“Match of the Day’s the only way to spend your Saturday.”

Not at the moment it isn’t.

A song from simpler times. “We paid four hundred thousand pounds for him. You realise that?” Nowadays that wouldn’t go near buying you a top player’s big toe.

Curiously this isn’t the only football reference in a Genesis song (‘a goal can find you a role on a muddy pitch in Newcastle, where it rains so much, you can’t wait for a touch of sun and sand,’ from Mad Man Moon on the Trick of the Tail album.)

This seems to have been Santana’s first hit in the UK though if asked I’d have thought Black Magic Woman or Oye Como Va had got there before it. Memory is a funny thing.

I’ve heard this on the radio several times recently.

It was good to be reminded of it.

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.

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.)

Another from Clifford T Ward. In fact the one I referred to in this category’s 147^th post.

Here’s Clifford in a live BBC TV performance.

Tull in their pomp. An acknowledgement of their bluesy origins in the intro leading into a complete rock-out and then one of Ian Anderson’s trademark flute solos. The mix of blues and rock also pointed to Prog Rock leanings but Tull always denied they ever purveyed Prog.

Edited to add. This video has the LP track overdubbed onto concert footage.

Last week Dr John died.

In his early years known as The Night Tripper, he never troubled the UK charts much. (At all? Well a no. 54 with Right Place, Wrong Time).

I featured Marsha Hunt’s version of Walk on Gilded Splinters – a song from Dr John’s first album Gris Gris – in Friday on my Mind 11.

Hunt’s single was weird enough but Dr John’s original – as I Walk on Guilded Splinters – is even eerier.

Here’s Dr John playing Such a Night live.

Malcolm John Rebennack (Dr John:) 20/11/1941 – 6/6/2019. So it goes.

Yet another from 1970.

The Guess Who were Canadian and had a first success with a cover of the Johnny Kidd and the Pirates hit Shakin’ All Over released by their record label under the name Guess Who, which effectively forced them to accept the new name. Their biggest hit in the UK (at no. 19 apparently equal to its follow-up No Sugar Tonight – which I confess I cannot remember at all) was, though, this song.