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Every track has a story. Classic songs from the rock music, pop, reggae & soul archive and the stories behind them with Simon Tesler, founder and former editor of 1980s music, media and pop culture magazine BLITZ.
That was Music Sounds Better With You, the one and only release from the French House act Stardust. One glorious single and then nothing more. So, Stardust were a partnership between school friends Alain Braxe and Benjamin Diamond Cohen with French house maestro Thomas Bangalter of Daft Punk. These were still early days for Daft Punk; their debut album Homework had been released but not yet its world-conquering follow-up Discovery. Braxe had been recording his own music at home and one of his tracks came to the attention of Thomas Bangalter, who released it on his private label. "Now we should do a show," Bangalter suggested, so Braxe roped in his old school friend Diamond to help out on vocals. They started messing around with a guitar riff lifted from a Chaka Khan track Fate, and the result was Music Sounds Better With You.
"We began with the lyrics," Diamond told The Guardian, "and we had lots. There were originally verses and verses, but in the end I think there are just four sentences in the whole song. At the time, I was in a punk band. When the guys realised I was working with Thomas and Alan, they fired me. 'Go to your techno friends,' they said. 'We don’t want you.' I was disappointed but it was OK. I got my revenge with the success of Stardust."
"In the spring of 1998," said Braxe, "Thomas took the track to some DJs in Miami and they all loved it. By summer, it had been released all over the world, just six months after being written."
By now, though, Bangalter was hard at work on Daft Punk's Discovery album so he had no time to spare for more Stardust projects. Braxe was OK with that. "We only ever played that one live show," he said, "we released this one single – and we never did an album. All three of us are happy with that. It gives it more magic, which is possibly what made the song so successful. That’s it. It’s there. It’s just music. Nothing else."
Shame.... OK more music. It's time to put the needle on the record, with three tracks from Criminal Element Orchestra, Corinne Bailey Rae and Queen Madge herself.
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Put The Needle To The Record from Criminal Element Orchestra, followed by Corinne Bailey Rae with Put Your Records On and finally Madonna and Music.
So Criminal Element Orchestra was one of the many alter egos of the American producer Arthur Baker. He was already a key figure in the New York hiphop scene, having been behind the controls for Afrika Bambaataa's seminal Planet Rock and Walking On Sunshine by Rockers Revenge in 1982. A year later he was working with New Order on their track Confusion, and also remixing tracks for other big name artists like Cyndi Lauper, Hall & Oates and even Bruce Springsteen. At the same time, he was also producing tracks of his own, initially as Wally Jump Jr & The Criminal Element with vocalists like Will Downing and Craig Derry, and then on his own as The Criminal Element Orchestra.
Studio computer technology was evolving all the time, and Put The Needle To The Record was one of the first examples of cut-and-paste sampling, where multiple different samples could be welded together. There's that guitar snippet there from Kiss by Prince as well as a whole load of other samples. But computers were still not quite powerful enough to create a loop that would last for the whole five or six minutes of a track, so for Needle On The Record, Baker's assistant Gail Sky King had to literally ride the record player, dropping the needle over and over again on the bassline break from a track released a decade earlier by a band called The Magic Disco Machine, over a live drum track already recorded in the studio by the musician Keith LeBlanc.
It was an incredible piece of work for the time and it really opened the floodgates for other cut-and-paste mash-ups.
After that we had the lovely British singer Corinne Bailey Rae with Put Your Records On, released in 2006 from her self-titled debut album. She had a spectacular year, with that first album entering the UK charts at No 1 and winning a string of awards. It sold more than four million copies worldwide, and Put Your Records On was her biggest single with sales in excess of 6 million. She wrote the song, she said, about her insecurity growing up as a mixed race child and the way she would find comfort listening to her dad's records in her bedroom. But then tragedy struck in March 2008 when her husband, the jazz musician Jason Rae, died from an accidental drug overdose. Shattered by grief, she retired from music for almost a year and a half before slowly rebuilding her career.
And then Queen Madge with the title track from her 2000 album Music, the follow-up to Ray Of Light. The track was co-written with the French electronic producer Mirwais. It was, Madonna said, partly inspired by a concert by Sting she attended. "I went to see him in New York at the Beacon Theater," she told Rolling Stone magazine. "He has a pretty mixed audience — I always look at audiences when I go to concerts. I’m obsessed with checking out the audience and seeing how they react. And people were pretty well-behaved and enthusiastically polite for stuff that he was doing off of his new album."
"But then, when he did the old Police songs — and it was just him and a guitar, and the lights came down — somehow the energy in the room changed. It ignited the room, and it brought everybody closer to the stage. And suddenly, people lost their inhibition and their politeness, and everyone was singing the songs and practically holding hands — you know what I mean? I mean, it really moved me. And I thought, 'That’s what music does to people.' It really does bring people together, and mixes the bourgeoisie and the rebels. It erases so much."
OK, a change of style now for our next three tracks, which are all about the experience of being musician. First up, is Grand Funk Railroad, a rock group through and through despite their name. They came from the town of Flint in the US state of Michigan, where the Grand Trunk Western Railroad is a well-known railway line. So they originally named themselves Grand Trunk Railroad, but then the railway filed a complaint so Trunk became Funk and for a while they also dropped the word Railroad from their name. Their biggest and best-known track is We're An American Band, written by drummer Don Brewer as a collection of anecdotes about life on the road as a working rock group. After that, more stories of life on and off the road from Dire Straits and Deep Purple. Yep, wanna guess which tracks? But first, Grand Funk Railroad and We're An American Band.
