If you’ve enjoyed NYLPM, you might also enjoy:

- the NYLPM archives, which will be staying up.
- the rest of Freaky Trigger, which will sail on unaffected, though with fewer overall hits most likely.
- Popular, which restarts tomorrow with Chris Farlowe and will continue chronologically through the UK’s #1 hits.

So I will be spending 2006 on holiday in the late 60s and early 70s, but will still write a bit about music on various LiveJournal communities, and hopefully one or two things for the Stylus webzine. (If you have a music zine and you’d like me to write something, ask me.)

Meanwhile there are lots of other music blogs. When we started NYLPM in March 2000 there were about three, now there are thousands! Millions! Naturally I don’t actually read any of them but if I find a good one I might update this post with the links. Poke around on the sidebar in the meantime.

Happy 2006, 2007 and ever after. Bye!

After five and a half years, 3,500 posts and something like forty contributors I’m pulling the plug on this blog. Once upon a time it was the best music blog in the world, more recently it was just something nice to have around, and even if its best days are some years behind us, a hunt through most of its 70 archived months will turn up something worth reading - a review, a snippet of information, an idea or two ready to be picked up on. I may well hunt through myself sometime, and point you to the best bits.

I’m ending NYLPM because - as should be pretty obvious - I’ve no use for it anymore. Readership has been declining, and it’s been declining because the blog has been neglected, and the blog has been neglected because ultimately I’m bored with writing about music in this format. I dabbled in MP3 blogging to spice things up but my heart was never really in it. When I got back from the EMP conference earlier this year I’d had three days of really stimulating conversation about music, I’d heard some fascinating papers, and I realised I no will or desire to write it all up here. So this cancellation is overdue, but I’m still very proud of NYLPM, in its heyday and after.

This blog was never just a solo effort, and my decision to kill it off is a rather selfish one. Apologies and thankyous to Mark, Pete, Martin and Anthony, who were the most regular current contributors. And mighty thanks to Mike Daddino, Ned Raggett, Dan Perry, Maura Johnston, Fred Solinger, Tim Finney, Sarah C, Tim Hopkins, Dave Raposa, Sundar Subramanian, Jess Harvell, Stevie Nixed, Carsmile Steve, Jel, Marcello Carlin, Dr Alex T, Alan Trewartha, Robin Carmody, Greg Scarth, Tracer Hand, Steve Mannion, Stevie T, Jim Cassius, Peter Miller, Mike G, Ronan Fitzgerald, Andy Kellman, Mitch, William Bloody Swygart, and anyone else who contributed and who I shamefully forgot. And thanks to the linkers, commenters and readers too. It’s been a real pleasure and I hope you remember us fondly.

*but one.

So I got a machine to look back for me. I was a late iPod adopter but it’s come in useful, and it has a neat little feature which counts up how often I’ve played each track on it. So this Top 10 is quite simply the ten current tracks I’ve listened to most. I left out one record - Inaya Day’s “Nasty Girl” - because it was on my wife’s playlists more than mine - but otherwise this seems an accurate half of a story.

That half of the story happened in my living room, and among my fellow message-board co-dependents. The other half happened away from headphones, further out in the world, finding or rediscovering or refreshing places for music to happen to me. Places like:

- Seattle, for the EMP conference. Jetlag and a hectic schedule meant I didn’t spend as much time with the people I met as I’d planned, but the event reminded me how exciting thinking about music can be (and also how boring it sometimes is).

- My office. I’m lucky enough to work with people who I actually like, and who like music enough to argue with me about it. Working there has made me explain things I’d dismissed as obvious and like things I’d simply dismissed. I’m also lucky enough to work at a place that has the radio on all day. Maybe it’s obvious - to everyone but me-as-was - but listening to the radio makes you a better pop critic.

- Poptimism. I’ve been DJing at club nights for a few years but Poptimism was the one that ‘clicked’, won its own crowd, and turned briefly into something special. To have it suddenly taken away was more than just irritating, but even if we don’t find a new venue in ‘06 (and we will), it was a joy to do it, to give physical meaning and expression to our ideas about music, and to get ghastly drunk on cheap wine. Thanks to Steve, Pete and Alan, and thanks to everyone who came and joined in too.

10. Uniting Nations - You And Me: In Feburary I played for 300 or so people at my work company party. It was corny white-collar fuxx like me dancing badly to predictable records, but that didn’t make the delight we all took in filter-disco floorfillers any less glorious. “You And Me” hadn’t been released then but it makes me think of that night when the double-hit drums come in for the chorus.

