MacArthur Park

MacArthur Park is a strange song.

The original was recorded in a teeny studio near Leicester Square, with Richard Harris bellowing his words over the top of lush strings. Listening to it, one is reminded of a manic drunk yelling near the duck pond. Someone left his cake out in the rain.

This remarkable cover by Donna Summer is almost as odd. MacArthur Park becomes a fine piece of disco, achieving a strange poinancy mixed with hot shoe shuffle. It succeeds because it pays no attention whatsoever to the original.

Cover Me

Musicians often do covers. The best are the ones that bring something new to the song, beyond the original. The worst are those that add nothing and subtract the greatness of the original. That poor schmuck covering "Alluelia" for example. That's one that rarely gets any better.

There are good covers, bad covers, and many mediocre ones.

We'll start with Aztec Camera and Van Halen's "Jump". I heard this on holiday recently, and thought it was Lou Reed. It probably should be, but as a friend remarked, it sounds more like an invitation to top yourself than the mad, lycra hugging, masturbatory original. You might as well jump, you know.

Christmas Time is Here Again

And that means you have to listen that one, infernal EMI Christmas album wherever you go. The EMI Christmas Album.

Everyone knows that Christmas songs are rubbish. You buy them because the festive season addles your brain with wine and good will. In January they are rightly discarded. Since Simon Cowell rogered the Number 1 spot with whatever pathetic excuse for a singer he's dragged through ITV, Christmas music has got even less interesting.

There is only one good Christmas song, which is Slade's "Merry Christmas Everybody" which was made for whooping it up in the pub drinking Advocaat. The rest of the EMI Christmas Album is detritus. If you can crawl through Chris Rea singing "Driving Home For Christmas", John and Yoko crabbing out that war is over, if you want it, complete with tuneless vocals, you might despair that there are any good musical times at Christmas.

Christmas is for singing yourself, and the carols that you learned at school. That's the joy of it. It's for everyone and you don't need popstars to do it for you, unlike the rest of the year when we've all got day jobs to worry about. Christmas music can have finesse such as the carols from Kings in Cambridge, but at large in England there is a tacit acceptance that Christmas will mean wassailing from tuneless six year old girls and recorder recitals.

But Christmas is a time of good will to all men (even Simon Cowell) and so there have been some interesting songs written about Christmas. For good or bad it can be one of the most powerfully emotional times of the year, and I toast and post to that.

Mike Hugg and Highly Likely - What Happened to You?

Or the theme from "Whatever happened to the Likely Lads?"

This one is pure 1970s pop, and a bit clever. Mike Hugg of Mannfred Mann wrote the song and Highly Likely were his session band. I've never heard the full thing, only those lines that ask you what you used to be. It's an incredibly downbeat song in total. Miserable. Odd then that it should be the theme to a comedy. But there's a pathos in this that mirrors the comedy perfectly.

When I watched as a child I didn't understand Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? My parents found it horribly funny. Now I get it completely. I've been cleaning up in order to move, and a slip of paper found in the pocket of an old coat can sometimes bring it all back. What became of the people we used to be?

Here they are, the once Likely Lads, with faces of bewilderment as responsibility beckons. I'm glad they never revisited it. There never could be much funnier than this.

Ron Grainer - Doctor Who

Okay, its been terrifying children for decades, but the music alone is haunting.

This remarkable music is made by tape looping, white noise, and wave form oscillators titervated by Delia Derbyshire in the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop. Not one note comes from a musical instrument. That someone saw fit to create for a children's programme in 1963 is brilliant. The current version is with a full orchestra but goes to show you can't really improve it.



Delia Derbyshire was later invited by Paul McCartney to collaborate with the Beatles. The BBC nixed it. Gah!

Laurie Johnson - The Avengers

Ah, the Avengers, British television at its campest, funniest and most stylish.

I confess to shamelessly ripping my flirting technique from Diana Rigg and even copying her haircut when I was 16. It worked, I got that higher class of boyfriend who takes you out for a drink before lunging for your bra straps.

The Avengers owes a lot to Johnson's theme, recorded with a full orchestra for ATV. Lush, opulent, strings are undermined utterly rink dink piano. Perfect, atmospheric, and sets you up for both the sublime and the ridiculous.

Bill Bailey - The BBC Apocalypse

A silly one, but shows that the BBC can still style out a great theme when they want to.

Bill gave it a great remix, and when I managed to see him perform it live at the Apollo on Shaftesbury Avenue, the whole crowd got down. Next time the 10 o'clock news comes on, get your glow sticks out.

Ronnie Hazelhurst - Are You Being Served?

Ronnie Hazelhurst is the BBC composer. For anyone who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, his music was ubiquitous.

