Podcasts about stop your sobbing

Programa que pone el broche final a la temporada 2024 y redondeamos los homenajes a discos publicados en años terminados en 4, dedicándolo a 1964, con discos que cumplen nada más y nada menos que 60 años, para que lo disfrutéis los que en los años sesenta estabais en vuestra radiante juventud y para los jóvenes de ahora para que aprecien los orígenes de esta bendita locura que es el rock. No todo era Motown y rock and roll. El folk y el blues evoluciona y se rompen las barreras de la música, es el comienzo de la invasión británica y eran los inicios de grupos que se han convertido en leyendas. Móntate el guateque en casa con: THE RIVIERAS - Let´s Have a Party - Let´s Have a Party CHUCK BERRY - You Never Can Tell - St. Louis To Liverpool OTIS REDDING - Hey Hey Baby - Pain in my Heart THE BEATLES - Any Time At All - A Hard Day´s Night THE ROLLING STONES - I Just Want To Make Love To You - The Rolling Stones THE KINKS - I Gotta Move - The Kinks THE HIGH NUMBERS - Zoo Suit - Single THE ANIMALS - Gonna Send You Back to Walker - The Animals DUSTY SPRINGFIELD - I Only Want to be With You - Stay Awhile THE RONETTES - Baby, I Love You - Presenting The Fabulous Ronettes THE SHANGRI-LAS - Gim Him a Great Big Kiss - Single SAM COOKE - Another Saturday Night - Ain´t That Good News JERRY LEE LEWIS - Good Golly, Miss Molly - Live at The Star Club Hamburg THE BEACH BOYS - I Get Around - All Summer Long THE TRASHMEN - King of the Surf - Surfin´Bird SIMON & GARFUNKEL - Bleecker Street - Wednesday Morning, 3 AM THE BEATLES - Every Little Thimg - Beatles For Sale THE ROLLING STONES - It´S All Over Now - 12*5 THEM - Baby, Please Don´t Go - Single MANFRED MANN - I´m Your Kingpin - Single DOWNLINERS SECT - Bloodhound - The Sect ROY ORBISON - Oh, Pretty Woman - Oh, Pretty Woman MARTHA REEVES & THE VANDELLAS - Dancing in the Street - Dancing in the Street THE TEMPTATIONS - My Girl - The Temptetions Sings Smokey THE DRIFTERS - Under the Boardwalk - Under the Boardwalk THE BEATLEETTES - Only Seventeen - Single THE MOJOS - Everything´s Alright - Everything´s Alright THE YARDBIRDS - Too Much Monkey Business - Five Live Yardbirds THE ZOMBIES - She´S Not There - Single BOB DYLAN - The Times They Are A-Changing - The Times They Are A-Changing Acompañados por Stop Your Sobbing de The Kinks y de The Pink Panther Theme de HENRY MANCINY

Fecha de Grabación: Jueves 25 de julio de 2024. Algunas noticias y temas comentados: DC celebrará el aniversario de Batman: The Long Halloween El regreso de Jeph Loeb y el talento desperdiciado en su nombre ¿Hay cómics recomendables de Catwoman? Algunos consejos para superar el desinterés pasajero por leer cómics ¡...y mucho más! Comentario de cómics: Rock Candy Mountain, cómic escrito y dibujado por Kyle Starks, con colores de Chris Schweizer y rótulos del propio Starks. (Image Comics) Comentario de series y películas: Star Wars: The Acolyte, primera temporada de la serie desarrollada por Leslye Headland, con las actuaciones de Amandla Stenberg, Lee Jung-jae, Charlie Barnett, Dafne Keen, Rebecca Henderson, Jodie Turner-Smith, Carrie-Anne Moss, Manny Jacinto, Dean-Charles Chapman, Joonas Suotamo y Margarita Levieva, entre otros. (Lucasfilm/Disney+) Sweet Tooth, tercera temporada de la serie desarrollada por Jim Mickle y basada en el cómic homónimo de Jeff Lemire, con las actuaciones de Nonso Anozie, Christian Convery, Adeel Akhtar, Stefania LaVie Owen, Rosalind Chao, Kelly Marie Tran, Cara Gee y James Brolin, entre otros. (Warner Television/Netflix) Deadpool & Wolverine, película coescrita y dirigida por Shawn Levy, con las actuaciones de Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, Emma Corrin, Morena Baccarin, Rob Delaney, Leslie Uggams, Aaron Stanford y Matthew Macfadyen, entre muchos otros. (Marvel Studios) Pueden escuchar el podcast en este reproductor: Descarga Directa MP3 (Botón derecho del mouse y "guardar enlace como"). Peso: 98.8 MB; Calidad: 128 Kbps. El episodio tiene una duración de 1:47:25 y la canción de cierre es "Stop Your Sobbing" de The Kinks, pero en la versión de The Pretenders. Además de en nuestras redes sociales (Twitter, Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram), también puedes interactuar con nosotros en nuestro servidor en Discord, donde una pequeña comunidad comparte recomendaciones, arte, ofertas, memes y más, y la conversación gira alrededor de muchos temas además de cómics. ¡Únete a nuestro servidor en Discord! También tenemos un Patreon. Ahí cada episodio se publica al menos 24 horas antes que en otros canales, y hay un especial mensual exclusivo para suscriptores de esa plataforma. Puedes convertirte en uno de nuestros patreoncinadores™ con aportes desde 1 dólar, que puede ser cada mes o por el tiempo que tú lo decidas, incluyendo aportaciones de una sola vez. También puedes encontrar nuestro podcast en los siguientes agregadores y servicios especializados: Comicverso en Spotify Comicverso en iVoox Comicverso en Apple Podcasts Comicverso en Google Podcasts Comicverso en Amazon Music Comicverso en Archive.org Comicverso en I Heart Radio Comicverso en Overcast.fm Comicverso en Pocket Casts Comicverso en RadioPublic Comicverso en CastBox.fm ¿Usas alguna app o servicio que no tiene disponible el podcast de Comicverso? En la parte alta de la barra lateral está el feed del podcast, el cual puedes agregar al servicio de tu preferencia si éste ofrece la opción. Nos interesa conocer tus críticas y opiniones para seguir mejorando. Si te gusta nuestro trabajo, por favor comparte el enlace a esta entrada o a nuestro perfil en el servicio de tu preferencia, cuéntale a tus amigos sobre el podcast, y recomiéndalo a quien creas que le pueda interesar. Deja tus comentarios o escríbenos directamente a comicverso@gmail.com

Read Uncle Todd Sider's obituary. If you are so inclined, charitable donations in his honor can be made to the Dr. Todd Sider Training, Education & Excellence Memorial Fund at the Parkview Health Foundation or to the Congregation Achduth Vesholom fund for Adult Education. Barry, Abigail, and guest Todd Sider (Abigail's uncle and Barry's brother-in-law) discuss Todd's Jukebox submission, Pretenders by The Pretenders, and sample Harvester, Undaunted, Dr. Jekyll Low Cal Hazy IPA, and Mr. Hyde High Cal Imperial IPA from Chapman's Brewing Company in Angola, Indiana. Abigail's only knowledge of The Pretenders prior to reviewing this album was their Christmas song 2000 Miles. Other woman-led punk rock bands of this era mentioned were Pat Benatar, Heart, and Blondie. Try listening to Eminence Front by The Who or Where's the Orchestra by Billy Joel with only one headphone in! This album includes a cover of Stop Your Sobbing, originally by The Kinks. Read more about Saltwater Brewery's Eco Six Pack Rings made from spent hops. You can also buy Beer Mutts dog treats made from spent grain. Barry put in another plug for A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs. Jingles are by our friend Pete Coe. Visit Anosmia Awareness for more information on Barry's condition. Follow Barry or Abigail on Untappd to see what we're drinking when we're not on mic! Leave us a rating or a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify! Facebook | Instagram | X | YouTube | Website | Email us | Virtual Jukebox --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/pops-on-hops-podcast/message

The Songs Of Ray Davies & The Kinks “This Is Where I Belong”:Rufus Wainwright “Across The Universe”The Wallflowers “I'm Looking Through You”Eddie Vedder “You've Got To Hide Your Love Away”Ben Harper “Strawberry Fields Forever”Sheryl Crow “Mother Nature's Son”The Songs Of Ray Davies & The Kinks “This Is Where I Belong”:Jonathan Richman “Stop Your Sobbing”Bebel Gilberto “No Return”       Josh Rouse “A Well Respected Man”      Cracker “Victoria”         Queens Of The Stone Age “Who'll Be The Next In Line”  Matthew Sweet “Big Sky” Tré Burt “Traffic Fiction”:”Kids in tha Yard””Piece of Me””Win My Heart””All Things Right””To Be a River””Told Ya Then”Escuchar audio

Avec The Kinks. Coup de tonnerre dans le monde du rock le 4 août 1964 avec la sortie de ce grand classique des Kinks : "You Really Got Me", Ray Davies s'inspire d'un moment où il a été complètement hypnotisé par une jeune fille qui danse. Ils enchaînent en octobre 1964 avec "All Day and All of the Night" qui devient également un hymne rock, plus sexuellement évident. Sur ce premier album toujours, on retrouve "Stop Your Sobbing" repris 15 ans plus tard, en 1979, par celle qui sera un moment Madame Ray Davies : Chrissie Hynde des Pretenders. --- Du lundi au vendredi, Fanny Gillard et Laurent Rieppi vous dévoilent l'univers rock, au travers de thèmes comme ceux de l'éducation, des rockers en prison, les objets de la culture rock, les groupes familiaux et leurs déboires, et bien d'autres, chaque matin dans Coffee on the Rocks à 6h30 et rediffusion à 13h30 dans Lunch Around The Clock. Merci pour votre écoute Pour écouter Classic 21 à tout moment : www.rtbf.be/classic21 Retrouvez tous les contenus de la RTBF sur notre plateforme Auvio.be Et si vous avez apprécié ce podcast, n'hésitez pas à nous donner des étoiles ou des commentaires, cela nous aide à le faire connaître plus largement.

