Category Archives: Music

#741: Radiohead – Lift

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For a long time, ‘Lift’ by Radiohead was considered to be one of the best songs the band never released. In 1996 the band would perform it live, and it grew to be a very popular track among fans. Their take of it at Dutch festival Pinkpop that year seems to be the one where fans go ‘Yeah, that’s how the track should always be played.’ The group revisited it during a live route in 2002 when they were getting to ready to work on what became Hail to the Thief. It still never saw the light of day on any album of theirs.

That was, however, until 2017 when the band revealed that it would finally be officially released on the OK Computer 20th anniversary reissue alongside two other unreleased songs, ‘I Promise’ and ‘Man of War’ (also known as ‘Big Boots’ to many). Fans were shocked and stunned and, as you can see, very welcome to this announcement. If you care to know I felt at the time, I did feel that it was pretty cool that this was happening. It was always clear that the track was a very good song, and it was worked during the sessions for OK Computer. There probably would have been some kind of outrage if it hadn’t been included.

The big difference though is that the ‘Lift’ we got didn’t have the same energy and power that those live performances did. It was much more calmer, seemed a lot more resigned and sadder as a result. Still, I believe Thom Yorke – or at least another member of the band – said that this was the way the song should always have been played. Despite its restrained performance and almost raw mixing, it definitely still retains the anthemic quality that endeared it to so many Radiohead fans in the first place.

I lurk on the band’s subreddit, and I recall seeing a few fans who were still just a bit let down by the version that was released. So when 18 hours of the band’s sessions for OK Computer which included this other version of ‘Lift’ leaked onto the Internet last year….. well it was like a birthday and Christmas rolled into one.

#740: Nas ft. AZ – Life’s a Bitch

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Long ago from now, can’t even remember what year it was but I’ll hazard a guess of 2010/2011, I was watching this film called Fish Tank while in bed. Why this was I wasn’t sure. I think I wasn’t sleeping very well, so what do you do when that happens? Turn on the TV, I guess. To put it simply, the film is about a girl who has ambitions but has a not so great life at home and also rocks up into this strange relationship with a man. At the end, she eventually leaves home and, after playing once in an emotional scene near, this song played again over the credits. It struck a chord with me. A bit of a dramatic thing to say. But I got quite invested in the film by the end of it, and the track seemed to sum up its sentiment very well. Plus the instrumental was calming to the ears. It wouldn’t be for another few years that I would listen to Illmatic in full though.

I still prefer ‘Life’s a Bitch’ to a lot of other songs on that album. Maybe because I had already heard it before. But I definitely think it contains one of the best matches of lyrical content with production on there. It opens up with a little introductory skit in which Nas and AZ shoot shit about sorting out the money they’ve earned so far, and once that’s done AZ bursts out the gate with, arguably, one of the greatest verses from a featured artist on a hip-hop song to date. I’m sure that a lot of people probably know his verse more than Nas’ which follows after the song’s hook. It’s just the energy with which he comes in and starts flowing over the beat that’s an instant hit to me.

Both rappers do their thing though. While AZ comes in with the energy, Nas follows on a calmer wave and on a positive note – feeling comfortable with the way life was at that point (he was 20 years of age and feeling good to be alive) while also pondering on the not so good stuff he did in his past. Ultimately, the aim for the two artists is to make as much money as they can and focus on the good times of today because it could all end in a split second. And then after the final hook comes that cornet played by Olu Dara, Nas’ father, that caps it off on a sweet and almost sad note.

#739: David Bowie – Life on Mars?

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Ah, 2016. Seems like such a simpler time. It was one of the best years of my life. I turned 21; I was on a hiatus from this blog but was working at a music magazine as an intern; I got to go to Glastonbury for free; I went to the USA on a long trip in the last few months that Obama was still president. It was a great time for me. But all the while that year will always be remembered as the one where everyone you loved in the entertainment industry suddenly started passing away. George Michael. Muhammad Ali. Gene Wilder. Prince. Alan Rickman. Leonard Cohen. Carrie Fisher. Debbie Reynolds, Fisher’s mother, who died the next day. There are many more I could mention. It seemed like every week of every month someone of notable fame was suddenly gone.

