Groove On 13

This is Bella’s radio for the lockdown – an hour and a half of tunes from Stewart Bremner. Listen to them all here.

It’s Groove On Episode (unlucky) 13. However it’s only unlucky for one man: Roger Thornhill. After he’s mistaken for George Kaplan, his life is totally overturned and he ends up on a wild chase across the USA in Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest. The soundtrack is by Bernard Herrmann and moments from that will feature in between songs all through this episode.

The first song is ‘Keep Your Soul Together’, recorded by jazz trumpeter Freddie Hubbard in 1973. It is followed by ‘Across 110th Street’, the funky and grittily real main them from the film of the same name, composed and performed by Bobby Womack.

More songs from the beginning of the seventies follow. The very righteous ‘My People… Hold On’ is by The Temptations founder Eddie Kendricks and ‘The Desert Is A Circle’ is by Shades Of Joy (who weren’t really a band), although sometimes it’s said to be have been by film director Alejandro Jodorowsky (who at best might only have composed it).

We move forward now, first to 1978 for a small excerpt from Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version Of The War Of The Worlds called ‘The Artilleryman Returns’ and then into the eighties, for the New Romantic hit ‘Planet Earth’ by Duran Duran and then The Cure’s ‘A Forest’, although in this instance it’s the 1990 mix of the song called the ‘Tree Mix’.

Next we head into the nineties for ‘Many Tentacles Pimping On The Keys’ by Lo-Fidelity Allstars, a ‘big beat’ band who recorded for Skint records when the label was the trend-setter for that musical style. Progenitors of that musical style where The Chemical Brothers and we have a highlight from their debut album Exit Planet Dust, called ‘Three Little Birdies Down Beats’.

The Jackson 5 follow with exactly the sort of long, funky, stripped-back performance we never associate them with on ‘Hum Along And Dance’ from 1973.

The last two songs of this episode bring in the guitars. First up is ’Warzone City’ by H P Zinker, who were a three-piece part-Austrian band playing in New York in the early nineties. The last track is ‘Where The Flavor Is’ by Mudhoney, from their excellent album Since We’ve Become Translucent, which is about the most worthy successor to The Stooges Fun House that you might ever hear.

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  1. The Barrastinian says:

    Thank you Stewart for another great selection.

    From the absurdly heavy to the heavily absurd The Melvins were a big influence in the grunge scene.

    Crank. It. Up.

    1. Stewart Bremner says:

      Nice. I’ve never got round to listening to the Melvins, even though I know I really ought to have.

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