Song of the day: #7 Sage Francis – "Little Houdini"

Sage Francis has a new album, Li(f)e. The first single, "The Best of Times", has excitingly and improbably been playlisted by Radio 1 and made single of the week by Kiwi overenthusiast Zane Lowe, as well as gaining approving airplay from the hopefully-to-be-reprieved 6 Music and the like.

It's a magnificent, swooning song, with the hallmark tuned percussion and strings of composer Yann Tiersen (Amélie, Good Bye Lenin!) underscoring Francis' crushingly sincere tales of mortifying youthful awkwardness and ineptitude. At 2:41 it gives way to Tiersen's more forthright rock style and then keeps building up to almost impossibly climactic heights as SF seemingly lays bare all the embarrassments of his youth, at the same time reassuring the listener to essentially get through it, that it's much worse when you're there. i could have done with a lot more songs like that in my early teens.

And i'm not even meant to be writing about that track.

The focus today is actually album opener "Little Houdini", the story of Christopher Gay, career criminal and escape artist. Gay decided that prison would not stop him from visiting his dying parents for the last time, repeatedly breaking out and making his way home in a selection of stolen vehicles, including a Wal-Mart truck and Crystal Gayle's tourbus. (His third escape seems to have been just for the hell of it).

Francis relates that he first heard of Gay's escapology career in 2006, and decided to follow the story in the hope of writing something about him at some future point.

There wasn’t much press about this story at all. Nothing national at least, which I still find strange. I put together what details I could and used a few lines from the actual news stories. The original article said, “This is what country songs are made of.” I thought to myself, “Sure…but this is also what a rap song can be made of.”

Fittingly, "Little Houdini" (after the nickname Gay received from the media) ends up somewhere between the two genres, Francis' lyrics continuing the long storytelling traditions and outlaw focus of both ("I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die"; "the cop got scared, the kid, he starts to figure,/ "I'll do years if I pull this trigger...""). The music, a collaboration with former Grandaddy man Jason Lytle, backs up the point, with lazily strummed guitar, droning violin/organ and a plaintive, distant sung vocal evoking the open road of the third verse, before it breaks into a propulsive 6/8 gallop of a rap.

The song celebrates Gay's spirit rather than excusing his crimes ("he knows what he done was wrong / but he knows his father don't got long"), but Francis mainly reserves his scorn for the armchair moralists who would condemn him: "y'all can turn up your noise / and suck on your teeth and wag your finger like 'tsk, tsk!' / but he had to take the risk".

And why not? Our mythology needs romantic anti-heroes, and personally i'd rather watch, e.g., Escape Artist: The Christopher Gay Story than Ridley Scott & Russell Crowe rehashing Robin Hood for the 35th time but with a boring new PoMo conceit.<sup>1

1</sup> Having said which, i'd quite like to see Robin and the 7 Hoods, "a musical film set in 1930s gangster Chicago, with Frank Sinatra as "Robbo"."

Just doing my bit for the Streisand effect

In refusing to run this ad today, the Financial Times has inadvertently given it the extra oomph it needed to reach thousands whose general disinterest in financial wonkery would previously have precluded them from seeing it. All hail the Streisand effect! (pt. 483)

Alternatively, maybe there's a rogue environmentalist element somewhere within the FT that realised exactly what kind of exposure the ad would get if they turned it down, and strategically nixed it to gain that increase. Unlikely, but an amusing idea to me. Bottoms up!

Song of the day: #6 Delusionists – "Digital Connects"

Here's the Song of the Day for today, and most probably for the rest of the week too! Delusionists dropped a new album this Monday, Prolusion Plus, which as you can maybe gather is a boosted version of their previous smart 7-tracker The Prolusion.

Now with additional tracks, the odd alternate version and a couple of remixes, the EP has swelled to twelve tracks of UK dopeness. A proper review may well follow, but in the meantime check the awesome "Digital Connects", one of the aforementioned new tracks. Over a banger of a beat by Jon Phonics, Ben Black wordplays for dear life on the topic of the hottest spots to hang out online (hence the title, ya dig?) When i first heard it, i immediately thought "Tommy ain't my motherfuckin' boy...", not because i was having a multiple-personality crisis of confidence, but because the concept reminded me of the way GZA flipped the names of record labels on, erm, "Labels".

Two other awesome things about this track: firstly, the outro features a scratched sample of a yet-unreleased 30KB track which Mr. Black drops his fire on; and for seconds, this very blog is one of the ones namechecked in the song, rather awesomely ("be careful, cuz Life Just Bounces away..."). Apart from being a dope honour for yr humble writer, it also means i am finally succeeding (albeit indirectly) in my ambition of getting rappers to reference The Mighty Fall!

