Boxer John

For those of you who still drop in to the blog to check if there have been any recent additions, I just wanted to inform you that the blog has not been abandoned. I have had a lot to do recently and I only like to write the blog posts when I am in a certain mood, to make sure they are as authentic as possible and not just rushed time-fillers (although that can happen on the odd occassion). If you would like to be more connected, why not join me on facebook at http://www.facebook.com/boxerjohnmusic . I have aquired some real obscurities in recent months and I hope, when the time is right, I can share them with you again soon. Thanks for taking the time to drop in and see you shortly.

 This has long been one of my favourite Irish folk songs and has been one of my favourite road tunes for when I am travelling around. It never fails to get my blood well and truly pumping around my head and body. It helps that Luke Kelly is also one of my favourite male vocalists of all time (easily in my top five), but what gets me every time I hear this song and often sends my mind boggling, is the rarity of breath that comes between each vocal line. You can literally count the breaths Kelly takes on your hands and will be perhaps as bewildered as me as to how this genius was able to push out line after line of utter raw, unbridled awesomeness. The song itself is so frantic and relentless that it cannot fail to put rhythm and urgency into your step when you're walking down the street; I would even bet that having this on your headphones during a brawl might put the odds well and truly in your favour too, although don't see that as a recommendation by any means. I have some other, lesser known, material sung by Luke Kelly I would like to share with you in the near future to illustrate his ability to hold down the more delicate folk numbers with ease and rough grace, so visit again during the week for more. In the meantime, treat yourself to music that makes your soul want to jump out of your skin:

I have recently been listening a lot to the kingston Trio, having acquired an absolute wealth of their early material and am surprised that I love it as much as I do. The reason I never gave them much time before was because of the commercial nature of their sound; they lack the edge and graininess of some of their contemporaries. They (along with acts like the incredible Clancy Brothers) brought folk music to a whole new generation so the sound was never quite as rough as one might hope for when dealing with this kind of material. This turns out to be far from a fault, however; it adds a new sheen to many of the songs I have known for years and the harmonies and musical arrangements employed by the trio are very beautiful. It is easy to forget that comparing commercial music by fifties standards to commercial music from today is totally unrealistic. Commercial music from the fifties and sixties didn't automatically mean pigswill for the masses and I believe the Trio are a fair example of what it means/meant to be a commercial act with a lot to offer to even the more cynical listener. While they may never touch me as deeply as other more grounded and rustic acts, they were masters of their particular domain and can be thanked for inspiring many of the folk greats who came after them to pick up banjos and guitars and keep weaving the folk tapestry. With a plethora of songs from so many folk traditions to choose from (English, Irish, Scottish, American, Caribean etc etc), I have simply chosen one of the many I currently love. Enjoy:

To follow on from my previous two posts, I thought I'd post what I consider to be country folk. I bought a double album by "Hearts and Flowers" about ten odd years ago and loved it as much as I still do now. It is a unique mixture of country, folk and psychedelia (Ode to a Tin Angel is the stand-out psychedelic track) with a whole bunch of beautiful, sincere hippy sentiment thrown in. One thing that really intrigued me was that they did a cover version of the song "Two Little Boys" by the Australian artist Rolf Harris, which seems to me quite an obscure thing for a folk country band from the U.S. to consider (or even the fact that they heard of it to begin with). The beginning poem of my double album sets a nice tone for what's to come:

In this time of ours
We wonder if an end to hate we'll ever see
As we stand and hold in our hands
The unrhymed lines of our destiny

We face a race
We must rest before we run
Now is the time for hearts and flowers
And golden hours beneath the sun

There is a connection to the Eagles with this band but I forget what it is exactly. I vaguely recall that a couple of the members went on to form said band (It is written in my album liner notes but I'm not at home at the moment). There is little of the sound of The Eagles in Hearts and Flowers, however. This is just down-to-earth, simple, straightforward, organic music to forget about the city and allow whatever trace of innocence there is left residing inside you to bubble to the surface and make you feel good. 

