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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.
Hello, this is Simon Tesler with more great sounds from the Music Archive and a few of the stories behind them. This week, more songs about the WEATHER with tracks from Crowded House, Garbage, Tina Turner, AC/DC and much more. But first, some rain and some sunshine from James and then Semisonic.
Sometimes from James and then Sunshine & Chocolate by Semisonic; both bands making their first appearance on Sounds, along with six more acts still to come on today's show. So, yes, the weather is our theme again this week, with sunshine, storms, fog and lots of lots of rain. Back in September, when I did my first show about the weather, I noted that there are far more songs about rain than about sunshine. Must be something there than inspires a songwriter.
So first up we had Sometimes from the Manchester band James, the opening track from their 4th album Laid. James actually emerged in the early 1980s at around the same time as The Smiths and the two bands were close for several years, with James supporting The Smiths on several early tours. James's singer Tim Booth was good friends with Morrissey - who is said to have had more than a bit of a crush on him - but ultimately James arguably overtook their former pals in commercial success especially after the Smiths imploded towards the end of the decade. James actually enjoyed their greatest success in the 1990s, and they're still going today. They released their 18th studio album Yummy in 2024.
So where does the band name come from? Well actually from founder Jim Glennie. "No one ever calls me James," he said later, "so I don't associate it with my name in that respect. We couldn't use Tim because he's the singer and that would be weird. Our drummer was called Gavan, and we thought it sounded too 'heavy metal', and the other one was Paul, so it was either James or Paul, so we went with James. It didn't seem like a big deal at the time..."
After them we had the American band Semisonic, one of those 1990s post-Grunge bands who really should have been bigger than they were. Sunshine & Chocolate is from their 3rd album All About Chemistry, released in 2001, and it's packed full of great songs. Frontman Dan Wilson is one of the great unknown songwriters of the 2000s - and if you need any further proof let me point you in the direction of Someone Like You, Adele's mega-million seller, which he co-wrote with her.
OK, two more acts making their debut on Sounds now. Both tracks are from the early 90s. In a few minutes, Crowded House from New Zealand and Weather With You. But first British singer Zoe, and Sunshine On A Rainy Day.
Zoe Pollock with Sunshine on A Rainy Day, followed by Weather With You from Crowded House. Now, Zoe had a brief but meteoric success with the album Scarlet Red & Blue. Sunshine on a Rainy Day - the first song she ever wrote - ended up as one of those Ibiza dance classics in the summer of 1991, but all summers come to an end, and there was no follow-up to Scarlet Red & Blue, although she tried various other different musical styles in later years. She's now a successful painter and jewellery designer based mainly in Cornwall, though her Instagram feed suggests she still makes an annual pilgrimage to Ibiza. Old habits die hard I think.
Crowded House was the band formed in 1985 in Australia by Neil Finn, out of the ashes of Split Enz, which has the honour of being the very first rock band from New Zealand to gain international recognition back in the late 1970s, not least because of their unique visual style, sort of Cirque de Soleil meets Klaus Nomi in a power pop style. They were also, I should add, the second band I ever interviewed for the very first issue of BLITZ magazine in 1980; the others being The Associates, Brothers Johnson and Motorhead. An eclectic mix even then!
The core of Split Enz was the Finn brothers Tim and Neil, and it was Neil who formed Crowded House in 1985 after the break-up of Split Enz. He was later joined briefly by elder brother Tim, and even later still by his sons Liam and Elroy. Neil's post Split Enz band was originally called The Mullanes, but they changed their name to Crowded House after the very small property they rented in Los Angeles where they went to record their debut album. Weather With You comes from their third album Woodface, the only one to which Tim Finn contributed. It was the first track that the two brothers wrote together since the break-up of Splitz Enz.
Back to the UK now for the next two tracks. Tina Turner was of course American by birth, but it was in the UK that she resurrected her career in the mid 1980s after the collapse of her marriage and musical partnership with her volatile husband Ike Turner. After that, Whistle Down The Wind, a gorgeous track from the first solo album by former Haircut 100 front man Nick Heyward. But first Tina Turner and I Can't Stand The Rain.
It's not often that musicians are lucky enough to enjoy a complete resurrection and a whole new career, but Tina Turner is one such example. After considerable success in the 1960s in a partnership with husband Ike, Tina Turner had had just about enough of his physical and verbal abuse by the mid 1970s, and she left the marriage and the partnership to attempt to launch a solo career. But by the early 80s this was going nowhere, and she was being more or less written off as a nostalgia act.
