The Beatles inevitably had a major influence upon me musically as I was teenager in their early days. For me this is a turning point album moving from the early fairly straight forward recordings that could be replicated on stage to the later studio based albums like Sgt Pepper. To some extent it reflects my growing up as a person alongside the Beatles ‘growing up’ musically. It is still an album I play regularly with many standout tracks for me such as “Dr Robert” and “Got to Get You Into My Life”.

I never took sides in the UK Beatles versus Stones debate. I liked both. They moved me on musically towards a more blues based musical style. Some of the tracks reflect the growing influence of drugs upon their work – naively though as a 14 year old I never realized what “Mother’s Little Helper” was about at the time.

The late 1960s was a period in the UK when the blues became popular, especially when played live. One of the key musical influences for me has been Eric Clapton, and this is where it started. It is difficult to choose even a couple of tracks to highlight, as all are so good, but “Key to Love” and “Ramblin’ On My Mind” are two of my favourites.

This was the album that led me to folk music. After enjoying this I moved to some of their earlier LPs, and from those to folk music, especially live in folk clubs. A particular favourite track is “America”. Fifty years on I still want to get on a Greyhound bus to explore America!

This just means college to me! I was developing musically, and to some extent Neil Young was the key artist in this progression, leading me to a number of west coast bands. This was the first LP of his that I owned – key tracks are”Southern Man” and “Only Love Can Break Your Heart”.

Another college record. Never a hit in the UK, but always a student favourite. It summed up the aspirational California lifestyle for us. Standout tracks for me are “Alone Again Or” and “Old Man”.

Such a variation of styles of music. I love “Sir Duke” – one of my top ten all-time tracks, so I couldn’t miss this out. My father played in swing bands and this track gets nearest to that in this list.

There was a lot of hype about Bruce Springsteen when he first came to the UK. As soon as I heard the first few notes of Born to Run I knew why. I have never ever heard anyone perform live that surpasses the Boss for me. Still the CD that I turn to when I want to hear some rock. One of the key three albums on this list. Going to a Bruce Springsteen concert for me is a bit like going to Church! The audience knows their parts virtually automatically, like liturgy for a congregation.

I could listen to the title track daily and never tire of it. This CD introduced me to West African music. When listening to Malinka and Woloff speaking artists from Senegal, Mali and The Gambia you begin to realise the influence that their music has had upon western music through the slave trade taking people to the southern USA and West Indies. “Immigres” is the key track for me.

I did not discover this until its 50th anniversary – how did I miss it? I read a review on its re-issue in the Guardian and went out to buy it to discover what it was all about. I was totally taken in by it – a beginning of an interest in a new genre.

As I explored West African music more I began to really like the Kora as an instrument. Here the guitar and kora come together with two of the leading players. Sadly this was guitarist Ali Farka Toure’s last recording before he died. “Kala Djula” and “Sabu Yerkoy” are the two tracks I like most, although all are favourites.

Only in the last year or so have I developed my interests in jazz further. This exemplifies what is good in contemporary jazz for me – haunting themes, especially led by Benjamin Koppel’s saxophone playing. Again, this is one of the albums that spurred me on to explore the genre further, developing in ways I would never imagine. That is why Music is Good for me!

Near misses – too many! Some of these I don’t listen to as much now as when they were released, hence being on this list rather than the first list, but at the time they were key recordings for me

Layla and Other Love Songs – Eric Clapton
Moondance – Van Morrison
Led Zeppelin II – Led Zeppelin
The Nightfly – Donald Fagen
Thriller – Michael Jackson
But Seriously – Phil Collins
Deja Vue – Crosby, Stills and Nash
Tapestry – Carol King
Chicago Transit Authority – Chicago: This was a very near miss. I still listen to it often, enjoying the jazz/big band/rock fusion.