The Songs Of Ray Davies & The Kinks “This Is Where I Belong”:Fountains Of Wayne “Btter Things”Steve Forbert “Starstruck”Jonathan Richman “Stop Your Sobbing”Bebel Gilberto “No Return”Josh Rouse “A Well Respected Man”Cracker “Victoria”Queens Of The Stone Age “Who'll Be The Next In Line”Matthew Sweet “Big Sky”Lambchop “Art Lover”Bill Lloyd & Tommy Womack “Picture Book”Tim O'Brien “Muswell Hillbilly”The Minus 5 “Get Back In Line”Fastball “'Till The End Of The Day”Ron Sexsmith “This Is Where I Belong”Yo La Tengo “Fancy”Ray Davies “Americana”:“The Great Highway”Escuchar audio

Friend of the Jagbags Bruce Hollett joins us to discuss the music and career of the British power pop/punk pioneer the Kinks. Where do they rank in the all-time Rock Pantheon? What is their beat album? Their best song? Are they underrated or properly rated? Why were they destined to live in the shadow of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones? We go through our 45-minute all-time Kinks Playlist (an impossible task), and try to remember the exact word-for-word titles of the Kinks' most successful LPs.

RADIO CRYSTAL BLUE NOVUS ORDO 9/10/23 Lusitanian Ghosts "September" https://lusitanianghosts.net/ Public Soeaking "Right Angle Wrong Shape" - An Apple Lodged In My Back https://www.facebook.com/publicspeakingmusic Jaguero "All I Think About" - New Love https://www.facebook.com/jaguerocult And The Broken - "Puttin' Out Fires (Hurt) https://www.facebook.com/andthebroken Emily Adams "What's Wrong With You" https://www.facebook.com/MusicEmilyAdams/ Hank Woji "I'm Gonna Hit The Number" - Highways, Gamblers, Devils And Dreams www.hankwoji.com Gregg Hill "Big Blue Moon" - Bayou St. John www.gregghill.com Running time: 47 minutes ********************** RADIO CRYSTAL BLUE 9/10/23 I recited the first chapter of Jack Kerouac's "Dharma Bums" ******************** Van Morrison "On Hyndford Street" - Hymns To The Silence Them (featuring Van Morrison) "The Story Of Them" - The Story of Them compilation The Kinks "Stop Your Sobbing" s/t Rick Derringer "Hang On Sloopy" - Spring Fever David Bowie "Sorrow" Pin-Ups The Strangeloves "Just The Way You Are" - I Want Candy Thee Headcoatees "Cara-Lin" - Punk Girls The Headcoats "Girl from '62" - Elementary Headcoats Iggy & The Stooges "Gimme Danger" - Raw Power The White Stripes "Astro" s/t Jess Novak "A Thousand Lives" - A Thousand Lives www.jessrocknovk.com Jo Wymer "The Shoebox" - SLG www.jowymer.com Emily Howard "Live Fee" Good Grief https://www.emilyhoward.co.uk/ Tipps & Obermiller "Ferris Wheel" - Love (and other mysteries) www.tippsandobermiller.com Terry Klein "Wedding Day Eve" - Leave The Light On https://terrykleinmusic.com/ Lara Herscovitch "Italian Balconies" www.laraherscovitch.com Lonely Lost Boy "Walking Man" https://www.facebook.com/gordonhennessymusic123/ Amy Speace "If You Fall" Tuscon www.amyspeace.com ******************** Ringo Starr "Rewind Forward" - Rewind Forward www.ringostarr.com Keeley "Floating Above Everything Else" Floating Above Everything Else www.keeleysound.com Telquist "Moon" www.blickpunkt-pop.de Swansea Sound "Twentieth Century" https://www.facebook.com/swanseasound/ Matt Tiegler "Dream" - Hands Free Down Hill https://www.facebook.com/matttieglermusic Don't Panic "Black And Blue And White" - Setting Up To Fail https://dontpanicofficial.com Los Discorde "El Mar" www.facebook.com/losdiscorde Kurt Baker "Not Right" - Rock & Roll Club www.facebook.com/kurtbakermusic Second Cities "Chewing Teeth" (featuring Ryan McCombs) www.facebook.com/SecondCities --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/radiocblue/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/radiocblue/support

Ana, Valentina, and Mark say goodbye to Don Dago's, and Mark says goodbye to Ana. Sookmin reveals the villain that has been masterminding things all along. Chloe presents the sisters with an opportunity of a lifetime — and the Campos sisters head to Seoul.This is Episode 8 of Love and Noraebang from The Mash-Up Americans, the Kdrama RomCom of your California Dreams.Link to ScriptCast:Los Angeles / Randall Park Ana / Francia Raisa Federica / Ana Gonzalez Bello Mark / Rafael Torres Chloe / Julia Cho Kunwoo / Steve Lim Jaesun / Justin H. Min Sookmin / June YoonCredits:Produced by Sonoro and The Mash-Up Americans. Executive Produced by Camila Victoriano, Joshua Weinstein, Amy S. Choi and Rebecca Lehrer. Directed by Amy S. Choi and Rebecca Lehrer. Written by Quincy Cho and Anthony Aguilar. Producers are Sofía de Antuñano and Shelby Sandlin. Sound design and foley by Meni Bulnes. Music editor, orchestration and score by Laura Cruz. Original song by Laura Cruz, with vocals by Jen Kwok and additional production by Jen Kwok and Jody Shelton Composed by Jen Kwok and Jody Shelton.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Lauren Raham returns to the podcast with a copy of the self-titled debut from English-American rock band the Pretenders. We forgo popular tracks like "Brass in Pocket" and "Stop Your Sobbing" in favor of focusing on the reckless punk abandon of the record, which may surprise listeners only familiar with their hits.   If you like us, please support us at patreon.com/idbuythatpodcast to get exclusive content (episodes on 45s!), or tell a friend about us. Broke and have no friends? Leave us a review, it helps more people find us. Thanks!

In late December of 1979 Pretenders released their debut album. Recording began with Nick Lowe producing Stop Your Sobbing, but being of the opinion that this band was "not going anywhere", he jumped ship and Chris Thomas came in to pick up the slack. The results? Pretenders debuted at #1 on the UK Album Charts, cracked the top 10 on the Billboard 200, certified platinum in 1982, and is considered one of the finest albums of all time. Let's talk Pretenders, Pretenders!

Ana, Valentina, and Mark say goodbye to Don Dago's, and Mark says goodbye to Ana. Sookmin reveals the villain that has been masterminding things all along. Chloe presents the sisters with an opportunity of a lifetime — and the Campos sisters head to Seoul.

Barry, Abigail, and guest Todd Sider (Abigail's uncle and Barry's brother-in-law) discuss Todd's Jukebox submission, Pretenders by The Pretenders, and sample Harvester, Undaunted, Dr. Jekyll Low Cal Hazy IPA, and Mr. Hyde High Cal Imperial IPA from Chapman's Brewing Company in Angola, Indiana. Abigail's only knowledge of The Pretenders prior to reviewing this album was their Christmas song 2000 Miles. Other woman-led punk rock bands of this era mentioned were Pat Benatar, Heart, and Blondie. Try listening to Eminence Front by The Who or Where's the Orchestra by Billy Joel with only one headphone in! This album includes a cover of Stop Your Sobbing, originally by The Kinks. Read more about Saltwater Brewery's Eco Six Pack Rings made from spent hops. You can also buy Beer Mutts dog treats made from spent grain. Barry put in another plug for A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs. Up next… Modern Love by Matt Nathanson Our next Jukebox episode will be Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd, submitted by Jeff Shettler in Santa Barbara, California, releasing on May 27, 2022. Follow Barry or Abigail on Untappd to see what we're drinking when we're not on mic! Jingles are by our friend Pete Coe. Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube | Website | Email us | Virtual Jukebox --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/pops-on-hops-podcast/message

Amerikanske Chrissie Hynde var 27, da hun i starten af 1979 fik sit første (mindre) hit med en coverversion af Kinks-nummeret ”Stop Your Sobbing” med bandet Pretenders. Da havde Hynde så godt som opgivet drømmen om for alvor nogensinde at komme med i et band – og det var tilmed stort set den eneste drøm hun nogensinde havde haft, for rock'n'roll var det eneste, der virkelig optog hende, musikken var – og er – hendes livs store lidenskab.Født 1951 i Akron, Ohio i et småborgerligt miljø havde hun en lykkelig og begivenhedsløs barndom i en by, hun har skrevet flere sange om. Dog mest negativt, fordi den by hun elskede smadredes af byfornyelse. Og da puberteten ramte hende, vendte hun familien og skolen ryggen til fordel for rock, stoffer, sin guitar, vegetarisme og asocial adfærd. Hynde emigrerede til England i 1973, hvor hun blev en del af det vordende punkmiljø. Et demobånd skaffede hende i 1978 pladekontrakt med Real Records, og hun samlede den første – og efter manges mening – definitive udgave af Pretenders. Gruppen blev en øjeblikkelig succes, ikke kun fordi hun var en øjenfaldende og velsyngende frontfigur, men fordi hun virkelig kunne skrive sange og bandet virkelig kunne spille dem.Efter gruppens anden lp i 1982 smed hun bassisten Pete Farndon ud grundet heroinmisbrug, og få dage efter døde guitaristen James Honeyman-Scott af en kokainoverdosis. Siden da har Pretenders bestået af Chrissie Hynde og hvem hun på pågældende tidspunkt spiller sammen med – for gruppen er stadig 'going concern', selvom den har ført en mere tilbagetrukket tilværelse her i det ny årtusind.Rockhistorier elsker Chrissie Hynde og hylder såvel hende som Pretenders' musik i anledning af 70-års fødselsdagen den 7. september. Det bliver med cremen af et fabelagtigt repertoire, spredt over i alt 11 album, hvoriblandt det seneste udsendtes i 2020 med den sigende titel 'Hate for Sale'! 1. Stop Your Sobbing (1979)2. Kid (1979)3. Brass in Pocket (1979)4. Private Life (1979)5. Talk of the Town (1980)6. Bad Boys Get Spanked (1981)7. Back on the Chain Gang (1982)8. My City Was Gone (1982) 9. Middle of the Road (1983)10. Hymn to Her (1986)11. Sense of Purpose (1990)12. Night in My Veins (1994) 13. I Hurt You – Live (1995)14. Lie to Me (2002) 15: You Know Who Your Friends Are (2002) 16: Boots of Chinese Plastic – Edit (2008)17. Rosalee (2008) 18. Alone (2016)19. I Hate Myself (2016)20. You Can't Hurt a Fool (2020)

