51

I'm fifty one years old today. Last year's birthday, the big five- oh, took place in lockdown and despite everything it was a good day- lockdown brought some freedoms with it in a way, do what you can under the circumstances. This year's birthday means we can actually go to a pub although our booking for tonight is for sitting outside, it still feels a bit soon to be going indoors. 

Songs about being fifty- one are understandably thin on the ground. There aren't too many songs celebrating moving another year into your fifties. On Heartland in 1986 The The sang about the UK being the 51st state of the USA but that's not especially cheery for a birthday song. Instead here's Jimi Hendrix and his Experience in 1967 with a song about 51st anniversaries, the B-side to Purple Haze. Hendrix's guitar sings and swings, fuzzy and warm, switching between rhythm and lead or playing both at the same time, Noel and Mitch thudding away behind him. Jimi sings about the flipsides of marriage, a tale about not wanting to settle down, not wanting to be tied down- very much a young man's point of view. Jimi never lived to see his 51st birthday- he died four months after I was born, 18th September 1970. 

51st Anniversary

Dreaming

Drew posted this song a couple of weeks ago over at Across The Kitchen Table. I loved it the first time I clicked play and have been playing almost daily ever since. I can't hurt to re-post it here, in case anyone missed it over at Drew's blog.

The Lucid Dream are from Carlisle and have been around for a decade releasing 3 albums, making a guitar led, psychedelic racket. The new song, SX1000, as a bit of a departure. It sounds like a 1990 acid house remix of an indie guitar band where the remixer has chucked most of the source material away and turned the acid all the way up.



How good is that? Right up my alley and the video is excellent too. It appears judging by the comments at Youtube and elsewhere that The Lucid Dream's fanbase aren't all happy about this change in direction. This is Bad Texan, released back in 2016, a full on guitar, northern rock song. Very good too.

Shot Right Through With A Bolt Of Blue

While we're doing Joy Division and New Order let's have Frente!'s much loved cover version of NO's Bizarre Love Triangle (from 1994). It's good sometimes to hear familiar songs done differently- this is very sweetly sung with an acoustic guitar picking away. You could call it twee if you wanted to. I think I would.

Bizarre Love Triangle

The hole in the ground in the photograph was The Hacienda, Whitworth Street. What other city in the world would have allowed one of the most important parts of its cultural history to be demolished? The view at the time was 'we are not sentimentalists, tear it down'. Now there's a pretty nasty apartment block on the site called- yes, you guessed it- Hacienda Apartments.

Here's the 1986 original of Bizarre Love Triangle. Epic in every way.

51

A reader (Colin Dickson) sent me a link to this recently- Mr Weatherall live at the Hacienda in 1993- you can find it at BLOG51. The blogpost also mentions Hacienda resident dj Tom Wainwright, who I went to school with and, true fact, whose sister was my first girlfriend (aged 13 or something).