9. tATu - All About Us: So the lesbian stuff turned out to be a (very profitable) metaphor for indivisibility, the suffocating dangerous closeness of a hyperbolic teenage friendship. The kind of desperate friendship which even as a teen you probably didn’t have but one could recognise anyhow. One of those records that makes me imagine that I might be in a film and that it might end, thrillingly, badly.

8. Field Music - You Can Decide: A song I was surprised to find on the list, I assume I listened to it a lot for Stylus’ Singles Jukebox UK, trying to find an angle. I probably failed and gave it a 6. Stylus gets a good deal of online flak for many reasons - some good - but I’m grateful to it for letting me write uncomplicated silly singles reviews when I needed to. Field Music as I remember make a gentle, slightly fastidious noise which is difficult to dislike or love.

7. Roll Deep - The Avenue: The vibe here is a pop musical, Summer Holiday or something, big characters bursting into rhyme just because they can. At first it sounded ridiculous and clumsy but it seems to have lasted just through exhuberance. “Feel a sharp pain in my left tit” - that’s the best bit.

6. Madonna - Hung Up (Stewart Price Extended Remix Dub): this is the best version, you get more of the ABBA (make that sample pay its way!) and less of the Madonna, which is how I like it. And Price makes the ABBA record tease in a way which is enjoyably un-ABBA-ish. I’ve only heard the Madonna album once but it reminds me of the ’song-poem’ phenomena somehow.

5. Robyn - Konichiwa Bitches: I was sure Fannypack’s “718″ would end up here, since I’ve been glibly saying it’s my favourite song of the year, but apparently far from it. “Konichiwa Bitches” nods to Fannypack in its closing lines and sounds like a charming home-brewed tribute to pop-hop. It got so many listens because of its payoff, when Robyn finally brings in the synths. It also became a huge cult favourite at work, which made me very pleased.

4. Missy Elliot - Lose Control (Jacques Lu Cont Mix): This is my wife’s favourite record of the year, and I played it even more in our car. She likes the opening couplets - “Cute face / chubby waist / thick legs / in shape” - I like the way Jacques Lu Cont has been so ruthless at stripping out Missy’s old-skoolisms for something more Euro-relevant, a sleek synthpop attack with a rough bootleg edge.

3. Rachel Stevens - Nothing Good About This Goodbye: I’ve listened to this track most because it’s Rachel’s best performance. So many people have mentioned her lack of personality that it’s become a cliche but it works in her favour here - she needs to sound bruised, subdued, slightly crushed, and she does.

2. Girls Aloud - “Biology”: If the year were a few months longer we’d see “Models”, “Wild Horses” et al. on the list too. “Biology” is a hard track to do justice to - its infectious confidence lets it get away with its structural chutzpah, and the tricks and easter eggs never get in the way of the song’s momentum. I especially like how the brazen blues intro is the part that repeats later, dropped in as if to say, “Well, now do you see what it was doing there?”. This is a walking through London song, I try and make sure it’s the last thing playing when I reach the pub.

1. The Killers - “Mr Brightside (Thin White Duke Remix)”: I was surprised to see this top my list but it makes sense - I listened to it incessantly when I heard it, and rarely switch it off now, it’s made the switch from inspiring to comfortable without ever slipping through ‘annoying’. When I started my new job the original “Mr Brightside” was barely off the radio and I grew to hate it, for reasons I can’t remember. All I hear now when I think of the original is what this remix found in it, qualities I’d hardly noticed myself. The remix slows it down, lets it flower into an epic of self-regarding heroic woe, vanity in vain, which might only be a stately bore but the beats give it just enough momentum and direction. It ends up in some unsought sweet spot between “Jungleland” and a ZTT 12″.

So that’s what I listened to this year.

Now Chris Rea has not been pop for a very long time. But who knew that when leaving pop your compass can go so awry to end up in a truly audacious position. You see Chris’s latest project is so much more than just a double album. It puts The Clash’s Sandinista in the shade, if the individual elements are built into a wall. Chris’s new project : Blue Guitar : is an elevenuble** album. 11CD’s of music. And a DVD in case.

I would say hats off to Mr Rea for such an astonishing production. But I have to get it for my Dad for Christmas.

*Of course like any rule, there are occasions when these have been the best thing ever.

