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Music history comes alive. Forgotten favourites & undiscovered gems from the rock, soul & reggae archive and a few of the stories behind them. Your host is Simon Tesler, former publisher and editor of 1980s music, media and pop culture magazine BLITZ.
I'm Simon Tesler. Welcome back to another hour of great songs on the theme of FOOD. Let's eat out again now, with Harry Styles and Music For A Sushi Restaurant.
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Harry Styles with Music For A Sushi Restaurant, which was the first single from his 2022 album Harry's House. In fact, that was actually the original title for the album. Styles told radio broadcaster NPR "I was in a sushi restaurant in Los Angeles with my producer and one of our songs came on from the last album, and I said, 'This is really strange music for a sushi restaurant,' and then 'Oh, that would be a really fun album title,' And then as this song started being made, I kind of just said, 'Music at a sushi restaurant.'"
And just before the break we had Custard Pie, which is the opening track on Led Zeppelin's majestic Physical Graffiti album. Now, I think all of us adults in the room know what Robert Plant is talking about when he says he wants to chew down on your custard pie, but actually there's a bigger story behind that track and indeed much of Led Zeppelin's output. Like so many British musicians who had grown up in the 50s, Plant and Jimmy Page were obsessive about the imported Black American Blues records they'd listened to as teenagers.
Zeppelin's Custard Pie borrows heavily, especially in its lyrics, from three specific songs, all recorded in the 1930s. Drop Down Mama by Sleepy John Estes, Shake Em On Down by Bukka White, and I Want Some Of Your Pie by Blind Boy Fuller. In fact virtually every line of Custard Pie is lifted from one of those three tracks. The website and podcast TurnMeOnDeadMan is especially good at identifying all the source material for Led Zeppelin's output, look it up. Needless to say none of the three original artists got a share of Led Zeppelin's royalties.
Now, Led Zeppelin were by no means the only musicians doing this -- let's be kind and call it paying homage to -- American Blues. Next up, another example released more than 20 years later. In the late 1990s, a music journalist told electronic musician Moby about the work of the celebrated folklorist Alan Lomax, who had travelled the deep American South between the 1930s and early 60s interviewing Blues musicians and recording their songs. The resulting compilation, Songs From The South, became the inspiration for his breakthrough album Play, which uses samples from many of the songs Lomax recorded. In many cases, Moby gave songwriting credits to both Lomax himself and the original artists.
At first, the album sold poorly, but Moby and his management team had the bright idea of licensing the tracks on it to TV commercials and movies. Moby also toured relentless to promote the album, and that twin approach caused album sales to sky-rocket. In its first week on-sale, Play sold 6,000 copies. A year later, it was selling 150,000 copies a week. I'm going to play probably the best-known track from the album, Honey, which is based on a loop of the song Sometimes by gospel singer Bessie Jones. After that, two more songs about Honey, but I'll say more about them in a few minutes.
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So, Moby and Bessie Jones with Honey, followed by The Honey Thief from Hipsway and then Just Like Honey from The Jesus & Mary Chain. OK so of course we're back in the land of metaphor here, not literal honey. Hipsway and The Jesus & Mary Chain both emerged in the mid 1980s in what was then an explosion of new bands.
These were the golden years of course for the music industry of course, with record labels riding high on the cash injection from the compact disc revolution. For those of you too young to have been around back then, it was a time when record buyers were literally replacing all their existing scratchy vinyl for shiny new sound-perfect CDs. We all ended up with two copies of every album, and the record labels were making an absolute mint, and as a result, snapping up every good new band on the market. Hipsway and The Jesus & Mary Chain -- both from Scotland -- enjoyed a good couple of years, but they're perhaps now more interesting as the stopping-off points for two musicians who went on to other successes.
Hipsway was founded in 1984 by Johnny McElhone, previously one of the co-founders of Altered Images -- who can forget pixie-voiced Clare Grogan and their hits Happy Birthday and I Could Be Happy? After Hipsway he went on to co-found Texas with Sharleen Spiteri, where he remains to this day.
The Jesus & Mary Chain were formed at around the same times by the Reid brothers Jim and William, and they were greeted with rapturous ecstasy by the music press, as the "new Sex Pistols". Yet you could say that neither the band nor the Reid brothers quite lived up to the hyperbole or their early promise, though they continue to perform and record to this day. Their original drummer, though, did go on to enjoy some notable success as the founder and front man of Primal Scream. Yes, indeed, Bobby Gillespie.
Onwards. It's time to get funky with two slices of soul from the Deep South. First up is King Curtis, a saxophonist and bandleader who enjoyed great success both as a recording artist in his own right and also as a much-in-demand session musician. You can hear him on everything from The Coasters' Yakety Yak and numerous Aretha Franklin records including Respect to John Lennon's first post-Beatles album Imagine, released in 1971. We would no doubt have heard much more from King Curtis had he not been tragically murdered later that same year at the age of just 37 in a fight with a junkie on the steps of his New York apartment building while he was trying to fix the fuse for his air conditioning unit. What an truly absurd waste of a life. In a few minutes James Brown, but first this is King Curtis and Memphis Soul Stew.
