My favourite video from this playlist (in terms of the visuals) in the first week goes to Dido's "Sand in my shoes" (song 2 in the playlist video) perhaps some of you are thinking, for obvious reasons.

So today I watched a very interesting video analysis of a song by the Beatles called A Northern Song. Post Covid Island Discs now usually records the death of famous musicians and of course poor old George Harrison passed away many years before the Covid-19 pandemic. So I guess this post is in memorandum to George Harrison even if he did pass away so many years before this website was even born. Yet there appears to be so much more to this song of Harrison's than meets the eye as explained by James Hargreaves in his video which is also included under the Beatles Anthrology recording of Harrison's clever song which I think, as Hargreaves argues, is a passive-aggressive dig at the way McCartney and Lennon treated him as an inferior member of the Beatles.

After watching Hargreaves excellent analysis of the Harrison's song, along with his detailing of the complicated tensions that existed between the Beatles in the late 60s, it became obvious that the band was always in trouble and it was only a matter of time before the fab four would go their separate ways. Hargreaves analysis challenges the commonly held idea that the breakup of the band was solely down to Yoko entering the scene as clearly relational tensions in the Beatles were not just confined to John and Paul.

A less known version but better version (in my opinion) of the song before Lennon and McCartney fell into a possible trap set by Harrison (see Hargreaves analysis below).

Analysis of the song and its meaning by James Hargreaves

The mainstream version of the song as first published on the Yellow Submarine Album

So on Thursday I posted a song by probably the greatest wordsmith of rock and roll, Bob Dylan. Yet this Australian gives the great Dylan a run for his money in my opinion. For my UK friends, his music is really worth getting into if you like poetry set to music. He has so many great songs but in this little number, he manages to smuggle a recipe for making gravy into his lyric ("Just flower, salt, a little red wine; don't forget a dollop of tomato sauce for that sweetness and extra tang"). Like Bob Dylan's song Hurricane, this song tells a detailed and complex story about a guy spending his time in prison over Christmas.

Another clever lyric clause in this song is: "and you'll dance with Rita, I know you really like her, just don't hold her too close oh brother please don't stab me in the back. I didn't mean to say that, it's just my mind it plays up, multiplies each matter, turns imagination into fact."

What an iconic album cover and an equally iconic song.

"This song is not a rebel song, this is Sunday Bloody Sunday"

"Oh, oh half way there, oh oh livin' on a prayer." Bon Jovi is always an exciting musician to listen to and this really is one of the hard rock classics which gets the most amazing amount of crowd participation I have ever seen (or more accurately heard). When the crowd sing the chorus it really sounds incredible and must have been an amazing experience for those were at this concert. What is even cooler is the crowd easily hit the key change in the final chorus, I guess that is the advantage of having over 60,000 people singing unison.

He certainly inherited his Dad's voice. Kind of sad that John Lennon really never connected with Julian. I wonder what Julian made of John's song "Beautiful Boy" which was about his other younger son Sean that he had with Yoko Ono (Covid Island Discs Day 176). Another thought about this song is it was written in 1991 and contains the lines:

I have lived for love, now that's not enough.
For the world I love is dying (and now I'm crying)
Time is not a friend (no friend of mine), cause friends we're out of time and it's slowly passing by.

Wow this was written in 1991 so quite along way ahead of its time. If Julian thought we were out of time then, imagine what he must think now as we watch the worst-case predictions of global heating come to pass.

This is from the final Pink Floyd album with Roger Waters and it was appropriately titled the Final Cut. I have already posted the title song on day 173 of Covid Island Discs. The album has a very strong anti-war theme as it was pretty much Waters protest against the Falkland war of the 1980s. This is perhaps the darkest song on the album where Waters imagines rounding up all world leaders who make and cause war and placing them in a special home (named after his late father who was killed in world war II when Roger was only 5 months old).

An August 2022 update: Today the breaking news on Sky is a massive escalation in tensions between China, Taiwan and the USA as China live miltary exercises breaches Taiwan's territory. All in response to a visit by the US Senate leader Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan. What with the mess the UK is in currently as Truss and Sunak try to out rightwing each other by offering us a dystopian vision of a world with nearly zero taxes, zero services and slave wages, this song has never felt somehow more apt even given its rather ungodly solution to the world's "leadership question"

OK so today I went for my first swim at Grand Central. The last time I swam there was the same week Covid Island Disc started as this was the last time the pool was open before the UK went into lockdown. Although the pool opened again in 2021, I have been back until today

During my swim however I struck up a conversation with a bloke who was in my lane called Matt and it turned out he managed different bands. He picked up on my Australian and then told me about some of the Australian bands he managed. One of them apparently is quite big in Australia and appears regularly on the alternative Sydney rock station Triple J. Anyway, the band is called Stand Atlantic and this is one of their Youtube hits.