2010 July | Mazas Weblog

Do you believe in what you see?

31 July 2010 Written by MazAlien 0 Comments

Zero 7 is a Grammy Award-nominated, downtempo styled musical duo comprising of Henry Binns and Sam Hardaker from the United Kingdom. Contributing artists include vocals from Mozez, Sia Furler, Tina Dico, Sophie Barker, and José González. The guest vocalist lineup for the duo has subsequently included Eska Mtungwazi, Martha Tilston, and Rowdy Superstar for their fourth studio album.

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Zero 7 – In The Waiting Line

(Video hosted on Youtube.)

ero 7 have been popularly featured in various film and TV soundtracks, as well as lounge music compilations such as The Chillout Project by Filipino DJ Anton Ramos, and the Hôtel Costes compilation CDs. Their track “Lo” was featured on a mix CD by Layo and Bushwacka!, and is the reason behind the common mistake of people thinking that Layo and Bushwacka! had remixed the track. It is one of the few times the track has actually appeared on CD or in digital form, as the only Zero 7 release it has been featured on is EP1 which was only available on vinyl.

Their music appearances in movies and television are also apparent, most notably their songs “Destiny” (Blue Crush, Raising Helen, Smallville, Roswell, Obsessed), “Give It Away” (Top Gear,CSI: Crime Scene Investigation), “Polaris” (Sex and the City), and “In The Waiting Line” (Garden State, Sex and the City, House, Numb3rs).

“Destiny” was featured on the Lacoste website. For SkyTV’s broadcast of the Star Wars Saga, “Destiny” was used as the background music in the romance version of the full length commercial. In early 2006, HBO used “In The Waiting Line” for a promotional for the network’s upcoming season of shows. The 96-second trailer featured clips of the shows moving in backwards fashion. In 2008 NBC used “In The Waiting Line” in a profile of French Olympic Swimmer Laure Manaudou. Fox TV has also used “In The Waiting Line” on its hit show, House, shown in 2009.

Zero 7 have also influenced other artists, with the song “In The Waiting Line” being sampled by M Will the Shogun, son of Marley Marl, for use in the song “Nothing Iz Real” by Termanology.

George Harrison – Something

18 July 2010 Written by MazAlien 0 Comments

“Something” is a song released by The Beatles in 1969. It was featured on the album Abbey Road, and was also the first song written by George Harrison to appear on the A-side of a Beatles single.

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George Harrison – Something

(Video hosted on Youtube.)

t was one of the first Beatles singles to contain tracks already available on a long playing (LP) album, with both “Something” and “Come Together” having appeared on Abbey Road. “Something” was the only Harrison composition to top the American charts while he was in The Beatles. John Lennon and Paul McCartney—the two principal songwriting members of the band—both praised “Something” as among the best songs Harrison had written. As well as critical acclaim, the single achieved commercial success, topping the Billboard charts in the United States, and entering the top 10 in the United Kingdom. The song has been covered by over 150 artists including Elvis Presley, Shirley Bassey, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, James Brown, Julio Iglesias, Smokey Robinson, Eric Clapton and Joe Cocker, and is the second-most covered Beatles song after “Yesterday”.

Something (Live From The Concert For Bangladesh)” is just one of many gems on the new George Harrison career compilation album “Let It Roll”…It comes stacked with the essential solo cuts from “All Things Must Pass” …”What Is Life”, “My Sweet Lord”, “Isn’t It a Pity”, and “The Ballad of Sir Frankie Crisp”…and three prime live versions of Beatles classics from The Concert For Bangladesh “Something”, “Here Comes The Sun”, and “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”.

Something in the way She moves
Attracts me like no other lover
Something in the way She woos me

I don’t want to leave her now
You know I believe and how

Somewhere in the smile she knows
That I don’t need no other lover
Something in her style that shows me

I don’t want to leave her now
You know I believe and how

You’re asking me will my love grow
I don’t know, I don’t know
You stick around and it may show
I don’t know, I don’t know

Something in the way she knows
All I have to do is think of her
Something in the things she shows me

I don’t want to leave her now
You know I believe and how

Focus on Pinkpop Festival

12 July 2010 Written by MazAlien 0 Comments

FOCUS will be remembered as a band that, uniquely, brought instrumental music back into the charts in the early seventies (epitomised by the yodelling epic ‘Hocus Pocus’ and the glorious ‘Sylvia’) and – at the time of Britain’s entry to the “Common Market” – blazing a trail for European music both in the UK and the States where they enjoyed hit singles and albums. In Thijs van Leer and Jan Akkerman they also had two of rock’s finest instrumentalists.

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Focus on Pinkpop Festival

(Video hosted on Youtube.)

n the eve of their sell-out UK tour, in February 1976, Focus’ guitarist Jan Akkerman quit the band. This somewhat shocking news came after incessant touring and internal disagreements caused a creative hiatus. This manifest itself in the 1975 album ‘Mother Focus’ which received mixed reviews. Hugh Fielder writing in ‘Melody Maker’ thought the band had lost the thrusting side of their nature.

Thijs van Leer, the band’s founder and longest-surviving member, managed to enrol jazz fusion guitarist Philip Catherine for the tour. By the time of the BBC ‘In Concert’ recording in March 1976 he was fully up to speed. Although some may miss Akkerman’s flamboyance there is no denying that Catherine turned in a competent performance.

