This Year’s Christmas Song…

December 23, 2025 by 3 Comments

A few days out from the 25th, here’s this year’s Christmas song: Vince Guaraldi’s “Christmas Time Is Here.” Guaraldi’s pop breakthrough was the piano theme, “Cast Your Fate to the Wind”, which was a big hit in 1962. ”Christmas Time” was written for the 1965 television special A Charlie Brown Christmas, featuring characters from Charles Schulz’s beloved “Peanuts” cartoon strip, and has since become a seasonal jazz standard. Originally an instrumental, producer Lee Mendelson decided that the song needed lyrics. “When we looked at the show about a month before it was to go on the air, I said, ‘That’s such a pretty melody — we should try and find someone to put lyrics to it.’” When he was unable to, he wrote the lyrics himself: “I sat down with an envelope at our kitchen table and wrote it in about ten minutes. It was a poem that just came to me. It was only about a minute long. And Vince got a bunch of little kids together (the children’s choir at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in San Rafael, California) to sing it.” So here’s my take on Vince and Lee’s melancholy and wistful Christmas classic.

Previous Christmas songs can be found at martincolyer.com

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Super Hits (!) of The Sixties! Track 2

November 1, 2025 by Leave a Comment

¶ “All of the heavies were light as a feather“ | “I Had a Dream” was sung at Woodstock by John Sebastian. It’s the second of five songs from a new project, Super Hits (!) of the Sixties! I’m aided and abetted here by my old pal Mark Pringle on guitar.

¶ On August 16th 1969, John Sebastian took to the stage at the Woodstock Festival with an acoustic guitar borrowed from his old friend, singer-songwriter Tim Hardin, to face the 500,000-strong crowd. Stage coordinator Chip Monck couldn’t risk wheeling amplifiers onto the stage because of the rain, so he prevailed upon a stoned Sebastian — there as a spectator, not a performer — to entertain the crowd.

¶ In his short set, he played some tracks off his new, 
as yet unreleased, album. One was “I Had a Dream”. In the studio, it was performed as a piece of Baroque pop with harps and a Bacharach arrangement — musically quite a departure for the Pop Chart darling, whose hits with the Lovin Spoonful included “Do You Believe in Magic,” “Summer in the City,” and Darlin’ Be Home Soon”.

¶ A year later, it was chosen as the opening song on the soundtrack of the movie Woodstock. It fit the occasion perfectly, its hippy utopian lyrics undercut by a tremulous melancholia that pointed to the dream’s impossibility… I’ve always liked John Sebastian’s music (and he’s the best interviewee, bar Henry Diltz, in any film made about Laurel Canyon), so I made a version, losing some of the tune, in my usual way, to make it even more depressing. I sent it to Mark [he had lent me a very expensive microphone and I’d recorded the vocal with it] and he volunteered to add some guitar. Which he did, one very enjoyable afternoon. His approach was to bring his current style of oblique flying condensation to drape over the tune.

¶ I always wondered if Bob Dylan had the Loving Spoonful’s “You’re a Big Boy Now” (written for Francis Ford Coppola’s film of the same name) in mind when he returned to Columbia’s Studio A to record Blood on the Tracks in 1974…

#johnbsebastian

#woodstockfestival1969
@pringbat
#freefromartificialintelligence

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Starting All Over Again

September 20, 2025 by 5 Comments

It’s time to start writing about music again. As I limber up, here’s a placeholder.

¶ 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. I fitted a moody, dragged-out beat underneath the guitars, aiming for a Badalamenti mugginess.
¶ Having roughed it out thus, Mark P came to play “Next!” — a game where I play Mark tracks in various states of completion and he either responds to them, or doesn’t (and hence “Next!”). He has no knowledge of what I’m going to serve up, and sometimes it hooks him in enough to play multiple takes or work a part out. He played, I think, three passes on this song, adding his tensile guitar to the mix.
¶ An idea had occurred to me, a while before, to hire a bona-fide musician (Mark’s one, but he works with me for lunch and wine). And I thought of horns on this, so I emailed the wonderful Paul Taylor, who I’d seen, and enjoyed, with improv outfit the Horseless Headmen. I trepidatiously waited for a reply to my request that he write horn charts for a couple of songs, and was hugely thrilled when he said yes.
¶ Paul’s a great musician and a lovely chap to spend a day with. We discussed a ridiculous range of music, from trad to bebop, from The Bureau via Improv to Trombone Poetry. Having tuned up the part of my brain needed to cope with engineering a live trombone session — we set to. Paul methodically and with great precision overdubbed the trombones that you hear here. Then, realising that it was missing a bass track, and having seen Andy Cleyndart playing with my old friend Sammy Rimington, I asked him if he would do a session, working on various songs. So I then had to engineer a double bass session.
¶ So did their pledge hold? It’s September and we need to know… Here‘s my take, in all its crepuscular glory. This is one of five songs from a new project, Super Hits (!) of the Sixties!
¶ n.b. Brian Hyland moved to New Orleans in the 70’s and recorded an album, In a State of Bayou, produced by the late, great Allen Toussaint. I think Brian’s still touring today.