Inevitably many of my choices come from an era when I was developing musically. So being based in the UK and born in 1950 the Beatles became the major early influence. Since then the key artist has to be Bruce Springsteen for me. Although I have developed interests into other genre over the years, Bruce is always the artist I come back to when I want something comfortable that I know well. I have chosen something from each decade of my life in my selection. I am still exploring music, furthering an interest in jazz and beginning to listen to some classical music. To summarise, John Miles sings it:

Music was my first love
And it will be my last
Music of the future
And music of the past

To live without my music
Would be impossible to do
In this world of troubles
My music pulls me through

John Miles \’Music\’

Right up until the end of the last century, still continuing in some areas, carol singers used to go around houses and pubs in the UK singing sometimes playing instruments, collecting money,  usually for charities. Nowadays the most likely carol singers are actually Salvation Army bands in shopping centres. But a number of contemporary English folk artists have continued the tradition of Christmas and Winter songs with their recordings.

To get us in the mood I will start with Gaudette by Steeleye Span from the album Below the Salt. This is a carol in Latin written in the late 16th Century. Steeleye Span had a top 20 hit with it in the UK in 1973 – the only song in Latin to achieve this distinction. You can read more about the song here.

The first of my album  selections is Frost Bites by Belshazzar’s Feast

This is a collection of Christmas and seasonal songs more akin to traditional folk music, performed by Paul Hutchinson on accordion with Paul Sartin, a member of Bellowhead, singing and playing the violin and oboe. See them play One Cold Morning in December here. They discuss the album here.

More contemporary is the work of Kate Rusby. She has released two Christmas albums – Sweet Bells in 2009 and While Mortals Sleep this year.

These are both influenced by the music of her childhood in south Yorkshire. Here in December groups of musicians and singers would tour the pubs and streets of the area singing traditional carols and other songs. You can hear samples of these albums on =http://www.katerusby.com her website [/url] from =http://www.katerusby.com/recordings/sweet-bellsSweet Bells[/url] and =http://www.katerusby.com/recordings/while-mortals-sleepWhile Mortals Sleep[/url].

My next selection may not at first sight obviously fit into the genre of Contemporary English Folk Music, but actually has some close links to the early folk rock band Steeleye Span, with several musicians from that band playing on this album. It is The Christmas Album by Jethro Tull

There are some traditional Christmas carols, other seasonal songs, with several re-released Jethro Tull songs. If you go to the Jethro Tull website you can play several full length samples .

This brings us full circle back to where we started, Steeleye Span. Guadette was released in 1973, but it was not until 2004 that they released their first seasonal album:

Whilst many of the tracks are their versions of traditional carols and Christmas songs there are several songs written specifically for the album, some with a distinctly Pagan feel to them.  I hope you enjoy my selection for the Holiday Season!

My favourite track from this album is New York Girls – to hear this go here.

In folk music terms Bellowhead are a large band, with up to 11 members, led by John Spiers and Jon Boden. They play a range of folk styles and include a brass section. Their other albums are

and

Many of the members of Bellowhead are leading artists in their own right, particularly Boden and Spiers. I’ll follow them up in another monthly feature with some of their solo and joint recordings.
Another band I like are Imagined Village, founded by Simon Emerson of the Afro Celt Sound System. Their rationale is to produce contemporary folk music reflecting the multicultural nature of modern Britain.

Their first album, Imagined Village, is really more a collection of individual songs by the main artists backed at times by other band members. The band members included such illuminii of the English folk music scene as Mike Waterson, Martin Carthy and his daughter Eliza as well as Billy Bragg and poet Benjamin Zephaniah, amongst others. Carthy and Waterson make the link back to the original English folk revival of the late 1960s. Samples of this album can be heard at =http://imaginedvillage.com/releasesImagined Village[/url].

Their most recent album is

Go to this and this to see them playing.
By this album they were much more of a consolidated band, with some changes in personnel, but retaining the two Carthys and Simon Emmerson amongst others.

A couple more contemporary English folk bands I enjoy are

Despite their name, Stornoway, this is an English band, based in Oxford. They are very much at the folk – indie crossover point
Hear them play here and here.

More folk orientated are Spiro

As the Guardian has written

the experimental acoustic folk-influenced scene – is becoming increasingly sophisticated and adventurous, and Spiro are leading exponents of this new genre.

This is a four piece band playing great folk music. You can hear them here.