**Not a real word clearly.

Partway through the book, in the chapter discussing “Superwords”, I get quoted, a quote from this odd piece, which I’ve not dared read since I wrote it. My reluctance was based around my never finishing it - I never wrote the subsequent parts, and after a couple of weeks I’d forgotten what was meant to be in them. I was also afraid I’d read it again and think it was wrong - which I now do, but it’s not wrong in any terrible or humiliating way so I don’t know why I was so fussed.

The ‘death of pop’ piece sits as one of my most grievous examples of that Kogan bugbear, not following through ideas. I’m never sure how seriously I take this - I think a lot of ideas are un-follow-through-able, or rather than if you try to follow them through you get ground down and tired, so it’s better to just spray them out and see if anyone else can do anything with them. This was always a guiding notion behind ILM, which I actually started half-based on a description I’d read of a Frank Kogan zine (its other parent was the “Question of the Month” box on 80s Marvel editorial pages). But maybe when I say “better” I simply mean “more fun” or “lazier”.

This actually ties in a bit with what I was talking about in the Death of Pop piece. The bit I like most in the piece now is the section near the end about stage magic and pop existing in the same precarious showbiz state. In stage magic, pretending that it’s all for real (i.e. that you actually possess supernatural powers) is seen as vulgar or a cheat; showing the wires is also frowned upon. A magic performance, in other words, is an idea that refuses - or cannot survive - a follow-through. Somewhere in the tangle of the article I’m suggesting a similar thing about manufactured pop.

Except stage magic is - or used to be, I don’t know enough about how it works these days - a stable form where this refusal is built-in and understood by performers and to an extent by audience. Pop is unstable, judging by the continual movement of its performers towards perceived autonomy and credibility (which very rarely translates to achieved cred). The ‘death of pop’ I was getting worked up about four years ago is always with us, a constant career trajectory. So the question is: why? And also - to paraphrase a question Frank Kogan asks a great deal - what do the performers gain by that? What does the industry gain? What do we listeners gain?

Intro: Gone in a flash, sets the tone for a fast, trashy record.

Models: Something faintly Sleeper-ish, Transvision Vamp-ish about it, despite the electro overtones, very choppy, speedy, tacky, aggressively fun. You’ll have to be in the right mood for it.

Biology: Becoming my favourite single of the year, current favourite chunk: the “closer closer” bit.

Wild Horses: C&W overtones, Xeno-nonsense lyrics, now this is sounding like the grown-up Daphne And Celeste album. Some kind of science experiment to see how overstuffed a song can be with hips and still hang together? Anyway I’m lovin this one.

See The Day: OH NO!!!!!!! Worse by some distance than “I’ll Stand By You”, a weak song hugely overdone and aurely the only thing on here you can imagine S.Cowell really approving of.

Watch Me Go: SKA INFLUENCE! Saucy lyrics midly undermined by toffee-chewing lead vocal. And then YES!! A GA rap, about stripper vicars, so if this IS a Britpop album this must be Mansun.

Waiting: More Britpop ‘guitar’ ’strut’, OK make that Stray Cat Strut, a slightly more downbeat and less exciting sequel to “Love Machine”, still pretty good but no highlight. Goes on longer than its hook deserves.

Whole Lotta History: The frustrating thing about GA’s Xmo cover ballads isn’t “oh god it’s a ballad”, only fools “don’t like ballads” after all. It’s that their writers are really good at doing pop ballads - delicate, touching songs with great choruses that will end up glued to my headphones when I’m feeling maudlin coming home after a night on Binge Drink Britain’s tiles.

Long Hot Summer: Well-placed on the album, though still GA’s weakest ‘good’ single, some really nice little blips and bleeps behind the pre-chorus though and the coda is satisfying. It is probably the most dancefloor-ready thing here so far: this is not a bangin’ album.

Swinging London Town: Very odd and I’m not sure if it totally works, again on the “if it’s a Britpop album” tip with a Pulp comparison, the weird spoken-word parts of Wicker Man or Sheffield Sex City springing to mind, undermining - but maybe creatively - the boshin electro bits.

It’s Magic: Not a Pilot cover sadly. I’m enjoying this but not loving it, a little too diffuse to make an impact though some good “synthwork” I guess. Maybe I’m just getting a little knackered by the effort of listening to a whole album, it’s been months!

No Regrets: Back in balladland, this isn’t anywhere near as poor as “See The Day” but is actually a bit under-produced, can’t seem to decide if it wants to be a stark drum-pad confessional or something more Manilow and falls between two stools.

Racey Lacey: A song that will hugely annoy many people, sounding as it does like Geri Halliwell doing Great Escape era Blur.