And it all started when David Bowie, who had just released his album Blackstar and looked like he was making a musical comeback, passed away from cancer just two days after the record came out. 10 days into January that happened. But it wasn’t until the 11th that the news came out. I was on the way to work on the underground flicking through the socials as you do, and there was a post that more or less said ‘RIP Starman’. That was how I found out. And coincidentally, the track ‘Life on Mars?’ was lined up on shuffle on my phone while I was listening to my music library. No lies. It was a sad day. And I just so happened to be working in Brixton of all places while this was going down. I just wanted to get home from work that evening. Hours later, the route I usually walked down to get to Brixton station was packed with fans paying tribute to him.

So this is ‘Life on Mars?’, and it’s on Bowie’s 1971 album Hunky Dory. It’s very much a classic. I think it’s known that Bowie took the chords of ‘My Way‘ and put his own spin on that track, adding surreal lyrics about a mousey-haired girl and Mickey Mouse turning into a cow. I don’t know what the song’s about, really. Though I think the things he describes in there are basically a way of saying, “Well if all this crazy stuff is happening here, couldn’t it be possible that there’s life on Mars too?” It’s probably much more complex than that. Even if the lyrics are quite strange, there’s no denying the beauty of the music. Rick Wakeman’s piano and Mick Ronson’s string arrangement lift the song to an entirely different level. It’s no surprise that this song is considered to be one of Bowie’s greatest, if not that, one of the greatest songs of all time.

#738: The Dismemberment Plan – A Life of Possibilities

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Think it was 2013 when I tried to listen to The Dismemberment Plan for the first time. I was on my Pitchfork tip during that time, trying to hear ‘new’ albums particularly in the indie scene. And Emergency & I, the band’s album released in 1999 is considered to be something of a classic in that genre. I went onto YouTube, searched for this track, listened to the first few seconds and really wasn’t into it. Why was this man singing like that? And what was with the squirty keyboard bass? Get that outta here. That was more or less my line of thinking from what I can recall. This was a major error.

Fast forward a few months later. I was in my first year of university and decided to really sit down and give the full album a listen. ‘A Life of Possibilities’, if you don’t know, starts Emergency off so there were the strange vocals and the keyboard bass again. But this time those two things sounded great together, and were backed with an undeniable groove too. This is what happens when you give a song more than a mere few seconds of your time. Then the dueling guitar hook came in and I was instantly hooked. If there is one thing about Emergency & I that I appreciated straight from the bat, it’s that almost every track has a great chorus. There’s no proper chorus in ‘Possibilities’ but those harmonizing guitars act as one, coming in between each verse in which singer and lyricist Travis Morrison goes on about – I think – someone who isolates themselves from society but finds that at some point they’ll have to get out there to truly live their life.

So yeah, do check out Emergency & I if you have the time. Don’t be like me when I was seventeen and disregard it because you don’t like a few sounds on it. The record is suitable for those going through their quarter life crisis, or just those who have hard times growing up in their 20s. That’s a large demographic.

#737: Coldplay – Life in Technicolor ii

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Coldplay’s debut album Parachutes was released twenty years ago last Friday. Though there’ll be hundreds of thousands out there who will think that they never got any better than that, I’m thoroughly in the stance that Coldplay peaked in their Viva la Vida era and haven’t matched it since. Collaborating with Brian Eno in places, the group created material that was far out by their standards and experimented with different instruments, soundscapes (they made a shoegazing track that was pretty great) and production techniques like tape loops and other bells and whistles that resulted in one of their most enjoyable albums.

The creative juices were flowing in the sessions for Viva la Vida, and so much material was made that Coldplay released the Prospekt’s March EP just a few months after Vida was available worldwide. Both album and EP go hand in hand with one another; for any time first time readers here it wouldn’t do any harm in listening to the two in one long sitting. The EP is also where ‘Life in Technicolor ii’ can be found as the opening track.

I think I read somewhere that Chris Martin had said that ‘Life in Technicolor ii’ would have been the obvious first single for Viva la Vida had it been released in its original form on the album. To prevent it from being so, they took out the parts where Martin sang, put a Jon Hopkins loop at the beginning of the track, and released it as an instrumental instead. That’s what ended up as the opening track on Vida. I was 13 when this track was eventually released as the lead single for ‘Prospekt’s March’; I seem to remember it being something of a big deal that the instrumental from their then-new album was being released with lyrics and all. It’s a nice sentiment too. Chris Martin sings about the world coming to an end because of a war that’s coming, but as long as we’ve all got love then that will guide the way. Kinda cliché thinking about it now. But it sounds terrific. The music video is a bit silly too, but what can you do.