Episode one hundred and nineteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "You Really Got Me" by the Kinks, and the song that first took distorted guitar to number one. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.   Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "G.T.O." by Ronny and the Daytonas. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Resources As usual, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I've used several resources for this and future episodes on the Kinks, most notably Ray Davies: A Complicated Life by Johnny Rogan and You Really Got Me by Nick Hasted. X-Ray by Ray Davies is a remarkable autobiography with a framing story set in a dystopian science-fiction future, while Kink by Dave Davies is more revealing but less well-written. The Anthology 1964-1971 is a great box set that covers the Kinks' Pye years, which overlap almost exactly with their period of greatest creativity. For those who don't want a full box set, this two-CD set covers all the big hits. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we're going to look at a record that has often been called "the first heavy metal record", one that introduced records dominated by heavy, distorted, guitar riffs to the top of the UK charts. We're going to look at the first singles by a group who would become second only to the Beatles among British groups in terms of the creativity of their recordings during the sixties, but who were always sabotaged by a record label more interested in short-term chart success than in artist development. We're going to look at the Kinks, and at "You Really Got Me": [Excerpt: The Kinks, "You Really Got Me"] The story of the Kinks starts with two brothers, Ray and Dave Davies, the seventh and eighth children of a family that had previously had six girls in a row, most of them much older -- their oldest sister was twenty when Ray was born, and Dave was three years younger than Ray. The two brothers always had a difficult relationship, partly because of their diametrically opposed personalities. Ray was introverted, thoughtful, and notoriously selfish, while Dave was outgoing in the extreme, but also had an aggressive side to his nature. Ray, as someone who had previously been the youngest child and only boy, resented his younger brother coming along and taking the attention he saw as his by right, while Dave always looked up to his older brother but never really got to know him. Ray was always a quiet child, but he became more so after the event that was to alter the lives of the whole family in multiple ways forever. Rene, the second-oldest of his sisters, had been in an unhappy marriage and living in Canada with her husband, but moved back to the UK shortly before Ray's thirteenth birthday. Ray had been unsuccessfully pestering his parents to buy him a guitar for nearly a year, since Elvis had started to become popular, and on the night before his birthday, Rene gave him one as his birthday present. She then went out to a dance hall. She did this even though she'd had rheumatic fever as a child, which had given her a heart condition. The doctors had advised her to avoid all forms of exercise, but she loved dancing too much to give it up for anyone. She died that night, aged only thirty-one, and the last time Ray ever saw his sister was when she was giving him his guitar. For the next year, Ray was even more introverted than normal, to the point that he ended up actually seeing a child psychologist, which for a working-class child in the 1950s was something that was as far from the normal experience as it's possible to imagine. But even more than that, he became convinced that he was intended by fate to play the guitar. He started playing seriously, not just the pop songs of the time, though there were plenty of those, but also trying to emulate Chet Atkins. Pete Quaife would later recall that when they first played guitar together at school, while Quaife could do a passable imitation of Hank Marvin playing "Apache", Davies could do a note-perfect rendition of Atkins' version of "Malaguena": [Excerpt: Chet Atkins, "Malaguena"] Ray's newfound obsession with music also drew him closer to his younger brother, though there was something of a cynical motive in this closeness. Both boys got pocket money from their parents, but Dave looked up to his older brother and valued his opinion, so if Ray told him which were the good new records, Dave would go out and buy them -- and then Ray could play them, and spend his own money on other things.  And it wasn't just pop music that the two of them were getting into, either. A defining moment of inspiration for both brothers came when a sixteen-minute documentary about Big Bill Broonzy's tour of Belgium, Low Light and Blue Smoke, was shown on the TV: [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, "When Did You Leave Heaven?"] Like Broonzy's earlier appearances on Six-Five Special, that film had a big impact on a lot of British musicians -- you'll see clips from it both in the Beatles Anthology and in a 1980s South Bank Show documentary on Eric Clapton -- but it particularly affected Ray Davies for two reasons. The first was that Ray, more than most people of his generation, respected the older generation's taste in music, and his father approved of Broonzy, saying he sounded like a real man, not like those high-voiced girly-sounding pop singers. The other reason was that Broonzy's performance sounded authentic to him. He said later that he thought that Broonzy sounded like him -- even though Broonzy was Black and American, he sounded *working class* (and unlike many of his contemporaries, Ray Davies did have a working-class background, rather than being comparatively privileged like say John Lennon or Mick Jagger were). Soon Ray and Dave were playing together as a duo, while Ray was also performing with two other kids from school, Pete Quaife and John Start, as a trio. Ray brought them all together, and they became the Ray Davies Quartet -- though sometimes, if Pete or Dave rather than Ray got them the booking, they would be the Pete Quaife Quartet or the Dave Davies Quartet. The group mostly performed instrumentals, with Dave particularly enjoying playing "No Trespassing" by the Ventures: [Excerpt: The Ventures, "No Trespassing"] Both Ray and Dave would sing sometimes, with Ray taking mellower, rockabilly, songs, while Dave would sing Little Richard and Lightnin' Hopkins material, but at first they thought they needed a lead singer. They tried with a few different people, including another pupil from the school they all went to who sang with them at a couple of gigs, but John Start's mother thought the young lad's raspy voice was so awful she wouldn't let them use her house to rehearse, and Ray didn't like having another big ego in the group, so Rod Stewart soon went back to the Moontrekkers and left them with no lead singer. But that was far from the worst problem the Davies brothers had. When Dave was fifteen, he got his sixteen-year-old girlfriend Susan pregnant. The two were very much in love, and wanted to get married, but both children's parents were horrified at the idea, and so each set of parents told their child that the other had dumped them and never wanted to see them again. Both believed what they were told, and Dave didn't see his daughter for thirty years. The trauma of this separation permanently changed him, and you can find echoes of it throughout Dave's songwriting in the sixties. Ray and Pete, after leaving school, went on to Hornsey Art School, where coincidentally Rod Stewart had also moved on to the year before, though Stewart had dropped out after a few weeks after discovering he was colour-blind. Quaife also dropped out of art school relatively soon after enrolling -- he was kicked out for "Teddy Boy behaviour", but his main problem was that he didn't feel comfortable as a working-class lad mixing with Bohemian middle-class people.  Ray, on the other hand, was in his element. While Ray grew up on a council estate and was thoroughly working-class, he had always had a tendency to want to climb the social ladder, and he was delighted to be surrounded by people who were interested in art and music, though his particular love at the time was the cinema, and he would regularly go to the college film society's showings of films by people like Bergman, Kurosawa and Truffaut, or silent films by Eisenstein or Griffith, though he would complain about having to pay a whole shilling for entry. Davies also starred in some now-lost experimental films made by the person who ran the film society, and also started branching out into playing with other people. After a gig at the art college, where Alexis Korner had been supported by the young Rolling Stones, Davies went up to Korner and asked him for advice about moving on in the music world. Korner recommended he go and see Giorgio Gomelsky, the promoter and manager who had put on most of the Stones' early gigs, and Gomelsky got Davies an audition with a group called the Dave Hunt Rhythm and Blues Band. Tom McGuinness had been offered a job with them before he went on to Manfred Mann, but McGuinness thought that the Dave Hunt band were too close to trad for his tastes. Davies, on the other hand, was perfectly happy playing trad along with the blues, and for a while it looked like the Ray Davies Quartet were over, as Ray was getting more prestigious gigs with the Dave Hunt group. Ray would later recall that the Dave Hunt band's repertoire included things like the old Meade Lux Lewis boogie piece "Honky Tonk Train Blues", which they would play in the style of Bob Crosby's Bobcats: [Excerpt: Bob Crosby and the Bobcats, "Honky Tonk Train Blues"] But while the group were extremely good musicians -- their soprano saxophone player, Lol Coxhill, would later become one of the most respected sax players in Britain and was a big part of the Canterbury Scene in the seventies -- Ray eventually decided to throw his lot in with his brother. While Ray had been off learning from these jazz musicians, Dave, Pete, and John had continued rehearsing together, and occasionally performing whenever Ray was free to join them. The group had by now renamed themselves the Ramrods, after a track by Duane Eddy, who was the first rock and roll musician Ray and Dave had see live: [Excerpt: Duane Eddy, "Ramrod"] Dave had become a far more accomplished guitarist, now outshining his brother, and was also getting more into the London R&B scene. Ray later remembered that the thing that swung it for him was when Dave played him a record by Cyril Davies, "Country Line Special", which he thought of as a bridge between the kind of music he was playing with Dave Hunt and the kind of music he wanted to be playing, which he described as "Big Bill Broonzy with drums": [Excerpt: Cyril Davies, "Country Line Special"] That was, coincidentally, the first recording to feature the piano player Nicky Hopkins, who would later play a big part in the music Ray, Dave, and Pete would make.  But not John. Shortly after Ray got serious about the Ramrods -- who soon changed their name again to the Boll Weevils -- John Start decided it was time to grow up, get serious, give up the drums, and become a quantity surveyor. There were several factors in this decision, but a big one was that he simply didn't like Ray Davies, who he viewed as an unpleasant, troubled, person. Start was soon replaced by another drummer, Mickey Willett, and it was Willett who provided the connection that would change everything for the group. Willett was an experienced musician, who had contacts in the business, and so when a rich dilettante wannabe pop star named Robert Wace and his best friend and "manager" Grenville Collins were looking for a backing band for Wace, one of Willett's friends in the music business pointed them in the direction of the Boll Weevils.  Robert Wace offered the Boll Weevils a deal -- he could get them lucrative gigs playing at society functions for his rich friends, if they would allow him to do a couple of songs with them in the middle of the show. Wace even got Brian Epstein to come along and see a Boll Weevils rehearsal, but it wasn't exactly a success -- Mickey Willett had gone on holiday to Manchester that week, and the group were drummerless. Epstein said he was vaguely interested in signing Ray as a solo artist, but didn't want the group, and nothing further came of it. This is particularly odd because at the time Ray wasn't singing any solo leads. Robert Wace would sing his solo spot, Dave would take the lead vocals on most of the upbeat rockers, and Ray and Dave would sing unison leads on everything else. The group were soon favourites on the circuit of society balls, where their only real competition was Mike d'Abo's band A Band of Angels -- d'Abo had been to Harrow, and so was part of the upper class society in a way that the Boll Weevils weren't. However, the first time they tried to play a gig in front of an audience that weren't already friends of Wace, he was booed off stage. It became clear that there was no future for Robert Wace as a pop star, but there was a future for the Boll Weevils. They came to a deal -- Wace and Collins would manage the group, Collins would put in half his wages from his job as a stockbroker, and Wace and Collins would get fifty percent of the group's earnings. Wace and Collins funded the group recording a demo. They recorded two songs, the old Coasters song "I'm A Hog For You Baby": [Excerpt: The Boll Weevils, "I'm A Hog For You Baby"] and a Merseybeat pastiche written by Dave Davies, "I Believed You": [Excerpt: The Ravens, "I Believed You"] It shows how up in the air everything was that those tracks have since been released under two names -- at some point around the time of the recording session, the Boll Weevils changed their name yet again, to The Ravens, naming themselves after the recent film, starring Vincent Price, based on the Edgar Allen Poe poem. This lineup of the Ravens wasn't to last too long, though. Mickey Willett started to get suspicious about what was happening to all of the money, and became essentially the group's self-appointed shop steward, getting into constant rows with the management. Willett soon found himself edged out of the group by Wace and Collins, and the Ravens continued with a temporary drummer until they could find a permanent replacement. Wace and Collins started to realise that neither of them knew much about the music business, though, and so they turned elsewhere for help with managing the group. The person they turned to was Larry Page. This is not the Larry Page who would later co-found Google, rather he was someone who had had a brief career as an attempt at producing a British teen idol under the name "Larry Page, the Teenage Rage" -- a career that was somewhat sabotaged by his inability to sing, and by his producer's insistence that it would be a good idea to record this, as the original was so bad it would never be a hit in the UK: [Excerpt: Larry Page, "That'll be the Day"] After his career in music had come to an ignominious end, Page had briefly tried working in other fields, before going into management. He'd teamed up with Eddie Kassner, an Austrian songwriter who had written for Vera Lynn before going into publishing. Kassner had had the unbelievable fortune to buy the publishing rights for "Rock Around the Clock" for two hundred and fifty dollars, and had become incredibly rich, with offices in both London and New York.  