Mathematical Institute Bulletin: Song of the Week

It's a chilly night in Stockholm in 1966 and the Small Faces are in town. Check out the young girl dancing at 1.39.

Madonna Ciccone is in trouble. Two fans are suing her for coming on stage two hours late. They should count themselves lucky. For those of us old enough to have been to gigs in the last Millennium, two hours is positively early. 

There is much Madonna from which to chose, but your Song of the Week editor, being old, has a soft post for 'Borderline'. Mainly because it is fab.

When Mark E Smith, founder  of the Fall, heard Coldcut's track 'My Telephone' he thought the guitar, bass and drums fine, but the words, vocals and all the rest of it, rubbish. So he rewrote it (and made it about phone tapping). Smith could be awkward to say the least, and his vocal style (you'd hesitate to call it singing) singular, but he could also be compelling.

This is a traditional English folk song arranged by English 20th century composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. In it a young man's grief over the death of his true love is so deep that it disturbs her eternal sleep and she tells him to live his life.

When his record company told avant-garde musician Anthony Moore that his work was not commercial enough he wasn't happy. Or rather he was Slapp Happy, the name he gave to his new band with their deliberately commercial sound.  The band became less commercial subsequently but not before songs such as 'Blue Flower' bloomed. Dagmar Krause provides the distinctive voice.

Shane McGowan of the Pogues died last week. Aside from all the articles about self-destructive genius and the relentless playing of 'Fairytale of New York' over the next few weeks, it's worth remembering that the Pogues' first three albums are well worth a listen.

Incidentally he went to the same private school (Westminster) as Conrad Shawcross though he was expelled for possessing and selling drugs. Shane that is, not Conrad.

The Reverend Al Green tells it how it is.

If you are new to opera the Marriage of Figaro is a perfect place to start: satire, silliness and songs. This is the overture where Mozart sets the mood.

This track is taken from the album There's a Riot Goin' On, where Sly Stone moved away from the upbeat soul of the sixties and filled the sound with a downbeat, hazy instrumentation and vocal. Apparently he wasn't feeling great at the time. Critics think it is great though. Such is art.

Some pieces of music are very familiar, but the composer not known. 'Fanfare' was written by American composer Aaron Copland in 1942 in the wake of his country's entry in to the Second World War.

Written in the late sixteenth century, this song is typical of Dowland's melancoly ways. But is also catchy. An Elizabethan pop song perhaps.

Steven Rickards is the counter-tenor, Dorothy Linell plays the lute.

So famous you've never heard of them, Fanny were one of the first all-female rock bands. This track is a cover of a Beatles song (who you probably have heard of). It is from an episode of Beat Club, the legendary German sixties and seventies music programme. It has a treasure trove of performances from the period.

Reworking your old material is risky - not just in music - but when Gene Clark turned this track from a speedy psychedelic Byrds song in to a country rock ballad he produced something very different and very tender. Much feted now, it never really happened for Gene as a solo artist in his lifetime. A familiar story.

Ask your local chatbot to tell you about the Slits and it will gleefully splutter words like 'disruptive' and 'anarchic'. But in its excitement, it might omit 'pretty good'. Which they were, right down to the drumming from non-girl Budgie.

The music starts at 1.15, but meet the typical girls first.

The Clash didn't have much time for love songs. Too much social discontent, revolution and nuclear fear going on. And when they did, in the case of 'Train in Vain', it wasn't even listed on the album. It just appeared at the end of one side. Turned out okay though.

'Steal Away' is a 19th century spiritual composed by Wallace Willis, a slave of a Choctaw freedman. These songs often contained hidden messages about joining the Underground Railroad which took the slaves to freedom in the north, as seems the case in the lyrics of this track. It is now a gospel staple, here in the mellifluous tones of Sam Cooke.

A couple of you (and only a couple) have asked about a list of previous 'Songs of the Week'. If you search under 'Song of the Week' on the website it will bring up the list.

What's all the fuss about AI and robots? Kraftwerk predicted it over 40 years ago with the Computer World album. Here they are singing about the loneliness of home computer life and online dating. Earlier they had imagined robots playing their gigs. They eventually did.

ChatGPT's favourite band?

Sometimes a piece of music is so familiar you don't listen to it. Sergei Rachmaninoff's second piano concerto is one example, not least because of its appearance in films and other artists' work. But forget all that and listen to a romantic masterpiece. This is the adagio played by Georgian pianist Khatia Buniatishvili.

PS: Sergei is 150 this year.

If you are ever at a loose end you could always download the hundreds of studio and live albums made by jazz musician Miles Davis as he travelled (and led) the jazz landscape from the late 40s to the 80s.

This track is one of the first recordings he ever made.

Some nihilism for the weekend courtesy of one of the first recordings made by the original Buzzcocks line-up on 28th December 1976. Given that boredom was one of the themes of punk's 'rebellion', including against the 'boring' 15 minute album tracks of the time, you might think this fitted perfectly. But in fact it is about boredom with the punk movement itself even though it was only a few months old in the UK.

The guitar solo features two notes repeated 66 times.

Hip-hop is 50 this month. The story goes that it began when Cindy Campbell hosted a jam in the rec room of 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx to raise money to buy school clothes (you can do take a hip-hop tour of key locations). Hip hop has blurred into and inspired many other genres, notably rap and drill, but at its heart is the DJ, the MC and the B-boys and B-girls (dancers) as well as the graffiti (think New York subway trains).

The album that was trashed at the time only to be considered a classic years later. Yes, a staple of music (and all art for that matter).

Dexy's Midnight Runners were riding high after the success of 'Come on Eileen'. Cue band leader Kevin Rowland changing their look and their luck. This song from the subsequent album 'Don't Stand Me Down' (most critics did) is actually 12 minutes long (and better) but this is the short version. They are still around to tell the tale.

'Uptight' is the song that rescued 15-year-old Stevie Wonder's career (yes, you can be washed up at 15). It is also the first song he co-wrote. Motown songwriters Sylvia Moy and Henry Cosby were his co-writers. And check out the drumming by Benny Benjamin.

The BBC Proms have recently started, nearly two months of music at the Royal Albert Hall in London, largely classical, but not exclusively. You can listen to it all on BBC Sounds.

Tonight's concert spotlights the Portuguese musical tradition of fado so here is Song of the Week's own piece of fado from one of the stars of the genre which can be traced back over two centuries (two centuries of melancholy and loss as is the fado tradition).

This song is in fact a combination of two songs, both from the Musical 'Hair', but in Nina Simone's hands it is an anthem. And jeez, does she mean it. 

Dateline London, 1968