


Five Things I Saw & Heard This Week
Transcripts from the everyday world of music by Martin Colyer



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THE LATEST PROJECT: SUPER HITS [!] OF THE SIXTIES!

“SEALED WITH A KISS”
I’d heard the song for the first time in years on one of the last episodes of the TV series, Mad Men. Brian Hyland’s 1962 puppy-love pop classic (#3 on both US and UK charts) has a naggingly dark/slightly hysterical melody that stuck in my head for days after watching the programme. On one hand it’s an over-ripe teen anthem, on the other a singular melody that doesn’t sound like a “pop” tune at all. It’s the first track from a new project covering songs from the 60s.
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Aimee Mann Amanda Petrusich Aretha Franklin Barney Hoskyns Bill Colyer Bob Dylan Bruce Springsteen David Bowie Desert Island Discs Every Record Tells a Story Hot House Inside Llewyn Davis Janis Joplin JazzWax John Cuneo Joni MItchell Jonny Trunk Ken Colyer Leonard Cohen Levon Helm Liam Noble likeahammerinthesink London Jazz Collector Marc Myers Mark Pringle Martin Colyer Mavis Staples Michael Gray Mick Gold Miles Davis music Music Documentaries New Yorker Richard Williams Robbie Robertson rocksbackpages.com Ry Cooder Sam Charters Steely Dan Studio 51 The Band thebluemoment.com The Guardian US Esquire Van Morrison
SUPER HITS [!] OF THE SIXTIES! | ONE | “SEALED WITH A KISS”
I’d heard the song for the first time in years on one of the last episodes of the TV series, Mad Men. Brian Hyland’s 1962 puppy-love pop classic (#3 on both US and UK charts) has a naggingly dark/slightly hysterical melody that stuck in my head for days after watching the programme. On one hand it’s an over-ripe teen anthem, on the other a singular melody that doesn’t sound like a “pop” tune at all. Here‘s my version, part of a five song project covering songs from the 60s.
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HERE’S A TAG CLOUD…
Aimee Mann Amanda Petrusich Aretha Franklin Barney Hoskyns Bill Colyer Bob Dylan Bruce Springsteen David Bowie Desert Island Discs Every Record Tells a Story Hot House Inside Llewyn Davis Janis Joplin JazzWax John Cuneo Joni MItchell Jonny Trunk Ken Colyer Leonard Cohen Levon Helm Liam Noble likeahammerinthesink London Jazz Collector Marc Myers Mark Pringle Martin Colyer Mavis Staples Michael Gray Mick Gold Miles Davis music Music Documentaries New Yorker Richard Williams Robbie Robertson rocksbackpages.com Ry Cooder Sam Charters Steely Dan Studio 51 The Band thebluemoment.com The Guardian US Esquire Van Morrison
AND HERE’S THE ARCHIVE…
a fascinating post. you’ve been busy this week.
Thanks, Alex! What I need is a good editor, just to keep 5 Things weekly and not this jumbled ”every three weeks thing” that it’s become!
Thanks for another great post – about Bob’s troubled relationship with graphic design and Magnum. There’s another connection. When Bob exhibited The Asia Series at the Gagosian Gallery in 2011, fans quickly noticed that three paintings bore a strong resemblance to works by Magnum photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dmitri Kessel and Jacob Aue Sobol. As the controversy heated up, Magnum declared that Dylan had paid to license these images for his paintings. [https://web.archive.org/web/20111007073205/http://blogs.artinfo.com/artintheair/2011/10/01/bob-dylan-paid-to-license-asia-series-photos-magnum-says/]
Like everyone else, I’ve been listening to Bob’s last three releases and trying to make sense of my response. I read something last night that illuminated me. New Yorker journalist Hua Hsu, in a profile of Maxine Hong Kingston, wrote: “When the scholar Edward Said was nearing the end of his life, he explored the idea of ‘late style,’ how artists’ work accommodates the awareness that their days are numbered. He describes them engaging in works full of formal complexity, experimentation, and contradiction, all of it meant as some kind of final statement of what art can be.” That’s it! I thought. Though I must say False Prophet is by far my favourite. I just love that blues-driven voice-of-doom sound.
Your comments are always so thoughtful, Mick, you need a blog of your own…!
I still have all my Hot House memorabilia, including the posters that have always moved with me, well kept and I still treasure it with the same passion I felt the first time I listened to Don’t Come to Stay. I often listen to the records and I still think they shouldn’t be overlooked and let me assure you it has nothing to do with personal nostalgia or how attached I feel to those records because of what they mean to me.
For reasons I cannot fathom, I can’t ‘like’ this. WordPress just doesn’t let me do that anymore. But I can submit a comment and my comment is: ‘Like’.