Page and Kassner had entered into a complicated business arrangement by which Kassner got a percentage of Page's management income, Kassner would give Page's acts songs, and any song Page's acts wrote would be published by Kassner.  Kassner and Page had a third partner in their complicated arrangements -- independent producer Shel Talmy. Talmy had started out as an engineer in Los Angeles, and had come over to the UK for a few weeks in 1962 on holiday, and thought that while he was there he might as well see if he could get some work. Talmy was a good friend of Nik Venet, and Venet gave him a stack of acetates of recent Capitol records that he'd produced, and told him that he could pretend to have produced them if it got him work. Talmy took an acetate of "Surfin' Safari" by the Beach Boys, and one of "Music in the Air" by Lou Rawls, into Dick Rowe's office and told Rowe he had produced them. Sources differ over whether Rowe actually believed him, or if he just wanted anyone who had any experience of American recording studio techniques, but either way Rowe hired him to produce records for Decca as an independent contractor, and Talmy started producing hits like "Charmaine" by the Bachelors: [Excerpt: The Bachelors, "Charmaine"] Page, Kassner, Talmy, and Rowe all worked hand in glove with each other, with Page managing artists, Kassner publishing the songs they recorded, Talmy producing them and Rowe signing them to his record label. And so by contacting Page, Wace and Collins were getting in touch with a team that could pretty much guarantee the Ravens a record deal. They cut Page in on the management, signed Ray and Dave as songwriters for Kassner, and got Talmy to agree to produce the group. The only fly in the ointment was that Rowe, showing the same judgement he had shown over the Beatles, turned down the opportunity to sign the Ravens to Decca. They had already been turned down by EMI, and Phillips also turned them down, which meant that by default they ended up recording for Pye records, the same label as the Searchers. Around the time they signed to Pye, they also changed their name yet again, this time to the name that they would keep for the rest of their careers. In the wake of the Profumo sex scandal, and the rumours that went around as a result of it, including that a Cabinet minister had attended orgies as a slave with a sign round his neck saying to whip him if he displeased the guests, there started to be a public acknowledgement of the concept of BDSM, and "kinky" had become the buzzword of the day, with the fashionable boots worn by the leather-clad Honor Blackman in the TV show The Avengers being publicised as "kinky boots". Blackman and her co-star Patrick MacNee even put out a novelty single, "Kinky Boots", in February 1964: [Excerpt: Patrick MacNee and Honor Blackman, "Kinky Boots"] Page decided that this was too good an opportunity to miss, and that especially given the camp demeanour of both Dave Davies and Pete Quaife it would make sense to call the group "the Kinks", as a name that would generate plenty of outrage but was still just about broadcastable. None of the group liked the name, but they all went along with it, and so Ray, Dave, and Pete were now The Kinks. The ever-increasing team of people around them increased by one more when a promoter and booking agent got involved. Arthur Howes was chosen to be in charge of the newly-named Kinks' bookings primarily because he booked all the Beatles' gigs, and Wade and Collins wanted as much of the Beatles' reflected glory as they could get. Howes started booking the group in for major performances, and Ray finally quit art school -- though he still didn't think that he was going to have a huge amount of success as a pop star. He did, though, think that if he was lucky he could make enough money from six months of being a full time pop musician that he could move to Spain and take guitar lessons from Segovia. Pye had signed the Kinks to a three-single deal,  and Arthur Howes was the one who suggested what became their first single. Howes was in Paris with the Beatles in January 1964, and he noticed that one of the songs that was getting the biggest reaction was their cover version of Little Richard's "Long Tall Sally", and that they hadn't yet recorded the song. He phoned Page from Paris, at enormous expense, and told him to get the Kinks into the studio and record the song straight away, because it was bound to be a hit for someone. The group worked up a version with Ray on lead, and recorded it three days later: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Long Tall Sally"] Ray later recollected that someone at the studio had said to him "Congratulations, you just made a flop", and they were correct -- the Kinks' version had none of the power of Little Richard's original or of the Beatles' version, and only scraped its way to number forty-two on the charts. As they had no permanent drummer, for that record, and for the next few they made, the Kinks were augmented by Bobby Graham, who had played for Joe Meek as one of Mike Berry and the Outlaws before becoming one of the two main on-call session drummers in the UK, along with fellow Meek alumnus Clem Cattini. Graham is now best known for having done all the drumming credited to Dave Clark on records by the Dave Clark Five such as "Bits and Pieces": [Excerpt: The Dave Clark Five, "Bits and Pieces"] It's also been reported by various people, notably Shel Talmy, that the session guitarist Jimmy Page played Ray Davies' rhythm parts for him on most of the group's early recordings, although other sources dispute that, including Ray himself who insists that he played the parts. What's definitely not in doubt is that Dave Davies played all the lead guitar. However, the group needed a full-time drummer. Dave Davies wanted to get his friend Viv Prince, the drummer of the Pretty Things, into the group, but when Prince wasn't available they turned instead to Mick Avory, who they found through an ad in the Melody Maker. Avory had actually been a member of the Rolling Stones for a very brief period, but had decided he didn't want to be a full-time drummer, and had quit before they got Charlie Watts in.  Avory was chosen by Ray and the management team, and Dave Davies took an instant dislike to him, partly because Ray liked Avory, but accepted that he was the best drummer available.  Avory wouldn't play on the next few records -- Talmy liked to use musicians he knew, and Avory was a bit of an unknown quantity -- but he was available for the group's first big tour, playing on the bottom of the bill with the Dave Clark Five and the Hollies further up, and their first TV appearance, on Ready Steady Go. That tour saw the group getting a little bit of notice, but mostly being dismissed as being a clone of the Rolling Stones, because like the Stones they were relying on the same set of R&B standards that all the London R&B bands played, and the Stones were the most obvious point of reference for that kind of music for most people. Arthur Howes eventually sent someone up to work on the Kinks' stage act with them, and to get them into a more showbiz shape, but the person in question didn't get very far before Graham Nash of the Hollies ordered him to leave the Kinks alone, saying they were "OK as they are". Meanwhile, Larry Page was working with both Ray and Dave as potential songwriters, and using their songs for other acts in the Page/Kassner/Talmy stable of artists. With Talmy producing, Shel Naylor recorded Dave's "One Fine Day", a song which its writer dismisses as a throwaway but is actually quite catchy: [Excerpt: Shel Naylor, "One Fine Day"] And Talmy also recorded a girl group called The Orchids, singing Ray's "I've Got That Feeling": [Excerpt: The Orchids, "I've Got That Feeling"] Page also co-wrote a couple of instrumentals with Ray, who was the brother who was more eager to learn the craft of songwriting -- at this point, Dave seemed to find it something of a chore. Page saw it as his job at this point to teach the brothers how to write -- he had a whole set of ideas about what made for a hit song, and chief among them was that it had to make a connection between the singer and the audience. He told the brothers that they needed to write songs with the words "I", "Me", and "You" in the title, and repeat those words as much as possible.  This was something that Ray did on the song that became the group's next single, "You Still Want Me", a Merseybeat pastiche that didn't even do as well as the group's first record: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "You Still Want Me"] The group were now in trouble. They'd had two flop singles in a row, on a three-single contract. It seemed entirely likely that the label would drop them after the next single. Luckily for them, they had a song that they knew was a winner. Ray had come up with the basic melody for "You Really Got Me" many years earlier. The song had gone through many changes over the years, and had apparently started off as a jazz piano piece inspired by Gerry Mulligan's performance in the classic documentary Jazz On A Summer's Day: [Excerpt: Gerry Mulligan, "As Catch Can"] From there it had apparently mutated first into a Chet Atkins style guitar instrumental and then into a piece in the style of Mose Allison, the jazz and R&B singer who was a huge influence on the more Mod end of the British R&B scene with records like "Parchman Farm": [Excerpt: Mose Allison, "Parchman Farm"] Through all of this, the basic melody had remained  the same, as had the two chords that underpinned the whole thing. But the song's final form was shaped to a large extent by the advice of Larry Page. As well as the "you" and "me" based lyrics, Page had also advised Ray that as he wasn't a great singer at this point, what the group needed to do was to concentrate on riffs. In particular, he'd pointed Ray to "Louie Louie" by the Kingsmen, which had recently been released in the UK on Pye, the same label the Kinks were signed to, and told him to do something like that: [Excerpt: The Kingsmen, "Louie Louie"] Ray was instantly inspired by "Louie Louie", which the Kinks quickly added to their own set, and he retooled his old melody in its image, coming up with a riff to go under it. It seems also to have been Page who made one minor change to the lyric of the song. Where Ray had started the song with the line "Yeah, you really got me going," Page suggested that instead he sing "Girl, you really got me going", partly to increase that sense of connection with the audience again, partly to add a tiny bit of variety to the repetitive lyrics, but also partly because the group's sexuality was already coming in for some question -- Dave Davies is bisexual, and Ray has always been keen to play around with notions of gender and sexuality. Starting with the word "girl" might help reassure people about that somewhat. But the final touch that turned it into one of the great classics came from Dave, rather than Ray. Dave had been frustrated with the sound he was getting from his amplifier, and had slashed the cone with a knife. He then fed the sound from that slashed amp through his new, larger, amp, to get a distorted, fuzzy, sound which was almost unknown in Britain at the time. We've heard examples of fuzz guitar before in this series, of course -- on "Rocket '88", and on some of the Johnny Burnette Rock 'n' Roll Trio records, and most recently last week on Ellie Greenwich's demo of "Do-Wah-Diddy", but those had been odd one-offs. Dave Davies' reinvention of the sound seems to be the point where it becomes a standard part of the rock guitar toolbox -- but it's very rarely been done as well as it was on "You Really Got Me": [Excerpt: The Kinks, "You Really Got Me"] But that introduction, and the classic record that followed, nearly never happened. The original recording of "You Really Got Me" has been lost, but it was apparently very different. Ray and Dave Davies have said that Shel Talmy overproduced it, turning it into a Phil Spector soundalike, and drenched the whole thing with echo. Talmy, for his part, says that that's not the case -- that the main difference was that the song was taken much slower, and that it was a very different but equally valid take on the song.  Ray, in particular, was devastated by the result, and didn't want it released. Pye were insistent -- they had a contract, and they were going to put this record out whatever the performers said. But luckily the group's management had faith in their singer's vision. Larry Page insisted that as he and Kassner owned the publishing, the record couldn't come out in the state it was in, and Robert Wace paid for a new recording session out of his own pocket. The group, plus Bobby Graham, piano player Arthur Greenslade, and Talmy, went back into the studio. The first take of the new session was a dud, and Ray worried that Talmy would end the session then and there, but he allowed them to do a second take. And that second take was extraordinary. Going into the solo, Ray yelled "Oh no!" with excitement, looking over at Dave, and became convinced that he'd distracted Dave at the crucial moment. Instead, he delivered one of the defining solos of the rock genre: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "You Really Got Me"] "You Really Got Me" was released on the fourth of August 1964, and became a smash hit, reaching number one in September. It was also released in the US, and made the top ten over there. The Kinks were suddenly huge, and Pye Records quickly exercised their option -- so quickly, that the group needed to get an album recorded by the end of August. The resulting album is, as one might expect, a patchy affair, made up mostly of poor R&B covers, but there were some interesting moments, and one song from the album in particular, "Stop Your Sobbing", showed a giant leap forward in Ray's songwriting: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Stop Your Sobbing"] There may be a reason for that. "Stop Your Sobbing" features backing vocals by someone new to the Kinks' circle, Ray's new girlfriend Rasa Didzpetris, who would become a regular feature on the group's records for the next decade. And when we next look at the Kinks, we'll see some of the influence she had on the group.

