Saturday, October 31, 2009

Heim is where the heart is...

heim? , yes heim...in fact Icelandic for home. woke up feeling shit today, got them damn late autumnal blues, so i put on a favourite couple of tracks and all is right with the world...
First up we have Sigur Ros with 'Samskeyti' off the album "Heim", this track always makes me feel calm, i found out about Sigur Ros just after the 1st album had come out and they fascinated me by their use of the Hopelandic language (a lead singer invention) and emotive musical phrases. The idea of Hopelandic was so that their songs were accessible to all and people could put in meanings to songs with relevance to how they feel whilst listening to it, clever eh? Sigur Ros have seen me through some bad patches, some of you older readers will know that I had cancer 3 years ago and I used to play their albums to take me away from the reality of it all..very cathartic!
The second track today is the Paul Oakenfold remix od Massive Attack's 'Unfinished Sympathy' a track that never fails to move me. Massive attack were a mighty force around the late 80's and early 90's and I remember blasting them out when I worked at Virgin Records in Southampton. They were known for their production values and vibe, you could see customers start to nod and shimmy to the sounds emanating from the shop speakers. Thats when record shops were good and staff were allowed to play what they want without having a corporate radio station blasting out pap all day as they do now! Those days of the Virgin Empire were great, the manager used to smoke weed in his office and all of us staff knew what we were talking about and loved music so much...those days are now gone. I remember we hosted the Video premiere in shop of George Michaels 'I want your sex video' as it wasn't being shown on telly...the shop filled with hundreds of people just to see a video, it wouldn't happen today, the magic of the retail record shop has gone...may it rest in peace.

ciao

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Everything has changed hasnt it mate they think they are making things better but they just make them worse. I think the fall came though with the invention of the cd. Albums dont seem the same anymore.... Martin