Focus’ days were numbered after this tour. They reconvened for one final album, ‘Focus Con Proby’ which featured the unlikely presence of sixties pop star PJ Proby. Van Leer continued to pursue a successful solo career (this success had actually contributed to Akkerman’s departure) whilst Catherine returned to his jazzier world. David Kemper who had played drums on several of the ‘Mother Focus’ tracks filled in on the tour and subsequently returned to session work, whilst Bert Ruiter (who had remained with Focus since the ‘classic’ 1972 line-up) reappeared in his wife’s band Earth and Fire.

Focus is a Dutch rock band. It was founded by classically trained organist/flautist Thijs van Leer in 1969, and is most famous for the songs “Hocus Pocus” and “Sylvia”. The band have found renewed fame due to the use of “Hocus Pocus” as the theme for the Nike 2010 World Cup commercial, Write the Future.

Desmond Dekker’s Israelites

09 July 2010 Written by MazAlien 0 Comments

Get up in the morning, slaving for bread, sir,
So that every mouth can be fed.
Poor me, the Israelite.

“Israelites” is a song written by Desmond Dekker and Leslie Kong that became a hit for Dekker’s group, Desmond Dekker & The Aces. Although few could understand all the lyrics, the single was the first UK reggae number one and the first to reach the US top ten. It combined the Rastafarian religion with rudeboy concerns, to make what has been described as a “timeless masterpiece that knew no boundaries”.

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Desmond Dekker’s Israelites

(Video hosted on Youtube.)

he vocal melody is syncopated and is centred on the tone of B flat. The chords of the guitar accompaniment are played on the offbeat. They are the standard chords of B flat major with a surprise chord of G flat in the final bar.

It was one of the first ska songs to become an international hit, despite Dekker’s strong Jamaican accent which made his lyrics difficult to understand for audiences outside Jamaica. In 1969 it reached the Top Ten in the United States, peaking at #9 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. It hit number one in the United Kingdom, Netherlands, Jamaica, South Africa, Canada, Sweden and West Germany. The song came almost two years after Dekker first made his mark with the rude boy song, “007 (Shanty Town)”.

“Israelites” brought a Jamaican beat to the British fans for the first time since Millie’s number two hit “My Boy Lollipop”. Subsequently, ska had its breakthrough in the United Kingdom. The Beatles soon recorded their own ska-influenced song, “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” which the pop group Marmalade subsequently took to number one. (“Desmond” in “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” was sometimes taken to be Dekker, though McCartney has said it was simply a typical Jamaican name.)

The disc was released in the UK in March 1969 and was number one for one week, selling over 250,000 copies. A global million sales was reported in June 1969. Dekker had two more UK Top Ten hits over the next year, “It Miek” and his cover of Jimmy Cliff’s song, “You Can Get It If You Really Want”. Dekker recorded on the Pyramid record label, and when its catalogue was acquired by Cactus Records in 1975, “Israelites” was re-issued. The song again reached a Top Ten position in the United Kingdom just over six years after the original release

Summer Wine

03 July 2010 Written by MazAlien 0 Comments

Summer Wine is a song originally sung by Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood.
It was later covered by Demis Roussos, Bono of U2 with The Corrs, Gry with FM Einheit and his Orchestra, Scooter (on the 2000 album Sheffield), and by Ville Valo & Natalia Avelon for the soundtrack of Das Wilde Leben. It was also covered by Ed Kuepper and Clare Bowditch on the cult Australian music gameshow Rockwiz.

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Ville Valo & Natalia Avalon – Summer Wine

(Video hosted on Youtube.)

ummer Wine is a song written by Lee Hazlewood. It was originally sung by Suzi Jane Hokom and Lee Hazlewood in 1966, but it was made famous by Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood in 1967. This version was originally released as the B-side of “Sugar Town” the previous year before featuring on the Nancy & Lee LP in 1968. It was the first of Sinatra and Hazlewood’s string of popular duets.

Lyrically, “Summer Wine” describes a man, voiced by Hazlewood, who meets a woman, Sinatra, who notices his silver spurs and invites him to have wine with her. After heavy drinking, the man awakens hungover to find his spurs and money have been stolen by the mysterious woman; the subtext of which being they experienced intercourse and as repayment she misappropriated them (them being his “silver spurs a dollar and a dime”). The song was later covered by Demis Roussos, Bono of U2 with The Corrs, the Swedish band Ultima Thule, Gry with FM Einheit and his Orchestra, Anna Hanski & Lee Hazlewood, Scooter (on the 2000 album Sheffield), and by Ville Valo & Natalia Avelon for the soundtrack of Das Wilde Leben. “Summer Wine” was also covered by Ed Kuepper and Clare Bowditch on the cult Australian music game show Rockwiz. The latest version is sung by Australian singer Tony Keo.

Ville Hermanni Valo (born November 22, 1976) is a Finnish singer, songwriter and frontman of the Finnish rock band HIM. Valo was also the drummer for the Daniel Lioneye project. Valo has a baritone vocal range. Ville Hermanni Valo was born in a district of Helsinki, called Vallila. His father, Kari, is Finnish and his mother, Anita, is of Hungarian descent. Soon after his birth, the family moved to the riverside community of Oulunkylä where they lived throughout his teenage years. In 1984 his younger brother and only sibling Jesse, a professional Thai boxer (left ‘Iconcrash’ in 2008), was born. In his late teens, he worked at his father’s sex shop and later moved out on his own when he was 18. As a child, Valo was exposed to the songs of popular Finnish performers such as Tapio Rautavaara and Rauli Badding Somerjoki by his music-loving parents, while an older cousin introduced him to the heavier sounds of bands like Kiss, Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden.

Archive for July, 2010

Do you believe in what you see?

George Harrison – Something

Focus on Pinkpop Festival

Desmond Dekker’s Israelites

Summer Wine

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