LEE PAYNE

Tag: john

  • 30 for 30 – songs that bring back memories

    My 21st birthday, 2013

    I’ll be 30 on 25th August – despite my protestations about not being done with my 20s yet. Anyway, the other night I made a playlist of songs that hold memories for me in my life so far. These are not necessarily favourites (I haven’t listened to Cher for a while, I have to say), but ones that take me back to a particular time and place. I hope you find a song you really like here, and look out for the links that look like this – clicking on them will give some extra information about what I’m banging on about.

    SNAP! – Rhythm Is A Dancer

    The number one single in the UK on the day I was born, 25th August 1992.

    Scatman John – Scatman (ski-ba-bop-ba-dop-bop)

    My mum won a hifi system in a radio competition, the kind that would have been way out of our price range, and somehow it ended up in my bedroom. I remember listening to this song on it and being fascinated by it.

    Cher – Believe

    Brings back memories of being driven around Norwich by my mum with this blasting out very loudly.

    Cartoons – Witch Doctor

    Hearing it now, this song is completely ridiculous – but I can definitely remember hearing it at home, where we had it on CD. Some people had Abbey Road… I think it sounds a bit like Scatman John in terms of playing around with mouth sounds, so there could be a link there.

    Dario G – Carnaval de Paris

    Originally released for the 1998 World Cup, though I have no memory of that tournament (2002 was the first one I can recall). This was actually used by Sky Sports as the theme tune to their Premier League coverage in the early 2000s, and that’s where I remember it from.

    Heather Small – Proud

    We all sang in this in the school hall on our last day at Norman First in July 2000. Corny? Yes. Memorable? Definitely.

    U2 – Beautiful Day

    You’ll notice a trend of songs I remember from being theme tunes to TV shows. This was what ITV used for their highlights programme The Premiership, when they briefly held the rights away from the BBC’s Match of the Day in the early 2000s.

    MIKA – Grace Kelly

    A massive hit in 2007, this seemed to be on the radio every morning on the way to school. I was surprised to see MIKA turn up as one of the hosts of this year’s Eurovision – I’d not heard a peep from him for years.

    The Killers – Read My Mind

    I remember listening to this a lot when I was at sixth form – 2008 to 2010. Seeing The Killers perform it live at Carrow Road in June this year was a special moment.

    Arctic Monkeys – Brianstorm

    There will be a lot of Arctic Monkeys on this list – after all, they’re my favourite band. The first album of theirs I actually owned on CD was their second, Favourite Worst Nightmare. This song was track one.

    Arctic Monkeys – I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor

    Their first single and the Arctic Monkeys song I reckon most people will have heard of.

    Alex Turner – Piledriver Waltz

    My Arctic Monkeys obsession led to me discovering Submarine, which is my favourite film. Arctics frontman Alex Turner did the soundtrack and this is my favourite song from it.

    Arctic Monkeys – Black Treacle

    Reminds me of driving backwards and forwards between Norfolk and Essex when I was at university. This is from their 2011 album Suck It and See.

    Pulp – Do You Remember The First Time?

    I can’t remember the first time I heard this song but it always stops me in my tracks when I hear it. Makes me feel nostalgic and sentimental. It’s between this and Babies for my favourite Pulp song.

    Arctic Monkeys – Cornerstone

    Probably my favourite of all Arctic Monkeys songs and one that reminds me of an unrequited love.

    Depeche Mode – Just Can’t Get Enough

    Was played a lot at Carrow Road during the years Paul Lambert was manager (2009 to 2012). Some of the happiest and most successful times Norwich City have had in my lifetime.

    Grandaddy – A.M. 180

    The theme tune to Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe, a programme I have seen many, many times over and still go back to now and again.

    Harvey Danger – Flagpole Sitta

    The theme tune to Peep Show. I first saw the sitcom starring David Mitchell and Robert Webb in a Media Studies lesson at school, oddly enough, but I loved it and have seen every episode more times than is healthy.

    Morning Runner – Gone Up In Flames

    Another TV theme tune – this one is from The Inbetweeners. The sitcom about four lads and their time at sixth form was broadcast exactly when I was at sixth form myself and, I can tell you, it was very realistic.