I said I would talk about Hank Williams some more in future posts but it turns out that this particular song won't give me any rest at the moment and that's fine by me. This is one of those songs that puts me in a really good mood although I am not somebody who requires "feel good" music in order to feel good (actually quite the contrary; I derive a lot of joy and inner peace and calm from music that others tend to describe as meloncholy). Sometimes all the labels are in the right place and I guess this is one of them. When listening to Hank Williams (Senior by the way), I can't help but think about Woody Guthrie and this makes me wonder again about that link between folk and country and if anyone has a satisfactory defintion of the differences between the two. Usually I would say that folk takes more melodic and structural risks and is, lyrically, less afraid to venture into unexplored territory, and country has a certain rhythm, structure and instrumentation that it adheres to rather more strictly in order that it can still be labelled country. Of course, I am assuming that I can say with any certainty what folk music is and that is also open to debate and is a term which is often very lazily interpreted. An interesting experiment would be to give the same song to two different musicians but have them play it and sing it in exactly the same way except one with a southern state or mid-western American drawl, the other with a regional British accent. Very likely the former would be labelled by the lay-person country and the latter folk although, stylistically, nothing sets the two apart. Those with a passion for either genre, on the other hand, may be able to instinctively group both into the same genre but not really be able to explain why it is either folk or country. I fear the incoherent ,rambling beast of inarticulation rearing it's ugly head in my blog post now so I'll just leave you with a great song to enjoy and not care about how it's labelled 

That brings me to the end of my posts in the "where it all began feature"; at least for the time being. In the meantime, I stumbled upon this record by The Blue Velvet Band earlier in the year and loved it from the first bang of the drum on the first song. Rough and wonderful it is with an old school feel (old school by my standards), especially considering it was made in 1969 and it could easily be mistaken for something a good ten years earlier. A couple of months later I was in the cinema watching a movie (obviously) and I heard Ramblin' Man as part of the score and thought it was pretty darn cool that they were using such an obscure soundtrack. However, upon watching the end credits, I realised that it wasn't this band but Hank Williams himself doing it, so similar are the versions, although I would say that this is the meatier of the two and, therefore, perhaps more likely to satisfy. This band, coupled with the movie, (Moonrise Kingdom I believe it was; nice movie) compelled me to invest in as much Hank as I could on a budget, and I have a new found respect and admiration of him as a result. On listening to Hank, many pieces of my musical jigsaw have fallen into place and the borders between folk and country have become, perhaps temporarily,more comfortably blurred than they ever have been before. Williams version of Ramblin' Man is pretty easy to find but I'm not sure on the availability of this one so I thought I'd share it as it is too good to miss. Do expect some Hank Williams in future posts though, by which time I hope to have let a bit more of his raw beauty seep into my soul.

P:S:The fella on the video photo right at the back with the bald head and tash looks remarkably like Tom Paxton. Will have to find out if it is!