¶ Lead guitar | Mark Pringle | Trombones arranged & played by Paul Taylor | String Bass by Andy Cleyndart | Vocal, rhythm guitars, vibes & song arrangement by Martin Colyer. The first of the revived Five Things will follow next week.

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Extra! A Christmas Song for 2024

December 12, 2024 by 1 Comment

Season’s Greetings & a Christmas Song | All the best to all Five Things readers

So, this year’s Christmas song is “Silent Night”. Written in 1816 by Joseph Mohr, with music by his friend, Franz Xavez Gruber. My version is an unholy mix of “Nightshift” by The Commodores (I wish) and Robbie Robertson’s soundtrack to Killers of the Flower Moon (I also wish).

Even as a child I baulked at the “tender and mild” line — always odd, now it brings to mind supermarket descriptions of steaks and bags of salad… so I used a more accurate translation to English (by Bettina Klein), which keeps the spirit and meaning of Joseph Mohr’s original.

The traditional English version of “Silent Night” has only three verses. These are the first, second and last verses of the six verses of “Stille Nacht! Heil’ge Nacht!” written by Mohr. I’ve used four verses (otherwise, this would be ten minutes long…). The painting in the video is Le Seize Septembre by Rene Magritte. Enjoy!

Silent Night! Holy Night!
All is calm, all is bright
Round yon godly tender pair
Holy infant with curly hair
Sleep in heavenly peace
Sleep in heavenly peace.

Silent Night! Holy Night!
Brought the world gracious light
Down from heaven’s golden height
Comes to us the glorious sight:
Jesus, as one of mankind
Jesus, as one of mankind.

Silent Night! Holy Night!
Long ago, minding our plight
God, the world from misery freed
In the dark age, our fathers decreed:
All the world is redeemed
All the world is redeemed.

Silent Night! Holy Night!
Shepherds first saw the sight
Of angels singing alleluia
Calling clearly near and far:
Christ, the Saviour is born
Christ the Saviour is born.  

Last year’s song can be found here…

And four previous songs can be found here…

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Extra! When I Paint My Masterpiece

August 13, 2024 by 4 Comments

FUN WITH BOB | Bob Dylan. Bo Diddley. Brazilian Drumming. Amusing-to-make video. Another month, another Bob cover — I love this song, but I put this here feeling that I never quite got it right… I can’t spend any more time on it, so here it is for your amusement or otherwise. Five Things proper will return in September — best to you all.

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A song about Soho, bakeries and fathers

April 4, 2024 by 5 Comments

Why today? So, on my dad’s birthday (he would have been one hundred and two today), a song about our Sunday trips to buy bread in Soho. I was brought up on Charing Cross Road, on the edge of Soho, where everything we needed was: food shops, liquor stores, barbers, music venues (for my dad), the wonderful magazine shop where I bought comics, and various school friends. There was a bakery, hidden down a slope, that supplied the restarants of Soho and beyond, and where locals would go and get fresh baguettes, hot from the ovens. The smell of fresh baked bread still gives me a Proustian rush. I just wish I could remember the name of the bakery…

What inspired it? I was listening to Ella Fitzgerald’s “Cry Me a River” and became hypnotised by its intro — Herb Ellis on guitar and Joe Mondragon on bass — so I looped it. I chopped up some electric piano and organ loops and then played some very reverbed guitar over the top. Walking in Soho one night, I passed Bourchier Street, and the lyrics started there, suggesting a use for the loopy track. I felt that I should use some of the names of the places we frequented (Camisa, Lina Stores, Ronnie’s, The Nellie Dean, Moroni’s… I got one wrong, Gerry’s, which didn’t open until the 80s, and I didn’t have time to re-record it — let it stand for all of Soho’s liquor stores!) 

