So this week there are no major video productions so nothing that stands out visually. If I was going to suggest just two video in this week's list that are worth watching then I would go with "Death Defying" by the Hoodoo Gurus and Voodoo Child by Jimi Hendrix. The former because it is just a brilliant song and the later for the cool hippy audience enjoying Hendrix amazing guitaring.

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

OK I will admit this wasn't going to be my original entry but then Anthony Holmes reminded me of this album in one of his posts. It makes sense to post it today because it also fits with my rock collaboration theme where Sting does the "I want my MTV".

However, another reason for posting is because I have quite a funny back story to this song. In 1985, the year after I had left school this album was released. That year my school friend Mark Short, who was doing journalism at the time, rang me to ask if I knew anything about an unfolding story of the 1985 Higher School Certificate papers being stolen. I was nonplussed that he should think I would know anything about such seedy goings on.

Yet of course Mark was one step ahead of the game as it turned out that the whole unsavoury affair was centred around our local high school (Balgowlah Boys High School, oh yeah mate that the sort of names we give our suburbs in Aus) where some characters in that school managed to get hold of the national test papers before they were sat by the general public. How do I know this? Well my dear late friend Jonathan Higgs, who was one of the top students in the school, was approached by one of the boys, who had the 2 unit HSC mathematics paper, and asked if he could solve a particular problem from it. Of course Jon did not know it was his year's HSC and given he was a 4 unit maths student, he never sat the 2 unit paper anyway. Looking back so many years later, it still makes me laugh.

So why is this story connected with this song you ask? Well after the fiasco blew over, some cheeky group released a cover song of Money for Nothing which was all about the stolen 1985 HSC papers. I don't remember any of the lyrics except for the iconic Sting line: "I want my MTV" which they of course changed to "I want my HSC".

Time to lighten the mood a little. Another classic 80s dance song. Enjoy those synthesizers.

First for this band in Covid Island Discs. Like the way they combine the word shame with the guitar.

Postscript March 2022: RIP Taylor Hawkins.

This is the first time "Panic at the Disco" has featured on Covid Island Discs and they are a favourite band of my daughter, Grace. "High Hopes" is a song that has both interesting lyrics and an eye-catching video clip. The song captures the common theme in many young people of possessing high hopes for their own personal future success.

"High Hopes" is an upbeat song because it suggests the singer achieves his dreams, as captured in the video of him walking vertically up a skyscraper! This song made me think of another tune from Pink Floyd's "The Final Cut" album which acts in stark contrast to this tune's main theme (see tomorrow's Covid Island Disc post for more details).

Time to end the week with this classic from Fleetwood Mac. This song of course is one of their classics from their most famous album rumours. It is kind of an oddly appropriate title given the personal shenanigans that were going on in the band when this album was recorded. Below is a little snippet from the Wiki article about the making of the Rumours album.

As the studio sessions progressed, the band members' new intimate relationships that formed after various separations started to have a negative effect on Fleetwood Mac. The musicians did not meet or socialise after their daily work at the Record Plant. At the time, the hippie movement still affected Sausalito's culture and drugs were readily available. Open-ended budgets enabled the band and the engineers to become self-indulgent; sleepless nights and the extensive use of cocaine marked much of the album's production. Chris Stone, one of the Record Plant's owners, indicated in 1997 that Fleetwood Mac brought "excess at its most excessive" by taking over the studio for long and extremely expensive sessions; he stated, "The band would come in at 7 at night, have a big feast, party till 1 or 2 in the morning, and then when they were so whacked-out they couldn't do anything, they'd start recording".

In 2018 I took my daughter Grace to see Paul Kelly in a pub in the Northern quarter of Manchester. If we were to see him in Australia, we would be in a many thousand seat venue however because he is not really known in the UK we had the privilege of seeing him a venue which held at most about 150 people. It was absolutely great. At the time his latest album "Life is Fine" had only recently been released and this was the third song on the album which he played as his third song in the concert since he literally played every song on the new album; something he could do because every song on the album is top quality and so makes great concert material.