Overall: Mildly disappointing, even though there’s nothing dreadful apart from “See The Day” it feels like a weaker record than Neighbours, busier but less surprising and charming. “Biology” and “Wild Horses” total winners though.

Joe M says:

The Jay-Z attack on Nas in ‘Takeover’ is a masterpiece because he acknowledges that Illmatic was a great album, and even that another unspecified Nas album was insert equivocal hand-wavering gesture here okay. Then he adds “That’s a one hot album every ten year average”. This is pretty much the accepted wisdom on Nas: that he made one of the best debuts in hip hop history and never achieved that level of quality again. Saying this, rather than saying “You are shit in every way” as some rappers are prone to do on diss records, made at least a large part of Jay’s attack on Nas very hard to refute.

Andrew F says:

(The Takeover is) a near-perfect diss record, through disrespect into dismissal. Where most rappers come up with a good insult or two and off to the studio, this is pleasingly thorough, covering the target’s past, sexuality, street cred, business sense and basic rapping ability (”Yeah I sampled your voice, you were using it wrong”). It’s magnimanious in victory - Jay-Z has no problem saying that Nas has released two great albums, as long as he has made more and greater. And still, better to be the target of all this than the multitude brushed aside in the last line.

I don’t think its possible to write about how bad near arctic winters are. Edmonton is one of the most northerly cities in the world, and even with the lack of snow, and the relative mild weather, it’s isolating.

50 years ago, people close to hear would travel for card games and never come back (there is a Sinclair Ross story about this). infastructure came with industry and the military, but it still feels wild. It’s dangerous in a way that is more elemental then anything else–and its danger is in the stillness, the darkness.

There is no drama to the death from exposure.

Thinking about all of this, a month before Christmas, I put on Mathias Goene’s volume of Schubert’s Winterreise. Going through what seems proper for the cold—a sort of Winter Death Mix, you could have Dylan’s Visions of Johanna or Leonard Cohen’s Bird on a Wire or The Huron Carol or certain versions of certain hymns (the strange melancholy of Silent Night, the literalness of In The Bleak Midwinter) But nothing matches the melancholy of being alone in the cold like Schubert.

Goene is new, German, and his role has some controversy, because he’s much more somber then his predecessors, and much darker. He adds timber and complexity to an artist who is mostly known for basically sweet candy. I know this is supposed to be a pop music blog, and this is not pop (and I am not going to insult you by saying Lieder was the pop of the 19th century.) but its important, vital even, to have gravity when gravity is called for.

This is as dark as the grave, and cold as the ground (in the words of Blind Willie McTell)

(The text of the Lieder written by William Mueller is here , with translations)

Hyperion is selling Winterreise as part of their Schubert collection, for about 13 pounds.

Is it lame to like a song because it has Wee in the title. Of course not. Luckily, that is not the real reason why Wee Rule, well, rules. Though my description of why Wee Rules rules is partially about the idea of “ruling” in a UK slang kind of way. UK rap was still in its very nascent form, and this - along with Smiley Culture - defined (for better and worse) what we were going to get from the UK rap scene for ten years. Often it was quick snatched verses over a pop track. Or a slow, sonambulent Jazzy B stab at something credible. What We Rule does, in a minor sense, is bring it back to the playground.

You would not hear Run DMC saying that they rule. Or that they were skill. The Wee Papa Girl Rappers were clearly British, albeit leaning on dancehall roots. They were not an Althea And Donna for the late eighties though, this was clearly rap. And it managed to slip French swearing on to Top Of The Pops (and even point out it was doing it). It was a pop tune though, and probably led to more school projects where you write a rap about crossing the road. The Wee Papa Girl Rappers (one letter away from being the Twee PGR) told us they were rap, and were just a cheeky pair of South London girls (who have passed their French exams).

All this and the “Bomp-bomp-bomp-bomp” in the chorus: one of those killer stings that roots a tune in your brain for the rest of your life. The Lawrence girls may not have done much more, but were clearly paving the way for Mel & Kim and TLC (though both groups would probably have been able to traverse an unpaved road).

Alright, it does have Weein the title too. That is a bit funny.

People wanting some festive cheer should wander over to Poptimists, which always has a few MP3s going and is running an audio advent calendar. (You might also wish to visit Poptimists’ monstrous disowned sibling Sukrat). If that’s not enough for you, or if LiveJournal brings you out in hives, then I recommend this ILM thread for all yr Wobs greed needs.

It has been 20 years since this simple song was released and about a dozen since I fell for it, playing it on a dare in an 80s disco. I have listened to it well over a hundred times, and I’m not tired of it, which isn’t something you can say for many records where the pleasure is in the punchlines.