Episode one hundred and nineteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “You Really Got Me” by the Kinks, and the song that first took distorted guitar to number one. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “G.T.O.” by Ronny and the Daytonas. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Resources As usual, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I’ve used several resources for this and future episodes on the Kinks, most notably Ray Davies: A Complicated Life by Johnny Rogan and You Really Got Me by Nick Hasted. X-Ray by Ray Davies is a remarkable autobiography with a framing story set in a dystopian science-fiction future, while Kink by Dave Davies is more revealing but less well-written. The Anthology 1964-1971 is a great box set that covers the Kinks’ Pye years, which overlap almost exactly with their period of greatest creativity. For those who don’t want a full box set, this two-CD set covers all the big hits. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we’re going to look at a record that has often been called “the first heavy metal record”, one that introduced records dominated by heavy, distorted, guitar riffs to the top of the UK charts. We’re going to look at the first singles by a group who would become second only to the Beatles among British groups in terms of the creativity of their recordings during the sixties, but who were always sabotaged by a record label more interested in short-term chart success than in artist development. We’re going to look at the Kinks, and at “You Really Got Me”: [Excerpt: The Kinks, “You Really Got Me”] The story of the Kinks starts with two brothers, Ray and Dave Davies, the seventh and eighth children of a family that had previously had six girls in a row, most of them much older — their oldest sister was twenty when Ray was born, and Dave was three years younger than Ray. The two brothers always had a difficult relationship, partly because of their diametrically opposed personalities. Ray was introverted, thoughtful, and notoriously selfish, while Dave was outgoing in the extreme, but also had an aggressive side to his nature. Ray, as someone who had previously been the youngest child and only boy, resented his younger brother coming along and taking the attention he saw as his by right, while Dave always looked up to his older brother but never really got to know him. Ray was always a quiet child, but he became more so after the event that was to alter the lives of the whole family in multiple ways forever. Rene, the second-oldest of his sisters, had been in an unhappy marriage and living in Canada with her husband, but moved back to the UK shortly before Ray’s thirteenth birthday. Ray had been unsuccessfully pestering his parents to buy him a guitar for nearly a year, since Elvis had started to become popular, and on the night before his birthday, Rene gave him one as his birthday present. She then went out to a dance hall. She did this even though she’d had rheumatic fever as a child, which had given her a heart condition. The doctors had advised her to avoid all forms of exercise, but she loved dancing too much to give it up for anyone. She died that night, aged only thirty-one, and the last time Ray ever saw his sister was when she was giving him his guitar. For the next year, Ray was even more introverted than normal, to the point that he ended up actually seeing a child psychologist, which for a working-class child in the 1950s was something that was as far from the normal experience as it’s possible to imagine. But even more than that, he became convinced that he was intended by fate to play the guitar. He started playing seriously, not just the pop songs of the time, though there were plenty of those, but also trying to emulate Chet Atkins. Pete Quaife would later recall that when they first played guitar together at school, while Quaife could do a passable imitation of Hank Marvin playing “Apache”, Davies could do a note-perfect rendition of Atkins’ version of “Malaguena”: [Excerpt: Chet Atkins, “Malaguena”] Ray’s newfound obsession with music also drew him closer to his younger brother, though there was something of a cynical motive in this closeness. Both boys got pocket money from their parents, but Dave looked up to his older brother and valued his opinion, so if Ray told him which were the good new records, Dave would go out and buy them — and then Ray could play them, and spend his own money on other things. And it wasn’t just pop music that the two of them were getting into, either. A defining moment of inspiration for both brothers came when a sixteen-minute documentary about Big Bill Broonzy’s tour of Belgium, Low Light and Blue Smoke, was shown on the TV: [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, “When Did You Leave Heaven?”] Like Broonzy’s earlier appearances on Six-Five Special, that film had a big impact on a lot of British musicians — you’ll see clips from it both in the Beatles Anthology and in a 1980s South Bank Show documentary on Eric Clapton — but it particularly affected Ray Davies for two reasons. The first was that Ray, more than most people of his generation, respected the older generation’s taste in music, and his father approved of Broonzy, saying he sounded like a real man, not like those high-voiced girly-sounding pop singers. The other reason was that Broonzy’s performance sounded authentic to him. He said later that he thought that Broonzy sounded like him — even though Broonzy was Black and American, he sounded *working class* (and unlike many of his contemporaries, Ray Davies did have a working-class background, rather than being comparatively privileged like say John Lennon or Mick Jagger were). Soon Ray and Dave were playing together as a duo, while Ray was also performing with two other kids from school, Pete Quaife and John Start, as a trio. Ray brought them all together, and they became the Ray Davies Quartet — though sometimes, if Pete or Dave rather than Ray got them the booking, they would be the Pete Quaife Quartet or the Dave Davies Quartet. The group mostly performed instrumentals, with Dave particularly enjoying playing “No Trespassing” by the Ventures: [Excerpt: The Ventures, “No Trespassing”] Both Ray and Dave would sing sometimes, with Ray taking mellower, rockabilly, songs, while Dave would sing Little Richard and Lightnin’ Hopkins material, but at first they thought they needed a lead singer. They tried with a few different people, including another pupil from the school they all went to who sang with them at a couple of gigs, but John Start’s mother thought the young lad’s raspy voice was so awful she wouldn’t let them use her house to rehearse, and Ray didn’t like having another big ego in the group, so Rod Stewart soon went back to the Moontrekkers and left them with no lead singer. But that was far from the worst problem the Davies brothers had. When Dave was fifteen, he got his sixteen-year-old girlfriend Susan pregnant. The two were very much in love, and wanted to get married, but both children’s parents were horrified at the idea, and so each set of parents told their child that the other had dumped them and never wanted to see them again. Both believed what they were told, and Dave didn’t see his daughter for thirty years. The trauma of this separation permanently changed him, and you can find echoes of it throughout Dave’s songwriting in the sixties. Ray and Pete, after leaving school, went on to Hornsey Art School, where coincidentally Rod Stewart had also moved on to the year before, though Stewart had dropped out after a few weeks after discovering he was colour-blind. Quaife also dropped out of art school relatively soon after enrolling — he was kicked out for “Teddy Boy behaviour”, but his main problem was that he didn’t feel comfortable as a working-class lad mixing with Bohemian middle-class people. Ray, on the other hand, was in his element. While Ray grew up on a council estate and was thoroughly working-class, he had always had a tendency to want to climb the social ladder, and he was delighted to be surrounded by people who were interested in art and music, though his particular love at the time was the cinema, and he would regularly go to the college film society’s showings of films by people like Bergman, Kurosawa and Truffaut, or silent films by Eisenstein or Griffith, though he would complain about having to pay a whole shilling for entry. Davies also starred in some now-lost experimental films made by the person who ran the film society, and also started branching out into playing with other people. After a gig at the art college, where Alexis Korner had been supported by the young Rolling Stones, Davies went up to Korner and asked him for advice about moving on in the music world. Korner recommended he go and see Giorgio Gomelsky, the promoter and manager who had put on most of the Stones’ early gigs, and Gomelsky got Davies an audition with a group called the Dave Hunt Rhythm and Blues Band. Tom McGuinness had been offered a job with them before he went on to Manfred Mann, but McGuinness thought that the Dave Hunt band were too close to trad for his tastes. Davies, on the other hand, was perfectly happy playing trad along with the blues, and for a while it looked like the Ray Davies Quartet were over, as Ray was getting more prestigious gigs with the Dave Hunt group. Ray would later recall that the Dave Hunt band’s repertoire included things like the old Meade Lux Lewis boogie piece “Honky Tonk Train Blues”, which they would play in the style of Bob Crosby’s Bobcats: [Excerpt: Bob Crosby and the Bobcats, “Honky Tonk Train Blues”] But while the group were extremely good musicians — their soprano saxophone player, Lol Coxhill, would later become one of the most respected sax players in Britain and was a big part of the Canterbury Scene in the seventies — Ray eventually decided to throw his lot in with his brother. While Ray had been off learning from these jazz musicians, Dave, Pete, and John had continued rehearsing together, and occasionally performing whenever Ray was free to join them. The group had by now renamed themselves the Ramrods, after a track by Duane Eddy, who was the first rock and roll musician Ray and Dave had see live: [Excerpt: Duane Eddy, “Ramrod”] Dave had become a far more accomplished guitarist, now outshining his brother, and was also getting more into the London R&B scene. Ray later remembered that the thing that swung it for him was when Dave played him a record by Cyril Davies, “Country Line Special”, which he thought of as a bridge between the kind of music he was playing with Dave Hunt and the kind of music he wanted to be playing, which he described as “Big Bill Broonzy with drums”: [Excerpt: Cyril Davies, “Country Line Special”] That was, coincidentally, the first recording to feature the piano player Nicky Hopkins, who would later play a big part in the music Ray, Dave, and Pete would make. But not John. Shortly after Ray got serious about the Ramrods — who soon changed their name again to the Boll Weevils — John Start decided it was time to grow up, get serious, give up the drums, and become a quantity surveyor. There were several factors in this decision, but a big one was that he simply didn’t like Ray Davies, who he viewed as an unpleasant, troubled, person. Start was soon replaced by another drummer, Mickey Willett, and it was Willett who provided the connection that would change everything for the group. Willett was an experienced musician, who had contacts in the business, and so when a rich dilettante wannabe pop star named Robert Wace and his best friend and “manager” Grenville Collins were looking for a backing band for Wace, one of Willett’s friends in the music business pointed them in the direction of the Boll Weevils. Robert Wace offered the Boll Weevils a deal — he could get them lucrative gigs playing at society functions for his rich friends, if they would allow him to do a couple of songs with them in the middle of the show. Wace even got Brian Epstein to come along and see a Boll Weevils rehearsal, but it wasn’t exactly a success — Mickey Willett had gone on holiday to Manchester that week, and the group were drummerless. Epstein said he was vaguely interested in signing Ray as a solo artist, but didn’t want the group, and nothing further came of it. This is particularly odd because at the time Ray wasn’t singing any solo leads. Robert Wace would sing his solo spot, Dave would take the lead vocals on most of the upbeat rockers, and Ray and Dave would sing unison leads on everything else. The group were soon favourites on the circuit of society balls, where their only real competition was Mike d’Abo’s band A Band of Angels — d’Abo had been to Harrow, and so was part of the upper class society in a way that the Boll Weevils weren’t. However, the first time they tried to play a gig in front of an audience that weren’t already friends of Wace, he was booed off stage. It became clear that there was no future for Robert Wace as a pop star, but there was a future for the Boll Weevils. They came to a deal — Wace and Collins would manage the group, Collins would put in half his wages from his job as a stockbroker, and Wace and Collins would get fifty percent of the group’s earnings. Wace and Collins funded the group recording a demo. They recorded two songs, the old Coasters song “I’m A Hog For You Baby”: [Excerpt: The Boll Weevils, “I’m A Hog For You Baby”] and a Merseybeat pastiche written by Dave Davies, “I Believed You”: [Excerpt: The Ravens, “I Believed You”] It shows how up in the air everything was that those tracks have since been released under two names — at some point around the time of the recording session, the Boll Weevils changed their name yet again, to The Ravens, naming themselves after the recent film, starring Vincent Price, based on the Edgar Allen Poe poem. This lineup of the Ravens wasn’t to last too long, though. Mickey Willett started to get suspicious about what was happening to all of the money, and became essentially the group’s self-appointed shop steward, getting into constant rows with the management. Willett soon found himself edged out of the group by Wace and Collins, and the Ravens continued with a temporary drummer until they could find a permanent replacement. Wace and Collins started to realise that neither of them knew much about the music business, though, and so they turned elsewhere for help with managing the group. The person they turned to was Larry Page. This is not the Larry Page who would later co-found Google, rather he was someone who had had a brief career as an attempt at producing a British teen idol under the name “Larry Page, the Teenage Rage” — a career that was somewhat sabotaged by his inability to sing, and by his producer’s insistence