Tequila Anyone..?

Well, it’s the end of another weekend here on my island so I think I’ll sit and chill out on the porch of my beach shack… amazing what you can do with a bit of hard work, some old driftwood and a bit of imagination, but I think the place looks good up there on the photo… home sweet home.

And I think I’ll sit and look forward to the week ahead with a cup or two of tuba, the coconut vodka, and have a blast of Leslie West on the laptop while I watch the sun go down. Then I’ll leave the laptop connected to my little wind generator before I retire to my hammock and let it charge overnight. Not really the sort of music that you’d use as a lullaby… but what the heck?… It’s only a two minute blast, and who better to give a guitar a good two minute blasting than Leslie West?.. more of him later in the blog. But for now here he is doing his version of Tequila …. you’ll not have heard Tequila played quite like this before I’m sure, but it’s brilliant. So go on…. give it a little click and brighten up your Sunday. I’d never go anywhere without this on my mp3 player.. especially not to a desert island. So I’m just going to sit here and let the sound drift across the bay up there.

The Pepper Box Punch Up

Oh my goodness, going through these songs brings back some memories, but that’s what songs do…, they respresent memories from certain times in your life. And if I was listening to this song on my desert island it would definately bring a smile to my face…. although I don’t know why… but here’s the story..

I’ll have been nineteen or twenty at the time, me and three friends of mine had travelled over to a town a few miles away from home. On a hilltop above the town there’s a hotel, and in the basement of the hotel there’s a disco on a Friday and Saturday night… it’s a Friday… mid ’70’s. We travelled over there in a car that belonged to the father of one of the friends I was with… only the father didn’t know it, we waited while he was asleep in bed and then sneaked off in his car… very naughty.. but we’d done it before and knew we’d be ok.

We’re having a good time in the disco, it’s packed and everyone is either dancing or stood around chatting in groups.. a good night. As the night is drawing to an end one of my friends… no names mentioned…starts chatting to a girl and they end up on the dancefloor, just dancing to this next song and enjoying themselves. I’m leant against a post at the edge of the dancefloor having a beer, just watching the world go by, when I see this guy go up to my friend and punch him to the ground…. seems that the girl wasn’t on her own… anyway, I instantly push my way through the crowded dancefloor and lay into this guy, the one who’d hit my friend, and proceeded to give him a taste of his own medicine. This sparked off a real old punch up on the dancefloor between me, this guy and his friends… my friend had vanished… thanks a lot. Anyway, bouncers appear on the scene but I was going at full throttle by now and one of the bouncers ended up on the deck. But everything calmed down and I was allowed to stay in the club.., after some reasoning with the remaining bouncers… and the night continued. But I vividly remember this song playing as the melee ensued… it was a song called Pepper Box.., by The Peppers. It’s a bit cheesy when I listen to it now… moog funk come northern soul… everyone used to love it and it was used on TV ads and as radio show themes back then.

… anyway, on with story. As we leave the club that night there’s a crowd of people waiting for us… that girl definately wasn’t on her own.. she was stood with her boyfriend, the one I’d levelled, and all their friends… maybe twenty or so of them… and there we are, four of us… and in the wrong town. The odds were massively stacked against us, but you know how it is when you’re nineteen…, or maybe you don’t.., but me and one of guys with me just piled into the crowd. At this point we realised we’d bitten off a bit more than we could chew… we also realised that we were on our own because the guy who’s father’s car we’re in has got in it and is trying to get it out of harms way… fair enough. But my other friend, the one who got it all started in the first place by dancing with the girl, has jumped in the car as well. So it’s left to two of us to fend off the blows and try to beat a retreat to the car, talk about running the gauntlet. But we managed to get into the car, my friend just floored it and we were out of the car park and away…, laughing for some strange reason. The morning after I went into the bathroom and gazed into the mirror, I had quite a few lumps and bumps on my face that weren’t there the day before. They say it’s all part of growing up… just turned out that parts of my growing up were a bit painful.

But I wouldn’t be without Pepper Box, cheesy as it is… it’s not a bad song really, and it would be worth having around on my desert island hard drive just to play now and then…. and bring the smile over my face that I get everytime I think of this story…. ah, the memories.

Desert Blues – Tinariwen

What better music could you to take with you to a desert island than some excellent desert blues?.. I just love Tinariwen. Their story is a fascinating one, nomadic tribesmen.., Ghaddafi’s poet soldiers going into battle with a guitar strapped over one shoulder and a Kalashnikov over the other…, one of them is reputed to have seventeen bullet wounds…, the stuff of legend. How much of the myth is true I have no idea but their’s is a great story. I’ve become a huge fan of their music.

The members of Tinariwen are Tuaregs, the Kel Tamashek… the Blue Men of the Sahara, desert traders who shift their merchandise across the vast desert plains on camel caravans. They live around the Mali region of North Africa, and that part of the world is fast becoming a hotbed of new music. Tinariwen are reputed to be the first of these emerging Mali bands to use electric guitars and now they play to worldwide audiences, even supporting the Rolling Stones last year.

The two songs I’d have in my desert island collection are brilliant, completely different to the music that I grew up with, or is it?… it’s definately blues music, but with a very distinctive eastern feel to it. The other thing is that I have no idea what they’re singing about… bit of a language barrier there I’m afraid, but not to worry because the music is good.., very good. The first one is Matadjem Yinmixan… I can spell it but can’t pronounce it, but that’s the beauty of world music… and I sing along to the words without having a clue what they mean.. you just pick it up.

The second is Amassakoul’N'Tenere, real foot tappin’ stuff.

If you’ve never heard of Tinariwen before look them up on the internet, there are some good Tinariwen videos on YouTube, and the story of the band and their culture is interesting to say the least. Real desert blues for a desert island disco…. perfect.

Groovin.. It Must Be Mr. Bloe

While uploading some of my music files to MyBloop it occured to me just how many of my favourite songs are classed as one hit wonders, pop songs that stormed the charts at various times. Some were just that, one offs.. the artists involved had no intention of making a follow up. Others were recorded by artists who attempted to follow up their initial success only for their future recordings to flop. Why is that?… some of these songs are really good, how come a band can turn out one great record.. one, then that’s it?.. no matter how hard they try.

The next desert island digital track is one such record, a real one hit wonder if ever there was one…. but what a record. The song is called Groovin with Mr. Bloe…, and was recorded by Mr. Bloe. Up until recently I had no idea who the hell Mr. Bloe was, I just always loved the song and that was enough for me. Then I came across a video on YouTube which features a funny little cartoon sheep dancing to the song, I decided to do a little research and ended up on Wikipedia… and there it was, a small write up about Groovin With Mr. Bloe.

It’s an instrumental, a harmonica and piano backed up by a powerful bass beat… very, very catchy tune. When I was at school we had a piano in the music room, we’d sneak in there on a lunchtime some days and mess around on it, trying to pick out tunes… we used to try and replicate the piano on Groovin…., the song was always playing at the local youth clubs… it was 1970, summertime. Anyway, back to Mr. Bloe himself. It turns out that harmonica was played by a session musician called Harry Pitch, the piano was played by a guy called Zack Lawrence… I can honestly say that I’d never heard of either, and yet I’ve loved their hit record since 1970 when it reached number two in the UK singles chart.

Just as a footnote, I’ve attended a couple of Northern Soul nights in the last few years and Groovin With Mr. Bloe has been played at each of them… packing out the dancefloor…. it’s still a popular song, and so it should be. But I just class it as a great pop song. Desert island must have.