Gardiner's Question Time

The Boris Gardiner Happening c.1973

Name - Boris Gardiner

Born - 13 January 1943; Kingston, Jamaica

1st Big Hit - Elizabethan Reggae (1970)

Best Known For - I Wanna Wake Up With You (1987)

Not a lot of people know - As a renowned bass player he was an in demand  session musician recording and touring with Lee Scratch Perry and the Upsetters, the Heptones and a ton more.

Reason for featuring on the blog today - Pete Paphides played this on his Soho Radio show last Monday evening...

Boris Gardiner - Love Dub (1975)

Boris Gardiner · Love Dub

Only Talking Sense

Neil and Tim Finn have been responsible for so much of the music that lives within me; music that makes me smile and music that makes me cry - often in equal measure. Whether it be Split Enz, Crowded House, the songs they wrote and recorded apart or, and this is where I think the the Holy Grail resides, in the albums they made together as the Finn Brothers.

Their 1995 album Finn has just been made available on vinyl for the first time thru Pete Paphides' Needle Mythology label; Pete is truly one of the finest music journalists/authors around and a curator, some may say gatekeeper, of some of pop's most overlooked recordings. Here's a short film of Pete giving Neil his copy of the album. 

And here is a taster of what you can expect to find on this luscious album. It's side one, track one and this is (I think) its first live outing on the BBC's Later - with both Neil & Tim (and Jools Holland) looking like mere boys.

The Finn Brothers - Only Talking Sense (1995)

I'm looking for 1976

On the back of my post yesterday regarding our impending meltdown (literally), I thought I'd give this a quick spin: it's a love letter to 1976 from Darren Hayman's Minehead EP - he put it out over ten years ago now and the quality of the lyrics are to die for. I'm particularly fond of this couplet:

'I'm looking for turquoise Formica, I'm looking for Twiggy or someone just like her.' Genius. You can find it on Pete Paphides' latest Spotify compilation 'Too Hot to Move, Too Hot to Think'. 

Stay safe next week; in the words of Greg Lake - 'Keep it cool, keep it cool.'

If it's not Broken

I finished Broken Greek over the weekend - Pete Paphides' utterly enchanting coming of age memoir. It documents Pete's first 13 years (1969-1982) growing up in Birmingham with his Greek Cypriot parents and older brother, Aki. 

Set against a backdrop of down at heel chip shops and prepubescent anxiety, his early childhood is soundtracked by anyone in the charts (even at such a tender age his knowledge of the hit parade is encyclopaedic) he feels could step in to the breach as replacement parents: one of his many anxieties (and a recurring theme in the book) that, in his eyes, he wasn't living up to his mum and dad's expectations of him. Being glued to Top of the Pops from the age of seven his first musical love, Eurovision winners Brotherhood of Man ("I felt they understood me - the kind faced blonde woman & the only slightly less kind-faced dark-haired woman") seemed like ideal surrogates should his parents ever give up on him. As did Abba. And Kiki Dee ("You could tell she was a nice person, not least because of her immense generosity in letting Elton John join in her song.")

As he moves through school and different friendship circles and as his addiction to record shops becomes all consuming, so Pete's musical palette widens - forays into the Barron Knights (one of the books many highlights) and Racey give way to a new post punk crowd - the Human League, Orange Juice and Dexy's Midnight Runners all fight for ownership of Pete's turntable and all are written about with such love and affection - his homily to Kevin Rowland is particularly moving. By the end, you'll probably begin to see your own interest in music as merely pedestrian by comparison - I know I did.

A huge thank you to Pete for personally signing my very own book plate. And thanks for a riveting read.

Thank you @petepaphides
The signed bookplate arrived this morning!
Stay safe and hopefully see you @FiveLeavesBooks #Nottingham in the not too distant. pic.twitter.com/cZEuh9YdQ5

— John Medd (@JohnMeddUK) March 17, 2020

Black Sky

"Can we make the sky black? Like Justin did."

God bless Twitter; yes, like any branch of social media, it's got its fair share of nut jobs and knuckle draggers. But no more than you'll find on your average high street or indeed Clapham omnibus. And although to the untrained eye it may appear to be full of nothing but Brexit, and kitten videos (and, to be fair, it's hard to remember a time when it wasn't), you'll come across nuggets like this:

Blimey. Now there's a thing. https://t.co/3xtGHOMmlY

— The Swede (@_The_Swede) March 22, 2019

Hands up if you knew that Justin Hayward's promo video for his 1978 single Forever Autumn was the prototype for Bowie's Ashes to Ashes. My hand would have remained firmly down at the back of the class. Whilst we're on the subject of Hayward, Pete Paphides played an extract from Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds on his Soho Radio show this week. It was a particularly gloomy passage - that's H. G. Wells for you - and afterwards Paphides came out with a simple solution for making this particular concept album a little less miserable: instead of Richard Burton doing the narration, they should've given the gig to Ronnie Corbett. How wonderful would that have been?

