For Whom Chris Bell Tolls

 

Welcome to Day 9 of the badly titled Everyone Has Got one Good Song blog thing.

I was thinking of building the ultimate playlist with one simple rule. One artist. One song. Each day will feature a song by an artist whose birthday is that day and then nine other songs by nine different artists just because people like things to be in tens.

The playlist is here - https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4exU9MUJMWaouOgnu7zmSl?si=I5fqk7VpQX6aDGec7xvqsQ&pi=e-IfIWXc5GT56R

 

So, the idea was that you might want to follow and share and either have the playlist yourself or do your own or chat about it with me, you could use the hashtag #EHGOGS.

I’m on Twitter X thing as @fourfoot

Today’s selection.

Our featured birthday artist is Chris Bell. Like a lot of music fans my age I got to know of him through the copious references to Big Star whenever Teenage Fanclub were being interviewed in the early 90s. I presumed he’d died of a drug overdose or suicide or something, but it was a car crash – I only found this out yesterday when I was reading about him. His one solo album, released posthumously and really fucking posthumously at that, is really great. You can hear everything from Byrds to Todd Rundgren in there and he would have been 73 today. One of the 27 Club….

The other songs today….

Hilly Fields – Nick Nicely. One of the first records I sought out when eBay became a thing, having heard it on the much missed Radcliffe Graveyard Shift show some point circa 1995. Psychedelic, eighties, very English and ever so slightly electro too.

Tales of Flossie Fillett - Turquoise. More English psychedelia. I probably heard this on Radcliffe too. It’s an acquired taste, admittedly.

I Never Want to See You Again - Quasi. I think this lot were Elliot Smith’s backing band for a tour or a record, something like that. A sentiment we can all get behind, there was a big thing for piano led three pieces in the nineties. A bit like that post-White Stripes two kids and one of them is a drummer thing we’ve had so much of of late. This is a belter though.

Flames and Flat Tires – Squirrel Flower. As previous playlists will attest, give me a doleful female vocal with anything mildly Americana and my ears are there quicker than you can say “beat me up round the back of the diner, please mr redneck.” Or something. This sounds like something you’d hear over the kind of montage of redundant oilwells, closed diners and barren cornfields in a particularly bleak episode of Friday Night Lights, i.e fucking tremendous.

I Think It’s Gonna Rain Today – Dusty Springfield. I love this song. I used to play this in the off license where I worked a hundred years ago. I wrote a short story about that place here. Randy Newman is kind of a hero of mine, no one does the kind of understated melancholy he trades in better.

R&B – English Teacher. I know fuck all about this band and I suspect they’re probably dreadfully middle class but it’s a tune. A really good one.

Suzanne - Moose. My mate Steve used to tape SNUB when it was on back in the early 90s and this band were on there and I became briefly obsessed with them. Got tagged as shoegaze by some at the time but they had a lot more going on than navel-gazing pedal pushing home counties whining.

The Man Who Sold The World - Lulu Even though Lulu is manifestly dreadful, she at least gave this Bowie song the kind of spirited, fuck it, throw everything at it treatment it didn’t know it deserved. Though I still prefer the eerie original myself.

Starlight – Supermen Lovers. Because I like to end on a jarring note, here’s a pop smash from 2001. It had a video with subterranean potatomen who looked like Andrew Tate. And it’s a proper play loud tune. Shove ten bottles of blue WKD my way, I’ve got a 9/11 to avoid….

Tomorrow, we have ten more….including one from birthday boy Suggs.