Magic, that is. Here’s a reminder of Kate’s original.

So what are The Futureheads up to these days? If they dropped off your radar, or you never really checked them in the first place, I can say they’re doing very nicely: the 2010 album is called The Chaos and it’s a stormer. Download Struck Dumb for free and give it a blast. Recommended.

I really don’t know what you’re going to think about Cracker‘s version of The Clash’s White Riot, from this album. I’m pretty sure you’ll be.. er.. polarised in your opinion. It’s either the most brilliant thing you ever heard, or the most absurd. A country version with a full-on chicken-pickin’ slam-bang hoe-down ending? Come on, it’s ridiculous, what on earth are they doing? How could they?

So why do I like it so much?

P.S. I first heard this song on an internet radio show, The Garden Fence Of Sound, piloted by David Newton (producer and ex-Mighty Lemon Drops guitar man). I emailed him immediately and asked who it was. Cheers, Dave!

ElTele

OK, let’s get this straight right from the word go: Spanky Wilson got her nickname because she was a naughty girl when she was a child growing up in Pittsburgh.

This storming, soulful version of the Clapton/Bruce/Brown penned Sunshine Of Your Love is a cult club favourite, and I hope it’ll be one of your favourites too. It’s from her sophomore album Doin’ It, from 1968. There’s no woozy 60s lead guitar noodling here – it’s all crisp clipped funk rhythm and tight horn section, topped off with Spanky’s dynamic jazz inflected vocals. It’s a monster of a floor-filler all right, guaranteed to get you out there shaking your booty and making a damn fool of yourself.

So check out the cover and the original below. Would I be right in thinking Spanky makes the Cream tune (from Disraeli Gears, 1967) seem a little… pedestrian?

P.S. Spanky’s still making excellent music today – check out the I’m Thankful album (2006) featuring the Quantic Soul Orchestra.

Mary Isabel Catherine Bernadette O’Brien and Marie McDonald McLaughlin Lawrie had tremendous success in British light entertainment in the 60s. Dusty Springfield was a masterful interpreter of American pop written by the best – Goffin/King, Bacharach & David – and Lulu was the sprightly young pop poppet of the charts and the Eurovision Song Contest.

Dusty’s renditions of the classics gave her the leverage she needed to take a step up in class and record with the best. Though it had been very successful, Lulu simply hated what she was singing (though glimpses of the direction she was to take can be seen in her TV show, which also gave us one of most edgy television moments of the decade). Contract at an end, she signed up with Atco and got a chance to show what she could do with classier material. They both went to America.

Dusty worked with Aretha Franklin’s production team of Jerry Wexler, Tom Dowd and Arif Mardin in Tennessee, backed by the legendary Memphis Cats (well known for providing a sterling musical service to Elvis, Wilson Pickett and more). Dusty In Memphis isn’t quite the gritty downhome album it might have been, but it is an incredible meeting of pop and soul, complete with superb funky arrangements.

Lulu headed for Alabama and the same production team as Dusty. The musicians were the awesome Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, who were responsible for more than a few landmark recordings (Aretha’s Respect and Wilson Pickett’s Mustang Sally to name just two). Add legendary guitar slinger Duane Allman to the mix and you can see that Lulu was in the very best company in making New Routes.

Both these records made the lower reaches of the American top 100. The late 60s and early 70s were more about Woodstock, Led Zeppelin and Janis Joplin, so these exemplary recordings were somewhat overlooked, but they represent the artistic high point of two remarkable British singers.

You’ll have heard Son Of A Preacher Man before, but maybe not seen this clip of Dusty. You might not have heard Lulu’s Oh Me Oh My, but Aretha knows how great a performance it is, since she recorded her own version on Young, Gifted and Black in 1972.

Ladies and  gentlemen, Dusty and Lulu.

P.S. Here’s a little extra Dusty – singing the blues. Following New Routes, Lulu went and did it all over again on an album called Melody Fair. The backing band on that record? The Dixie Flyers plus the Memphis Horns, augmented by Elvis’s backing singers The Sweet Inspirations, no less! Both albums are collected on The Atco Sessions 1969-1972.

