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- Readers recommend: Mr and Mrs songs
No point acting like Mr Complicated this week – just send us your favourite songs with Mr, Mrs or Ms in the title ...
No, nothing to do with Derek Batey. This week we'd like you to suggest some great songs whose titles contain the honorifics Mr or Mrs (or Ms – this is the Guardian, for goodness sake).
They can be fictional (like Noël Coward's Mrs Worthington) or real (Ozzy Osbourne's Mr Crowley). And they need not have real-sounding names after the honorific (Jean Knight's Mr Big Stuff).
There you go – simple. No point in being Mr Complicated.
The toolbox:
* This week's collaborative Spotify playlist
* The RR archive
* The Marconium (blog containing a wealth of data on RR)
* The 'Spill (blog for the RR community)
Please do:
* Post your nominations before midday on Tuesday if you wish them to be considered.
* Write a few lines advocating the merits of your choices.
But please don't:
* Post more than one third of the lyrics of any song.
* Dump lists of nominations. If you must post more than two or three at once, please attempt to justify your choices.
Cut-out-and-keep guide to the strange words used by regular RR posters:
* Dond: To second another reader's nomination. Here's how the word was coined.
* Zedded: The song has already been included in an A-list (and so convention dictates it cannot be included in another one). The songs I mentioned above are all zedded, in case you were wondering.
* Assfairy: A song that I have repeatedly failed to include in RR playlists, no doubt due to poor taste and judgment. Here are definitions offered by RR stalwarts Shoegazer and Pairubu
* More strange words in the RR glossary (courtesy of the Marconium)
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Radiohead's Colin Greenwood reviews Guardian covers band Radio Eds
Last week, Guardian staff members formed a band to cover the Radiohead song Creep. Here, Radiohead's bassist reviews them
Watch Radio Eds perform CreepHaving heard quite a few covers of Creep by artists such as Chrissie Hynde and Roland Orzabal, this is definitively one of them. I thought the Radio Eds dispatched it with pitiless ease.
I loved the revelatory interplay of banjo and trombone, lending the song some jug-band bathos. Katrina Dixon's drumming reminded me at points of Low's Mimi Parker in its sparse, haunting percussion. The guitar and bass were servicable, chugging along perfectly amicably, although I missed my brother's shredding guitar stabs.
I thought it was great that the singer, Ed, felt confident enough to have fun with the vocal part and add a whole range of emotive expectorations, and extra vowels, which certainly added to the sound of the band. He has the dress, posture and phrasing of a true frontman.
My favourite performance of the lot was the unshowy yet commanding piano work by Alan – he held it all together and led the way for the others to follow. Without his obvious musical gifts it might have all fallen apart. I'd say he certainly has a future in live music, and I would happily ask to go on a guest list to see him play again.
I read recently about a tribute band festival called Glastonbudget and wondered if the Radio Eds would consider building on their success so far, and taking it to the next level?
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - New music: Sons and Daughters – Silver Spell
The Glasgow band have stripped away their punky guitars for a more minimal sound – a risk that may just pay off
This Gift, the Bernard Butler-produced 2008 album from Glasgow's Sons and Daughters, was hook-laden, brisk of tempo and featured some of the band's most commercial material to date. Fast forward three years and we find the four-piece at a different juncture. Silver Spell, the first taster of their forthcoming album, Mirror Mirror, is built around a clomping drum beat, a distant synth murmur and the twin vocals of Adele Bethel and Scott Paterson. It's a brave, minimal set-up that moves the emphasis from the primal to the cerebral. On first listen it seems to disorientate, with sections of complete silence throwing you off before a low synth rumble adds a murky atmosphere. Apparently the song had "full-on punk rock guitars", which were removed as the band wanted a new sound. It's a risk, but it seems to have paid off.
Mirror, Mirror is out 13 June via Domino. Silver Spell can be downloaded for free from the SoundCloud player above
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Let's stop this Top of the Pops revival in its tracks
Though great in its day, the world does not need the return of a weekly half-hour ghetto for pop music
BBC Four is hosting a Top of the Pops night this Friday. From then on, the classic Thursday night slot will see episodes screened weekly, from that equivalent week, starting from 1976. Which, of course, is great: everyone loves a good Pan's People montage and the chance to see vintage Madonna clips. Except, of course, that's not where it will end. Next thing you know, it will have inspired another Facebook group, another Twitter hashtag and another guileless attempt to bring the thing back. Not in my name.
Top of the Pops was great and necessary in its day, but the world has changed. Think about what this campaign actually suggests: the return of a weekly half-hour ghetto for pop music, based around the singles chart, predicated on the idea that this is the only place for people to hear their favourite songs. Now, that couldn't fail to look anything other than totally foolish.
In his forthcoming book Retromania, Simon Reynolds examines how the present is so ashamed of itself that it's driven to obsessing about its recent past to the point where there isn't actually any past left.
It's why a grunge revival has been predicted every two years since grunge actually ended, and it's why people are still slavishly demanding a Top of the Pops comeback. But Top of the Pops isn't Doctor Who, a programme so ingenious it can survive the test of time. It belongs to an era when music was dominated by only a few artists, who were tightly product-managed. This was a time when Sunday afternoons were spent taping songs off the radio, and waiting until Thursday evening to see them performed on TV felt like a real event.
