Wedding Songs Part 1

I’ve had enough of work for the day, so it’s definitely time to blog about the songs C and I chose to play during dinner for our wedding last month. For no good reason except she’s in Batticaloa complaining about the heat, and seems to think it would be fun if I did.

Fergus Sings The Blues – Deacon Blue

Just another great song from that rich genre of 80s Scottish pop/rock. It was a close call between this track and the magnificent Real Gone Kid. If I remember right, Deacon Blue were the first band in the UK to get a million-pound advance on their contract. I don’t think they ever made back the money in sales, Ricky Ross is probably still working double shifts in a petrol station in Strathclyde in order to pay it off.

Or maybe not, looks like they’re still at it…

New Partner – Palace Music

Now this is a beautiful little song off one of the all-time great albums – Viva Last Blues by Palace Music, the band that Will Oldham (aka Bonnie “Prince” Billy) formed with his brother and a couple of other guys.

The album was recorded in 1995 by Steve Albini, the king of ambient-noise recording (who had recently produced Nirvana’s In Utero). The songs are under-rehearsed, the band is out of tune in places, Oldham’s voice is reedy and weird as ever, there are bangs and clatters in the tapes and the drums bleed into everything but yet it still manages to retain a kind of drunken grace – and the songs are just immense. It’s simply a great work of art. Oldham’s lyrics are delirious, feverish trips through love, hate, fear and death, expressed through sometimes visceral metaphors of dumb beasts and the brutal beauty of nature. Got that?

New Partner is a slow-medium waltz where the darkness is peeled back for a while to reveal love and longing, and the uplifting, bittersweet revelation of the chorus – “I’ve got a new partner riding with me.”

I can’t find a youtube clip of the song except for some bad cover versions by bedroom guitarists. Here’s Bonnie Prince Billy doing the fantastic Cursed Sleep instead, a much more polished, lush 2006 track. In case you didn’t notice, he’s one crazy-lookin’ fella.

Love Will Tear Us Apart – Joy Division

Well, it was a wedding, you need a nice, happy love song.

Freddie Freeloader – Miles Davis

From the Kind Of Blue album, just a smooth, simple riff, much foot-tapping and head-nodding, and exquisitely tasteful, understated noodling from the master and his acolytes. C plays sax and I used to when I was at school. C is really rather talented, and has gigged in front of thousands. I never even passed grade two, and sounded like a duck farting in the fog. The last straw was spending about a year learning Take Five and still not being able to get the triplets right.

What’s Happening Brother? – Marvin Gaye

We had to have some Marvin, particularly we had to have a song from What’s Going On? I was all for the one where he starts crooning “save the babies!” but unfortunately that track’s too long. This is the one where he sings the part of someone coming home from Vietnam, trying to get back into his old life, asking his mates what’s new and how things have been. It’s got that impeccable groove and it’s charmingly naive.

Misty Mountain Hop – Led Zeppelin

C has been a Led Zep fan since she were a nipper, I’m more of a recent convert, having put a couple of her albums on my ipod last year and having personal rock-out sessions between North London and the South Coast. My absolute favourite is the monstrously overblown blues of Since I’ve Been Loving You, proof that sometimes too much can never be enough, but this one comes close and it was better for the wedding anyway. I love songs like this when the drums come in on the off-beat and suddenly the whole groove changes.

A guy I used to work with called George has a great Led Zep story. His dad was a folk musician in the sixties, back when folk music was sung by serious working-class country people or travellers who liked to drink and fight. At a festival somewhere, some fey hippie in a kaftan with a harmonica keeps trying to get up on stage with George’s dad and jam with the band, George’s dad ends up having to put down his violin and hit him in the mouth. Turns out the fey hippie was a young Robert Plant, whose God-sized ego doesn’t seem to have suffered too much from the incident. He clearly wasn’t paying much attention to the music either, as he went on believing that a “folk music influence” meant daft, pseudo-mystical lyrics about misty mountains, spirits, May Queens and hedgerows.

More gratuitous uses of the word “groove” in part 2, if and when I get around to it.