So this week three videos which are worth checking out are:

• "My Baby" by Cold Chisel
• "Don't want to miss a thing" by Aerosmith
• "While my guitar Gently Weeps" by Lynn et al.

The Cold Chisel video for the great footage of Aussie girls in Sydney, the Aerosmith video for scenes from the movie Armageddon which was the movie that this hit was the soundtrack to and finally, "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" for the gathering of rock and roll royality to commemorate the life and work of the late great George Harrison. The last video is a little sad as two of the perfomers, Tom Petty and Prince are of course no longer with us.

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

Over the years I have had a love/hate relationship with chess. A game I would love to be good at but alas stuck at a rating of about 1200. Great musical though.

In this song, Alan Parsons adopts Egyptian mythology and imagines a conversation between a man who is at the point of death and the boatman who has been charged with taking his soul across the river of death. I have written below the beginning of verses 1 and 2.

"Well I sympathise completely, but there is nothing I can do, I am just a humble servant with a message here for you. And I know you have good reasons and there's things you have to do but the boatman won't be waiting and he's leaving here with you."

"Well I sympathise completely, but there is nothing I can do, I am just obeying order, I'm a simple soul like you. Well you really are persuasive but I heard it all before.."

That final line of verse 2 I have always found striking as the image is so powerful. Yes imagine the most powerful richest man or woman in the world trying to argue with death that it is not their time. I love the way death (the boatman) is so polite softening the blow with feigned praise; "yes you really are persuasive .... but I heard it all before: wow what an understatement when one thinks of the number of people in the history of the world who have died.

Back in the days when I was a St Paul's fellowship leader, I used this song in an Evangelistic play I put together. A girl who attended our fellowship group at the time, who was a dancer, put together a really cool choreographed dance sequence for me. Once more all distant memories of long lost days.

So one final thing, about this clip. It features the late comedian Robin Williams playing the part of the protesting traveller. Somewhat sad and ironic because, as with so many comedians, in reality William's life was much more towards this melancholic end of the scale rather than the funny man of many of his movies and of course in the end he embraced the boatman through suicide — RIP.

This song I first shared all the way back when I was doing Covid Island Discs on Facebook. Little did I know then that I would still be sharing songs six months later. Given 2020 is a leap year, day 183 is exactly the six month mark so what better way to celebrate (if you can call it that) than with this song from the New Zealand band Split Enz. Now obviously I can't have any repeats in my play list so I have replaced day 38 with another song which fits the theme of that time which was strange hit wonders. If you're interested to see what I have replaced this day with then click here.

Another song from the Aussie band Cold Chisel is well overdue. Once again this band nicely captures the slightly melancholic existence of most blokes who have reached middle age and have experienced at least a few life knocks. Probably the most poignant lines in this song are:

had a friend, heard she died
On a needle she was crucified
Baby that was years ago.

So this is a song that was released by Alan Parsons after 15 years of musical silence. The video of this song is also really worth watching because it really is in some ways Parson's musical autobiography. I watched this song just after preparing Parson's biography for Covid Island Discs (Week 23) and what is fascinating about the video is seeing all the important landmarks of Parson's life in the imagery of the video, including Abbey road and his past famous albums. In fact, even the very opening scene of the video has a piece of old ship paper with the words "Dark Side of the Moon" inscribed on it as this was one of the early albums Parson's helped to produce along with the iconic Beatles album, "Abbey Road", when he first went to work at Abbey road studios as a young man.

OK this video clip is a bit of unusual find where Paul Simon and Willie Nelson duet on the Simon and Garfunkel classic Homeward Bound. Willie Nelson certainly brings a unique sound to this classic song as no-one has the vocal tonality of Willie's unique signature voice.