David Bowie - Ashes to Ashes (1980)

Wish You Were Here

Wedding of the Year 2018

2018. It's had its ups and downs, for sure; but with more ups than downs, definitely. All in all it's been a good year - well, it would be, it's got an '8' in there, hasn't it?

A lot of firsts; my eyes have widened and my soul deepened, that much I do know. I also know that, pretty much like last year, my end of year round up is very simple, being both compact and bijou:

Best Song: Paul McCartney - I Don't Know

Best Mixtape: Hong Kong Ping Pong 10

Best Wedding: James & Janneke

Best Bar/Pub: either Jenkins [Sherwood] or the Organ Grinder [Loughborough] - I really can't make my mind up
Best App: remove.bg Remove the background from any photograph Instantly (see 'Wish You Were Here' - below) 

Best Walk: Attenborough Nature Reserve. By a country mile

Best Breakfast: Warsaw Diner, Canning Circus
Best Gig: The Prodigy - Nottingham Arena

Best Podcast: Ruthie - Me & My Dad

Best Blog: What's It All About? [Alyson]

Best Radio Station: another joint 1st. prize - Soho Radio [London] / RTÉ Radio 1 [Dublin]

Best Radio Presenter: Pete Paphides

Best Book: The Chalk Man - C J Tudor (below)

Best Open Mic: The Running Horse - with a big thank you to Paul Carbuncle 

Once again a big thank you to everyone who looks in my shop window, and an even bigger thank you to those who trust to luck and cross the threshold... 

Have a peaceful Christmas

Thank you so much @cjtudor and everyone at @nottsmechanics for a great evening. Caz, you had me enthralled for the full 2 hours x pic.twitter.com/eeYbjZ9c5N

— John Medd (@JohnMeddUK) May 9, 2018

Beautiful Stranger

Pete Paphides - yes, he wears cardigans

I listen to Pete Paphides' Soho Radio show on Tuesdays. This week he laid down on the studio couch and bared his soul: "Black Coffee in Bed isn't really a Squeeze song", he said.  "It just fell into the wrong hands. Everyone knows it's a Smokey Robinson song. Don't they?"

And so the floodgates opened: Somebody to Love was seemingly snatched from the Proclaimers at birth, and palmed out to Queen. Donald Fagen was just in the right place at the right time when Madness foisted Walk Between the Raindrops on him.

It's that kind of programme. I heartily recommend it.

I'll leave you with this:

In 1999, after posting flyers on telegraph poles that read "LOST SONG. GOES BY THE NAME OF BEAUTIFUL STRANGER", the Charlatans heard this coming out of their radio:

Damn you Madonna

(Another) Another Train

A couple of years ago I was corresponding with Pete Paphides for a piece he was writing on obscure record shops, and I did a mixtape for him. He said that half way thro' listening to it he'd logged onto CD Baby (other online stores are available) and was buying up most of the stuff off it! Including Another Tain by Pete Morton. He'd never heard it before, loved it and commented that it was 'just the right side of soppy.'

I wonder if Pete P's heard Pete M's reworked version of the song he did with with Full House?

Pete Morton & Full House: Another Train mp3

We fill our heads with the craziest things that only break our hearts

Dapper Dans

Prompted by Pete Paphides, aka Mr. Caitlin Moran, I've dug out these examples of sartorial elegance from the back pages of Melody Maker. It's from January 20, 1973 (priced at 8 new pence, or 50 cents if, per chance, you were buying it in the USA) and has Eric Clapton on the cover pictured at his comeback gig at London's Rainbow Theatre the previous Saturday.

Looking rather fetching in his white suit, a look also favoured by Messrs. Presley, Lennon and Hopkirk, Clapton would have been looking out at a crowd not sporting Cream or Blind Faith tee shirts (back then rock and roll merchandising was still in short trousers) and nor would his disciples have been wearing anything with a designer label. No, what Clapton would have seen was three thousand guys and gals dressed in garments like these:


Or, more likely, these (note the subliminal cigarette advertising):


Just as well the term fashion victim hadn't been coined back then; there are two pages full of embroidered loons, velvet loon jackets, Danish clogs, male clogs, brushed denim dungarees, genuine RAF overcoats, shaggy pile jackets, cavalry boots, velvet caps, square neck vests...I could go on, but I think you get the picture. As Paphides says, these are historical documents. If you want to know what was going on (or to see what the natives used to wear) during a particular time frame, look no further than back issues of the British music press.