that it would be a good idea to record this, as the original was so bad it would never be a hit in the UK: [Excerpt: Larry Page, “That’ll be the Day”] After his career in music had come to an ignominious end, Page had briefly tried working in other fields, before going into management. He’d teamed up with Eddie Kassner, an Austrian songwriter who had written for Vera Lynn before going into publishing. Kassner had had the unbelievable fortune to buy the publishing rights for “Rock Around the Clock” for two hundred and fifty dollars, and had become incredibly rich, with offices in both London and New York. Page and Kassner had entered into a complicated business arrangement by which Kassner got a percentage of Page’s management income, Kassner would give Page’s acts songs, and any song Page’s acts wrote would be published by Kassner. Kassner and Page had a third partner in their complicated arrangements — independent producer Shel Talmy. Talmy had started out as an engineer in Los Angeles, and had come over to the UK for a few weeks in 1962 on holiday, and thought that while he was there he might as well see if he could get some work. Talmy was a good friend of Nik Venet, and Venet gave him a stack of acetates of recent Capitol records that he’d produced, and told him that he could pretend to have produced them if it got him work. Talmy took an acetate of “Surfin’ Safari” by the Beach Boys, and one of “Music in the Air” by Lou Rawls, into Dick Rowe’s office and told Rowe he had produced them. Sources differ over whether Rowe actually believed him, or if he just wanted anyone who had any experience of American recording studio techniques, but either way Rowe hired him to produce records for Decca as an independent contractor, and Talmy started producing hits like “Charmaine” by the Bachelors: [Excerpt: The Bachelors, “Charmaine”] Page, Kassner, Talmy, and Rowe all worked hand in glove with each other, with Page managing artists, Kassner publishing the songs they recorded, Talmy producing them and Rowe signing them to his record label. And so by contacting Page, Wace and Collins were getting in touch with a team that could pretty much guarantee the Ravens a record deal. They cut Page in on the management, signed Ray and Dave as songwriters for Kassner, and got Talmy to agree to produce the group. The only fly in the ointment was that Rowe, showing the same judgement he had shown over the Beatles, turned down the opportunity to sign the Ravens to Decca. They had already been turned down by EMI, and Phillips also turned them down, which meant that by default they ended up recording for Pye records, the same label as the Searchers. Around the time they signed to Pye, they also changed their name yet again, this time to the name that they would keep for the rest of their careers. In the wake of the Profumo sex scandal, and the rumours that went around as a result of it, including that a Cabinet minister had attended orgies as a slave with a sign round his neck saying to whip him if he displeased the guests, there started to be a public acknowledgement of the concept of BDSM, and “kinky” had become the buzzword of the day, with the fashionable boots worn by the leather-clad Honor Blackman in the TV show The Avengers being publicised as “kinky boots”. Blackman and her co-star Patrick MacNee even put out a novelty single, “Kinky Boots”, in February 1964: [Excerpt: Patrick MacNee and Honor Blackman, “Kinky Boots”] Page decided that this was too good an opportunity to miss, and that especially given the camp demeanour of both Dave Davies and Pete Quaife it would make sense to call the group “the Kinks”, as a name that would generate plenty of outrage but was still just about broadcastable. None of the group liked the name, but they all went along with it, and so Ray, Dave, and Pete were now The Kinks. The ever-increasing team of people around them increased by one more when a promoter and booking agent got involved. Arthur Howes was chosen to be in charge of the newly-named Kinks’ bookings primarily because he booked all the Beatles’ gigs, and Wade and Collins wanted as much of the Beatles’ reflected glory as they could get. Howes started booking the group in for major performances, and Ray finally quit art school — though he still didn’t think that he was going to have a huge amount of success as a pop star. He did, though, think that if he was lucky he could make enough money from six months of being a full time pop musician that he could move to Spain and take guitar lessons from Segovia. Pye had signed the Kinks to a three-single deal, and Arthur Howes was the one who suggested what became their first single. Howes was in Paris with the Beatles in January 1964, and he noticed that one of the songs that was getting the biggest reaction was their cover version of Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally”, and that they hadn’t yet recorded the song. He phoned Page from Paris, at enormous expense, and told him to get the Kinks into the studio and record the song straight away, because it was bound to be a hit for someone. The group worked up a version with Ray on lead, and recorded it three days later: [Excerpt: The Kinks, “Long Tall Sally”] Ray later recollected that someone at the studio had said to him “Congratulations, you just made a flop”, and they were correct — the Kinks’ version had none of the power of Little Richard’s original or of the Beatles’ version, and only scraped its way to number forty-two on the charts. As they had no permanent drummer, for that record, and for the next few they made, the Kinks were augmented by Bobby Graham, who had played for Joe Meek as one of Mike Berry and the Outlaws before becoming one of the two main on-call session drummers in the UK, along with fellow Meek alumnus Clem Cattini. Graham is now best known for having done all the drumming credited to Dave Clark on records by the Dave Clark Five such as “Bits and Pieces”: [Excerpt: The Dave Clark Five, “Bits and Pieces”] It’s also been reported by various people, notably Shel Talmy, that the session guitarist Jimmy Page played Ray Davies’ rhythm parts for him on most of the group’s early recordings, although other sources dispute that, including Ray himself who insists that he played the parts. What’s definitely not in doubt is that Dave Davies played all the lead guitar. However, the group needed a full-time drummer. Dave Davies wanted to get his friend Viv Prince, the drummer of the Pretty Things, into the group, but when Prince wasn’t available they turned instead to Mick Avory, who they found through an ad in the Melody Maker. Avory had actually been a member of the Rolling Stones for a very brief period, but had decided he didn’t want to be a full-time drummer, and had quit before they got Charlie Watts in. Avory was chosen by Ray and the management team, and Dave Davies took an instant dislike to him, partly because Ray liked Avory, but accepted that he was the best drummer available. Avory wouldn’t play on the next few records — Talmy liked to use musicians he knew, and Avory was a bit of an unknown quantity — but he was available for the group’s first big tour, playing on the bottom of the bill with the Dave Clark Five and the Hollies further up, and their first TV appearance, on Ready Steady Go. That tour saw the group getting a little bit of notice, but mostly being dismissed as being a clone of the Rolling Stones, because like the Stones they were relying on the same set of R&B standards that all the London R&B bands played, and the Stones were the most obvious point of reference for that kind of music for most people. Arthur Howes eventually sent someone up to work on the Kinks’ stage act with them, and to get them into a more showbiz shape, but the person in question didn’t get very far before Graham Nash of the Hollies ordered him to leave the Kinks alone, saying they were “OK as they are”. Meanwhile, Larry Page was working with both Ray and Dave as potential songwriters, and using their songs for other acts in the Page/Kassner/Talmy stable of artists. With Talmy producing, Shel Naylor recorded Dave’s “One Fine Day”, a song which its writer dismisses as a throwaway but is actually quite catchy: [Excerpt: Shel Naylor, “One Fine Day”] And Talmy also recorded a girl group called The Orchids, singing Ray’s “I’ve Got That Feeling”: [Excerpt: The Orchids, “I’ve Got That Feeling”] Page also co-wrote a couple of instrumentals with Ray, who was the brother who was more eager to learn the craft of songwriting — at this point, Dave seemed to find it something of a chore. Page saw it as his job at this point to teach the brothers how to write — he had a whole set of ideas about what made for a hit song, and chief among them was that it had to make a connection between the singer and the audience. He told the brothers that they needed to write songs with the words “I”, “Me”, and “You” in the title, and repeat those words as much as possible. This was something that Ray did on the song that became the group’s next single, “You Still Want Me”, a Merseybeat pastiche that didn’t even do as well as the group’s first record: [Excerpt: The Kinks, “You Still Want Me”] The group were now in trouble. They’d had two flop singles in a row, on a three-single contract. It seemed entirely likely that the label would drop them after the next single. Luckily for them, they had a song that they knew was a winner. Ray had come up with the basic melody for “You Really Got Me” many years earlier. The song had gone through many changes over the years, and had apparently started off as a jazz piano piece inspired by Gerry Mulligan’s performance in the classic documentary Jazz On A Summer’s Day: [Excerpt: Gerry Mulligan, “As Catch Can”] From there it had apparently mutated first into a Chet Atkins style guitar instrumental and then into a piece in the style of Mose Allison, the jazz and R&B singer who was a huge influence on the more Mod end of the British R&B scene with records like “Parchman Farm”: [Excerpt: Mose Allison, “Parchman Farm”] Through all of this, the basic melody had remained the same, as had the two chords that underpinned the whole thing. But the song’s final form was shaped to a large extent by the advice of Larry Page. As well as the “you” and “me” based lyrics, Page had also advised Ray that as he wasn’t a great singer at this point, what the group needed to do was to concentrate on riffs. In particular, he’d pointed Ray to “Louie Louie” by the Kingsmen, which had recently been released in the UK on Pye, the same label the Kinks were signed to, and told him to do something like that: [Excerpt: The Kingsmen, “Louie Louie”] Ray was instantly inspired by “Louie Louie”, which the Kinks quickly added to their own set, and he retooled his old melody in its image, coming up with a riff to go under it. It seems also to have been Page who made one minor change to the lyric of the song. Where Ray had started the song with the line “Yeah, you really got me going,” Page suggested that instead he sing “Girl, you really got me going”, partly to increase that sense of connection with the audience again, partly to add a tiny bit of variety to the repetitive lyrics, but also partly because the group’s sexuality was already coming in for some question — Dave Davies is bisexual, and Ray has always been keen to play around with notions of gender and sexuality. Starting with the word “girl” might help reassure people about that somewhat. But the final touch that turned it into one of the great classics came from Dave, rather than Ray. Dave had been frustrated with the sound he was getting from his amplifier, and had slashed the cone with a knife. He then fed the sound from that slashed amp through his new, larger, amp, to get a distorted, fuzzy, sound which was almost unknown in Britain at the time. We’ve heard examples of fuzz guitar before in this series, of course — on “Rocket ’88”, and on some of the Johnny Burnette Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio records, and most recently last week on Ellie Greenwich’s demo of “Do-Wah-Diddy”, but those had been odd one-offs. Dave Davies’ reinvention of the sound seems to be the point where it becomes a standard part of the rock guitar toolbox — but it’s very rarely been done as well as it was on “You Really Got Me”: [Excerpt: The Kinks, “You Really Got Me”] But that introduction, and the classic record that followed, nearly never happened. The original recording of “You Really Got Me” has been lost, but it was apparently very different. Ray and Dave Davies have said that Shel Talmy overproduced it, turning it into a Phil Spector soundalike, and drenched the whole thing with echo. Talmy, for his part, says that that’s not the case — that the main difference was that the song was taken much slower, and that it was a very different but equally valid take on the song. Ray, in particular, was devastated by the result, and didn’t want it released. Pye were insistent — they had a contract, and they were going to put this record out whatever the performers said. But luckily the group’s management had faith in their singer’s vision. Larry Page insisted that as he and Kassner owned the publishing, the record couldn’t come out in the state it was in, and Robert Wace paid for a new recording session out of his own pocket. The group, plus Bobby Graham, piano player Arthur Greenslade, and Talmy, went back into the studio. The first take of the new session was a dud, and Ray worried that Talmy would end the session then and there, but he allowed them to do a second take. And that second take was extraordinary. Going into the solo, Ray yelled “Oh no!” with excitement, looking over at Dave, and became convinced that he’d distracted Dave at the crucial moment. Instead, he delivered one of the defining solos of the rock genre: [Excerpt: The Kinks, “You Really Got Me”] “You Really Got Me” was released on the fourth of August 1964, and became a smash hit, reaching number one in September. It was also released in the US, and made the top ten over there. The Kinks were suddenly huge, and Pye Records quickly exercised their option — so quickly, that the group needed to get an album recorded by the end of August. The resulting album is, as one might expect, a patchy affair, made up mostly of poor R&B covers, but there were some interesting moments, and one song from the album in particular, “Stop Your Sobbing”, showed a giant leap forward in Ray’s songwriting: [Excerpt: The Kinks, “Stop Your Sobbing”] There may be a reason for that. “Stop Your Sobbing” features backing vocals by someone new to the Kinks’ circle, Ray’s new girlfriend Rasa Didzpetris, who would become a regular feature on the group’s records for the next decade. And when we next look at the Kinks, we’ll see some of the influence she had on the group.

