Number 9: Susan Fassbender & Kay Russell - Twilight Café

This is one that an algorithm suggested, possibly influenced by my recent listening choices of obscure 1970s and 80s artists.

I was surprised I had never heard of this, because back in 1981 when it reached Number 21, I did follow the charts and watch Top of the Pops etc. Not having heard the song before nor even heard of the artists I looked them up to read the sad story that Fassbender committed suicide in 1991. 

It seems that although this song made the charts and led to television appearances, the next two singles failed to repeat this success, the record company decided not to go ahead with an album and Fassbender and Russell left the music industry and started families.

That seems to have been the way it was back then. Nowadays, when recorded music makes so little money, musicians earn their living by performing live and finding other income streams. Back then live performance was done first to obtain a recording contract and afterwards to promote records. Touring was a loss-making activity. So presumably after this brief brush with fame, there was no choice but to head back into normal life.

It seems that many years later the act's surviving member, Kay Russell, collected demos and arranged for them to be released. I would highly recommend it, but I wonder if their music didn't belong to any obvious style or genre and their songwriting output was quite varied contributed to their not achieving sustained commercial success.

Whichever way, there does seem to be some online recognition of their output, including a Facebook Fan Page, which appears to be run with involvement of Fassbender's family. Sadly, Kay Russell died earlier this year and I can't help but wonder whether that unhappy news might have been what pushed this track up the algorithm and on to my screen.

Anyway I have enjoyed discovering and listening to the song, yet in view of what was to come the second verse feels all too poignant:

The music grabs me, spins me round and around
My spirit soars, no longer smashed to the ground
The cares and worries of a busy day
Just slide across me as I start to play

Number 10: Matt Bianco - Whose Side Are You On

Somehow I feel the need to explain myself with this one...

Way back when I was in my teens, liking certain sorts of music entailed not liking others - at least if you wanted to avoid having your friends mock your record collection and stop being your friends. So it was not OK to like The Clash and Yes, or indeed REM and Matt Bianco.

Both at the time and subsequently, the latter were often cited as the epitome of 80s Uncool. I remember reading an article by Paul Morley where he expressed this view as a fixed truth, requiring no further explanation. Which is a bit rich given that when he was in Art of Noise he tried to recruit Thereza Bazar from Dollar as lead singer. 

For myself, not being a musician or even knowing about music per se, I like songs, pretty much regardless of style and never had a problem liking prog and punk or alternative rock and lounge music, provided the tune was memorable, the words at least interesting and the arrangement pleasing to the ear. But I was conformist enough to hide my copy of the Matt Bianco single
Get Out of Your Lazy Bed at the back of my record collection along with my Jethro Tull and Al Stewart records just in case anyone spotted them and mocked.

Now, though, I am 58 and don't have to account to my peers for my musical tastes. Since back in 1984 as a poor student, I hadn't the budget actually to buy Matt Bianco's debut album and sensed anyway that this was a step too far into loss of such street cred as I might have had. 

Anyway, this year I have downloaded and listened to it and the whole thing is rather fun, admittedly more in the mode of background music than something to concentrate on. In the process I puzzled over why Matt Bianco were so despised and decided to look this up on the internet. One, essentially positive, blog post described it thusly 'It’s not overtly offensive, it’s not thrilling, it’s…nice. Whether that’s what Robert Johnson flogged his soul for is a moot point.'

The thing is, though, not all music has to shake the establishment or protest against authority. Matt Bianco's music can be enjoyable even if Get Out of Your Lazy Bed isn't a satire of ruthless capitalism or More Than I Can Bear a call to revolutionary consciousness. It could also be argued that just a few years after punk, using musical styles dating from the pre rock and roll era was at least a little daring. And worth remembering that even REM and the whole Paisley Underground had a jingle-jangle element that drew on the 1960s. I'll even push it so far as to say that Whose Side Are You On, as a wry comment on the murky and mercenary world of espionage, was quite topical for 1984 and also that it is now uncontroversial for artists to follow a range of influences including Latin and lounge music. Perhaps Matt Bianco were pioneers

Whichever way, it's enjoyable song and the video, which I never saw at the time, is rather fun too. I feel no shame in liking it.

Number 11: Buffalo Tom - Autumn Letter

Apparently taking their name from the first half of Buffalo Springfield and the drummer's first name, Buffalo Tom seemed to be regarded in their early years as a sort of discount shop Dinosaur Jr, whose leader, J. Mascis, produced their first album. But I preferred the influencees to the influencer and have nearly all their work in one format or another.

The release of a new album Jump Rope at the end of May this year passed me by until a few months later, by which time I had also missed seeing them on tour - they remain high on my list of bands I like to see live but haven't. Otherwise this one would be higher in the charts.

There hasn't been much in the way of stylistic evolution by Buffalo Tom, over the decades. Their new album sounds remarkably like their first one, released in 1988. But they can always be depended on to deliver grungy but melodic songs combined with literate, well constructed, if often opaque lyrics written by their lead singer and guitarist Bill Janovitz. I read somewhere that he has a master's degree in English literature so perhaps that explains it.

I only started listening to this one in mid-October so perhaps Autumn Letter was destined to be my favourite song on the album. The words conjure up an autumnal feeling and indeed seasons seem to be a sub-theme of this album with the next but one track Come Closer starting with the words 'Bleak, midwinter sun'.