Arnold Layne by The Pink Floyd (as they were originally called) was the song that opened me to the world of sixties psychedelic music way back when. However, even my introduction to that song came about from being familiarised with another song by them, "The Gnome". At the time of hearing "The Gnome", I was listening to a lot of early nineties indie and the remnants of my passion for rock and metal from that time. I was sitting in the back row of the school chapel with an old school friend and he passed over one of his ear-buds and told me to listen. It is hard to pinpoint exactly what it was that excited me so much about the sound but, retrospectively, I have the feeling that it was the melodic and lyrical innocence of the whole thing. I had, and still have,the feeling that a lot of music relies on the cool factor (image, fashion and relevance to modernity) and this bothers me somehow because if all music relied on being rated for it's coolness, there would be little worth listening to. So, when you hear something like "Pipers At The Gates Of Dawn", you are immediately thrust into a world where you don't have to feel self conscious or overly aware of your immediate surroundings; you are in a timeless universe where you are drawn into the here and now of your own consciousness and not the here and now of earthly fashions and superficial pretense (I am very much aware of the risk in using the word pretense at the end of such a sentence but any other way of saying this fails me). With reference to Arnold Layne, why should a song about a pervert who steals clothes from women's clothes-lines still sound so perfect after all these years? I can't articulate what I think I know very well so I will leave that up to you to ponder upon: 
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Vinyls by these guys were in abundance when I was growing up and you could usually pick one up in fairly good nick for a couple of quid, and thiat is why I have included them in this set of blogs. The Moody Blues, as far as I know, have never been considered a cool band, but luckily that doesn't mean anything at all as coolness is usually decided on by idiots. The Moody Blues were an extremely prolific and talented outfit with heaps of creativity and stylistic nuances. They are often overlooked by people looking back to the sixties for their muse as, just with modern music, retrospective music consumption often tends to follow a set of rules which are meaninglessly fashionable. The Moody Blues transcend all of this by being a warm, sincere band with a lot of integrity which is evident in everything from the beautiful album artwork to the loving care with which each song has been written and arranged. In an age when sincerity and idealism have become dirty words to some, music like this can provide a very potent antidote. It is often very thoughtful and the albums are oftentimes punctuated with spoken word "poetry" which may sound a little hippyish to some but will suit others more than just fine. Due to the fact that there are gems on all of their albums, it was incredibly tricky to choose a song to introduce so I settled on the first one I thought of, which happens to be tinted with a nice shade of psychedelic. The song, "Dear Diary", is from their 1969 album, "On The Threshold of a Dream".

A few posts back, I did a blog on Jeff Lynne's lesser known band "The Idle Race" but since adding the "and not" part to the title of my blog. next to the word obscure, I feel more liberated to include the band that made him famous, "The Move". It is almost impossible to avoid the more comercially known music during this particular series of blogs as these are what formed the springboard into my lesser-known musical affectations. There is, of course, the chance that somebody happens across the blog that has never heard of The Move, in which case they may well be rejoicing at this point. "Flowers In The Rain" was probably the first Move song I heard when I was about seven or eight; it was yet another song that was on the compilation album "Savile's Time Travels" (Nonce or not, I won't go into the whole Savile debacle which I have learned about since being abroad). The Move are one of those instantly appealing bands with insanely catchy melodies and simple, endearing lyrics yet somehow, they have longevity too, and many years later they still get their listening dues. I only wish they had been a tad more prolific but alas, Lynne seemed too creatively twitchy to be anchored to one band brand for too long. I have chosen "Kilroy Was Here" which references common grafiti from back in the day (tags of antiquity) and is, if possible, one of their lesser known songs. Enjoy:

I started writing this post before setting off work this morning and after writing enthusiastically for some time, I accidentally clicked the wrong button and erased my entire post. Indignant and disgusted, I thought I'd better leave it until later, lest my laptop takes a trip out the window, so now is later  Anyway, anyone familiar with the Small Faces and their album "Ogden's Nut Gone Flake" may be familiar with the English used in the title. I managed to procure the original tobacco tin-shaped vinyl back when I was a teenager though the record itself was a little ragged, I was happy to have the sleeve in good nick. This album got played to death by myself and some of my friends, who also had it, back in those days. One side is standard Small Faces, so very good, but the other side is completely unique and one of my favourite themed pieces of all time. It is essentially a story of a guy called Happiness Stan who goes out looking for the "other half of the moon and dangly", because he can only see a half moon. I don't think I have ever used the word delightful to describe anything in my life but I can't think of anything more appropriate for this. The narration was done by a fella called Stanley Unwin who developed an entirely new way of speaking English which he employed for story-telling. As the story unfolds, it is punctuated with songs from The Small Faces alluding to the story. There is no way you can listen to this story without being incredibly happy afterwards so I recommend it as a serious antidote to the blues. This is a very special album and I wholeheartedly love it! Here is one of the more psychedelic extracts: