From the Vaults

Bob Dylan: The Christmas Blues (2009)

20 Dec 2024 | <1 min read | 1

No one would ask why Bob Dylan does something -- shilling for Victoria's Secret comes to mind -- or can be surprised by whatever it is. That said, the Yuletide album Christmas in the Heart in 2009 did catch everyone by surprise. Dylan croaking through Here Comes Santa Claus, Hark the Herald Angels Sing, Little Drummer Boy, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas and other seasonal delights?... > Read more

Ernest Tubb: It's For God And Country and You, Mom (1965)

2 Dec 2024 | 1 min read

War always produces songs from all sides of the trenches and Vietnam was no different: a slew of patriotic and tally-ho songs in the early days then more cynical, anti-war sentiments coming through as the body count rises. Here Ernest Tubb and His Texas Troubadours deliver one from those early days of US military involvement when some saw the issue very simply: there was a line drawn to... > Read more

Steeleye Span: Cam Ye Oer Frae France (1973)

25 Nov 2024 | 1 min read | 1

As with Fairport Convention (which included Richard Thompson), Steeleye Span were in the vanguard of the British folk-rock movement of the late Sixties. Unlike Fairport however, Steeleye Span didn't move as often and as far from the roots of folk and frequently drew on Francis Child's text The English and Scottish Ballads for inspiration and source material -- a book which has more recently... > Read more

Chris Clark: I Want To Go Back There Again (1967)

18 Nov 2024 | 2 min read | 1

Of the few white acts on Berry Gordy's Motown label, Chris Clark -- with platinum blonde hair, pale skin and a kind of Marilyn Munroe appeal -- was undoubtedly the whitest. "Getting my singles played on radio was difficult," she said later. "Once [DJs] found out I was white they thought Motown had tried to trick them. "I always hesitate to say any of that, or that... > Read more

Geeshie Wiley: Skinny Leg Blues (1930)

11 Nov 2024 | <1 min read

Blues singer Geeshie Wiley -- probably not her real name, more likely a nickname because she was of the Gullah people of South Carolina and Georgia -- recorded even fewer songs than Robert Johnson. Just six known recordings and no photograph of her exists either. She may have been with a traveling medicine show in the Twenties but, other than her recordings in an 18 month period, not... > Read more

The Nu Page: When the Brothers Come Marching Home (1973)

4 Nov 2024 | 1 min read

The Nu Page were a one-single group signed to the Motown subsidiary label MoWest which released songs by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, Thelma Houston and Tom Clay (whose version of Abraham Martin and John/What the World Needs Now is Love gave them a top 10 hit). Of Nu Page very little is known but this song -- celebrating the closing overs of American involvement in Vietnam -- had... > Read more

The King: Come As You Are (1998)

28 Oct 2024 | 1 min read

Although there aren't Elvis sighting in gas stations and supermarkets any more, there is still no shortage of lookalikes and impersonators around. While there seems no great call for Kurt Cobain and Mama Cass impersonators, those who swish their hair back and sneer a little seem to be always out there. One week I interviewed two of them and within days I had forgotten which was which,... > Read more

Leonard Cohen: Because of (2004)

21 Oct 2024 | <1 min read | 1

The equation seems simple: Leonard Cohen (the self-described "ladies man") + women + bed = But of course nothing was ever quite that straightforward with a Jewish Zen Buddhist poet-cum-singer and unlikely sex symbol even his mid 70s. Here with amusing self-effacement he confronts aging, his reputation, plays with images of "naked" women bending over the bed . .... > Read more

Bruce Woolley and the Camera Club: Video Killed the Radio Star (1979)

14 Oct 2024 | 1 min read

Whenever the story of the Buggles' hit Video Killed the Radio Star is told, two things are invariably mentioned: the clip of it was the first song to be played on MTV in 1981 and that the Buggles -- real one hit wonders and merely a studio band -- never played live. However there is more to the story and it is told by chief Buggle/songwriter and famous producer Trevor Horn in his modest,... > Read more

Bob Dylan: You Belong To Me (1994)

7 Oct 2024 | 1 min read | 2

The idea of "possessing" your lover isn't a pleasant thought these days: the subtext is spousal abuse, just plain creepy stuff and not a few killings you read about on page five. But there are a few songs where that idea of possessive passion has a wistful, oddly lost and sympathetic quality on the part of the singer. At one end it is someone asking Ruby not to take her love to... > Read more

