Hefner - Gabriel At The Airport...

Yesterday, walking along grey autumn streets, this song brought me enormous cheer, as it always does.  Hefner's Gabriel At The Airport is not only an excellent, incredibly catchy, pop song, but the lyrics are Awesome and hilarious. There is a great recorded version on Catfight, and also The French, Darren Hayman's post-Hefner band, recorded it for Local Information.  It was intended to be on what would've been the sixth Hefner album, Travel, Go, according to Hayman's notes here.  The first part of the 43 song Catfight can give you an idea of what that might've sounded like.

Peel Session from 11 December 2001:

Darren Hayman - I Taught You How To Dance...

My third favourite song of 2011 (after Mikey Georgeson's Moth In The Flame Of Carnality and The Real Tuesday Weld's You're Gonna Live), I Taught You How To Dance is just lovely, a beautiful pop song.




I interviewed Darren Hayman recently and found he had a lot of interesting things to say about music.  You can read it here.  Here's his comments on this song:

I Taught You How To Dance is one of my favourite songs of the year, anything to say about that one?

DH:  Ok, thank you.  I like that it’s a bit like a standard.  Sometimes when you’re in a situation like…you’re at someone’s wedding, and this doesn’t happen really, but you sometimes feel like if somebody went ‘Oh, Darren’ll do a song, Darren knows a song’ and then you’re seeing like old people and young people and children and I’ve just often felt I’ve got nothing for that situation. Like just a stand-by, just like a love song which doesn’t talk about prostitutes or money or any horrible things.  So that was the idea behind it, to write like a cruise ship song, and it sounds like a cruise ship song to me, it sounds like you’d have the mirror ball going around whilst it was playing.  There’s nothing particularly special about it. I quite like the title, it started from the title and I quite liked a love song having an arrogant title.  I liked the idea of the song coming from a point of arrogance, cause it would be naturally more romantic to say ‘You Taught Me How To Dance’, would be the more emphatic way to structure the song, so I quite like that as a writing challenge.

And I just found this "Unplugged In Monti" version from indieforbunnies.com .  "a very special acoustic version of his song "I Taught You How To Dance" in a little courtyard of Via Del Boschetto, in the heart of Rione Monti "