    The Wombats – Anti-D

    I spent a fair bit of time as a uni student being miserable – this song was released around that time and I can remember listening to it in my more self-indulgent moments in the room I rented in a lady’s house a short walk from the college.

    Cage The Elephant – Shake Me Down

    Another song I can remember hearing a lot during my time at uni.

    Underworld – Caliban’s Dream

    I watched every minute of the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics and can remember being spellbound by this song. They were a great Olympics and they happened just a month or so after my mum and I moved to a little terraced house in Dereham. Happy times.

    Arctic Monkeys – Do I Wanna Know?

    From the fifth Arctic Monkeys album AM, released in 2013. An absolute banger – I saw them live in their native Sheffield in 2018 and this sounded amazing.

    Foster The People – Pumped Up Kicks

    For a little while, I taught my friend to drive in the empty Sainsbury’s car park after work on a Sunday. Our musical tastes were very different. This is one of the only songs we both liked so we played it a lot while she was driving around.

    Arctic Monkeys – One Point Perspective

    Arctic Monkeys finally released a new album in 2018, their first for five years. This masterpiece is my favourite track from it.

    Joe Cocker – With A Little Help From My Friends

    As I mentioned before, I saw Arctic Monkeys live at Sheffield Arena in 2018. This song was played over the speakers just after the gig had finished and the audience were filing out. It reminds me of the complete euphoria of seeing my favourite band in the flesh for the first time.

    Talking Heads – Take Me to the River

    A more recent memory, I can recall driving around listening to this song, just driving for the hell of it and lost in thought.

    Blossoms – Your Girlfriend

    I first heard Blossoms in 2016, when their single Charlemagne was played a lot on Radio X. I really got into them when I heard this song for the first time, sitting in my car at work during my lunch break a few years ago. They are now one of my favourite bands and I’ve got tickets to see them live in Norwich this November.

    The Rolling Stones – She’s A Rainbow

    During the first Covid lockdown, the Wednesday night trip to the pub was replaced by drinks and music in the living room. This song was one of the highlights.

    The Turtles – Elenore

    Another lockdown discovery, and in my opinion the funniest love song ever written.

    If you’ve got this far, thanks very much! This was just a bit of fun for myself really. If you want to carry these songs around with you, I put them in a Spotify playlist.

  • Listen To This: AM by Arctic Monkeys

    Listen To This: AM by Arctic Monkeys

    AM album cover

    Yes, I’m writing about Arctic Monkeys again. To go with my pieces on their first, second and sixth albums, I am going to take you track-by-track through the record that cracked America for the four-piece from Sheffield.

    One of the things I admire so much about Alex Turner, Jamie Cook, Nick O’Malley and Matt Helders is how they have evolved over time. They have never been afraid to go in a completely different direction and, to them, making the same music over and over again is a crime. Listen to their first hit single, 2005’s I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor, and One Point Perspective, my favourite track from the 2018 album Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, and you can scarcely believe that the two songs were written and recorded by the same band.

    By the time AM was released on 9th September 2013, Arctic Monkeys had transformed from the scruffy indie kids in baggy jeans they were when they started out to rockers with slicked-back hair and leather jackets. The music had gone through a similar process.

    In an interview with BBC Radio 1 at the time of release, frontman Alex Turner said:

    “…it feels like this record is exactly where we should be right now. So it felt right to just initial it.”

    AM was born – with more than a nod to VU, released in 1985 by the Velvet Underground.

    Track list (click on one to listen)

    Do I Wanna Know?
    R U Mine?
    One For The Road
    Arabella
    I Want It All
    No. 1 Party Anthem
    Mad Sounds
    Fireside
    Why’d You Only Call Me When You’re High?
    Snap Out Of It
    Knee Socks
    I Wanna Be Yours

    The album’s opening track Do I Wanna Know? features what I consider to be one of the great guitar riffs. If you happen to be walking somewhere listening to it through headphones, I promise that you will feel approximately 94% cooler than you really are. The song is about unrequited love, how difficult it is to move on when you’ve been obsessed with someone and ponders whether the narrator really wants to know ‘if this feeling flows both ways’ or not.