The Ray Davies Songbook : -The Pretenders “Stop Your Sobbing” -Robert Palmer “You Really Got Me” -Graham Bonnet “Set Me Free” -Little Angels “Tired Of Waiting” -Andy Taylor “Lola” -David Essex “Waterloo Station” -Eddi Reader “Wonder Boy” -Bob Geldof “Sunny Afternoon” -The Kinks “Scattered” -Elvis Costello “ Days” -Marianne Faithfull “Rosie, Rosie (Aka Rosy Won't You Please Come Home)” -The Cascades “I Bet You Won't Stay” -Sir Douglas Quintet “Who'll Be The Next In Line” -The Romantics “She's Got Everything” -The Fall “Victoria” -The Stranglers “All Day And All Of The Night” Escuchar audio

Features selections from their 2010 release “Live In London” includes, Boots of Chinese Plastic, Kid, Don’t Lose Faith, Back On The Chain Gang, Don’t Get Me Wrong, Tequila, Stop Your Sobbing, Day After Day, Cuban Slide, Middle of The Road, The Wait, Tattooed Love Boys, I’ll Stand By You, and Brass In Pocket

durée : 00:05:49 - Pop Story saison 6 - The Pretenders Stop your sobbing - C’est pour une petite amie inconsolable que le leader des Kinks, Ray Davies écrit « Stop Your Sobbing », en français arrête de sangloter.

Wherein: Adrienne and Steve discuss the beautiful songwriting of Chrissie Hynde, the influence of Nick Lowe, and the heartbreak and tragedy that informs her writing Scroll down to play Podcast                 Stop Your Sobbing at Discogs                          Back On The Chain Gang at Discogs                         UK Singles Box 1979-1981 at Discogs                 Stop Your Sobbing Video at Youtube       Back On The Chain Gang at Youtube      Pretenders Official Website                  Kinks at Discogs                                  Nick Lowe Biography with Will Birch                                King Of Comedy Soundtrack                 Pretenders on Austin City Limits from Youtube                 Adobe Spark Website              

On this week’s Stick To Wrestling podcast we continue our Summer Series as we take a look at the Summer of 1979 in the WWF as John McAdam and Sean Goodwin are joined by fellow old school WWF fanatic Randy Barrier. On the table this week: –Pat Patterson wins the North American title, and then … Continue reading Episode 62: Stop Your Sobbing → The post Episode 62: Stop Your Sobbing appeared first on Stick To Wrestling with John McAdam and Sean Goodwin.

HOORAY! I’m finally doing an audio version of my former column called Original vs Cover that ran for two years on the now defunct website, The Z Review. I do a compare and contrast of original songs, and interesting cover versions, and then I choose my favorite! You will hear snippets of each version and decide which you like better. Apologies for the sniffling, I was just getting over a malaise. IN THIS EPISODE; 1 - Fell In Love With A Girl 2 - Keep Me Hangin’ On 3 - Stop Your Sobbing 4 - When You Were Mine 5 - I Love Rock And Roll 6 - Take Me To The River

Live at Fi - A Trouser Press Playlist An Ira Robbins curated set list, performed live at The HiFi Bar. Tom Shad - Musical Director, bass Lane Steinberg - guitar Keith Hartel - guitar Carl Baggaley - keyboards Tom Curiano - drums Matthew Kaplan - MC 00:00 Introduction 00:40 Interview with Ira Robbins and Tom Shad 07:37 Introduction by Matthew Kaplan 08:47 Girl About Town performed by Tammy Faye Starlight 11:47 Girl From Germany performed by Verena Wiesendanger 15:30 Soul of My Suit performed by Chadbourne Oliver 18:05 Stop Your Sobbing performed by Amy Cabot 20:40 Love Comes in Spurts performed by Mike Fornatale 22:35 Walking Out on Love performed by Lenny Zenith 24:28 Indian Summer performed by Melissa Johnston Live sound by Colin Poellot Recorded and mixed by Richard Brukner. Host: Mike Stuto Produced by Richard Brukner for RPB Creative, LLC and Mike Stuto for The HiFi Bar. Girl About Town (H. Love) originally performed by Helen Love Girl From Germany (Mael, Mael) originally performed by Sparks Soul of My Suit (Bolan) originally performed by T. Rex Stop Your Sobbing (Davies) originally performed by The Kinks, arr. by The Pretenders Love Comes In Spurts (Hell) originally performed by Richard Hell and the Voidoids Walking Out On Love (Collins) originally performed by The Breakaways Indian Summer (Johnson, Lewis, Lunsford) originally performed by Beat Happening All recordings presented with the permission of the performers. All rights reserved. Unauthorized duplication is a violation of applicable laws. Live recordings (C)(P) 2015

