I'm still coming down from Dodgy's gig at Rock City last Saturday. There's more than a strong possibility I'll be seeing them a little later in the tour; if only to hear them do their a capella version of Find the Cost of Freedom. For years now they've been dropping it into their set as part of This is Ours. I could listen to them harmonising all night. Here it is/they are from the Astoria in London doing just that.
Dodgy - This is Ours/Find the Cost of Freedom (1995)
And here's the original. Absolutely no introduction necessary.
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - Find the Cost of Freedom (1970)
A whole month of World Cup action recently came and went and I managed to keep this sleepy digital backwater a football free zone for the duration. Likewise today, on what is Ian Broudie's 60th birthday, I'll try not to mention that song; you know which one I mean.
Ian Broudie has written some cracking songs over the last thirty years or so. His band the Lightning Seeds was really nothing more than a vehicle to take the songs he'd written on the road and play them live. Like a lot of musicians he's much more at home in a studio working by himself, writing, recording, refining. The Lightning Seeds was just a name above the door. When he recorded the tracks for what would become Jollification, apart from some additional vocals by Alison Moyet and Terry Hall, Broudie played every note of music himself and, of course, produced it. Quite literally a one man band.
Jollification came out slap bang in the middle of the Britpop boom and could be seen and heard rubbing shoulders with the likes of Oasis, Blur, Dodgy (who he also produced), Ocean Colour Scene et al. The fact that it spawned four hugely successful singles should not have come as a surprise to anyone. Except, maybe, the slightly morose, slightly awkward scouser who wrote them all.
This one has, for a number of reasons, become something of an ear-worm just lately. Lucky You may not have set the charts alight, but nearly 25 years later it's till ringing in my ears; lucky me.
When Del Amitri released Twisted in 1995, Justin Currie rode shotgun with me in my Laguna for nigh on 50,000 miles: such was a. the sheer audacity of their (never bettered) album and b. the crazy mileage I covered in the year following its conversion to C90 and admittance to the Renault's tape deck. (Where it lived 'till I got beam ended one Friday night on the M1 at Leicester Forest East.)
Following the accident I never really played the album again. New set of wheels, new set of tunes - Dodgy had just released Free Peace Sweet, and I parted company with the Del boys.
And then, last weekend, I found this on Youtube: Justin Currie on his own - the other fella (the one who looked a bit like Lemmy) had gone, leaving our man alone on a stool singing such a beautiful song that it makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up now - twenty years ago I'd be pulling the car over to have a little weep. In fact, thinking about it, that's exactly what I did do the first time I heard Driving With The Brakes On.