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You knew it was going to be Smoke On The Water, didn't you. So yes, after Grand Funk Railroad that was Dire Straits with Sultans Of Swing and Smoke On The Water from Deep Purple. Both songs were of course inspired by actual events.
In 1977, Dire Straits frontman Mark Knopfler was living in a dingy little council flat in Deptford in south east London with his brother David and their friend John Illsley who played bass in the band they'd just formed earlier that year. "“We were living on next to nothing," Illsley told Classic Rock magazine. "We weren’t even able to pay the gas bill. We weren’t called Dire Straits for nothing."
On his way home one night, Knopfler ducked into a local pub for a couple of pints, and found there was a band playing. "The pub was semi-deserted," he told the journalist Robert Sandall, "and the band were down at heel and they were just playing these Dixieland standards of Louis Armstrong songs... I think they were actually surprised they had an audience of even three or four... I remember asking them to play Creole Love Call or Muskrat Ramble. I think they were amazed that there was somebody in the pub who actually knew a few of the titles..."
"They're an interesting make up, those kind of bands, in that they're blokes who do all sorts of things, aren't they? They're postmen, they're draughtsmen, whatever, quantity surveyors, teachers, different things and they were expressing themselves. At the end, the trumpet player or whoever came up to the microphone and said 'Goodnight and thank you very much', you know, 'We are the Sultans of Swing'. There was something really funny about it to me because Sultans they absolutely weren't. They were rather tired little blokes in pullovers."
Yet it gave Knopfler the idea for the song that would win them a record contract and be the first big hit of their career.
And then, Smoke On The Water, not just one of the most famous guitar riffs of all time, but also one of the best-known anecdotes in rock history. The story behind the song is exactly as Ian Gillan tells it. In 1971, Deep Purple went to Montreux in Switzerland to record their next album Machine Head. The plan was to use the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio to record the tracks at Montreux Casino, which was situated on the edge of Lake Geneva.
The night before they were due to begin, Frank Zappa & The Mothers Of Invention were playing a show at the venue, but halfway through the set someone in the audience fired a flare gun at the ceiling, which immediately caught fire. Zappa stopped the show and told the audience to leave, while "Funky Claude", as he described in the song, the local music promoter Claude Nobs, ran in and out of the building to ensure all the audience and staff were safely evacuated. The members of Deep Purple retreated to a nearby restaurant where they watched the casino burn down to the ground.
They set up the mobile studio somewhere else instead, and went ahead with the recording session as planned. But on the last day, their engineer told them it's all great guys, but we're several minutes short for a full album. You need to come up with another song. They'd already come up with the riff for what became Smoke On The Water on the first day of recording while jamming for a soundcheck, but there were no lyrics. So bassplayer Roger Glover and singer Ian Gillan quickly hunkered down to come up with something. In a last-minute panic, they decided to tell the story of what had happened, and a legend was born.
Another set of three tracks now. If there is one thing that virtually all professional bands have in common, it's that they usually hate their record company. So here's a trio of tracks about famous fall-outs between the artist and the label. In a few minutes, Graham Parker delivers a poison-pen letter to his one-time label Mercury, and then the Sex Pistols roast industry giant who released their debut single Anarchy In The UK and then fired the band over the infamous Filth & The Fury interview with TV journalist Bill Grundy.
But first, The Clash and Complete Control. Throughout their career, The Clash railed against what they believed was authoritarian control of one sort or another. Complete Control had several targets, chief amongst them being their label CBS's decision to release the track Remote Control from their debut album as a single without getting their agreement. Back then, the consensus among more credible bands was that singles were singles and albums were albums and both should remain separate. Once an album came out, you didn't strip mine it for a string of singles; you came up with non-album singles instead. How things have changed!
But also in Joe Strummer's cross-hairs were concert promoters and the police - of course - and also their manager Bernie Rhodes who had convened a meeting with the band and told them he wanted "complete control". Tell 'em about it Joe.
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After Complete Control, that was Mercury Poisoning from Graham Parker & The Rumour and then EMI by the Sex Pistols. Parker's fury at Mercury Records, who were his American record label, was inspired by what he felt was their inept marketing of his first three albums, which had flopped there. Parker's manager was Dave Robinson, also boss of hip UK indie label Stiff, and he suggested his client should write a whole album of hate songs about the label. In the end though there was just this one, which was released on Stiff in the UK and by Arista in the US. This was enough for Mercury who agreed to release Parker from his deal, and sign instead with Arista.
And then the Pistols... Well, in all fairness, the band and their manager Malcolm McLaren did everything in their power to provoke what was then Britain's oldest, biggest and most prestigious record company. Drunkenness and bad behaviour in virtually all their public appearances, the catastrophic TV interview on Bill Grundy's live tea-time Today Programme, complete with f-words that had never before been heard on daytime television, followed by a brutal backlash from the mainstream media, and then from local councils across the country who banned the Pistols from performing. Packers at EMI's manufacturing plants even downed tools and refused to handle copies of Anarchy In The UK. The final straw came when the band were due to fly to Europe for a few gigs and ran riot at the airport, apparently spitting at other passengers and vomiting into waste bins. Sacked by EMI after only three months, they were snapped up instead by A&M Records, but that contract lasted only six days. Clearly that relationship was too short to merit anything more than a parting glance in the closing moments of EMI....
Oh dear. It's a hard life in the music biz. Let's take all the bad vibes away with one last burst of joy. When all is said and done, it's only music after all. To close the show, a fabulous track from Santana from their album Festival. There's no story, and no message, just 3 and a half minutes of uptempo joy. Let The Music Play.