State Broadcasters give us five tunes to fill your day

We’ve got five on it!

In what will hopefully become a regular occurrence, we want to find out what sort of music the Glasgow hit-makers take inspiration from.

If we get this going, we will be looking to find out five tracks that matter and up first is Graeme Black from one of our favourite local acts, The State Broadcasters.

The title for this playlist is:
“Five Youtube music videos you can idly peruse during your working day”

In the words of Graeme, “I was idling quite a lot today so I had more than five but we’ll go with this lot!” but we’ll let Graeme do the talking to explain his choices.

1 Bjork – ‘Unravel’

It’s a live performance by Bjork of ‘Unravel’ from The Riverside Chapel in New York. It is utterly astonishing. It has a harp, a laptop and Eskimo choir and Bjork singing without any mike. It doesn’t look like there are a lot of people there, she trots down the aisle. It’s a stop what you’re doing moment, its beautiful, when the Eskimo choir starts singing, she has a cheeky smile like she knows how good it is. Even the crowd look amazed; it would have been phenomenal to be there.

It reminds you of the power music can have.

2 Billy Bragg – ‘Tank Park Salute’

Billy Bragg with ‘Tank Park Salute’, it’s from 91 and this is from a live performance. Me and my friend on that tour went to all 3 Scottish dates. He played Glasgow, Aberdeen, Edinburgh on a Friday, Saturday and Sunday night and it was just a great weekend. Truly memorable, and the London leg was recorded for DVD and it was stuck on DVD.

The song is about Billy Bragg’s dad who had died and the song is incredibly beautiful. There are people who misinterpret Bragg and a tuneless one dimensional character but he is one of the best British songwriters in the past 20 years. He has a phenomenal range of song writing and this shows a different side of him.

We have a song called ‘Archie’s Tears’, its a song about someone losing their dad, not saying it is up there with this track but it has a similar aspiration. The person whose dad it was is the same person I was at these gigs with so I return to it quite a lot.

3 Gillian Welch & David Rawlings – ‘Look At Miss Ohio’

This choice is a Gillian Welch song called ‘Look at Miss Ohio’, which was recorded for BBC. It was recoded in a church in London, St Lukes, so there is maybe a churchy feel to these songs. (We asked if Charlotte Church was up next week but she just missed out on the top 5!)

Gillian, in my opinion, is the best contemporary songwriter of our generation. You had Dylan, Bowie, Morrisey but for me, Gillian is up there, easily as the best songwriter of the past ten years.

It’s a great performance and really aesthetically pleasing to look at. Also, the album it is from, me and my wife used to play it quite a lot when went on camping trips, so it reminds me of driving in a Ford car and listening to it on sunny days. If I need cheering up, it is a song that never fails to hit the mark.

4 Mathroom Mob with Chas and Dave – ‘Snooker Loopy’

Okay, the fourth track is the Matchroom Mob with Chas and Dave, ‘Snooker Loopy’ I just think it’s absolutely brilliant, I love it. Also, it harks back to a more innocent time for sport. These guys were the biggest names in the sport, which was bigger at the time, and to have them do such an amateurish video and things in a song, just wouldn’t happen now.

Barry Hearn, the manager of them all, is in the video. There is a reference in the song to the fact that he signed them all and doesn’t care who wins! If you listen to the lyrics, I’m probably over analysing, it’s so interesting and it just wouldn’t happen these days. It is just a good laugh, if you are into snooker, which I am, look at it. It’s been ripped from a show called the top 100 really bad songs, its number 33…but I clearly don’t agree with that. Chas and Dave are underrated in my opinion.

5 Shane MacGowan & Sinead O’Connor – ‘Haunted’

The last one, I’ve swithered about…but what I’ve decided upon is from a Youtube point of view…there is a song called ‘Haunted’ by Shane MacGowan which he sang with Sinead O’Connor. It was taken from The White Room, hosted by Mark Radcliffe (CBC: We used to love that show until old Terrahawk Jo Wiley got involved) MacGowan wrote it for the Sid and Nancy soundtrack with Shane and Cat O’Riordan from the Pogues doing it. They re-recorded it, probably because they needed money and they got Sinead O’Connor to sing on it.

It’s a really beautiful song and Sinead O’Connor sings it perfectly in a really fragile way. She is quite underrated, she can sing in a fragile soft manner as well as the aggressive manner most people would think of. If you put it into the terms of Sid Vicious but it works on a few levels.

This was from 95 so McGowan was at a low ebb but he looks really cool, he has his shades on, the slicked hair and the suit. It was around this time that O’Connor shopped him to the police as she was so worried he would have a heroin overdose. She kinda looks at him in a sly way, we don’t know if it was before or after it happened. They are two chaotic figures and the haunting element of a lost love is quite staggering and well worth a look. The recorded version isn’t that great so this is well worth seeing.

So that was the five from Graeme and you may be interested to hear how his own band’s music sits alongside his personal choices.

We’ve chosen a live recording and it captures two tracks of the band;

The songs are ‘Ivor Cutler suggests we join the Noise Abatement Society’ and ‘Let’s Make T-Shirts’; both of which can be found on their lp, ‘The Ship and The Iceberg’.

More information on how to download the record can be found here.

Graeme also spent some time with our friends at WeKnowSFA to talk about the state of modern football and his thoughts will be appearing there over the next few days. We’ll keep you informed of that but for now….

We hope you enjoy his playlist.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.