Tracks of my Years

8/9/18

As I am turning the ‘Odds and Sods’ section of pauljoneshorseracing.com into a more personal/fun-related page to offer some occasional lighter relief amongst all the punting-based content (in other words a page of pure ego-drenched, self-indulgence), that friends and family as well as website members and any soul who just happens to stumble across the website can access, I thought I’d kick off with my one of my great loves - my music - which I hope also gives the reader a little bit more details about what makes me tick.

I was undecided whether to go down the Radio 2 ‘Tracks of my Years’ route where songs are selected by celebrities that best chart various times of their life in chronological date order or Radio 4’s ‘Desert Island Discs’ where guests effectively choose their favourite songs. As ‘Tracks of my Years’ is ten songs (two a day between Monday-Friday) and ‘Desert Island Discs’ just eight, I’ve elected to go for the first option but will look to feature the latter at some point in the not-too-distant future as that would feature a different set of songs.

I enjoyed putting this together so hope you approve of at least some of my ten choices! 

Safwn Yn y Bwlch by Hogia’r Wyddfa

Being part of a large Welsh family on my father’s side (he is now aged 85, a former brass band conductor and the sole surviving sibling of 16), I’m kicking off with the record that he played most on our family gramophone during the 1970s in my infant and junior school years. Safwn Yn y Bwlch translates as ‘We Stand In the Breach’ and is performed by Hogia’r Wyddfa (Snowdon Players) who are a vocal harmony group who formed in 1963 and are widely regarded today as the most popular and successful act in Welsh-speaking entertainment over the last 50+ years. My father was born and raised in the village of Llanberis at the foot of Mount Snowdon and one of my numerous cousins, Vivian, formed part of the five-piece group on rhythm guitar - hence why Hogia’r Wyddfa’s music was regularly played in our house. I actually preferred the B Side as a boy as it was much more upbeat and I didn’t have the patience for slower songs but, digging the single out of my attic earlier this week having not played it for over 20 years, now I can hear and realise why Safwn Yn y Bwlch will long be remembered as one of the most loved songs in Wales. I still don’t understand a single word of it (my dad tells me that it’s a song about standing up for Wales) but it really is a beautiful harmony and melody and brought back many memories when I replayed it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unUGcIqbLOQ

I Only Want To Be With You by The Tourists

The likes of Queen, Blondie and The Boomtown Rats were the first bands that I took a real shine to but the cover version of Dusty Springfield’s original hit, I Only Want To Be With You, by The Tourists makes it into ‘Tracks of my Years’ instead being the first single that I ever bought at the age of nine in 1979. The record cost me 10p from a second-hand shop in Acocks Green, Birmingham, where my grandparents lived and we visited them regularly. The Tourists were a new wave band which was fronted by Annie Lennox with Dave Stewart on guitar, so effectively they were the forerunner to The Eurythmics who were formed two years later styled and sounding very differently. Unlike Springfield’s version, this was rocked up and it dates very well today unlike a lot of new wave music. I never really took to The Eurythmics as I’ll always prefer guitars over synth-based music. It’s short at 2mins 29secs but still very sweet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsTIuNikq4w

Surfin’ Bird by The Trashmen

Best known to sports fans these days as the walk-on music for when Stephen Bunting plays in a televised PDC darts tournament, although released nine days before JFK was assassinated and it went on to reach Number 4 on the Billboard Hot 100, this was the song of the summer of 1985 for me. Between the ages of 12 through to 17 my favourite week of the year by a country mile was the annual 1^st Kettering Boys’ Brigade summer camp alongside two other companies from Matlock and Corby. Every year there was one song that was played to death at full blast by Jason Ashton as he had the biggest and loudest ghetto blaster and it just so happened that in Southwold in 1985 it was Surfin’ Bird. I was aged 16 and it was also the first year that the Girls’ Brigade had been invited for the week…..so happy days! The Boys’ Brigade was a huge part of my youth as virtually all my friends were part of it and it was also through how I met my wife and my two closest friends to this day, so I wanted to mark it within the ten songs. Since the mid-eighties Surfin’ Bird has acquired cult status helped by appearing on the Full Metal Jacket film, the Rockabilly Psychosis Garage Disease album and it has also appeared on various TV advertisements.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Gc4QTqslN4

Sultans of Swing (live) by Dire Straits

My musical tastes had moved on by the time that I had reached sixth form so the time between 1985-1992 were my Dire Straits years, having initially been drawn in by their Money For Nothing and the opening riff in particular. Rather embarrassingly, I spent much of the summer of 1985 wearing a Mark Knopfler-style sweatband around my head. There is photographic evidence but I’m not uploading it! In fact, his music even propelled me to buy an electric guitar and take a year’s worth of lessons. However, I wanted to run before I could walk and didn’t have the patience to give it the time required. I vaguely recalled Romeo and Juliet and Private Investigations (both too slow for a boy aged 10-12) but we were now firmly in the video age and Thriller and Money For Nothing were the videos of the mid-eighties and Dire Straits became the biggest band in the world at the time with the release of their Brothers In Arms album. However, it was their double live album, Alchemy, from the Hammersmith Apollo that I played the grooves off for hours and hours in my bedroom. I enjoyed the studio version of Sultans Of Swing but the elongated live version with Knopfler’s guitar solo that builds and builds takes it up at least another five levels and, to some, they took it up another notch for the 1992 tour with Chris White on saxophone dueting with Knopfler for the finale. I prefer just the guitar climax though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Pa9x9fZBtY

