Tom Lehrer In Concert (1959)

My father was never a punk rocker. And I'd never wish him to be... In fact I get mildly embarrassed at 75% of my music collection whenever our conversations turn to music - he is an austere classicist through and through, with a deep knowledge of classical (but not Stravinsky, he's got not melody you see) and a passion for light opera (Gilbert & Sullivan etc). We even got the marching band treatment as kids. I always loved it. Rock n' roll and doo-wop vinyl, recorded to cassette to put on in the car - that's as close as he got to letting his hair down. Don't get me wrong, he's not a blinkered old fart, just musically conservative, or at least uninterested in the frivolous nonsense I waste my time on. Sometimes I agree with him.

But this is all before you take account of Tom Lehrer. My father broke his leg in a motorcycle accident in the late 70's and Lehrer's literary brand of satirical sing-song kept him sane, apparently, and it's easy to see why: there's something very comforting about the best musical satire of the 20th century - it makes you realise you aren't insane after all and everything really is fundamentally fucked.

Don't let the cover fool you either, Tom plays a mean piano and has a meaner lyrical repertoire that covers everything from drugs and nuclear holocaust to rednecks and 'poisoning pigeons in the park' - which perhaps explains his popularity with 60's subculture.
Lehrer was infuriatingly educated, funny and conscious, with a head-spinningly deft playing technique and an ability to mimic other styles. This bloke and a piano could bring the house down and he was, predictably, bigger in the UK than his native land, I guess he was too much to stomach for a Cold War audience. At the time, the mainstream press deemed Lehrer tasteless. This is poppycock, obviously. His wit shines in the spoken interludes and the total lack of frills on this live compilation give it a warm and jovial atmosphere.
Not much here has dated, as long as you have the vaguest grasp of where the world was at in 1959. Step outside yourself, laugh and enjoy. If this was big with the hippies you mugs'll love it. I'll end on a quote from the 81-year-old himself. 'I'm not tempted to write a song about George W. Bush, I couldn't figure out what sort of song I would write. That's the problem: I don't want to satirise George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporise them'

This is a sizeable upload and probably all the TL you'll ever need.
Part the first
Part the second

Chris Morris - The Chris Morris Music Show (1994)

^'On The Hour' - groundbreaking news satire with yet another exposure of the sadistic British
right-wing tabloid institution (the tape is obviously fake, I believe 'Neil Kinnock' is played
by Steve Coogan)

Satirical genius (a word I never use lightly) Chris Morris: if you're a Brit you probably know him better for his one-off TV shows that send up a moral panic-prone society, and it's po-faced news media which stokes the fires of PC/reactionary paranoia. But he's also had a long and fractious association with BBC radio - The Chris Morris Music Show was one of many live broadcasts he produced and presented (credit has to go to him for being great with mash-up sound editing and pastiche songwriting too).
Like 1992's innovative serial 'On The Hour', the Chris Morris Music Show features all manner of controversial stunts often with none-the-wiser interviewees; and Morris presenting us a warped, but depressingly familiar, version of reality.

Apart from going out of his way to bait any listeners without a sense of humour, his taste in music is also delectable; the playlist is a great mixture of classic funk/soul and prime cuts of indie rock and hip-hop from the early-to-mid 90's era (although they don't all escape mockery and 'embellishments'). One song he plays is below - I totally forgot about this, frankly amazing promo from everyone's favourite giant baby. Reminds one of 'Eraserhead' slightly (Pixies actually covered the Lady in the Radiator song, available from this post)

Highlights of the show so far include Chris getting a blowjob from the producer over Beefheart's 'Tropical Hot Dog Night' and offering students a GCSE exam hotline, where he reveals exam questions to callers.
You can stream and download all the radio rips from those (comparatively) golden 1990's right here. It's a long-running and unrivalled fansite for all things Morris, and it's got bloody everything.
Each show is an hour long, I've done three and cracked a rib.

Morris' last project proper: if you hate scenesters and think Shoreditch in London (or just all of London) should be reduced to a smoking crater littered with student guts, WATCH 'Nathan Barley'

Jake Thackray - La-Di-Dah (1991 collection)

A real treat for yuz here. To celebrate my purchasing of the Jake In A Box retrospective, I present here a 22-track compilation of Jake Thackray recordings, taken from his tenure at EMI in the late 60's and early 70's with a couple of live tracks from later in the 70's. To my mind he's at his best as you see him on stage: solo with an acoustic guitar; but I was pleasantly surprised by the producers' restraint in embellishing his songs in the studio - all of them are gold. So - no flies on me!

Thackray's bawdy, verbose and often hilarious folk songs don't at all betray his reputed stage fright, a fear which eventually led to his premature retirement from performing. However this wasn't before he completed many sessions for the BBC, played the Royal Variety show and recorded his debut in 1967, a door down from the Beatles at Abbey Road... (although he's not always exactly wholesome family entertainment).

'So, what makes him so damn great?', I hear the voices in my head cackle.

Over an idiosyncratic finger-picking style, Jake tells quirky and satirical stories with whimsy, wit, raunch (always in good taste) and the occasional dash of absurdism, all in an exquisite Yorkshire brogue. Not unlike Nick Drake with a sense of humour (Nick was a fan apparently). He's been called 'the North Country Noel Coward', but this doesn't do him justice at all. Thackray taught in France for many years, and was essentially responsible for introducing the chansonnier tradition to these shores. The video below is his translation of George Brassens' 'Le gorille'.

I was introduced to the songs of Jake Thackray after seeing a 2006 BBC Four documentary aired to mark the revival of interest following his death in 2002. Shamefully, it's taken me this long to properly exploit my curiosity. He is all the more appealing for his detatchment from that contemporaneous music scene of psychotropics and Eastern mysticism; right up there with 60's traditionalists like Ivor Cutler and the Kinks circa 'the Village Green Preservation Society'.

'The Thack' just wrote great down-to-earth songs with a mastery of the English language we don't often see in this day and age; his pastoral songs always put me in a rustic frame of mind and almost make me proud to live in the countryside (see: 'North Country Bus', probably the most impenetrably colloquial song on here, or not? Non-Brits leave yer feedback!).

Ripped@320 mit artwerk
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