A bit of all-out guitar rock from 1998.

The band’s third (equal) biggest UK hit at no 9.

This is a track from Lindisfarne’s first album Nicely Out of Tune, my favourite track on there, but I’ve not been able to feature it before as I couldn’t previously find an embeddable example.

I have a thing about lyrics. You know this. (Maybe I’m a frustrated song-writer.)

I particularly like the rhyming in this one but the overall lyric has some great lines.

Who hasn’t been in the situation, “So we sat and watched each other through the fading firelight
Each one waiting for the silence to be broken”? Those lines just ache for resolution.

“The spittle from his twisted lips ran down to his bow-tie,” (and bow-tie rhymed with ‘eye’ and ‘deny’) is nothing short of inspired as is also in the last verse, “Teachers from whose hallowed mouths great pearls of wisdom crawl,” where the emphasis provided by the internal rhymes in, “The joke is on the bloke who never spoke a word at all,” hammers the song’s point home.

Add in the fact that the last line of each verse is not just foreshadowed but fore-ordained by the word immediately preceding, “And the things I should have said,” and you have a lyrical masterpiece.

2019 kept taking away till the very end. Not content with removing Alasdair Gray from us it managed to take Neil Innes on the same day.

It was only four months ago I featured his big hit with The Bonzo DogDoo-Dah Band, I’m the Urban Spaceman.

That was the least of the band’s eccentricities. Innes contributed the most bizarre guitar solo to the utterly indescribable Canyons of Your Mind. Try out this video from the BBC’s Colour Me Pop for size.

Innes’s Beatles parodies for Rutland Weekend Television and subsequent recordings as The Rutles were sublime. The haunting Let’s Be Natural is the perfect example.

Neil James Innes: 9/12/1944 – 29/12/2019. So it goes.

It’s not often you get a song with a title in Greek, or with part of its lyric in Greek, appearing in the charts.

But Mr Mister did exactly that with this song’s title and chorus.

The recording is still very much an eighties production, though.

Merry Christmas one and all.

This song was on Tull’s Christmas album in a remastered form but originally appeared on Songs From the Wood. This, the earlier version, sounds warmer to me.

One of the few black British entertainers – one of the few black faces – to appear on British television in the early 1960s, belonged to Kenny Lynch, who has died this week.

There were US acts of course, such as Sammy Davis Jr, Nat King Cole and Harry Belafonte and Blues and Motown artistes would feature on shows such as Ready, Steady Go! and Top of the Pops but as for British performers Lynch was just about it.

There were quite a few strings to Lynch’s bow, singing on variety shows, popping up on game shows – always with a cheerful demeanour – and he also had a career as an actor but among other songs Lynch wrote Sha La La La La Lee which became a hit for the Small Faces. He was also the first singer to cover a Beatles song (Misery.)

This is his joint biggest UK hit. On it Lynch sounds a bit like Sam Cooke. No small praise.

Kenneth Lynch: 18/3/1938 – 18/12/2019. So it goes.

Marie Fredriksson, half of Swedish pop/rock duo Roxette, died earlier this week after a long illness occasioned by a brain tumour from which she had seemed to recover but which unfortunately recurred.

Roxette’s œuvre was one of those which you recognise when you hear them but maybe can’t quite put your finger on fully. Or is that just my age? Their songs tended however to be accomplished and reasonably well-polished.

This one was a no 1 all over the rest of Europe but reached only no 4 in the UK.

Gun-Marie Fredriksson: 30/5/1958–9/12/2019. So it goes.

There hasn’t been an Elvis Presley record in any of my music posts – until now: mainly because I was never a particular fan of his.

This song, however, is worth a listen.

For comparison purposes here is the original version of the song by its writer (F Zambon if you can make out the record label) singing as Mark James. I assume that Zambon had to give up most of the rights to this for Elvis to record it. His manager, Colonel Parker, was notoriously sharkish in that regard.

A follow-up to Don’t Let it Die, this song only reached no. 4 in the UK compared to Smith’s previous no. 2, but was a big hit in the US.

Smith’s idiosyncratic “cracked” singing voice was certainly distinctive but his first two singles represent the summit of his recording career.

The writing credit on this is to Hurricane’s wife, Eileen Sylvia Smith (see link above.)

This was the first single from Clutching at Straws, Marillion’s last album before the departure of Fish. The band’s sound had by this time become more polished, less raw than on Script for a Jester’s Tear and Fugazi and a concept album like its predecessor Misplaced Childhood. Dealing as it did though with the exigencies of pop stardom and lifestyle indulgence it had the potential to be alienating. The single did reach no 6 in the UK though. (And no 24 in the US.)

I assume this is the video made at the time:-