Living in the Twilight Years Nursing Home for Old Gits has its advantages. F'rinstance. I remember (*eyes cloud over, drip forms on end of nose*) seeing Roxy Music live at the height of their first album trash aesthetic madness. Back then, they were so totally unlike ANYTHING else happening* they divided their audience like no other band I've seen before or since. There were those of us who were blown away (like me) and those who thought they stunk - and REALLY stunk! These people were like the accoustic purists at the Dylan "Albert Hall" gig, but heavily into serious prog and wearing ex-army greatcoats and generally being fuccking miserable, and the sight of these science-fiction fag jokers prancing about to belching synth and outer-limits sax was just too much for their sad little hearts.

A great band; I like all their albums, and all the solo albums, but my favourite remain the first two, which would be perfect if they'd included those first singles!

*including Bowie, who was, in spite of surface similarities, doing something else entirely.

See my last response in the BFS thread, dewd ... I'm Audi!

I love you, Ian, and I want to have your baby.

Sorry. My bad.

*merdas adult diaper*

"Better than Joe Nursing Home."

Your best post in this thread!

Yawns, stretches ... watches fly crawling across wall.

Nope. It's holism.

"I take rock seriously and I think taking a stand for everything is the same as taking a stand for nothing. Foda deal with it." - Joe College

Uh ... okay.

Deal with it.

One of those phrases that just leaves me ... strangely unmoved. Deal with it yourself, thank you!

"Sorry. Taking a stand for Sale over Pepper, for me, is like taking a stand for the Ramones over Yes."

Why do you feel you have to do either?

"I'll take this album over Pepper anyday."

Go ahead. It's not like anyone is stopping you. But I wonder at the attitude that insists you have to choose one over the other. The Beatles produced a body of work, conveniently sliced for your consumption. Me, I'll take everything they ever recorded, thank you. Most of which I bought at the time anyway. I'm just grateful I can see the difference between "Mr Moonlight" and (say) "Fixing a Hole".

"You probably think Live At The BBC is a piece of crap, then. I like it better than anything post-Pepper."

Piece of crap is your phrase. Can't you grow out of the rocks/sucks dichotomy? Or try to?

"Ask anyone who lived through Beatlemania"

I was part of it. Saw them live in '63.

(The reasons you give for including the covers is valid. But it doesn't make the album any better.)

Great! That's what it's for, after all.  All I'm doing is criticising something. Which doesn't imply destroying it. There's a tendency on this board to equate criticism with a negative sneer - either something rocks or it sucks, and there's little in-between. Me, I happen to think that BFS is very much an in-between album. And for me, criticising something means seeing it more clearly. Works of art (which BFS is) are good for exercises of this sort.

Thanks!

First impressions: a nagging, haunting little melody, with lovely psychedelic feel and touches. Really very nice. But I don't think it sounds like the Beatles singing - there's a little too much fey English upper-class e-nun-ci-ation, and no hint of real scouse in there. It's fascinating, and definitely Beatley, but my money's on it being not Beatles!

*sigh*

NOTHING is "wrong" with cover versions.

BUT.

At this point in their careers (maybe you don't remember), after a stonking album of originals, the cover versions were seen as a retrograde step. They were already amongst the most talented songwriters in the world, and they didn't need to use covers to cover up their own compositional failings.

This was too early to do a tribute to their Rn'R roots, and too late to be contemporary.

I don't think they're particularly imaginative choices, and I don't think they're extraordinarily good versions, either. Just competent.

Which wasn't, and isn't, enough. Especially in the context of the great originals that make up the rest of the record.

*sigh*

It's a great pleasure to fall asleep to music. Not because it's boring, or you're not listening, but because it relaxes you and blisses you out ... I used to use Santana's "Welcome" album for this - the final, epic soar-a-thon with John McLaughlin "Flame/Sky" would always carry me off.

Any other nod-out recommendations?

Falling asleep music! That's a thread I'd be up for. In fact ...

"I guess he liked to "dirty up" innocent looking young french starlets."

Yes, he was a manipulating and often cruel man. The Vanessa Paradis album he wrote lyrics for ("Variations ...") is a great album. She was more than a match for him, too, and far from the Lolita figure he thought he could control ... "Paradis," he said, "c'est l'enfer" (Paradis(e) is hell).

"Jonathan and Ian are spot on. Great posts."

No, they're effing not! Enough of this mutual hot-tub hugging in agreement that BFS is "underrated" or a "great album" or whatever! It's this nonsense that has to stop!

The great stuff, as noted, is great, and shows real progression (and progression is important, to whoever suggested it wasn't - you progress or you stagnate). But any album with the following filler on it deserves a kicking:

Rock and Roll Music: Oh, please!
Mr Moonlight: Hideous showtune belted out like they were playing to an audience of geriatrics in the Catskills.
Kansas City: see Rock and Roll Music. Hangovers from their Star Club nights - the Beatles had moved on by this stage and so had we. Covers we didn't need.
Words of Love: Why? To show they could?
Honey Don't: no, don't.
Everybody's Trying To Be My Baby: *snorrrrrrrrrre!*

Six ho-hum cover versions on a 14-track album. Do the math. What's left is fine, but not enough.

This was too early to do a tribute to their Rn'R roots, and too late to be contemporary. You may like the cover versions for what they are - competent performances of Rn'R standards - but they were certainly filler at this stage in their career.

It's a shame that one of his greatest qualities - superb lyricist - isn't going to register with non-French speakers.

He wrote a late-sixties' hit for France Gall (sp? Zelil?) called "Sucette" (lollipop) which is, perhaps unsurprisingly, all about giving blowjobs - fairly explicitly. The great joke was that Ms. Gall, a particularly dim example of manufactured French popstarlet, wasn't in on the joke when she recorded it (nor, apparently, for some time after). So there was this innocent blonde la-la-la-ing a nagging piece of pop fluff all about oral sex on the TV ...

(Waits for corrections from Zelil ...)

Serge a better Zappa than Zappa?

SG was a completely insular hedonist and serial drug abuser. Zappa deplored musicians getting out of their heads, and his drug of choice was tobacco. Zappa was a band-leader, always, Serge never. Zappa lived in the studio and touring on the road, Serge lived in bars and beds. Zappa was a studio perfectionist and virtuoso musician, Serge couldn't give a fucck.

If you want to measure them in terms of public outrage, I don't think either of them was perticularly "offensive" (whatever). Zappa shot his mouth off to his own semi-political agenda, Serge got drunk and swore. Neither exactly made the walls of the city shake with their revolutionary posture; Serge was loved for it, Zappa largely ignored (at least by the people he wanted to affect).

So I don't get the Zappa/Ganisbourg connection, is what I'm saying: worth taking further?

Aaaargh. The link to download the song is dead.

Okay; seriously, folks:

Anita O'Day, with Ike Quebec, Bill Evans, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe.

And maybe some showgirl leaping out of a cake.

(Not the bulimic version, though - a cake leaping out of a showgirl).

Note to self: pick up Stanley Turrentine nextly.

Thanks.

Always been way fond of this album. Most of it was written in a Paris hotel room during a rush of creativity, if I remember right. Great cover, too. Great movie. Great everything. They were so effortlessly cool back then. I can forgive the middle eight of WIGH, because the standard throughout is so blazingly and consistently high. No filler, 100% Lennon/McC. I always thought they took a step back with the next album.

So. Much. Fun.