Next month I’ll look at some of the leading female English folk music artists.

I’ve been waiting for this album for 45 years, virtually three quarters of my life, but it is still not the finished article! Back in the mid 1960s, The Beatles reigned supreme in the world of popular music. But if any group (as we then called them) came close to taking that crown, it was the Beach Boys. The Beach Boys’ previous album to the Smile sessions was Pet Sounds, Brian Wilson’s answer to Rubber Soul and Revolver. The Beatles had raised the bar with their albums; until then, LPs were usually collections of singles, b-sides and fillers. But a few months after the release of Pet Sounds, Sgt. Pepper raised the bar even higher for Wilson. He wanted something even grander, and Smile was to be his answer. As he describes it in the notes published for this new release, “Each Beatles album had sounded different. The way I saw it we were in a race, a production race.”

Back then, recording techniques were primitive compared to today. Most recording was still done on 4-track analogue recorders. Some studios were beginning to use 8-track machines. For any more than 8 tracks, a process of layering (or “bouncing”) was used, where a number of tracks were mixed together and then layered with another set of mixed tracks. This took an enormous amount of time to achieve the many levels of sound Wilson wanted, so while the rest of the band toured without him, he worked on layering tracks. (For more details, have a look at Wikipedia’s Smile article.)

Drugs, fall-outs, and mental health issues for Wilson eventually led to the Smile tapes being shelved. Versions of two tracks, “Good Vibrations” and “Heroes and Villains,” had been released as singles, but the remainder of the tapes remained in vaults for several decades. In the 1990s, several tracks and even a few versions of the entire album began to circulate on the internet. Versions of several tracks were released in 1993 on Good Vibrations: Thirty Years Of The Beach Boys, a career-retrospective box-set, and in 2004, Brian Wilson issued a completely new recording of the album. But only now has the original album has been officially released on its own for the first time, though it’s probably not surprising that multiple versions of it are included in the same package, or rather, packages. The Smile Sessions can be purchased as one CD, two CDs, or a boxed set with 5 CDs and 2 vinyl LPs. (I’m reviewing the 2 CD set here; this has the basic Smile tracks along with a range of segments used for the layering, along with a few other items from the studio sessions.)

I was in my mid-teens in the UK when Smile was being recorded. The Beatles were at their peak, and the Summer of Love was still a couple of years away. Bob Dylan was barely known outside the folk music scene; there was no Neil Young, no Bruce Springsteen, and no punk, which was a decade away. Even the English folk revival was a couple of years or so away. TV was still black and white, and England had just won the World Cup – a very different era. Computers with far less power than my basic mobile phone took up a large room. So has the wait for Smile been worth it?

Brian Wilson once described the album as a “teenage symphony to God,” but it is certainly not a religion-inspired record. I do understand what he means, though, in that he is giving his ultimate in this recording, in the way that one should do for God. For me, there are three standout tracks, though all of them have been known in a slightly different format before, two from the time of recording. “Good Vibrations” is the best known; this is a modified version of the original single. The same is true for “Heroes and Villains”, with more changes since the single release. The third of these tracks, “Surf’s Up”, first surfaced in this format in the 1990s as part of the 1993 Good Vibrations box-set. All three are distinctively Beach Boys recordings, with harmonies forming a major component.

The remaining tracks are familiar from Brian Wilson’s own recording of Smile, but the key difference comes in the use of multiple voices to create the sound Wilson wanted. This technique permeates the bonus tracks, which are really just snippets from the recording process, though some must have taken several days to record. These are the ones I’ve found most interesting, as they provide major insights into the way Brian Wilson was trying to work. One such piece, for example, from “Heroes and Villains” reminded me of Crosby, Stills and Nash, even though their first album was two or three years away.

Do I recommend this album? Yes and no – it depends, as always, upon your own musical interests and backgrounds. If like me, you were a teenager in the mid-1960s who was already into music, it’s probably an essential buy. If you want insights into how Brian Wilson created the Beach Boys’ sound, again, it’s an essential album. But for many people, a download of three or four key tracks might be sufficient to add historical insights to their music collections. It does show what we missed at the time, though!