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Haha! Hands up if you remember that last track. More about that in a minute. So after King Curtis and Memphis Soul Stew, we had Mr Dynamite himself, James Brown with Mother Popcorn. That was one of no fewer than four singles Brown released over the course of 1969 that were designed to popularise a dance move he had himself invented and christened as The Popcorn. That was the name of the first single and it was followed by Mother Popcorn, then Lowdown Popcorn and finally the mouthful of Let A Man Come In And Do The Popcorn.
And that was just records under his own name. He also got several of his various supporting acts to record other popcorn-based songs, like Vicki Anderson's Answer To Mother Popcorn (I Got a Mother For You). The dance kind of caught on, but to be honest it was a bit too complicated for most people. No one could dance quite like James after all, and it wasn't long before his attention had moved elsewhere.
So, what was that track after Mother Popcorn? Well, it has the honour of being the very first entirely electronic successful pop record: Popcorn by the band Hot Butter. The same year that James Brown was trying to get kids to do his dance moves, in a completely unconnected but coincidental development, a Broadway composer and arranger by the name of Gershon Kingsley was experimenting with the newly invented Moog synthesizer, the first practical machine that was capable of creating musical sounds with electronic frequencies.
This had caused a sensation a year earlier with Switched-On Bach, an album of classical pieces performed entirely on a Moog synthesizer. Kingsley set about creating an album of pop songs played on the same instrument, under the name Music To Moog By. Most were covers of songs originally written by The Beatles or Simon & Garfunkel, but one was an original composition which he named Popcorn. A couple of years later, it was re-recorded by one of Kingsley's colleagues and released it as a single under the name Hot Butter. It was a global smash, especially here in Europe, selling more than two million copies worldwide, more than half of them in France. Popcorn by Hot Butter. I remember it fondly. I had a copy myself.
Where shall we go now to eat? How about Jamaica? Max Romeo has some Fish In A Pot for us; and then Big Youth tells us the best way to serve it, because Some Like It Dread.
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So first up was Fish In A Pot, an early track by Max Romeo, one of Jamaica's first big reggae stars. He scored a huge hit in the late 60s with the song Wet Dream. It was massively successful in Jamaica but the BBC wouldn't play it on the radio in Britain, despite Romeo's claim that it was about a leak in the roof of his house. Various other similarly playful tracks followed, including Fish In A Pot in 1970 before Max found Jah and got serious. His masterwork of course is the 1976 album War Ina Babylon.
Then we had the fabulous Big Youth. Some Like It Dread comes from his superb 1975 album Dreadlocks Dread, arguably his own masterwork. It's true that some like it hot, some like it hot, but personally I'd prefer not to have it in a pot nine days old.
Some minestrone soup now followed by cold lasagne. Yes we're back in metaphor land again with 10cc. Life Is A Minestrone was the first single from what is arguably their finest album, The Original Soundtrack. As co-writer Eric Stewart once explained to the BBC: "Life *is* a minestrone, isn't it? It's a mixture of everything we pile in there and of course once we sat down to start writing Life Is A Minestrone, well, what's death? Death's got to be a cold lasagne, you know, three days old, stuck in the fridge, you don't want to eat it, and once you get on, on a roll like that about food and, and feeling, we had it written in a day." Here it is all its glory. 10cc with Life Is A Minestrone.
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Three rockers to close the show. First up, another tasty dish in a pot. It's Brain Stew by Green Day from their 1995 album Insomniac. And of course this isn't a literal brain stew that frontman Billie Joe Armstrong is talking about. He'd just become a father for the first time, and as the album's title makes clear he was struggling to get any sleep at all: My mind is set on overdrive/ The clock is laughing in my face.
After Green Day, the title track from Blondie's 4th album Eat To The Beat. And then we'll end with a track from The Police. It's Peanuts from their debut album Outlandos d'Amour. Why Peanuts? I couldn't tell you, and nor can Sting or Stewart Copeland who co-wrote the song. What we do know though is that it was written specifically about Rod Stewart, a former hero of Sting's who had ended up becoming tabloid newspaper fodder because of his celebrity exploits. Easy to say when you're just starting out, but Sting had changed his mind a few years and a few tabloid headlines of his own later. He wrote in Lyrics by Sting, published in 2007, "I was more than willing to pass judgment on his extracurricular activities in the tabloids, never thinking for a moment that I would suffer the same distorted perceptions at their hands."
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I'm Simon Tesler. Thanks for joining me for another deep dive into the music archive and a few of the stories behind the songs. I hope you'll join be again next week for another great selection. See you then!