About “Cry Me a River” Arthur Hamilton wrote it for Ella Fitzgerald to sing in Pete Kelly’s Blues, but it didn’t make the edit. It was then recorded by the languorous Julie London, and that version was used in the Jayne Mansfield film The Girl Can’t Help It. Wikipedia: “The jazzy number was a remnant of the past in a picture that otherwise celebrated the emergent beat of rock ‘n’ roll, but that didn’t prevent its selling millions and becoming one of the most covered standards of all time”. The bass and guitar on Julie’s version were played by Ray Leatherwood and Barney Kessell (who also arranged it).

Thanks to Calum (likeahammerinthesink) I hear the brilliant set of podcasts made by Clare Lynch for The Photographers Gallery, which solves the mystery (only my mystery, obviously) of the name of the bakery. Here’s a transcript…
Claudio Mussi: In the sixties there was the 2i’s Coffee Shop, next door to Camisa, where all the pop stars used to go. Bar Italia of course was there, where we all gathered in the afternoon to have a cup of coffee. Moroni, the news agent was very famous in London in the ‘60s, because he was the only one who used to sell Italian newspapers. The Italian people are crazy about football. On Monday, Gazzetta dello Sport used to arrive about 3 o’clock from Italy. In those days it used to come by plane from Milano, between 3 and 4. There used to be a queue, all waiters and chefs coming out of the restaurants in Soho, rushing there, queue up and wait for the newspaper to arrive so they could read the football Italia results. Because there was no other way of knowing the results.  And here, where La Perla was, there was a branch of a chocolatier, a firm that used to make chocolate that was in the corner of Great Windmill Street and I cannot remember the name. See this is a classy street now! Floris, Floris also used to be a bakery, a chocolatier. It used to be down there, I think, Floris the bakery. And this used to be a chocolatier. Armin Loetscher (Sweetie): I’ve been in London since 1959. I used to work as a pastry cook, when I worked for Madame Floris. You had to have a permit, then, you know to come in. But I worked in Zurich for a patisserie, and she knew Madame Floris. And she got me the job and I got a permit and worked there in Bouchier Street, Bouchier Street there, you know where the flats are, that used to be a bakery.

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At the Edge of Town / A Song for Richard Manuel

April 2, 2024 by 11 Comments

Every April I think about Richard Manuel, born on April 3, 1943, in Stratford, Ontario. I still remember where I was in March 1986, when I heard that he had taken his own life — the magazine art department of The Observer newspaper. I remember feeling unmoored for days, which seems too much of a reaction for someone I hadn’t met or known personally, but The Band had been such an important musical influence on my life. They were my equivalent of another generation’s Louis Armstrong or Hank Williams or Charlie Parker. When Sam and Ann Charters came through London on their way to live in Sweden in 1971, Sam had brought me five of his favourite albums as a gift. One of them was Music From Big Pink. He sat me down (I was fifteen at the time) and played me his favourite song, Richard’s “In A Station”. It sounded like nothing else I’d ever heard. It still sounds like nothing else I’ve ever heard.

Richard was one of my favourite singers, songwriters and drummers. He wrote incandescent, sui generis songs for The Band — “Whispering Pines”, “When You Awake”, “Sleeping”, “We Can Talk About It Now”, and “Lonesome Susie” — as well as putting the funereal music to Bob Dylan’s lyrics for “Tears of Rage”. There’s a lot of great writing about Richard’s extraordinary qualities, and a quick web search turns most of them up — or you can go to Jan Hoiberg’s excellent site on The Band, its history, songs and members. (https://theband.hiof.no/about_this_site.html)

I wrote this song in the 2010s, a meditation on his tragic death, which happened at a time when the Robbie Robertson-less group were touring places that were, in reality, beneath them. When I came to the point in the song where there’s usually a solo, I remembered a lovely version of “Georgia On My Mind” that my pal Mark had worked on as he figured out how to record in Garageband, and I dropped the mp3 in the track. The song was a favourite of Richard’s (highlighting his love of Ray Charles), to which I added the sound of a disinterested supper club. So here’s my song for Richard, that Stratford star, because there “must be some way to repay you / Out of all the good you gave…”

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To the memory of Alexei Navalny

February 18, 2024 by 4 Comments

“Joe Hill ain’t dead,” he says to me,
“Joe Hill ain’t never died…
Where working men are out on strike
Joe Hill is at their side,
Joe Hill is at their side.”

