In my rush to upload my Hancock and Mamma Mia! etc. reviews earlier I forgot that I was always intending to offer up a digital copy of my own favourite ABBA tune, “The Day Before You Came”, as it is rarely heard and quite marvellous:
ABBA - The Day Before You Came [right-click to download]
And as an added bonus, as I feel so sorry and so generous at the same time, here’s the song as I first heard it (by English pop band Blancmange from 1984):
Blancmange - The Day Before You Came [right click to download]
[And curse all blogging software including ecto and MarsEdit and WordPress as this post should have taken about 10 minutes and instead took an hour. Gah!]
This morning I hustled across town to Radio NZ House on The Terrace to review Duncan Sarkies‘ new novel “Two Little Boys” for Nine to Noon. You can click here (for a week at least) to listen to what Kathryn and I had to say. As is often the case when I’m doing something for the first time (or for the first time in a long time) it was not a 100% satisfactory performance but I’ll let you be the judge. It is a good book, though, and I recommend it to you.
And when you’ve listened to the review (only 6 minutes and 23 seconds, although it felt a lot less…) you can listen here to the song that inspired the title of the book. This version features not only the legendary Rolf Harris (who made it famous) but also Liam O’Maonlai from Hothouse Flowers. This version is from a 1993 ‘Stop the Killing in Northern Ireland’ charity/protest album called Peace Together:
Rolf Harris & Liam O’Maonlai - Two Little Boys (mp3)
I first heard of Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep when it was admiringly referenced in Los Angeles Plays Itself, Thom Anderson’s witty and knowing appreciation of LA in the movies, during the 2004 Film Festival.
I’ll confess that it didn’t seem all that promising - a black and white, neo-realist, micro-budget drama set among the black community of Watts, LA. But the screening on Monday night, as part of the Wellington Film Society Charles Burnett retrospective, confirmed that Killer of Sheep is a stone-cold masterpiece.
Essentially about one man (Henry Gayle Sanders) trying to keep his family going in a community of fecklessness and poverty, Killer of Sheep keeps coming back to the Watts children, roaming the empty streets, fighting each other, throwing stones, amusing themselves while the adults either work until they drop or drift off in to disinterest via alcohol or drugs. I kept thinking that this could be Cannons Creek today.
Killer of Sheep was a student graduation project for Burnett, never intended for distribution. The soundtrack alone, full of R&B, jazz and blues classics would prove prohibitively expensive to any company wanting to screen the film commercially. But it is the soundtrack, and the placement of the songs, that is the film’s crowning glory and I’m glad that no one was tempted to re-score the film cheaply (as is done with DVD releases of tv shows from the era).
In honour of Killer of Sheep here’s Dinah Washington singing the unbearably haunting “This Bitter Earth” from that soundtrack.
Dinah Washington - This Bitter Earth
If the CD market has dropped from $14.2b to $10b in less than10 years, what is the money being spent on instead? From the latest edition of Esquire, Chuck Klosterman reports:
And while we’ll never know exactly where all those bones disappeared, my specific theory is this: A lot of the money not spent on music in the twenty-first century is being used to pay off credit-card debt that was incurred during the nineties. In other words, not paying for In Rainbows today is helping people eliminate the balance they still owe for buying Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness when they were broke in 1995.
And, for no better reason than I want to try the “Add media” button in WP2.5, here’s Pinkard & Bowden’s amusing parody of “Islands in the Stream” (”Music Industry”) from 1985:
Pinkard & Bowden - Music Industry (1985)
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