Take enough time to study them and musical genres are easy to understand. Not so Balearic. Why, for example, is the latter-day bohemian folk of Edie Brickell’s Circles a Balearic classic? It’s because Alfredo, the original Balearic definer (and likewise many who followed), had such a refined, catholic taste - rock, disco, AOR, MOR, punk, funk, soul, reggae etc, etc ad infinitum - that, unlike any other genre, it just means class. And Circles has that in abundance.
When common or garden folk are in a mood they smoke a fag or kick the cat. Not Isaac Hayes. He just goes out and records Ike’s Mood, one of the sweetest, most epic pieces of soul ever made (and, as a consequence, one of the most sampled). It’s so darned good he didn’t even need to sing on it… maybe that’s why he was in a mood.
It’s a mystery why the swamp-infested psychedelic blues-folk of James Luther Dickinson’s Dixie Fried isn’t considered a masterpiece save by a select few. He later become a much sought-after producer. This 1972 album and its grand opus O How She Dances shows that a life often only tells half the story.
Hacienda DJ MIke Pickering was right when he likened Derrick May’s Strings Of Life to a symphony. It’s hardly surprising then that a classical pianist should have chosen to reinterpret it. That classical pianist is Francesco Tristano, a man who, with Carl Craig and Moritz von Oswald, later formed one of the world’s most high-brow supergroups.
Folks of the 70s, you have a lot to answer for. Not least the lunatic critical and commercial rejection of Gene Clark’s LP No Other. “Gram Parsons once expressed a dream of creating Cosmic American Music. No Other was the real thing.“ Strength Of Strings is No Other’s beating heart.
You can almost forgive Genesis all those awful 70s album covers (not to mention the soporific, A Level art school tunes found inside them) for one track: The Brazilian. Or you could pretend it wasn’t them at all. Perhaps they took the day off and let David Sylvian and some obscure Belgian New Beat band finish off the otherwise dire Invisible Touch. Yes, it’s that good.
One very wise journalist hit the nail on the head when he wrote that Simon Jeffes, Penguin Cafe Orchestra’s founder, “made World music from an alternate universe, composing jingles, folk tunes and even a ballet”. PCO made some very famous music (like this and this) yet to delve deep into this alternate universe you really do need The Sound Of Someone You Love Who’s Going Away And It Doesn’t Matter.
“This sounds like it was recorded in a bus shelter, and is all the better for it.” Tracks like The Groupies’ Primitive prove there’s hope for us all. All you need is a garage, a pen, a scrap of paper, a Betamax camcorder, a pair of scissors or a beaten-up piano to make great art. Amen to that.
Perhaps Black Sabbath were the greatest metal band ever but with Planet Caravan they showed they could psych(edelic)-out the best of them. Listen to Ozzie’s historically hypnotic Leslie speaker-ised vocals and it’s easy to understand why, 30 years later, he ended up playing the clown on MTV. This man ‘suffered’ for his art.
Jon’s lucky he teamed up with Vangelis. Otherwise he’d have the least memorable name in music*. But he did and for that we should be full of gratitude. What other pair could get away with the 11 minutes of opulent idiosyncrasy - film star impersonations, Weimar vocals and a pseudo operatic breakdown - that is The Friends Of Dr Cairo? Run-of-the-mill stuff this is not.
* Unless he used his full name (Jon Anderson) and then he could be a prog rock legend.
