And if you want more James Brown goodness, check out James Brown Olympia 1966.
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Tag: music
Well, both stuffings were good. The (more experimental) ginger one tasted great, though a little unexpected in an otherwise very traditional Christmas meal.
The local Great Spotted Woodpecker was drumming this morning. They are always a very early sign of spring, but December still seems freaky. It’s been a weird old winter, weatherwise, and my woodpeckers are hardly the only sign of it. The newspapers have been going through one of their periodic phases of interest in climate change as a result, but I daresay they’ll move on to something else soon enough, and no-one’s behaviour will have changed much.
The other curious nature observation of the week was a heron in the garden with a pair of crows taking turns to sidle up behind it and try to tweak its tail feathers. Apparently for no reason other than a bit of fun.
The death of James Brown was sad news to wake to on Christmas morning. I listen to a variety of music – pop, soul, reggae, hip-hop, soukous, techno – but what it all has in common is that it has a bit of a groove to it. So as you can imagine, James Brown, the most sampled man in the world, has an important place in my personal musical pantheon. One of the great artists and great entertainers of the twentieth century. From a groove point of view, perhaps the greatest of them all.
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FSotW: Heavy Metal Concert Flyers
Flickr set of the fortnight, really, since I forgot last week. Anyway, it’s Heavy Metal Concert Flyers by quibx. From the old days before computers when people actually did these things with a felt-tip pen and a photocopier. It would be hard to claim that any of the results are lost design classics, but I do like some of the idiosyncratic details. Like “former Fate’s Warning members”:
And what’s not to love about a tag-line like “George Bush, Dan Quayle, and The P.M.R.C. all hate RANCID FOETUS”:
And Heavy Metal Design Rule #1 is of course, that you can never go wrong with a skull motif:
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Tulear Never Sleeps
Everyone’s favourite fair trade DRM-free world music store, Calabash, has introduced embedded audio players for your blog. So here’s one of the favourite albums I’ve bought from them, Tulear Never Sleeps, an album of the tsapiky music of Madagascar:
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Stupid instruments
Because I didn’t go all the way to Ecuador to find reasons to be rude about the US, let’s be rude about something Ecuadorian: pan pipes.
The fact that people can produce tunes with them at all is a minor triumph for human ingenuity, but let’s be honest, they’re a rubbish instrument. They make the penny whistle look nuanced and sophisticated. I feel rather the same way about steel bands: I don’t care how typically local and evocative they are, I don’t want to have to listen to them on holiday.
The steel band thing may be influenced by the fact that every Christmas on Oxford Street there are some annoying bastards playing fucking Christmas carols on the steel drums, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard a tune played by a steel band that wouldn’t have sounded better on something else. Ditto pan pipes.
I thought it would be fun to make a whole set, with different record labels. I’ve added Trojan, Upsetter, Chess, Apple and Sun:
You can get a zip of them as .icns files here.