Thanks to fellow bloggers ElTele and Talcy for spurring me on with their own excellent 26×26 selections. What’s next, chaps?

The Zombies released just two albums, and as they broke up shortly after recording Odessey & Oracle, you might say it didn’t have the huge impact it deserved. Their first record was a collection of singles and covers: this one is therefore their only ‘true’ album, written by Zombies Rod Argent and Chris White. It was recorded at Abbey Road (with no producer-ly interference), shortly after the aforementioned Sgt. Pepper and Pink Floyd’s Piper At The Gates Of Dawn. 1967 was a good year for the studio, but torture for the Zombies.

Morale within the band was low. Two singles from the sessions had been released to complete indifference from the record-buying public, the band were disillusioned and fighting amongst themselves. Singer Colin Blunstone hated what would become the album’s closing track Time Of The Season, but was persuaded to sing it.

The album was mixed in mono by Argent and White, but the record company required a stereo mix and said the band should pay for it themselves. This mix was completed, but it was the final financial straw, and the group split before the album release. Time Of The Season hit the charts, but it was all over for the Zombies.

Odessey & Oracle isn’t overly experimental or ‘out there’. It’s subtle, but daring and witty. It has a wistful air, chiefly due to Blunstone’s sweet voice. It has brilliant harmonies and superb composition. Odessey & Oracle is perfectly-formed intricate pop music.

And if that’s the kind of thing you like…

P.S. I could just as easily have written about: ZZ Top and the album Deguello. It was also the only other ‘Z’ I had in My Music.

Wow, that’s it then, 26 albums. I’m done.

Or am I? Stay tuned.

The ‘most blueswailing’ Yardbirds went through their own stylistic line-up changes, whilst serving as a finishing school for three English rock guitarists: the god-like genius that is Jeff Beck, and two other guys.

OK, just kidding, they were of course Eric Clapton (who left in ’65 to play the blues, not pleased with the commercial direction the ‘birds were taking) and Jimmy Page (who switched from bass to guitar in ’66 when Beck got tired and fired, and.. you know the rest).

Lester Bangs wrote that it was the Yardbirds, not the Stones, that were an inspiration for a thousand American garage bands, who were persuaded chiefly by Relf’s rougher, raggedy, definitely-a-white-boy yowl that they could ‘make it’ too. Listen to The Shadows of Knight and The Count Five. Lester was right.

And how frequently in those days did a group of spotty individuals from Greater London take American music to America and ‘give it back to the kids, man’?

Any road up, I’m going to steal what Charles Shaar Murray says about The BBC Sessions, because he’s spot on: “Judged as ‘blues’ it’s ridiculous. Heard as an example of how liberating blues material and attitudes were for stiff young Brits, it’s a revelation, despite the BBC engineers’ reluctance to allow the young brutes to turn their amplifiers up to real-life onstage levels.”

Play loud. This one’s for Linda in Wrexham, and all you other blues boomers out there.

N.B. I’ve got a few of these BBC Sessions compilations – The Who, The Kinks, Jimi Hendrix, and Cream – and they’re really good.

P.S. I could have just as easily written about: Young Marble Giants and the album Colossal Youth, but I already did that, ages ago.

I just can’t wait for Z.

I also know that, as long ago as the letter ‘W’, I’ve been emphasising how great the albums as a whole are. Not just a few top tracks, but entirely great records.

So here’s a warning before I continue: this IS a five star record, I’m totally entranced by it whenever I put it on, and the superlatives are going to go off the scale.

Wasp Star (Apple Venus Volume 2) is XTC’s last studio album, from 2000. If it’s the last one they ever make, it’ll be, for me, their career high. Twelve perfectly constructed, charming pop songs, brilliantly produced: gleaming arrangements, playful lyrics, glorious melodies, radio hooks aplenty, sparkling guitar work. Not one single moment where the quality drops below ‘excellent’.

I could be exaggerating. It might not be your thing. But just listen to this, while I go and have a lie down to recover..

P.S. No way I was going to write about X or X-Ray Spex or The XX when XTC’s Wasp Star is alongside them in my collection.

Wonder what Y will be?

