A Blessed Mixtape

Unless you've been lying under a rock for the last few months you will know today is D-day here in the UK. And even though I have very little with royalty or the institution of marriage, I couldn't resist the whole royal wedding fever while making a new Spotify mixtape for TwentyTrackTape...

BY ROYAL (DIS)APPOINTMENT contains 20 songs that cover all aspects of marriage: courtship, persuasion, parents' disapproval, objection, going to the chapel, the punch up at the wedding, solidarity, regrets and divorce.

Of course The Dixie Cups are on it with their Chapel Of Love, as well is Morrissey's Will Never Marry. There's Hot Chip's ode to monogamy and some good advice on marriage from Jimmy Soul and Smokey Robinson's mother. As I'm not the romantic type there a quite a few songs about divorce on it, including a song by Marvin Gaye, who recorded an entire album about his split from Anna Gordy (as part of their divorce settlement Marvin had to pay an extensive percentages of royalties of his next album to his ex. Consequently he made Here, My Dear, 14 songs about the deterioration of their marriage).

Especially for those of you who don't have Spotify, I'm treating you to a couple of the 'high lights' of my mix:


The Shangri-La's - Give Us Your Blessing. Get it here (YSI).
The Shangri-La's are one of my favorite girl groups. The girls sing like their chatting to each other, and lots of their songs are a bit sinister with sound effects dramatizing the mood. Wedding bells, a thunder storm and car crash can be heard on this song about two teenagers who run away because their parents don't approve of them tying the knot and crash themselves to death.


The Five Du-Tones - Divorce Court. Get it here (YSI).
A hilarious song that reenacts a court session. Especially one of The Five Du-Tones singing the wife's lines in a high pitched voice, and the husband breaking out in tears at the end!


Barrington Levy - Quick Divorce. Get it here (YSI).
Another song set inside the court. The reggae singer begs and pleas the judge to dissolve his marriage as fast as he can.

The hardest part of making this compilation was to limit it to 20 songs. I would have loved to included a Latin version of Frank Sinatra's Love And Marriage as sung by Peggy Lee, or I Cried All The Way To The Alter by country singer Patsy Cline or any song by The Wedding Present. But alas for them! Also my beloved Mirah didn't make the cut with Til Death Do Us Part, but I will share it with you here.


Mirah and Golden Bears - Til Death Do Us Part. Get it here (YSI).

And if this song was on Spotify it would have definitely made the list. More sound effects!

Roy C - Shotgun Wedding. Get it here (YSI).

Listen to the whole BY ROYAL (DIS)APPOINTMENT playlist on Spotify by clicking HERE. Chick here to visit my Spotify profile.

Heaven is a place in Wales

As it happens I live near one of the best places on the planet. It’s called Hay-on-Wye and it’s a beautiful little town on the border of Wales and England (population: 1469). It surrounded by glorious hills and it has 30 (!) secondhand bookshops.

So when we had friends visiting last week we took them to this quaint village. Unlike my Canadian friends I didn’t have to worry about excess baggage, so I came back home carrying kilo's of books (and extra body fat - a full English breakfast at the B&B and a delicious meal at the Old Black Lion were to thank). These are a couple of the books I got...

From the Honesty Bookshop (unattended outdoor bookcases, you just put the money in a box) I picked up some great cheap old books with lots of pictures of flowers and (extinct) animals for making collages.

I got a book by pop culture whiz Chuck Klosterman Killing Yourself to Live. I thoroughly enjoyed his other books, and so far I’m really enjoying the tales of his road trip visiting places where rock stars died. Though it’s not so much about the dead artists or their deaths; Chuck gets easily sidetracked by memories of his childhood, of songs, scenes from movies, ex-girlfriends and drugs. Chuck is funny.

As some of you will know I got more and more obsessed with patterns since I moved to this country, an obsession which has been particularly fueled by carpets in pubs and other unlikely places. So I bought myself English Printed Textiles 1720-1836, published by one of my favorite museums in the world: the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. It contains some great patterns with birds!

My biggest gem must be The Royal Family Pop-Up Book, published in 1984. Oh it’s so great, the royal family portrayed as cardboard puppets! I wanted to make a video while flipping through the book, but when I googled the book I found out some Chinese person already did that. With dramatic orchestral music!



And for a tenner I picked up a dented (hence the price) copy of Dancehall – The Rise of Jamaican Dancehall Culture by Beth Lesser. I already own the 2 cd-box set that goes with it, so I was overjoyed to find this beautiful book. The book focuses on Jamaican music in the 1980s, the "golden age of dancehall". It has loads of pictures and interviews and stories about the biggest artists, producers and sound systems of that decade. And Lesser provides us with some historical context. I’m always quite fascinated to read about how the political, economical and geographical situation of a certain place influences its music. For example one of the reasons that there is so much emphasis on the bass in Jamaican music can be traced back to the fact that Jamaica was a poor country and not a lot of people could afford a record player or a radio, or go out in clubs. So they would gather outside (as it's always good weather in the Caribbean) where some people had set up a turntable and a speaker. These soundsystem parties were extremely popular, sometimes thousands of people would turn up. So the music had to be really loud, and had to have a lots of bass! And then Dub was, as King Tubby stated, his attempt to recreate the natural effect of the delay you would be experiencing when you're in a large open space surrounded by multiple speakers.

There’s also a section about what was hot and what was not, fashion-wise. Well the clothes that were hot were literally hot. Apparently preppy clothes from the UK were all the rage. Pretty bizarre to see all those men in woolen sweaters and hats in what must have been a blazing heat!





Well, I leave you with two of tracks from this excellent Soul Jazz Records compilation...


Tenor Saw - Pumpkin Belly. Get it here (YSI).


Barrington Levy - Here I come. Get it here (YSI).