That was when she received an invitation from Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh to provide guest vocals on a compilation they were putting together of classic songs reinterpreted by new artists. Ware and Craig Marsh had been founder members with Phil Oakey of Human League but had recently split to set up their own band, Heaven 17. Tina was invited to sing the Temptations' song Ball Of Confusion on the new album, entitled Songs Of Quality & Distinction. It was so good that Capitol Records asked her to do another: Al Green's Let's Stay Together, also produced by Ware and Craig Marsh. That was even better, and Capitol signed Tina for a whole album, Private Dancer. It was to become the most successful album of her whole career, certified 5 times platinum in the US with global sales in excess of 12 million copies, launching Tina Turner on a whole new career as one of the top female acts of the 1980s.
Whistle Down The Wind was the first single from Nick Heyward following his departure from Haircut 100 in 1983, taken from his excellent solo album North Of A Miracle, which is packed full of great songs. What does the song mean? Well, Nick has never really said, but the phrase 'To Whistle Down The Wind' is an English idiom that's hundreds of years old - even Shakespeare uses it in Othello - and it means to leave someone or something to its fate. Famously it was the name of an early 60s British movie about a little girl who finds a homeless man living in the family's garden shed and begins to believe he is Jesus.
Heyward has said though that Whistle Down The Wind wasn't the song's original title, but the tone of it was just part of the general melancholy and depression from which he was suffering after the sudden explosive success of Haircut 100. He told Medium in 2019 "Life was crumbling around me at the time I wrote that song and it came out in the writing. I had always been a sensitive person, and sometimes I didn't want to be. But it was very good for the writing."
Two more songs now with an edge of melancholy. In a few minutes, the angelic voice of the troubled balladeer John Martyn with Sunshine's Better. But first, Walking In The Rain. It was later covered by Grace Jones on her Nightclubbing album, but this is the original version by Australian musicians and producers Harry Vanda and George Young, under the name Flash & The Pan.
A couple of classics now from the golden era of the American songbook. Stormy Weather was first sung at Harlem's notorious Cotton Club in 1933 by Ethel Waters; A Foggy Day was composed by George & Ira Gershwin in 1937 for a Fred Astaire movie, and both songs have been covered hundreds of times since then. I'm going to play you two versions from the 1950s. First up, a wonderful version of Stormy Weather from 1959 by jazz singer Keely Smith, perhaps best-known for her ten-year partnership with larger than life bandleader Louis Prima; and then another jazz great Dakota Staton with her take on A Foggy Day from 1957.
Two rockers to close the show this week. Only Happy When It Rains was the second of five singles taken from the self-titled debut album by alt-rock band Garbage, who came out of virtually nowhere to be one of the biggest post-grunge acts of the 1990s. Co-founder Butch Vig was already one of the most influential rock producers of the period, sitting behind the controls for numerous era-defining albums, not least Nirvana's Nevermind. But he was itching to get back to having his own band again. He told Billboard in 2011, "By the time I'd done Nevermind, I'd recorded — I swear to God — 1,000 bands that were just guitar-bass-drums and I just decided I wanted to do a bit of a U-turn."
The plan was to blend together lots of different musical influences while also retaining a foothold in guitar-based rock. Only Happy When It Rains was a perfect metaphor for that approach, keeping the style of alternative rock while also mocking its self-absorbed pessimism. Guitarist Steve Marker told Addicted To Noise, "It's really just us poking fun of ourselves... at the alternative rock angst, wearing your heart on your sleeve thing and at ourselves for writing such dark songs."
And then, AC/DC with Thunderstruck, from their 1990 album The Razor's Edge. The band initially said it was inspired by an incident when a plane that guitarist Angus Young was traveling in was hit by lightning and nearly crashed. But he later admitted that was just a story. "It was really just a case of finding a good title along the lines of previous hits Powerage or Highway To Hell. We came up with the thunder thing and it had a good ring to it. ACDC equals Power. That's the basic idea." That's in a few minutes, but first Garbage and Only Happy When It Rains.
That's all for this week. I'm Simon Tesler. Thanks for joining me for another deep dive into the music archive. Next week, I'm moving to a new time, 7pm on Wednesdays and a new two hour show. I hope you'll be back with me for another great selection. See you then!