If you’re thinking my 26×26 is a bit ‘John Peel’ in places.. you’d be right. Just goes to show what a towering musical influence the man was on those of us who are a certain age. Here’s another Peelie favourite from 1987.

The Wedding Present played fast, jangling rhythm-guitar-led songs of love, loss and heartbreak, with a glorious matter-of-fact lyricism that just… said what you felt. I guess a modern equivalent might be The Libertines, except Weddoes supremo David Gedge can write Barat and Doherty under the table. The best version of the debut album George Best is the original CD – OK, you can go and get the extended mega super plus versions if you really want to – which has thirteen Gedge classics plus a blistering cover of Going Nowhere Fast by Girls At Our Best! (who, like the Wedding Present, came from Leeds, fact fans).

The song titles alone should convince you this is a great record (Everyone Thinks He Looks Daft and What Did Your Last Servant Die Of? open the album) and behind the blazing guitars, furious bass playing and thunderous drumming, every single track has a lyrical highlight:

Uneaten meals
A lonely star
A welcome ride in a neighbour’s car
A long walk home
The pouring rain
I fell asleep when you never came
Some rare delight in Manchester town
It took six hours before you let me down
To see it all in a drunken kiss
A stranger’s hand on my favourite dress

That’s poetry, that is.

N.B. The fun didn’t stop with George Best either: on through a Ukrainian folk song mini-album, their major label debut in Bizarro.. it’s all good. David Gedge had a detour into Cinerama, and still puts out Wedding Present albums. 2005′s Take Fountain is great, from which comes this superb song.

P.S. I could have just as easily written about: Wilco and the album A Ghost Is Born.

Wonder what X will be?

Before I make further comment on it, let me tell you a tale.

He’s a curmudgeonly old chap, is Van. You could argue he’s earned the right to be, with the classic material he’s put out over the years. He’s a legend, and he can do as he pleases. The times I’ve seen him in concert I was seeking the It’s Too Late To Stop Now experience, and I did get it, once, with a classic band led by Georgie Fame following Mr Morrison’s every move, sympathetic to the cause. Two hours of transcendent genius.

But the other times? A distracted, often grumpy Van and a parade of unnecessary ‘guest stars’ (if I want to hear Brian Kennedy sing Tupelo Honey I’ll go and see Brian Kennedy). Richard Gere on guitar one night. You think that sounds weird? It was. And not in a good way.

However, when Van is ‘on’, he’s really ON. It’s Too Late To Stop Now is the best officially released example of that: a storming collection of blues and soul classics (from Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, Bobby Bland and more) plus eleven Morrison originals, belted out by The Man himself on top form. All his on-stage energy is constructive, not destructive, and he throws himself into the music. He’s backed by the superb Caledonia Soul Orchestra (eleven of them, including horns and strings). All the excitement of the original gigs is translated onto vinyl. All killer, no filler.

During the dramatic ten-minute-plus Cyprus Avenue which closes the album, the band drops back for a second, maybe summoning some last reserves of energy to really bring it home.. and some wag in the crowd dares to shout “Turn it on!”. With impeccable timing, the perfect amount of dramatic tension – will he reply? won’t he? – Morrison snaps back “It’s turned on already”.

Is it ever.

P.S. I could have just as easily written about: The Velvet Underground and the album The Velvet Underground

Wonder what W will be?

N.B. Van is assiduous in chasing down posting of his material on the net, so play this track from the album quickly, before Grooveshark are asked to take it down. Videos on YouTube are scarce for the same reason.

It’s fizzy orange pop, thieving Mars bars from the corner shop, snorkel parkas, zits, exchanging football cards, Doc Martens, a quick snog round the back of the bike sheds, and the joy and angst of being a hormone-stuffed delinquent teenager.

A sugar-rush debut, including John Peel’s favourite song ever. Feargal’s wobbly wail, the O’Neill brothers’ buzzsaw attack, plus Michael Bradley and Billy Doherty solid at the back.

Sixteen tracks, two minutes or so each, five guys, three chords, one whole lot of fun. It might just be perfect.

P.S. I could have just as easily written about: U2 and the album Achtung Baby which is remarkable for one reason – it’s the only U2 album I like. But I decided to write about another bunch of Irishmen instead.

Wonder what V will be?