1. What Time is Love? (LP Mix) - The KLF 2. Make it Mine (v 1.0 Progress Mix) - The Shamen 3. Blue Eyed Pop (S1000 Mix) - The Sugarcubes 4. Love Baby - Fortran 5 5. Break 4 Love (Razormaid! Mix) - Raze 6. The Beginning (Roundabout Mix) - Seal 7. Walking Away (S.M.D. Mix) - Information Society 8. Don't Tell Me (Dance Remix) - Blancmange 9. Snappy (12" Remix) - Erasure 10. Beat of Life - Anything Box 11. Je T'aime (Extended Mix) - Vicious Pink 12. Bitter Heart (Razormaid! Mix) - Seona Dancing 13. Regret (The Fire Island Mix) - New Order 14. So Weit Wie Noch Nie (Erlend Oye Mix) - Jurgen Paape 15. The Caterpillar (Flicker Mix) - The Cure   Notes and Other Random Things:  Happy Memorial Day Weekend to all my US listeners and happy regular weekend to everyone else around the globe. The occasion here in the states marks a time of sun, friends, family, icy beverages and plumes of smoke wafting from the grills and barbeque pits of backyards everywhere. But it also marks a time of quiet reflection and giving thanks to the men and women in the Armed Forces who have served our country and have, in some cases, given their lives to protect our shores. It is thanks to their bravery and their willingness to put everything on the line that the rest of us have the freedom to over-eat, get sloppy drunk and moon my television while screaming obscenities at whichever NASCAR event happens to be on. Oh, don't tell me you haven't done it. Anyway, even though it doesn't seem like nearly enough, a heartfelt "Thank You" to all those in uniform. Heroes - all of you. On such a patriotic day for us in the states, and with my being one of its inhabitants, I almost feel guilty including songs with foreign lyrics like Vicious Pink's French-inspired Je T'aime and Jurgen Paape's So Weit Wie Noch Nie. The latter song includes samples from an artist named Daliah Lavi, whose lyric appears in a 1972 track called Vielleicht Schon Morgen. Mind you, I have nothing against the French and the Germans. One makes great fries and the other exceptional gummy bears. It's just that on a day like today, I somehow feel like the whole podcast should be nothing but John Philip Sousa samples sprinkled into a mash-up of The National Anthem and Take Me Out to the Ball Game, you know? But because none of those are 80s tunes (or 90s tunes for that matter) that would never happen. Of course, considering that this podcast sort of strayed from a typically unwavering adherence to the 80s & 90s theme anyway, I suppose I could have chosen that path. For instance, the Jurgen Paape track is actually a 2002 release. It just fit so well with New Order's Regret that I couldn't resist. Also, astute listeners will hear an MC5 sample right at the beginning of the KLF track What Time is Love? Yeah, that's lead singer Rob Tyner screaming, "Kick out the jams, M0+#er Fu(k=r!" And if you listen closely and know well your old people music, you will hear a number of other samples including a highly recognizable "1 ... 2 ... 3 ...4" from the Beatles in the remix of Make it Mine by The Shamen; and "It is time ..." a chopped up sample from Chrissy Hynde of The Pretenders in the track Love Baby by Fortran 5. The original lyric appeared in the song Stop Your Sobbing. Back to the KLF … James Cauty and William Drummond have appeared in an earlier episode of CRC. At that time, I mentioned how musically irreverent they were and how glaringly insubordinate they were to the music industry as a whole. It seemed as if everything they did was merely to get a reaction out of the public or to challenge the accepted definitions of art. One read of their hilarious and very tongue-in-cheek book How to Have a Number One the Easy Way will support that notion, but it doesn’t mean they didn’t pen some very infectious and highly danceable tracks in the process. What Time is Love?, despite dripping with mid-range frequencies, is one of them. Now, pay attention because here are some names that you should know as they helped make the song what it is: Isaac Bello: he’s the guy who does the rapping in the song. Wanda Dee: she’s responsible for the “I wanna see you sweat” lyric And then there are P.P. Arnold and Katie Kisson, who yell “Mu Mu!” at various intervals. How’s that for a resume builder? The Sugarcubes make their second appearance on CRC with the excellent remix of Blue Eyed Pop. As most Bjork fans know, the Icelandic collective is where the pint-sized pop star first gained international acclaim, though she had been involved in music from a very young age, even recording her first album at age 11. She has also had a brilliant solo career and contributed vocals to the song QMart on the 808 State album Ex:el. This mix of Blue Eyed Pop was done by S1000. The DJ/production duo consisted of Mike Koglin and Spencer Williams. Koglin has gone on to become a very prominent trance DJ and producer these days, running his own record imprint called Noys Music. To those younger listeners with a larger familiarity with the trance scene, he had a huge club hit in 1998 with a track called The Silence, which was a reworking of Depeche Mode’s Enjoy the Silence.  Raze were conceived by American producer Vaughn Mason with singer Keith Thompson contributing vocals. Though Break 4 Love was released in 1988, Thompson also did the vocal honors on a track called Jack the Groove in 1986. That song was one of the very first house music chart topping tracks in the UK, creeping into the top 20 at one point. The Pet Shop Boys and Peter Rauhofer, who also performed under the name Club 69, did a cover of Break 4 Love in 2001. Using the name The Collaboration, the track appears on the bonus disc of the album Release and as a b-side to the second disc of their single Home and Dry. The Razormaid! version here is pretty filthy at points, thus the Explicit tag on this podcast. It’s a pretty muddy, steamy affair anyway, but some of the samples might make you squirm a bit if you’re within earshot of your parents while listening. Why on earth you would put yourself into that predicament anyway is beyond me. Then again, as the guy who just admitted he moons his television, I probably don't have much room to judge. You probably don’t want to play this one around your kids either, unless you’re prepared to answer a LOT of questions. Information Society have appeared on CRC several times in the past and they will appear again in the future. I’ll let the band themselves tell you about this particular track. I’m still trying to figure out what S.M.D. stands for. “This was the 2nd single released off the ‘first’ album. It did almost as well as What's On Your Mind, getting to #9 in the top 40 in the fall of '88. The video got a lot of MTV airplay. We had a big problem with this one in the studio. When we were mixing, and we got to the vocals, they sounded distorted in a very strange manner. Of course, the first thing we did was to solo the vocals to hear what was wrong with them. Then we couldn't hear anything wrong with them, so we shook our heads and went back to mixing. Then they sounded distorted again. Only WITH the tracks did they sound distorted. Eventually we realised that the super-heavy TR-808 kick drum sound was creating the ILLUSION of distortion in the vocals, similar to the effect of talking into a fan. We had to remove the super-sub-kick during the vocals sections.” They went on to say, “It was on this single that we began to realise how little control a band, especially a dance band, really has over its re-mixes. We rejected the Shep Pettibone mix outright. It went on the CD anyway. We really didn't like the "The Space Age" samples in the Space Age mix, they stayed.” Hmmmm. I think I’m getting some pretty good ideas about what the S, M, and the D might stand for now! Erasure are no stranger to this podcast nor will they ever be with the sheer volume of catchy dance tracks Andy Bell and Vince Clarke have cobbled together over the twenty-plus years they have been together. Snappy is the b-side to the song Chorus, which appeared on the album of the same name. This 12” mix was produced by uber-producer extraordinaire Martyn Phillips. Fans of Erasure (and Depeche Mode for that matter) might be interested to know that an album collaboration between Vince Clarke (an original member of DM) and Martin Gore is forthcoming. On August 27th of last year, Clark shared via Twitter that he and Gore had recorded a track called “Zaat”, which was to appear on the next Erasure album. The two apparently had enough creative energy together to crank out a full-length. As far as I know, no dates have been set for either release at this point. Last, but not least, I wanted to write a few words about Seona Dancing (pronounced like Shawna). The knowledge has gained a bit of traction with the success of The Office in the UK and all his other pursuits, but Seona Dancing was the musical outlet for one Ricky Gervais when he was but a skinny little gothy/new wavy-looking kid back in the day. They had two single releases: this song and one called More to Lose, but after both achieved only modest (and apparently unofficial) chart positioning, he and friend/bandmate Bill Macrae decided to call it a day in 1984. Gervais is certainly not regretting that move, though any lovers of 80s electronica might beg to differ. As a side note, if you have small kids, do yourself a favor and don't let them listen to Break 4 Love. Did I already say that? In all seriousness though, get Ricky's excellent Flanimals series of children’s books. I happened to pick up the first one a few days ago and it’s really quite funny. It’s a brief biography of a bunch of non-sensical creatures with non-sensical names along with descriptions of their habits and behavioral traits. It’s a very entertaining read, I must admit. I also must admit I think I bought it more for myself than for anyone else. Hey, I do an 80s podcast. What kind of maturity level do you think you’re dealing with here? Thanks to everyone for listening. I hope to be back again soon with another episode. In the meantime, enjoy this one and be sure to support the artists you like. Without their efforts, none of this is possible.   

Stop Your Sobbing You may recognize the headline above as a famous '60s song written by the Kinks. However, when GM exited from bankruptcy last year it almost turned that hallowed tune on its head. With brands being jettisoned left and right, "Stop Your SAABBING" -- recorded by Big Ed & The Board -- seemed like the song Detroit was ready to export to Trollhattan, Sweden, home of the iconic motor company SAAB. And as word of its impending doom grew you could practically hear the cries from the Swedish automaker's loyal community for a white knight to save their favorite cars. But instead of resolution came the teeter- totering spectacle where one moment the the brand was saved by some international buyer, while the next the doors were being locked for good. Yet in the end, Dutch businessman Victor Muller rode in to save the day on a white hand-built Spyker C8 Aileron Spyder and stopped all the potential sobbing with his purchase of SAAB. And now the resurrection begins. But how can a car company that sold less than 9,000 vehicles last year in America be reborn? For those answers and details on the plan itself join John McElroy and his Autoline panel -- Todd Lassa of Motor Trend and Jeff Bennett from the Wall Street Journal -- as they talk SAAB with Mike Colleran the man in charge.

Stop Your SobbingYou may recognize the headline above as a famous '60s song written by the Kinks. However, when GM exited from bankruptcy last year it almost turned that hallowed tune on its head. With brands being jettisoned left and right, "Stop Your SAABBING" -- recorded by Big Ed & The Board -- seemed like the song Detroit was ready to export to Trollhattan, Sweden, home of the iconic motor company SAAB. And as word of its impending doom grew you could practically hear the cries from the Swedish automaker's loyal community for a white knight to save their favorite cars. But instead of resolution came the teeter- totering spectacle where one moment the the brand was saved by some international buyer, while the next the doors were being locked for good.Yet in the end, Dutch businessman Victor Muller rode in to save the day on a white hand-built Spyker C8 Aileron Spyder and stopped all the potential sobbing with his purchase of SAAB. And now the resurrection begins. But how can a car company that sold less than 9,000 vehicles last year in America be reborn?For those answers and details on the plan itself join John McElroy and his Autoline panel -- Todd Lassa of Motor Trend and Jeff Bennett from the Wall Street Journal -- as they talk SAAB with Mike Colleran the man in charge.