He dominated the themes of the BBC, writing the funky Yes Minister (listen to that guitar), Last of the Summer Wine, Some Mothers Do Ave Em, Sorry, and arranging countless other tunes. He even managed to do Eurovision. Ronnie is at his height with the big band stylings of the Two Ronnies, but perhaps his most creative with "Are You Being Served?". Since he couldn't afford a percussionist, he disguised the gap with the clanging of tills and change, a full year before Pink Floyd did "Money".

Far out, Ronnie.

Beethovens of the Small Screen - Pop Goes Bach

Television has lost stock recently. Falling advertising revenues and miniscule budgets mean that it is cheap, dominated by quizzes, reality shows and phone ins where money can be recouped.

These cuts in budget are not just evident in what comes on screen, but also in the music used. These days, television rarely has its own music, but instead buys hits from music companies.

In the glory days of course, British television had its own composers. They created music that is instantly recognisable, taut and perfectly made. This week, we celebrate those Beethovens of the small screen, the classic tunes of British television.

We start with the irrepressible "Ski Sunday" by Sam Fonteyn, otherwise known as "Pop Goes Bach" because it resembles Fugue in D Minor. Fonteyn made it a Frug in D Minor. The BBC still show "Ski Sunday" but they've buggered up the theme by making it modern. Gah. And Alberto Tomba, aka "Tomba La Bomba" aka Tomba the Bomb aka the greatest slalom skier of all time isn't in it anymore, which is a shame. Both theme and man exist in perfect harmony. Tomba flinging himself down the mountains of Austria to this theme still lingers in the memory.

War - Good, Good Feelin'

I went out on Saturday for some class disco. I didn't get it, so here's something to meet the need. Shake it!

Chucky Berry - Johnny B Goode

A party this evening. So sling this on, Johnny B Goode tonight.

Brigdet Bardot - Saint Tropez

Oh the summer has gone and I'm cold. Bridget Bardot will cheer me up with her challenging ode to summer sun.

It was of course, the theme to Eurotrash. Oh Eurotrash, I do miss you.

Georges Bizet - Seguedille

I attended the Royal Opera House last night to see Carmen.

My parents played opera constantly when I was a child. I hated it then. It was overblown, stupid, demanding and irritating.

Of course, as soon as even the meanest teenager has had a love affair, then opera is completely explicable. Opera is demanding in the way that love is demanding. You do have to listen to it. It is, in an age when most music has become a soundtrack, impossible to make it into disposeable chunks which may be consumed between microwave meals.

Anyway, to Carmen, that great bitch who lives and dies by her treatment of men. She could not be ignored either. You won't need a translation if you don't understand French.

Zager and Evans - In The Year 2525

The Peanut Duck does not always choose records that it likes. Case in point is this basket case of a record seems to go nowhere. You beg for it's terrible logic to stop.

How did Zager and Evans get a recording contract? The answer is in the year 9595. But we will not still be alive.

Roger Troutman - So Ruff So Tuff

The kind of music you'd have in one those unbelievably cool discos in films. The place where they dance as if they need to touch their knees with their elbows.

This is available on "The Many Facets of Roger", which is a glorious funk album, which is impressively self centred funk.

The Bangles - Walk Like An Egyptian

The Bangles have the moves. Walk Like An Egyptian is a basic guide in how to make a fool of yourself on the dancefloor. If you can frug to this and not do at least one stupid Egyptian hand move then you are better than me.

Five hairbrushes of five.

Michael Sembello - Maniac

Famously featured in the film Flashdance, Maniac is a song that never needed to exist. It's the kind of record produced by someone who thought more is more, and that lyrics never need to make sense. In fairness chaps will appreciate the bottom shots in this. Otherwise this tribute to the bunny boiling metal workers of the dancefloor doesn't bear repeated listening.

Unless you enjoy dancing in the "danger zone", of course. Three hairbrushes out of five.

Olivia Newton John - Xanadu

We begin Guilty Pleasures week with this splendid track.

Olivia Newton John was raised on some sexy Australian helium and then produced this with the Electric Light Orchestra. A million thanks will be yours if you can explain to me exactly what this psychedelic roller disco at a Grattan catalogue fashion shoot means.

Hairbrush rating - 5 out of 5. If you can't get into this you must be tragic or sober.

The Dirty Mac - Yer Blues

The supergroup of supergroups. Worth watching to see Mick Jagger make a thorough tit of himself in the first two minutes. Yer Blues indeed.

Badfinger - Come And Get It

"Come And Get It" was part of the soundtrack to the Magic Christian, one of my favourite films. A cheat since Paul McCartney both wrote and produced the record, but Badfinger are wierd beatle puppets on this record, which was of course, a big hit and one of those records you wish the Beatles had actually recorded themselves. You wonder what it might have been if McCartney had become a producer after he left the Beatles.

Note that Jimmy Saville is ageless, looking like an excited gonk in a kaftan. What was he injesting in the late 1960s?



The Magic Christian is also worth a watch, for the sheer excess.