Certainly more feted ’story records’ don’t come close. Dylan’s “Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts” is by one of my favourite acts, on a really good album: it’s awful. The Shangri-Las’ death ballads are sublime but I don’t listen to them as much as Smiley, and I don’t smile at them as much either. What is it about this song?

Not the story, really, especially as the ‘twist’ is dumb: Culture’s already told the coppers his name a few lines ago. No, it’s the telling that stays fresh. That slight increase in tempo at the end when he knows he’s going to get away with it, and his natural cockiness reasserts itself, “me draw out me Parker”. The venal cop, all oily mangnanimity, “a favour for a FAYvour”. The bubbling pride, while the situation’s still in the balance, “number one was its number”. And the brilliant interrogation, switching on a half-beat between eager police and weary, hassled, contemptuous Smiley, “What you got in the boot then son? Me cyassete recorder.” Right then the police are everybully, and Smiley is you.

*(there is no material correlative as evidence, it is a face-saving assumption abt the intentionality of tambo and bones which actually indicts the prejudicial refusal to listen of mr interlocutor)
**the old space bein the one that eg scott walker and jim webb established their respective auteurdoms within; in the shrivelled*** space of the 90s both wd have had to be eg merely elvis costello and NEVER have found themselves a useable torque
***ok altered is perhaps better than shrivelled: as well as spaces that had vanished, new spaces also existed that DIDN’T in the 60s, viz the “rock press”, but there AWESOMENESS wz NO LONGER PRTOECTED BY TRIVIALITY (= there is NO equivalent in the 90s rock press to eg hendrix appearing on the lulu show)

“That is kind of the problem though, it’s a terrific album partly because it’s a series of little revived micro-genres (’the Bucks Fizz one’, ‘the Adam Ant one’ and so on) but it’s hard to sell that to a mass market and harder still if it’s going to be packaged in as dull a way as possible.

The Spice Girls got big not so much from showing off in the lad mags but because they pushed the gang-of-mates angle, dare I say it that GA’s marketing people need to be thinking more Lambrini?”

First impressions of the new Madonna album: too little variation, she’s fallen for the bangin’ pop JLC style - and who wouldn’t - but she doesn’t have many ideas what to do with it, vocally, so a lot of the time it sounds like she’s making it up as she goes along over the top of some (great) grooves. The one about “New York” takes this to an amazing/awful extreme, there is one bit where she says new york ain’t for whiny little pussies and it’s like a poptastic Lou Reed! The one with the Arabic sample shd be a single probably.

Fans of more thoughtful criticism should look at the revived Church Of Me.

I have about 200 Christmas songs sitting on my hard drive and I want to write about them.

So having this song starting with diagnosis and ending with her dancing at the prom–one is reminded about Wilde on Dickens (One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.) But they pull it off, its not mawkish at all.

The song features plain detail, common speech, little detail, and a touch of clinicism (actually mentioning blood flow and surrival rates) The plainness, the lack of hand wringing, the complete and pure rigor moves away (in fact refutes) domestic melodrama.

I am shocked Rascal Flatts had it in them.

The big questions that arise from this case are:
a) Where can I hear a copy of Acquaviva’s work to judge for myself?
b) What kind of power does the Belgian court have to enforce the removal of this song from the album?
c) What exactly was Madge doing in the 90’s? Hanging around bars in Belgium it would appears, waiting for one great song: especially considering that Frozen is probably one of her best 90’s tracks.

One wonders if the prevalence of mp3’s may also allow the courts an alternative action. ie: A search and destroy function in i-Tunes which would initially completely wipe the existence of the song, much like the Chinese completely wiped the existence of their global voyages in 1421.

i. gambo wipin away a tear when sabbaf were inducted
ii. the general old folks reunion small-world-intit feelin
iii. angus young in LONG PANTS AT LAST!!
iv. p.townshend sounds EXACTLY LIKE (and looks a little like) my neighbour: viz quizzical, querulous, quite high-pitched “hippie” cockney
v. the commentator who explained pink floyd’s ageless astonishingness thus: hummable tunes played by excellent musicians in refined settings

and he wz careful and serious and strangely polite really; and she wz bright-eyed and amused and comfy — and the latter worked a lot better, for the (deeply absurd) situation

UPDATE: bah, 25 years have not improved love will tear us apart; it is still JD’s worst song, weighed down by by the inadequacies of its singer then and its singer now, both of them better than OK on other songs, but hapless and crummy on this morose, structurally half-formed sales-pitch wettie

Well done Alan Connor of the BBC for a sensible reply to an absurd Observer article (look it up if you can be botherd), but now we have a reputation to live up to, so here are five great pop songs I’ve been listening to recently (i.e. that have just come up on my iPod), and a good reason why to like each of them.