Listening to Alexei Sayle’s Desert Island Discs a while back, it was interesting to me that he chose “Joe Hill” as one of his eight discs, recalling that it was performed at his mother’s funeral. I first heard “Joe Hill” on the Woodstock soundtrack, sung by Joan Baez. Never a great admirer of her precise and pure voice, I nevertheless loved the song. I next heard it in the 1971 Bo Widerberg film biopic, for which guitarist Stefan Grossman did the score. When I listen to it sung, usually as a folk ballad, I always think it’s too sweet — and the version by Baez played on DID was a Nashville studio recording, with a prominent and syrupy pedal steel part. I recorded it a few years ago with the aim of making an angry industrial version, piston-driven and distorted. At one point I felt it needed a rap section and cast around for someone that may fit the bill. My friend Mark put me in touch with painter and wordsmith Nathan Detroit, who, with no real brief from me, came up with something he calls Cyborging — an abstract and impressionistic flow of words. Sounded great to me, so one afternoon we recorded it. Here it is. Play it loud.

“I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night” was a poem, originally, written by Alfred Hayes (1911-1985), a British-born screenwriter, television writer, novelist and poet. It was set to music by folk singer and arranger Earl Robinson. The song became a popular labour anthem and was recorded by Paul Robeson, Pete Seeger, and Joan Baez, among others.

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Wednesday, 20th December

December 20, 2023 by 5 Comments

Season’s Greetings & a Christmas Song | All the best to all Five Things readers — I’m going to get back into posting more regularly in 2024, promise. In the meantime, a few days out from the 25th, here’s this year’s Christmas song. It’s that old chestnut, “Winter Wonderland”, which was written in 1934 by Felix Bernard and lyricist Richard Bernhard Smith. Smith, a native of Honesdale, Pennsylvania, was inspired to write the lyrics after seeing Honesdale’s Central Park covered in snow while being treated for tuberculosis in the West Mountain Sanitarium in Scranton. Due to its seasonal theme, it is often regarded as a Christmas song. The lyrics are about a couple’s romance during the winter season. A later version, printed in 1947, included a new children’s lyric that transformed it from a romantic winter interlude to a seasonal song about playing in the snow. The snowman mentioned in the song’s bridge was changed from a minister to a circus clown, and the coup

My version kicks off with a 24-year-old Ken Colyer playing “Winter Wonderland” in New Orleans on 24 February 1953, between his stint in the Parish Prison and his deportation from Ellis Island. Ken: “It’s a pleasant pop song from some years back — I remembered it for some reason…” So settle back and hear a blizzard of guitars take you back to Honesdale, Pennsylvania…

Previous Christmas songs…

Four Christmas Songs
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Christmas Song/2022

December 24, 2022 by 5 Comments

This year’s offering is a version of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”, written by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane in 1943 for the film, Meet Me in St. Louis.

It first appeared in a scene in which a family is troubled by plans to move to New York City, leaving behind their beloved home in St. Louis. In a scene on Christmas Eve, Judy Garland’s character, Esther, sings the song to cheer up her despondent five-year-old sister, played by Margaret O’Brien. When presented with the original draft lyric, Garland, her co-star Tom Drake and director Vincente Minnelli criticized the song as depressing and asked Martin to change the lyrics. 

Though he initially resisted, Martin made several changes to make the song more upbeat. As Martin tells it, he initially baulked at changing the words. “They said, ‘It’s so dreadfully sad.’ I said, ‘I thought the girls were supposed to be sad in that scene.’ They said, ‘Well, not that sad.’ And Judy was saying, ‘If I sing that to that sweet little Margaret O’Brien, they’ll think I’m a monster!’ And she was quite right, but it took me a long time to get over my pride. Finally, Tom Drake [the young male lead], a friend, convinced me. He said, ‘You stupid son of a b—-! You’re gonna foul up your life if you don’t write another verse of that song!’”

In 1957, Frank Sinatra asked Martin to revise the line, “Until then we’ll have to muddle through somehow.” He told Martin, “The name of my album is A Jolly Christmas. Do you think you could jolly up that line for me?” Martin’s new line was “Hang a shining star upon the highest bough.”

So, what I’ve done here is cast a pall over the Holiday Season. Sorry about that. However, it does have a more hopeful-sounding coda where I try to lift the gloom. On that note, all good Christmas wishes to all who follow Five Things, wherever you are in this world. In 2023, I’m going to post every two weeks. I won’t, however, be changing the name to Five Things I Saw and Heard this Fortnight…

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