The Rainmakers: Let My People Go-Go (1986)

30 Sep 2024 | 1 min read

Bob Walkenhorst of Kansas City's Rainmakers had a good line about his fellow Americans' willingness to get out of it. "The generation that would change the world is still looking for its car keys." The smart line came from the song Drinkin' on the Job off the band's self-titled, major label album in '86 ("Everybody's drunk, everybody's wasted, everybody's stoned and... > Read more

Norman McLaren: Synchromy (1971)

23 Sep 2024 | 1 min read

Personal story here. In the mid-Eighties I started a brief correspondence with the Canada-based animator Norman McLaren, then very advanced in years. I wanted to tell him the pleasure his short animated films gave me and my senior school students studying film. I think my first letter was sent to the National Film Board of Canada where he had worked and was forwarded to him because he'd... > Read more

Eddie Quinteros: School Blues (1958?)

16 Sep 2024 | <1 min read

One of the pleasures of diving into the vaults is you come across songs you'd forgotten but seem to say so much about an era. At the same time as Chuck Berry was writing his songs celebrating teenagers, the hop, cars and rock'n'roll itself, this Mexican-American from Daly City near southern San Francisco was exactly the right age to be singing about school blues. Eddie Quinteros was 13... > Read more

The Rolling Stones: I'd Much Rather Be With The Boys (1965)

9 Sep 2024 | 1 min read

Right at the end of the Rolling Stones doco Charlie is My Darling -- which captures extraordinary footage of a brief tour in Ireland in '65 with a stage invasion and general mayhem -- we see the Stones goofing off and playing a song that was a rarity. This one. And its rarity value is two-fold. First it was credited to Keith Richards and their manager Andrew Loog Oldham, and second that... > Read more

Rodrigo Amarante: Tuyo (2015)

2 Sep 2024 | 2 min read

For a Netflix series awash with drugs, guns, bloodshed, serial smoking, violence, impossibly large amounts of money and hedonism, the theme song to Narcos by the Brazilian singer-songwriter Rodrigo Amarante is ineffably sad. The narcocorrido ballad – a style of music from the borderlands of Mexico and the US which alludes to drug smuggling – was written by Amarante (who had been... > Read more

The Cure: A Forest (1980)

26 Aug 2024 | <1 min read

Because it is so familiar – the band play it at almost every show and it is the go-to song for archetypal Cure – it is hard to remember how innovative and different it seemed at the time. Melodically and in its tone, it wasn't too far removed from their debut single, the often misunderstood and Camus-inspired Killing An Arab. But the swathes of keyboards and prominent bass... > Read more

Half Man Half Biscuit: Time Flies By (When You're the Driver of a Train) (1985)

19 Aug 2024 | 1 min read | 2

Never let it be said Elsewhere doesn't listen to its constituency. When the cry went up more than a decade ago, "Why no Half man Half Biscuit at From the Vaults?" the solution was obvious. (The answer however is, because they're pretty awful -- but that's neither here nor there) For those who have lived happy and fulfilled lives in the absence of any knowledge of this often... > Read more

Status Quo: When My Mind is Not Live (1968)

12 Aug 2024 | <1 min read

For the past 50+ years, Status Quo have been a heads-down boogie band in denims and "rockin' all over the world". So it's hardly surprising people would know them for nothing more than that enjoyably reductive style. However . . . For a few years in the late Sixties the original band (with the inevitable line-up changes) flirted with trippy hippie rock of the psychedelic... > Read more

Paul McCartney: Twenty Flight Rock (1974)

5 Aug 2024 | 1 min read

In the large and detailed book which came with the recent reissue/remixes of John Lennon's Mind Games, there is an interview with Lennon and Yoko Ono at the time. In it Lennon says what he misses in his solo career was just sitting down and playing with the group. And, as seen in the Let It Be/Get Back movies, when they got together their default position would always be just to jam on the... > Read more

Ernest Tubb: It's America, Love It or Leave It (1965)

29 Jul 2024 | 1 min read

The great patriot Ernest Tubb has appeared at From the Vaults before with his mind-numbingly awful It's For God and Country and You, Mom written by Dave McEnery. Ernest clearly like to keep things simple and in the same year he recorded this little pearler by Jimmy Helms. It became adopted as a satirical statement by those hippie draft-card burners who objected to America'... > Read more