You can buy Prolusion Plus from Bandcamp for a paltry four quid, or a super-decent six for a real-life hactual CD. (The latter also had a cool-looking sticker, which has now been given pride of place on my newly-refurbished laptop.)

Song of the day: #5 Ivor Cutler – "A Barrel of Nails"

Ivor Cutler never fails to cheer me up.

On "A Barrel of Nails", the late lamented master puts a very tongue-in-cheek spin on the tropes of the traditional folk song, the humour derived from the odd treatment of the imagery ("when a barrel of nails kept a body warm") as well as the insistent repetition of the melody. i get the impression that if you ever saw him perform him this, you'd have cracked up, and then he'd probably have fixed you with a stern, disapproving glare that would have been just as deadpan as the song itself. Such is the sense of mischief Ivor's songs give off.

At the same time, there's the hint of a real sadness in the song. The pretty dark image of the old man, his partner dead, committing surreal hara-kiri by swallowing up his barrel of nails is reminiscent of a story Utah Phillips tells¹ on the album The Past Didn't Go Anywhere, about his time in the Korean War and how, on the birth of the first child into a family, the male elder would go and sit on the bank of the Imjin river with a jug of water and wait to die, whereupon he would roll down the bank and be carried out to sea. The fact that Ivor's body "will drop like a barrel of nails" completes a similar cycle.

mp3: Ivor Cutler – "A Barrel of Nails" (YSI)

¹ Scroll to the third text block (divisions marked out by a single asterisk) or text search "Imjin".

For Wu-Tang fans with Spotify

• Chronological Wu-Tang playlist
• Chronological Wu-Tang affiliates playlist

(Info from this page.)

It's frustratingly incomplete in some places - no 8 Diagrams? no 6 Feet Deep? no Wu vs. Dubstep? (actually no, it's a good thing that that last one isn't on there, since dubstep is boring). But there's still 2.1 days of sheer Wu, and an additional 3.3 days' worth of affiliates, to get through, so i guess that's not to be sneezed at really.

Song of the day: #4 Average Joe Stalin – "Montel Gets Things Done"

 The first song ever written by Average Joe Stalin was essentially a list of directions to the house in Glasgow i used to live in. This is the second, a tribute to the talkshow host Montel Williams¹ and his eponymous show, often on ITV2 in the background in the traditional student manner. It's surfaced again on a compilation by the Little Rock record label, FUCKNO, to be released on April 30.

AJS has since popped up in a variety of guises. The track, written around 2004, is a brief, enjoyable blast through daytime TV and its irresistible cathode lure. There's more than a hint of Brainiac influence, all dessicated guitar riffs, stomping motorik beat and shimmering falsetto vocals (this is always a good thing, since Brainiac were ace). Probably the real win, though, is in the understated deadpan wit of the lyrics. i seem to remember that the band name is also TV-related, the pun being inspired by a really shitty reality show that was on around the same time.

All the daytime TV hosts namechecked herein have since disappeared from view: Montel was quickly cancelled in 2008 following an appearance on another show, Fox and Friends, during which he lambasted the American media for its pitiful coverage of the Iraq war and overriding focus on celebrity trivia like the death of Heath Ledger. He then did a radio show on the Air America network, which closed this January, and has apparently now gone down the George Foreman-pioneered painfully-flogging-kitchenware route. Richard and Judy left This Morning to do an eponymous chatshow on Channel 4 teatime, before moving to some godforsaken cable channel watched by precisely no-one, only to be dropped in 2009 because, predictably, no-one watched it. Christ knows what they're doing at the moment.

At times like these, it's good to know who your friends are
TV's a friend to me, and it'll be a friend to you (yeah)
You can watch more but your folks say you're a vegetable
Your eyes'll go square and you won't talk sense no more
Love is blind, but TV's much more sensible
Caring and smart and everything you want and more
When I die, TV'll give the eulogy
Keep it simple, maybe some Richard and Judy

Montel gets things done

Average Joe Stalin – "Montel Gets Things Done"

¹ Other incorrect guesses have included R&B singer Montell Jordan, sprinter Montell Douglas and wrestler Montel Vontavious Porter.

Popbitch Commentary #3 (Thursday 22/04/10)

"FYI 3: Sly [Stone] has taken a lot of cocaine, meths and PCP.

Really, Popbitch? Really?