Typical. No posts about music and then 3 come along at once. As well as the NME’s contribution to comms thinking below, here are another couple of music related nuggets combined in one edible portion.
First up: Mix classic British post-punk new wave sounds with Brazilian inspired bossa nova and what do you get? A great record, that’s what. I’d already heard a track from Nouvelle Vague (a cover of Depeche Mode’s "Just Can’t Get Enough") which was good but not quite good enough for me to rush out and buy the album. Someone I know then told me just how good it was. And they weren’t wrong. This stuff is gloriously strange. Nouvelle Vague are two seasoned multi-instrumentalists (or maybe two seasoned mentalists) with a string of female guest vocalists, most of whom are French. Their eponymous album includes tropical sounding covers of The Clashes "Guns of Brixton", The Undertones "Teenage Kicks", "A Forest" by The Cure and "Too Drunk to F**k" by the Dead Kennedys. Bizarre but strangely compelling.
And for the main course try the Word magazine blog. The mag has long been one of my favourites, but the blog is a feast of delights including this one from David Hepworth (rock journo God, Guardian and Radio 4 contributor and Word founder – well worth checking out his personal blog too) on favourite rock interview cliches:
"I genuinely think this is our best album."
"I was expelled from school for answering back."
"Then I heard my mother’s Joni Mitchell albums and nothing was quite the same again…"
…and this post on the ten most memorable live introductions (including audio plug ins of each). Check out my absolute favourite at number 2…a 3 minute fawning, adulatory ramble from Howard Cossell (some sports announcer) at The Main Event, a 1974 Frank Sinatra TV/radio gig which was simulcast "across the Western Hemisphere". Like the way the band step up the volume towards the end to try and drown out his bootlicking oration.
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