Welcome back to the LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY TRACKS, our weekly (in theory) music discovery game. Eleven players submit tracks each round on a theme – the idea is to find stuff we the voters haven’t heard yet. This is the playlist post – once you’ve heard the songs, go and vote in the poll post.
This week’s theme is – well, it’s complicated. Originally the submitted idea was “Introducing…” – debuts by musicians on songs by others, like guest verses or debuts of later jazz bandleaders. A cool theme, but very tricky to research (since, by the nature of things, debuts of famous people tend to be well known in their own right). I asked to expand it to include more broad shifts like band line up changes, collaborations, aliases and side projects. And in the end line up changes and side projects were what almost all the players went for. So I renamed the week to “ALL CHANGE!”
The Spotify playlist is missing a final track – the Orb and Alan Parker collaboration – it’s the final song on the YouTube list:
I’ll leave it to the players to explain how each track qualifies. For now, just enjoy the sounds they’ve selected. Thanks to them for wrestling with a tricky brief!
Ringing The Changes:
- HERBIE HANCOCK – “Wiggle Waggle”: From 1969’s Fat Albert Rotunda
- BY STORM – “Double Trio”: From 2023’s Double Trio EP.
- V/Z – “Habadash”: From 2023’s Sueno Assente
- PROPAGANDA – “La Carne, La Morte e Il Diavolo”: From 1990’s 1234.
- EKKAH – “Last Chance To Dance”: From 2014’s Last Chance To Dance EP.
- THE OTHER TWO – “Selfish”: From 1993’s The Other Two And You
- MAM – “Ongelofelijk”: A 1989 single!
- LEAVES’ EYES – “Across The Sea”: From 2018’s Sign Of The Dragonhead
- TSOL – “Flowers By The Door”: From 1984’s Change Today?
- NANCY VANDAL – “Egg Sandwich”: From 1996’s The Interrogation Room
- THE ORB ft ALAN PARKER – “Grey Clouds”: From the 2007 compilation Annie Nightingale Presents Y4K
Special note: One contestant was unable to submit this week, so I found a track instead. But I’m not going to tell you which it is!
In the salad days of mp3 blog era, I came across Zongamin and tucked him away in some dusty corner of my brain for years and years. I literally discovered the V/Z project by looking into what he might be up to now, and it turns out he had formed a collaborative project with drummer Valentina Magaletti (she’s the V, he’s the Z). I figured that was enough to qualify for this week’s brief, but for good measure I chose a track with a guest vocalist: Cathy Lucas of Vanishing Twin.
It was only later (like, this morning lol!) that I learned both Z and V are actually members of Vanishing Twin, where Cathy Lucas sings full time.
But TO BE CLEAR, “Habadash” is not a Vanishing Twin song, even if it looks like it could be one on paper. It’s something else.
My nomination is By Storm. It’s a return of one of my most loved Golden Beats, Injury Reserve, who were nominated by our @exileinmudville for the 2021 poll. I’m going to link to the full story, but I gotta tell you this song is much more powerful (imho) if you think of it as a song of mourning.
https://pitchfork.com/news/injury-reserve-retire-name-share-first-song-as-by-storm-watch-the-video/
So, Propaganda then…
The year is 1990, and as befits a cash-strapped teenager I’m a frequent scanner of the bargain bin at the record shop. Two successive Propaganda singles land in there, and I scoop them up – although I don’t think I’d read much in the music press about the band making a comeback, these were the P Machinery / Duel hitmakers! What could be wrong?
Weeeellll… as the A-sides of those cheapo 12″ singles indicated, this was barely the same group. Vocalist Claudia Brücken had married Paul Morley, left the band, and in the chaos the band had left the ZTT label with lawyers becoming involved over the generosity (or otherwise) of their contract. Suzanne Freytag and Ralf Dörper had stayed on longer and contributed to the start of the writing and recording of album two. One member – Michael Mertens – remained in situ and added two ex-members of Simple Minds (you couldn’t tell) and a vocalist, Betsi Miller, who remains sufficiently obscure that she does not have her own Wikipedia profile. All change, indeed.
They hoped you liked their change in musical direction, which was mostly MOR Radio 2 fodder, anticipating the sound of The Corrs, of all people, a few years later. The whole thing appears to have been an unholy A&R mess – guests on the album include Howard Jones, Dave Gilmour, Pino Palladino and Blue Weaver, a country mile away from the Fairlight-driven drama of A Secret Wish. Who wanted this? Apparently, not many.
Tucked away as a B-side of the second single was La Carne, La Morte E Il Diavolo, which as you’ll have heard, is a stately, Morricone-like instrumental quite unlike the rest of the parent album, and rather unexpected from the same source as A Secret Wish. I loved it, and it has stayed with me for 32 years, just waiting for an opportunity to bang on about it in some way – and here we are.
(Count yourself lucky. At one point in the selection process I was giving serious consideration to a track off the first post-Fish Marillion album.)