1969
The Bee Gees song written for Otis Redding but redone as a hippie country-soul heartbreaker. Gram Parsons and the Flying Burrito Brothers, give it a country twang replete with pedal steel guitar that was entirely absent from the original.
This is a fantastic discovery If you like funky horn sections and you like powerful female voices. They don’t come much more powerful than Lydia Pense and her San Francisco-based band Cold Blood.
This song is such a masterpiece with which to launch a career. And Donny Hathaway is rightly regarded as one of the greatest of all soul singers.
Cream’s original version of this song was played a lot when I was at school, driven along by a bassline Jack Bruce apparently inspired by seeing a Hendrix concert. It was only much later that I heard this funky soul version by Spanky Wilson, with its exuberant horns and serpentine basslines.
Like great novels, great songs often have their roots in real life. But I never knew that was the case with Suspicious Minds.
I was busy building tree houses and playing with train sets when The Stooges released their debut album so I can only imagine the impact of hearing this when it came out. No need to say when that was either – it’s right there in the title.
This is, and always has been since I first heard it, my favourite song of all time. It’s just perfect in its simplicity: wistful, dreamy, mournful and melancholic.
Not sure how I’ve missed seeing or hearing this remarkable piece of pop history before – a ten-year-old Michael Jackson singing the blues.
RIP Melanie Safka (1947-2024)
I remember Melanie – just “Melanie” – as a hippie chick with long hair, black eyeliner and a warbling vibrato. I first heard her singing a song called Ruby Tuesday. I was a child and she sounded like one too.
This song is so perfect, like a four-minute movie. A miniature kitchen sink drama. Shot in black-and-white, of course, with the principal characaters played by Albert Finney and Rita Tushingham.
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