hit the red button on my stereo for the CD I was listening to earlier in the week to cough back into life.

MOMENTS

The eerie hollow drum machine and car horn sample from the start of ‘Vermillion Sands’ by the Buggles kicked in. I was transported to another place, accelerating into the dark surrounded by and ethereal pop song from the eighties, it felt like being fired from a helium cannon with my balls being suspended in blancmange. A whole body immersion of sound and sight for 6.48 perfect minutes… it’s exactly what ‘it’ is all about.

I even had to switch the stereo off before Tesco because ‘I am a Camera’ was next and you simply can’t start that song half way through after your shopping, it needs to be fresh and pure.