The internet has obviously played a significant role in the ubiquity of pop, but even in the dusty old world of television, there's more access to music than ever before. It's everywhere.
The BBC plays Florence and the Machine to plug Lark Rise to Candleford. Rihanna can waggle her arse on The X Factor and create a national panic. When promoting her single Don't Hold Your Breath, Nicole Scherzinger performed it on Dancing On Ice, Loose Women, T4, Lorraine, The Hot Desk, The Crush, Let's Dance for Comic Relief and Freshly Squeezed.
Meanwhile, William McKinley High seems a far more interesting backdrop to hear the songs of Katy Perry and Bruno Mars. At least you know none of it's real. And as more of us go digital, there's about three dedicated channels for every musical genre.
It doesn't help that the internet, with its obsession with search terms and short sharp shocks, has so far failed to generate the compelling alternative to music television it has so much potential for. And yes, there certainly is a space for a dedicated pop show with songs and performances that actually feel exclusive, creative access to stars with wit, personality and credibility, rather than the label-funded puffs that pass for interviews on 4Music. I'd be more than happy to executive produce such a show it any networks are listening. But that programme wouldn't be Top of the Pops, and it would sully a great institution to try calling it that.
But if you really need evidence of why Top of the Pops should stay dead, just watch it on Christmas Day. It's fun then, but it would be painful on any day when you're not drunk by lunch. Does this once great colossus really deserve the indignity of having Adele performing Someone Like You every week until June 2013? Really?
In 2011 pop music is an inventive, high-concept fantasy playground, where Nicki Minaj becomes a samurai warrior , where Lady Gaga is paraded inside a giant egg, and where Biffy Clyro play at being pirates. But it's a world with no place for Top of the Pops. Let it go.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - How to make Rebecca Black sound halfway listenable
Software program PaulStretch lets you slow down songs, transforming a hideously banal tune into something that sounds like a collaboration between Kate Bush and Mogwai
These days, two things seem to happen when rotten pieces of music achieve a certain level of notoriety. (Yes, I am about to mention Rebecca Black again, but bear with me.) First there's the outpouring of untrammelled fury over the fact that someone has dared to create something that seems to be culturally worthless. Then someone takes the track and timestretches it.
The notion of sitting at home making Rebecca Black's Friday last five times longer would seem, on the face of it, to be an act of self-flagellation. Uploading it for others to listen, surely an act of barbarism. But, as you'll hear, it's a beautiful thing. A shimmering, slow-shifting soundscape that transforms the hideously banal lyrics into a series of elongated vowels and hissing consonants. The music itself – which is, at normal speed, a GSCE-type exercise in how two notes in a scale can fit reasonably well with a repeated sequence of four chords – becomes complex, even fascinating. Passing a magnifying glass over something stultifyingly predictable can reveal minuscule, beautiful shifts in harmony and timbre that its creators would, it's safe to say, never have come up with in a month of Fridays.
This isn't new, of course. Back in August someone realised that Justin Bieber's U Smile actually contained some hidden beauty – you just had to play it 800% slower. The software that's used to produce all these pieces is called PaulStretch, created by programmer Paul Nasca. In fact, it's not a strict timestretch; it's enhanced by a clever process of randomisation, where each tiny chunk of the music – a hundred milliseconds or so – is "smeared", digitally rebuilt and then placed back in sequence. While tens of thousands of people have sat back and enjoyed these ambient symphonies, from the well-known (Jurassic Park) to the more recently uploaded (Emmerdale) the credit really has to go to Nasca for producing a piece of software that effortlessly emulates ambient work that artists on the 4AD label 25 years ago would have spent weeks crafting. All we have to do now is, literally, click a button.
That took me two minutes; a Mike Sammes paint commercial transformed into something akin to Le Mystère Des Voix Bulgares. It sounds lovely, but ... I don't feel as if I've created something. Because it required no effort.
There'll always be debate surrounding whether merely digitally processing other people's work is artistically sound. A lot of attention was given in the autumn to Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never, when he produced a loop of two bars of Chris de Burgh's Lady in Red – probably the two least offensive bars of the whole song – and was hailed as something approaching a genius. Surely that's easy, right? Well, I've just spent five minutes sticking a drum loop behind a section of Starship's We Built This City to show just how simple the process can be.
Unfortunately it's a bit rubbish. There's clearly a skill in making bad music sound good – but at the moment I'd say Paul Nasca deserves the most praise. And I've not even heard any music he's made. Bizarre.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - New music: Lil Silva featuring Sampha – On Your Own
Thrilling team up from two top producers, featuring pinging synths and chopped-up rhythms
Bedford-born DJ and producer Lil Silva made quite an impression on the burgeoning UK funky scene when he emerged seemingly from nowhere in 2009 with his debut 12in, Seasons/Funky Flex. A year later, influential dance label Night Slugs released his EP, Night Skanker, a collection of rib-rattling, grime-influenced instrumental dance tracks that helped cement his reputation as one of the UK's foremost producers. Next month, Good Years will release his new EP The Patience, which is due to feature On Your Own, a more subdued but no less thrilling production featuring fellow producer/remixer/all-round talent Sampha on vocals (everyone should check out this duet with Jessie Ware immediately). Over a bass-heavy backdrop of pinging synths and chopped-up rhythms, Lil Silva creates a soundbed that makes space for Sampha's vocals, the two complementing rather than competing with each other.
A higher quality version can be heard here.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать
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