Housequake (live) by Prince

After Dire Straits came the Prince years. I would be less inclined these days to put on a Prince CD as my tastes have moved away from pop and too many of the album tracks are just that, but in my eyes he was a bonafide genius and to this day I remain open-mouthed at his astonishing showmanship and innovation which I had the pleasure of seeing in the flesh half a dozen times. It was a dark day when his untimely death was announced. Although Purple Rain will go down as his seminal album, I preferred Sign O’ The Times which was far more varied in musical styles. I wore out the Sign O’ The Times and Lovesexy concert videos and in particular his performance of Housequake on both. The sped-up vocals on the studio version didn’t really do it for me but I found the live performance mesmerising. There’s just something about horns that I like in songs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frz-i0flpI4

Unchained Melody by The Righteous Brothers

A couple of weeks ago my wife and I celebrated out 24^th wedding anniversary. The relevance of this being that Unchained Melody was the choice for our first dance as man and wife at the evening reception. Also our last I reckon as I’ve got absolutely no rhythm whatsoever and there is no way my kids will allow me anywhere near a dance floor. The song is arguably the most covered in history (over 1,500 recordings) and it has reached Number 1 in the UK on four separate occasions but no version can match the vocal quality of Bobby Hatfield who performed it solo, though it is always referred to as by The Righteous Brothers. I don’t think it needs any introduction but here is a live version anyway.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYj2hex99gY

Carrickfergus by Streams of Whiskey

Between 1997-2001 a friend who I worked with at Weatherbys and I started to follow a couple of fairly local Irish-based bands/duos from Northampton. Being a regular at their gigs, we got to know them quite well personally and also travelled south to hear them play in North London pubs. My two favourite local bands were Streams Of Whiskey, named after a Pogues song, who were fronted by a singer/guitarist called Sean Grew, and Little Hinges, a duo with Mick O’Beirne on acoustic guitar and vocals who played alongside a superb, very attractive, wide-eyed fiddler by the name of Julie Clements, who was basically the star of the show. It was big part of my life in my late-twenties and on one occasion we travelled down with Streams Of Whiskey when they had been booked to be the warm up entertainment for The Dubliners for the after-fight party for Steve Collins following a successful world title defence in the basement of a swanky London Hotel. Sean had a fantastically, rich voice and finished most gigs off with his rendition of the traditional folk song, Carrickfergus, which he performed in a way that I am struggling to find a recorded version of. I did find a live version of Sean singing Carrickfergus on YouTube many years later but, sadly, a banjo player ruins it throughout. The closest I could find to Sean’s style was Tommy Fleming’s live version on his ‘Live at St Patricks Cathedral Dublin’ album which is the link below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoYbMaYauYo

Wild Dances by Ruslana

I couldn’t not include one Eurovision track given the contest is what some people best know me for(!) and it has been an annual obsession for me for the last 20 years. It’s difficult to choose just one track from all the years that I have been an avid follower of the Eurovision Song Contest but I’ve gone with Wild Dances which won for Ukraine in 2004. It’s not the best song that the contest has ever produced, and the fact that Ruslana looked like Catherine Zeta-Jones writhing around the stage fully clad in tight, black leather also has nothing to do with it, but it does still go down as my biggest winning bet of all time having got stuck in ante-post at 14/1 before they were sent off as 7/4 favourites on the night. Incidentally, as readers of From Soba To Moldova will know, my second-biggest winner was also on Eurovision when Greece won a year later. The ‘Moldova’ element in the book title also relates to Eurovision on how I narrowly lost on out on an even bigger win. Here’s the winning performance. I’m sure that you will agree it’s magnificent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10XR67NQcAc

5.15 by The Who

Of course during my mid-thirties I was fully aware of The Who and their big hits but it wasn’t really until having watched them perform Who Are You and Won’t Get Fooled Again at the Live8 concert that I properly began to appreciate the power of their live performances and complexity of their songs. Their 15 minutes’ slot showed all the much younger acts who performed at Hyde Park that day exactly how it should be done. Their performance propelled me to go back in time and it wasn’t long until I was buried deep into their back catalogue and especially the explosive live material starting with the iconic ‘Live At Leeds’ album. Messrs. Towshend, Daltrey, Entwistle and Moon then dominated my playlist for the next ten years and I’d have no hesitation in nominating Quadrophenia as my favourite album of all time. In a very tight heat, 5.15 would be my pick of the songs. The Who took Quadrophenia back on tour four years ago and I’d also nominate that concert as, musically, the best I have attended. Like I mentioned earlier, there is something about horns in songs that I really enjoy and the base of the Quadrophenia soundtrack is horn-based, especially on 5.15 which also gave John Entwistle the opportunity to show off his extraordinary bass guitar skills in concert.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dYVKB1MRIE

O Mary Don’t You Weep by Bruce Springsteen

I’d nominate Thunder Road as my favourite Springsteen song but I have O Mary Don’t You Weep to thank for sparking an initial interest in his music as I wasn’t particularly a fan when he first burst into my conscious in the mid-eighties. It all sounded a bit too Heartland America or Soft Rock to me. In fact, I rather had The Boss down as being one of the most over-rated artists who had hit it really big. How little did I know until only 2014?! All that changed when I was driving home late one night four years ago when Radio 2 played a couple of tracks from his The Seeger Sessions Band Tour album where Springsteen put his own take on traditional American folk songs with a cast of up to 20 musicians. It simply blew me away. If Jacob’s Ladder wasn’t good enough on its own, then followed O Mary Don’t You Weep with a horn section to die for. As with The Who, I then trawled back his extraordinary back catalogue to discover classic after classic before the Born In The USA years that I would still be unaware of today but for that chance listening and which has given me so much pleasure in very recent years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQT5PChpsuQ