FRANKIE KNUCKLES ft JAMIE PRINCIPAL - “Baby Wants To Ride”: Because it’s a paranoid early house track which mixes up sex and spirituality, Prince style, and then brings in geopolitics while the beat goes on and you-the-listener get the uneasy feeling that it’s 3am and you’ve gone home from the club with a lunatic.

RACHEL STEVENS - “Nothing Good About This Goodbye”: Because it’s the most heartfelt, bittersweet and straightforward pop song from Rachel Stevens’ second album - which is an excellent record but ‘heartfelt and straightforward’ seems to suit Rachel more than ‘clever and cool’.

THE CONTOURS - “First I Look At The Purse”: Because it’s the cousin to the more famous Motown hit “Money” and just as delightfully cynical. “Why waste time / Looking at the waistline?”

WILL SMITH - “Will 2K”: Because it’s such a perfect use of an iconic rock sample, and because squares like to party too.

BROADCAST - “Echo’s Answer”: Because it’s the sound of a winter night, and after four years I still can’t get less vague than that.

Normal gibberish can now resume.

What a wasteful society we live in, this report suggests. It also puts much credence to the idea that you should never lend CD’s to anyone, and that these things probably never happened with vinyl (this conclusion is wholly my own).

I assume the actual conclusion, since the research was commissioned by Napster, is that mp3’s rule because people can’t steal them, or drop them down the back of the radiator. However an interesting comparison might be how many tracks have you lost due to file corruption, a computer dying or dropping your i-Pod?

One of the reasons it’s such a great lyric is that it makes Andersson and Ulvaeus slightly pernickety grasp of English work in their favour. Sung in the voice of someone no more than averagely articulate, their grammatical exactness gives dimension to a life that seems exact, routine and slightly dull. Another reason is that it’s full of delightful little details, like this from when the singer goes to bed:

“I must have read a while, the latest one by Marilyn French or something in that style”

Offhand, vague, and the choice of author is perfect - intellectual but still quite populist, exactly the sort of thing you’d expect a serious-minded European woman to be reading in 1982. (Plus as a writer best-known for studying the history and effects of patriarchy, she’s resonant with the song, whose dread-laden music makes it ambiguous to say the least about the benefits of coupledom.)

The single was not a hit, and a couple of years later Blancmange covered it. They changed very little of the lyric, which is mostly gender-neutral and worked just as well for a gruff male voice. But they did change that particular line, probably because Marilyn French wasn’t that well known in the UK. (Although The Woman’s Room was a bestseller.) What did they change it to? Well -

“I must have read a while, the latest one by Barbara Cartland or someone in that style.”

Sorry?

There are several reasons why this totally misfires:

i) It has at least one more syllable, two more when you hear how the original squeezes “Marilyn”.
ii) There are perhaps slight ideological differences between Ms.French and Ms.Cartland.
iii) You find yourself unavoidably thinking, “Why on EARTH was he reading a Barbara Cartland novel?”

Great example all in all of how a song can be made or lost by a tiny detail.

*(A-Ha’s “Stay On These Roads” has just come on my iPod - why are these Nordics so damn good at this?)

Here’s hoping Rex teh Dog (whoever the sodding ARSE he turns out to be) does a remix soon.

[edit/update...]

OK, so first off, i meant Frente were guilty of questionable acoustic cover syndrome. obv. Second, to make up for NYLPM being so apparently behind the times, here is a MASH UP of the original Knife version and this acoustic version that’s doing the rounds on better informed mp3 blogs.

Third and finally Mr Gonzales is an Swede, hence compatriot of Teh Knife, who has many an acoustic cover under his belt it would seem.

This song is tucked away at the end of London’s Nice Girls Don’t Stay For Breakfast album, and is indeed a sultry version of the M-I-C-K-E-Y Mouse theme. It’s odd, and not necessarily good, but it seems quite an early example of i) a ‘classy’ performer reaching out for a ‘trash’ artefact and ii) a style or genre being self-conscious of itself as a style, and hence able to apply that style to ‘unlikely’ material.

(This is 1967 though, which is later than I originally thought, so quite possibly the novelty cover version was already popular as a move.)