    Another reason why this band means so much to me is that I really identify with the lyrics. There’s a line in the song – ‘maybe I’m too busy being yours to fall for somebody new’ – that completely nails how I’ve felt in the past, in a way that I hadn’t been able to figure out for myself up to that point. Do I Wanna Know? was the first Arctic Monkeys song to make the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the US and was the opener to every gig the band played when touring the album. If you’re a fan of Peaky Blinders you might recognise it too.

    The band wanted to make a record that sounded good in a car and after that strong start they follow it up with R U Mine?, which sounds a bit like an up-tempo version of Do I Wanna Know?. The rapidly delivered lyrics are about missing the object of your desires and having a sincere feeling that every moment spent without them is wasted. The video for the song won the NME award for Best Video:

    The award winning video for R U Mine?

    One For The Road is the first example on the album of the continuing influence of Josh Homme on Arctic Monkeys. The frontman of Queens of the Stone Age first worked with the Monkeys on their third album Humbug and has been close to them ever since. In this song, you get the sense that Homme – who features on vocals – is moving their sound away from their native Sheffield and towards a kind of Americana. This was not a popular move among some of the fans but, for me, it’s really good if done well – which it is here.

    “And when she needs to shelter from reality she takes a dip in my daydreams”

    — Lyric from Arabella

    Alex Turner would introduce a performance of the fourth track from the album by informing the crowd ‘I want to tell you about a girl called Arabella!’. The lyrics are poetic, full of metaphors and a sign of how Turner’s songwriting has matured from, as he put it, ‘pointing at things and talking about them’ to speaking more from within. The song is essentially all about how awesome the aforementioned Arabella is.

    I Want It All and Mad Sounds are as close as this album gets to filler – very listenable songs, both achieve the aim of sounding great in the car – but just not particularly ground breaking. Between those tracks sits No. 1 Party Anthem, the obligatory ‘slow’ number on the album. I’m not sure why, but it feels to me like a bit of a tribute to the band’s debut single I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor. It contains some cracking lyrics too, my favourite being ‘It’s not like I’m falling in love, I just want you to do me no good/And you look like you could’. The performance of it at Reading festival in 2014 was a highlight of their set.

    No. 1 Party Anthem live at Reading Festival in 2014

    Take in Fireside for its tale of how love can be unpredictable, the much-covered Why’d You Only Call Me When You’re High? for its story of frustration and try to get over that special someone with Snap Out Of It.

    Knee Socks is another song featuring the voice of Josh Homme, which might explain why I’ve always found it very similar to One For The Road.

    Most people would agree that Arctic Monkeys is a terrible name for a band. The story goes that it was guitarist Jamie Cook who came up with it but they were always looking to change it, until the performance poet John Cooper Clarke was apparently the first person to say he actually liked it. Clarke had always been a hero of Alex Turner’s, which isn’t surprising what with his proficiency with language, and performed at the Sheffield bar Turner was working in one night. Turner plucked up the courage to tell Clarke about the band he was part of and Clarke said ‘that’s a name I can imagine in the hit parade!’. The name has stuck ever since, and one of Clarke’s poems was slightly tweaked to turn it into the closing song on AM.

    I Wanna Be Yours, with its quirky lyrics including ‘let me be your vacuum cleaner, breathing in your dust’, seems the perfect way to finish off the record – it’s a love song, but one that’s down to earth and not too mushy. And for a brooding, confident album there seems no better ending.

  • #GoodStuff – a few things I’ve been enjoying despite all of this

    There’s a lot going on at the moment that can really get you down. If the coronavirus pandemic wasn’t enough, keeping us away from our family and friends, ruining our plans and making us worry, then the events in the US over the last week or so have only added to the load.

    I am a big Twitter user. I find it useful to keep up with what’s going on, connect with a wide range of people and to try to get my writing seen. However, I find it really difficult to avoid getting into arguments on there. With the topic of race right back at the top of the world agenda, I’ve been coming to blows with some who I feel have truly abhorrent views.

