Week In Music July 20-26th 2020

Busier week for listening this week. Starting off with hearing Nina Simone's wonderful 'Emergency Ward' album after seeing Alex from Fightmilk mention it on FB. Amazing cover of George Harrison's 'My Sweet Lord'. Wonderfully rev'd up and powerful




I heard New Order's 'Regret' on my weekly trip to the supermarket, what an excellent song.



I used to have a bootleg cassette of an Afghan Whigs show in Belgium from 1993 where they covered this pretty much right after it came out, was great. Would love to hear that again.


Then Orlando's 'Just For A Second' has been stuck in my head most of the week. A wonderful pop tune.





Once again got Melody Club's 'My Soft Return' stuck in my head too and gave the full 'Music Machine' album a spin. Some very good stuff on there. Great synthpop





And someone on my IG posted Nino Ferrer's 'Le Sud', a French classic which I'm glad I now know




And of course the Taylor Swift album came out Friday. mirrorball being my favourite. Quite dig the pop of betty too

Orlando...

I missed out on Orlando when they were around.  Nothing of theirs ever made it to America, as far as I know.  Though I distinctly recall a short piece on them at the beginning of an issue of Select (circa 96/97), with them talking about cigarettes.  Of course, being an avid Sarah Records collector I did have the Shelley single.  And buying whatever came out on Matt's next label, Shinkansen, I was introduced to Dickon's Fosca in 2000.  Their debut album, On Earth To Make The Numbers Up, was in constant rotation in my car the following winter.  But it wasn't until 2005 that Kate (Dornan, member of Fosca and about-to-be singer in H Bird) sent me the Orlando singles and ep's when I was briefly back in the States.  Great, classic Pop, in the grand tradition of Pet Shop Boys.  My friend Alex posted their TV performance of Nature's Hated the other day and I've been listening a lot again since:



And then there's Just For A Second, which is just GLORIOUS.  It combines joy and despair in the way all the best Pop songs do -  "Deep down I fear I might actually be Unremarkable".  Even the title captures the transient beauty that Pop revels in, is indeed probably its lifesource.   Magnificent and Timeless:



An interview with them talking about what they want from Pop, and how bands need better lyrics (this, sadly, always seems to be true):



And one of my favourites was always Someday Soon.