Wednesday 19 August 2009
Counting Backwards
Today was the hottest day of the year, which - as tradition dictates – I spent indoors in a recording studio. I can’t say why. And because I don’t want to be Mr ‘I’ve got a secret’ I’ll shut up about it and talk about something else.
There are some songs which are so good that, no many how many times you want to hear them, you always want to hear them again. Ones where you find yourself listening to them every day. Because they are that good.
At the moment I’m listening on a daily basis to ‘Great Fire’ by XTC. It wasn’t a hit and there isn’t even a full rendition of it on YouTube. So you’ll have to seek it out yourself. It has lots of great dipping-rollercoaster moments.
Another daily basis song at the moment is ‘Counting Backwards’ by the Throwing Muses, a song I think heard once on the ‘Indie’ chart of the The Chart Show and which stuck with me for nigh-on twenty years since. It reminds me of the Beatles ‘Rain’, it has that same sluggish beat with chaotic, lop-sided drumming, oblique repetitive lyrics and single-chord drone. Like ‘Rain’ you kind of suspect that it might sound exactly the same played backwards. And it even has a false ending, one of those things, like descending basslines, sliding string sections and a trumpet doing sixths over a fade-out which the Beatles never really did. But which sort of got associated with them because they’re such sixties clichés.
Don’t think I’ll be able to afford to get the Beatles remasters. At least, not straight away; and with these things there’s always a suspicion that they’ve just increased the volume and widened the stereo image. Though there is something subtly more Beatlesque about the mono stuff.