    To drag myself out of that particular tunnel I have started something called #GoodStuff, where I share things that have made me laugh, smile or simply made this whole situation easier to deal with over the last couple of months. Here are my first selections.

    Mark Church’s Garden Cricket

    When sport is your thing, a global virus pandemic bringing the whole thing to a sudden halt for a while is tough. Football and cricket are my two biggest loves and there hasn’t been any live action to watch in this country since March – except in Mark Church’s garden.

    Mark Church is the cricket commentator for BBC London. Usually at this time of year he’d be busy reporting on all of Surrey’s matches, but the coronavirus has left him with a bit more time on his hands.

    He’s been playing in his garden, against his garden furniture. A full schedule of five Test matches, five One Day Internationals and some upcoming Twenty20 games. Some might describe the whole thing as one man’s slow descent into insanity but, trust me, it will put a smile on your face.

    From the kid’s scooter taking a quick single to the rain delay musings of presenter ‘Roy Broadcaster’ to the day/night matches, it’s been a joy. Follow him on Twitter and subscribe to his YouTube channel.

    Blossoms making music in isolation

    This week I should have seen Blossoms supporting The Killers at Carrow Road, but that’s been rescheduled for next year for obvious reasons. I’ve been a fan of the Stockport band for a while and loved Foolish Loving Spaces, their third album, released in January.

    They haven’t let the fact that they’ve been locked down in different places stop them making music, though. They have recorded some of their own songs and a few covers in isolation, and the results have been incredible.

    My favourite is their cover of Tame Impala’s The Less I Know The Better, with Miles Kane from The Last Shadow Puppets. It sounds great, you’d never know they were recording their individual parts – and at one point drummer Joe Donovan plays a potato peeler. Have a listen.


    Elis and John’s Isolation Tapes

    I’ve been a big fan of Elis James and John Robins for about three years now. At the time, they presented the 1pm-4pm slot on a Saturday on Radio X and the start of their show would coincide with me driving home from work.

    I really liked how the show was basically two mates having a chat. They talked about all kinds of stuff, and it never felt forced or fake. They’re both comedians by trade, Robins an Edinburgh festival fringe comedy award winner and James a proud Welshman who now does a lot of gigs in the Welsh language.

    I started listening to the podcasts of their radio show and have done ever since. I went to see them at the UEA in 2018 when they released a book and did a tour of the country to promote it. At the end, I even got my copy signed!

    My signed book

    Last year they moved to BBC Radio 5 Live and during the pandemic they’ve been recording extra episodes called The Isolation Tapes. I’ve found them a wonderful slice of normality amidst the chaos.

    #514 – Chinese Geese, Caribbean Soaks and Emre Can Headspace – Elis James and John Robins

    It’s limbs in the studio as a box of brownies and a couple of books have lifted Elis out of a funk. What great news for bookworms with low blood sugar. But the internal glucose alarm isn’t the only one going off as a fire alert causes chaos. We also get psychological as the boys unpick the idea of the inner monologue, and with that the terrifying engine steering John under the bonnet. Would Freud enjoy this? Potentially. Would it frighten him? Almost certainly. And from brains to bodies, the show gets panned as the least erotic thing possible, whilst we have a couple of fantastically zoological Mad Dads.It’s elisandjohn@bbc.co.uk or 07974 293022 on WhatsApp if you’ve got any comments on the above. But please nothing too close to the erotic bone. Keep it PG.
    1. #514 – Chinese Geese, Caribbean Soaks and Emre Can Headspace
    2. #513 – John Laughter, Alan Giggles and Pierre Novellie
    3. #512 – Stasi Mealtime, Clown Stance and There’s A Lot Going On With You
    4. #511 – Chorister Humour, The Veg Guesser and What a Husband!
    5. #510 – It’s Not A Drawer, Creosote i Bumry and The Spirit of Shelford

    I hope you’ve enjoyed looking at some of the things that have been keeping me going during this difficult time. Stay safe everyone.