Petula Clark's Hit Parade
When I was very small the only music player we had in our house was an 8-track cartridge player, and most of the 8-track cartridges were compilations of popular classical music. But there were two 8-track pop tapes in our house - The Everly Brothers' Golden Greats and Petula Clark's Hit Parade. I played them both a lot but I think I played Petula more and still love her to this day.
Clark was a pretty strong, independent and amazingly successful female artist, as it turns out. Not that I had any clue while still in short trousers. Of course, Hit Parade had the classics like Downtown and Round Every Corner on it (although it predated Don't Sleep In The Subway), but I think my favourite song of hers was Heart. I must have danced around our living room a lot to that one.
"records I had to buy with my
own pocket money"
The Teardrop Explodes - Kilimanjaro
When I was a bit older and started listening to alternative music there were a lot of great albums being released. Dexys Midnight Runners, The Jam, Joy Division, The Smiths were all records I had to buy with my pocket money the week they came out. However, my favourite band was The Teardrop Explodes. I remember seeing the video to their hit single Reward on Top Of The Pops and it was like nothing I had ever seen before.
That single wasn't on the first edition of their debut album, but Kilimanjaro had lots of other superb songs. Julian Cope's imagination was always pretty out there it seems and I had no idea where his imagery and ideas came from. They just seemed to feel like what a proper band ought to be like, and it was only later on reading Cope's autobiography that I realised quite how dysfunctional they were.
Bob Dylan - New Morning
Then I went to college and discovered the greatest songwriter of all time, probably, and one of the finest poets of the years too. Dylan is inspiring in so many ways and he is still producing incredible albums at the age of 80 (his latest being one of his best in my view). I love so much of his music it's hard to pick any one album. Blood on the Tracks is incredible, Blonde on Blonde electric and the Basement Tapes I will never tire of, but one a few people ignore but I have kept coming back to is New Morning.
If Not For You, often covered and one of his most beautiful love songs, and the title track, one of Dylan's simple upbeat pleasures, are both gorgeous - but I love the creativity and playfulness of so much of this album - experimenting with folk music, and creating a new world, drawing on the past but very much in the present. I relate to that a lot in my own songwriting.
Tim Hardin - 2
Another one of my favourite songwriters, Tim Hardin lived too short a life, ruined by depression and drug abuse. But he left us with many beautiful songs, such as If I Were A Carpenter and Reason To Believe. I released a little EP of Tim Hardin covers a few years ago as Hiawatha Telephone Company, recorded alone at home, straight to my mobile phone, which included songs from across his career - but it tends to be the first two albums people talk about most. The third, a live album with a full band, is hard to find but it is also excellent and includes an astonishing version of TH2's You Upset The Grace Of Living When You Lie. If that song title doesn't make you want to stop reading and start listening then I just don't know.
Velvet Underground - Loaded
Lou Reed taught me how to be a songwriter however, for better or worse. I'd always been a music fan, but not really imagined I could be a music creator. It was a revelation when I realised Reed wrote a song like 'Heroin' with only a couple of chords. It was similar to when I found out the Beatles never learned to read music. You could be a musician and not understand the language you spoke - who knew? Of course, a baby doesn't learn their mother tongue either - if it's in you, it's going to come out. Or let the boy boogie woogie, as John Lee Hooker put it.
The Velvet Underground were on the verge of falling apart but their fourth album, Loaded, is full of great songs. There's a video of Lou talking about how he wrote Sweet Jane with only three chords, and it's my go-to cover but I play my version with only two chords. The lyrics seem to be about normal people and normal emotions but have a level of empathy that rises high above the mundane. If you ever had a heart, you wouldn't turn around and break it, right? If you ever played a part, you wouldn't turn around and fake it. Damn right!
"You could be a musician and
not understand the
language you spoke"
Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - Singer's Grave A Sea Of Tongues
Will Oldham, AKA Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, is another person whose style and approach I relate to a lot. He's released dozens of albums all of which are interesting in different ways. Lyrically, there's an intelligence and poetry to Oldham's songs that few can compete with, except maybe the likes of Nick Cave who has a very different style. I also like the way Oldham revisits his songs with different players and completely reinvents them.
The album Singer’s Grave A Sea Of Tongues comprises poppier versions of songs that first appeared on the Wolfroy album only three years before but they sound completely different and I love these new versions. Oldham has done this before, re-recording songs from his Palace Brothers period on the album Greatest Palace Music which is also great. Singer’s Grave isn't on Spotify so I've included New Partner on my playlist instead, which Oldham has said felt like it drew elements from Nirvana's Heart-Shaped Box and the Rolling Stones' Get Off My Cloud, but ultimately is like neither. It's a song which began life on the Palace Music album Viva Last Blues, was reworked as the first song on Greatest Palace Music, and subsequently included on a number of other Bonnie 'Prince' Billy albums, including 2019's We Are Inhuman, where this version on Spotify comes from. However it's played, it's a magical song.
The Great Park - The Wife
When I was just starting out writing songs, Stephen Burch ('The Great Park') was living in Brighton, recording albums and putting them out himself, along with others by friends on his fledgling Woodland Recordings label, as well as curating a monthly gig in a small basement room which became a bit like a social club, with great music and a reliably friendly vibe. It all felt like "our music" and made the idea of writing and playing to an audience seem possible. Stephen was also super-supportive and would give a chance to anyone who he felt was doing something interesting. I recall he set up the first Last.fm page for my act Hiawatha Telephone Company, just because he knew how to and thought it mattered. He didn't need to ask.
Eventually Stephen moved to Germany but continued to write album after album of great songs. The Wife was one of the first albums released from Berlin and it is an astounding collection. I always tell people it's one of the saddest albums I know. A lot of The Great Park songs seem to be about running away, and Dig A Hole For Everyone is another one of those - but as I write there are Russian tanks amassing at the Ukraine border so it doesn't seem at all far-fetched.
Hiawatha Telephone Company - Harry Smith Was My Father
I recorded the album Harry Smith Was My Father in a little studio in Kemp Town in Brighton. 15 songs in five hours, just me and my guitar, and I think it cost about £100 in total. It was the first time I had recorded anything, the first time I had ever been in a studio, but I'd been writing these songs and I thought they needed to be preserved for posterity. And the collection Harry Smith Was My Father was the result.
The title of the album came from the affection I felt for the Harry Smith anthologies, and the feeling that in my own way I was creating a form of modern urban folk music, much like the old blues and folk players were doing when they played those old songs. My sofa and a bottle of beer was their front porch and moonshine whiskey. We're all different, and yet we're all the same. I believe that.
I still like these songs a lot, and played them again recently to a small audience on the 10th anniversary of the album's release. They would benefit from a full band Bonnie 'Prince' Billy style remake, but for now they're still here, just as they were recorded.
Bio
The Family Grave lives in Brighton (UK). He has a job and a family and likes to write songs. A new album titled 'Happy Songs' is due to be released in March 2022. You can find more of his work at The Family Grave
