LA MELANCOLIE

I remember when this was on TV. Was it... seven, eight years ago?
Anyway, by the time I had set up the VCR and found a tape I could erase, I had missed the first two songs. Not that it would matter much today, all my video tapes are in the basement and I have no machine to play them.
Still, the power of these two songs struck me so hard, I remember everything so vividly. The shape of the room, the color of the couch, the clothes my girlfriend and my friend Rémi were wearing that night...
For years I've patiently waited for someone to upload these two rare LEO FERRE TV appearances. And now here they are:

THE FALL

It took YAKHYA FALL only two songs to pop up in my personal pantheon of the world's finest guitar players: dig the delayed solo on JANGAAKE, and the Sterling-Morrisonesque solo on NDAGA SEERI BOY.
Discovered both these gems by STAR NUMBER ONE DE DAKAR on THIS COMP containing exhaustive, interesting, historical liner notes on the thick booklet by Florent Mazzoleni.
On the blog linked to, I found the whole albums, featuring yet another magical guitar moment on yet another extra slow track: WAALO.

YOUR OWN WAY

That QUICKSPACE vid put me in a Cullinan mood. Time to share one of the most bizarre offering of this genius musician.
In 2001, under the name DOUGAL REED, he decided to imagine what the most classic album of YACHT-ROCK, FLEETWOOD MAC's RUMOURS would have sounded like, had cheap speed replaced pure coke. Yes, he actually did the whole album.
Here are TWO HIGHLIGHTS. But really the only reason I didn't upload the whole thing is laziness.

FAR AND BEYOND THE UK INDIE SCENE

Yes, in spite of having always been so ridiculously underappreciated, QUICKSPACE did manage to appear on television once (in Japan). And now it's on Youtube. Even though the video has only been watched twenty-two times, one of the Youtube users who commented it got it right: "Quickspace is", indeed, "great band ever".

NILSSON SINGS NILSSON

Blast!

HELLO NEWMAN

"I used to be against world peace. But then Bono came out for it and the scales just fell from my eyes." - Randy Newman


RANDY NEWMAN wrote a million great songs. Most of them are on TWELVE SONGS, SAIL AWAY, GOOD OLD BOYS or on what is to me the masterpiece album of yacht-rock, TROUBLE IN PARADISE.
There are some that EVERYONE KNOWS, some written IN THE 60s, and some JUST TWO YEARS AGO.
And some were written for WALT DISNEY:

KID

Am I crazy for liking this song? Anybody can see how cheesy it is, but there's something sweet about its naivety... Isn't there?
Or do I associate it with childhood because KID CREOLE put this song in the charts when I was a child?
Twenty-five years later, my brother is on first-name basis with August Darnell, and my three-year-old daughter listens to this 1961 version of the same song all the time... What a carve up.