Autumn has always been my favourite season and the closing lines

    Panic shouts out (panic shouts out)
    Pity drowns out (pity drowns out)
    But mercy wins out in the end

seem to offer a note of hope rather than fear or regret.

Number 12: The Innocence Mission - Black Sheep Wall

Led by wife and husband team Karen and Don Peris, The Innocence Mission could be compared to 10,000 Maniacs, having some kind of alternative folk style. Only they weren't as well known and had only one sort of hit, Bright as Yellow. With the exception of a couple of songs, I never liked 10,000 Maniacs as much as I expected, finding the lyrics a overly worthy and earnest and the tunes not particularly memorable.

The Innocence Mission, whose work I somehow stumbled upon a few years ago, seemed at once more musically creative and lyrically enigmatic. It's also typical of me when finding two bands with similar styles to prefer the one that's less popular.

Anyway, they had drifted from my consciousness until hearing Karen Peris singing a duet with John Hiatt, while revisiting the latter's oeuvre (of which more later in this series I hope), leading me to seek out another album, their 1989 self-titled debut.

For me, the most listenable track was Black Sheep Wall, which I assumed from casual listening was about a reprobate lover, but now I look at the lyrics it seems to be a reflection on parenthood and protective feelings towards a child. Moving and haunting.

My top 12 tracks from 2024

I have long given up any pretence of keeping up with which music artists are popular, in the charts (if that's still a thing) or even appearing on Jools Holland. For a time after I had passed the age for following these things I still subconsciously the information by hearing what my stepchildren were listening to and even trading recommendations with them. Even after they left home I still read the music press, for example the late lamented Word magazine, which catered for older people who took popular music seriously. But I haven't found a good substitute for that publication.

Yet I've never grown out of obsessiveness about music. It's just that now, as I have hinted at in other posts about books, I'm catching up with things I've missed over the years rather than identifying new artists to follow. This year I have even overlooked new releases by artists I do like, and am now belatedly catching up on latest offerings from the Decemberists, Sleater-Kinney, Cassandra Jenkins and Nick Cave. I also tend to listen to music more when working at my computer - not like the old days when one bought vinyl or a CD, took it home and pored over the lyric sheet and other credits. So I don't pay as close attention to songs as I once did.

At the same time my nerdiness seems to have increased, as I have started using the LastFM website, with its Scrobbler function, which keeps a record of which songs you have listened to, and unlike Apple Music, lets this be applied to specific time periods. This has become my new toy, enabling me to compile my personal listening chart for 2024.

To confirm my above observations, pretty much none of the tracks that I've played the most this year have been released in the last 12 months, but with the help of Youtube suggestions and the like I have still found what for me have been new discoveries, as well as rediscovering other things. In the remaining 12 days before Christmas, I will roll out my top 12. 

For reasons set out above this is without any detailed lyrical exegesis or commentary on the musical arrangement, but at least sets me a challenge of keeping up the blogposts for a time.

Could the wilderness years be over for Coventry Rugby?

I am delighted to see that Coventry Rugby Club have applied to be approved as eligible for promotion to the English Premiership under the rules about stadium capacity. As they sit at the top of the second tier, for now things are looking up although there is a lot of the season still to go.

I have written here before about the travails of being a Coventry rugby supporter. I am always tempted to blame myself. Fifty years ago when I really became aware of their existence as my maternal grandfather was a supporter they were one of the great names of English rugby and winners of the then Rugby Football Union Cup for two seasons in succession. After I started supporting them it seemed to be all downhill.

When the league structures came into place in the late 1980s they lasted one season in the top tier before being relegated. While the club had clearly lost its way, there was every reason to hope that before too many years passed they might climb back up again, but it was not to be.

In part this was due to Cov's further off-field problems, including nearly going out of business twice. But the real issue was that a few years after the game went professional, the route back to the top tier was blocked by the restrictive practices of premiership clubs (£), whose owners believed that as they had invested in the game at a crucial time, their clubs should be protected from the jeopardy of relegation for all time.

They did this through a system that provided much lower funding for promoted teams and rules governing stadium standards and capacity, requiring clubs seeking to join the premiership to have a ground capacity of more than 10,000. Given planning and land ownership constraints this is all but impossible for many clubs and unfeasibly expensive for everyone. It has had the effect of fossilising the top tier of the game. 

It is also a nonsense, because premiership teams compete in European competitions against clubs with stadiums that would not reach premiership standards - and apparently without adverse consequences. For example, as I can testify from recent experience, Benetton's 5,000 capacity Stadio Monigo in Treviso (above) has an amazing atmosphere when full and looks pretty good on television too.

Earlier this year there seemed to be a relaxation of the premiership's protectionist rules, with acceptance that a promoted team could have four years to increase capacity from 5,000 to 10,001. But then the RFU stuck in a clause saying planning permission had to be secured before promotion for the new criteria to be met. This again puts prohibitive costs of obtaining planning permission in the way would-be promotion candidates, particularly as the whole thing may prove unnecessary if they don't go up or do but go straight back down again. 

Cov's latest application comes with a clear suggestion that legal action may be necessary to get the RFU to back down and an expression of confidence that this will be successful. I note that at least one legal commentator has suggested that the minimum capacity rule

is likely to breach competition law, as the restriction of competition and/or abuse of dominant position it entails cannot be justified by reference to a legitimate objective

Perhaps the RFU will see sense in time to avoid a costly legal battle, but I'm not holding my breath.