by Peter Moore
Number Twenty Five – Jimi Hendrix: Little Wing
Just before the Queen arrives on television, I’ve got a brief window of time to post the final song in this Christmas Vibe Box. I’ll leave you all with a resounding Merry Christmas, and what I reckon is probably one of the most delicate examples of guitar twiddling in the history of the pick up and the plectrum.
That’s it. BYE. X
by Peter Moore
Number Twenty Four – The Beatles: Across the Universe
It’s very nearly time for me to be wishing you all a very merry Christmas. Night has fallen on Christmas Eve, Santa Claus and his pack of cheerful reindeers are whizzing above us and the ever helpful people at Google Earth are helping us keep a sharp eye on him with their Santa tracker. Keeping in with the travelling theme, today’s Vibe Box features the Beatles with Across the Universe.
Now where were those mince pies…
by Peter Moore
Number Twenty Three – Elliott Smith: Angeles
I’ve this enduring nightmare that one day in the near future, some X Factor winner or other will be handed one of Elliott Smith’s songs on a platter by an olive skinned producer with ivory white teeth, who’ll encourage them to butcher it, all in the name of capitalism.
It’s a disturbing image, and a punishment that wouldn’t at all be due to the shy singer-songwriter, whose work is generally considered to be amongst the finest ever to emerge from his corner of the United States.
So, let’s all hope together that Simon Cowell never catches a glimpse of this Vibe Box, or this song: Angeles .
by Peter Moore
Number Twenty Two – REM: Crush With Eyeliner
If you ever care to visit the middle of England (not the north, or the south, but the middle), and locate a tiny village community named Kingstone, you’ll find a little village school surrounded by tall green railings and flanked on one side by a road that twists its way up a slight hill, exiting this village towards the east.
About two miles along this road, surrounded in all directions by a neatly clipped countryside of high hedges and rolling hills, you’ll find a public house called The Blythe. And in the backroom of the establishment, along with a pool table and a cigarette machine (which I now suspect has disappeared), you’ll be able to find one of the best jukeboxes in the entire world.
Well this is how I remember it circa 1999. And when we used to go along, play pool and drink far too much Coca Cola, we always used to throw this song on from REM. Crush With Eyeliner.
by Peter Moore
Number Twenty One: Israel Kamakawiwo Ole – Somewhere Over the Rainbow
Sticking with the ukuleles for a little longer, I’m going to nominate this version of Somewhere Over the Rainbow by Israel Kamakawiwo Ole, for today’s Vibe Box. It’s a song that’s nearing the impressive milestone of fourteen million YouTube hits.
A dreamy, whimsical song of the very best variety, the lyricist E.Y. Harburg must have considered it an excellent morning’s work when he sat down and came up with the effortless couplet: ‘Where troubles melt like lemon drops, Away above the chimney tops,’ which, let’s face it, is strong enough imagery to stimulate the imagination of even the most logical mathematician.
There might be something wretchedly comic about the vast body of Kamakawiwo Ole hunched over the tiny instrument for all the world like Mount Kilimanjaro over a goat, but within twenty seconds you’ll realise that his size is a nothing more than a momentary distraction from his voice. Deep, powerful and effortless, Kamakawiwo Ole’s voice has been lauded as the sound of the island – his memory immortalised amongst the palms, on the beaches, in the forests and the hills.
by Peter Moore
Number Twenty – Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain: Smells Like Teen Spirit
And now for something completely different.
by Peter Moore
Number Nineteen – Oasis: Let There be Love
A jagged black and white video of a dour rock and roll band from the north west of England. It seems a long time since a petulant Liam was cawing about cigarettes and alcohol and bragging about rock and roll, but, much to many people’s surprise, Oasis are still going. And as far as I am concerned there is nothing wrong with that.
by Peter Moore
Number Eighteen – John Lennon: Stand By Me
God knows our generation has more than enough problems to trouble us. But, to brighten our minds for a moment, it’s well worth being thankful that we were born at the end of the twentieth century and not a hundred or so years beforehand. Not merely because we would all have been expected to pull our socks over our trousers and set off towards the mud and bullets of Flanders, but also because we would have had to stand for the abysmal state of popular music.
The worst horrors of the X-Factor included, there is little about today that couldn’t trump the songs of the early 1900s. Titles such as ‘Oh, stop your tickling Jock’, ‘Every nice girl loves a sailor’ and ‘Pop goes the weasel’ abounded. And, if I want to amuse myself for a moment, I imagine a heavily moustachioed Simon Cowell nodding his head along to a lively rendition of Tipperary from some rugged second lieutenant or other, hoping to jolly well sing his way out of the trenches.
Imagine the collective wave of relief then, which humankind must have felt all those years later when Rock n’ Roll came along. The image of thousands of teenagers on either side of the Atlantic fiddling delicately with their wirelesses, their ears pressed to the crackling speaker trying for all their life to catch the rhythms, the lyrics and the twanging guitars of Chuck Berry, Bill Haley and the Comets or Elvis has become an enduring one.
Amongst that generation of Baby Boomers who grew up to be the mods and rockers of the 1960s, was a shabbily dressed drop out from the Liverpool School of Art named John Lennon. As one of the centuries most important, more influential and most complex personalities, there are hundreds of different books waiting to be written about Lennon. But leaving to one side for the moment The Beatles, the protests, the drugs, the politics and the preaching, I want to use today’s Vibe Box to suggest that at the heart of Lennon’s formidable personality lay an enduring and profound love for the raw energy of early Rock and Roll.
You can accuse me of folly for taking a great songwriter such as Lennon, and then not choosing one of his original songs. But despite the fact that I am keeping The Beatles in reserve for another day, there is something about this song which supports the argument I’m making. Because if we all admit to being at our most emotionally vulnerable when our long-term relationships break up, then we have to admit that our behaviour at about that time is usually most revealing.
Some might want to contact certain reliable friends, others might want to head directly to the pub, some will scoot straight off to their parents’ house and some of my female friends seem content to collapse in front of a television and devour large quantities of ice cream. Well, it’s perhaps telling then that when John Lennon split with Yoko Ono during the early seventies, he headed straight off to Los Angeles, stocked a mansion to the rafters with gin, whiskey and vodka before setting about recording a Rock n’ Roll album. In it, he included this version of the 1961 soul hit, Stand By Me.
by Moore Peter
Number Seventeen – The Pixies: Where is My Mind
Black Francis or Francis Black, the lead singer of The Pixies remains forever memorable for twisting his name about mid-way through his career. But I’ll leave that to one side for the moment, and stick to the music, which, once again, is rather good.
Once described to me in a pub as ‘America’s only ever indie band’, there is something unpolished about their sound, which is formed by contrasts: acoustic and electric guitars, changing time signatures, sudden key shifts, fast and slow, loud then quiet. You’re sometimes left cursing Black Francis (actually born Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson IV) for being a capricious bastard, who is incapable of making his mind up.
But when The Pixies work, the music is fabulous. A good introduction to their music is through their Wave of Mutilation compilation release – which (in a simile that I hope most of you get), is just about the musical equivalent of eating a Knickerbocker Glory and then wanting another one right away.
by Peter Moore
Number Sixteen – Spoon: I Turn My Camera On
A little rushed today – so you’ll have to go without an explanation for this pretty little ditty: I Turn My Camera On, by a band named Spoon.