This week all the videos are worth watching. I think there are at least 4 which are visually evocative:

1. Road to nowhere, Talking Heads
2. Mad hatter, Melanie Martinez
3. Be Good Johnny, Men at Work
4. One of us, Joan Osborne

Out of these four, the "Be Good Johnny" video really captures in the rather negative pressure that was put on my generation of Australian males to be good at sport. I really like the caricature of the older Australian male asking the boy "are you going play cricket this year Johnny? Nah, Nah, Nah... So tell me, what kind of boy are you Johnny?"

Melanie Martinez song is of course really out there in terms of visual imagery fitting the LSD-type altered reality of the Mad Hatter.

The video for "One of us" goes really well with the lyrical content of this song. The video switches back and forth from Joan Osborne singing to images of humanity living their lives in the strange reality in which we all find ourselves. The images have been purposely red colour-shifted so the whole thing has a more observer-like quality as one watches the various scenes unfolding in the video.

Yet this week my vote goes for Talking Head's video "Road to nowhere" as the imagery in this video consistently matches the theme of the song reflecting on the apparent meaninglessness of life's progression. I particularly like the sequence from 1 minute to 1 minute 21 seconds capturing a couple going through their whole life's events and ending in a dancing kiss — what a cool way to resolve life's apparently meaningless paradox!

Wow another milestone. This completes my David Bowie trilogy with the last 1984 themed-based song from his Diamond Dogs album. I remember really wanting to have a New Years' Eve party because wouldn't it have been great to play this song at midnight on the dawn of 1984 (just as good as playing Prince's 1999 at turn of the Millennium: man what a disastrous night that was, do you remember David E Coleman).

Needless to say, I did not get my wish because the Benson family were on holiday (can't remember where now maybe Lake Macquarie Julie Cummings ??) so it was just a quiet night in for me as a then young 17 year old teenager who put the song on his car cassette radio near midnight so he could pretend and imagine what it would be like to play this song at that unique date in human history.

This song really is great in its musical intensity.

Someday they won't let you, now you must agree
The times they are a-telling, and the changing isn't free
You've read it in the tea leaves, and the tracks are on tv
Beware the savage jaw of 1984

They'll split your pretty cranium, and fill it full of air
And tell that you're eighty, but brother, you won't care
You'll be shooting up on anything, tomorrow's never there
Beware the savage jaw of 1984

Yes we seem to be living in a time when most establishments are having problems. This song kind of captures the feeling of emotional overload one feels when reading a modern newspaper. The temptation is always to take Sixto's advice in the final line of this song: "frankly I couldn't care less".

"????Make you, make you make you notice. Gone is my arms, gone is my legs, gone is my style .. cause I'm going to make you see no else here no one like me.????"

Well it is my lovely wife's birthday today and I have the perfect song for this day. "Happy Birthday Helen" by Things of Stone and Wood. Sadly, the audio quality of this video is very poor so I have put two versions of the song one so you can see the Aussie band members of Things of Stone and Wood performing, the other so you can hear the song with decent sound quality. It is always gratifying when one can find the perfect song for an occasion (slightly more aligned than the song I chose for our 20^th wedding anniversary (Covid Island Discs Day 26) 😀.

Video of the band performing but poor sound quality

Audio of song with no video

This is a great little song by REM. I remember when it came out I was working as a PhD student at the University of Manchester. I have a very distinct memory of doing tissue culture work with another scientist Juliet while this song was blaring out of the radio. The lyrics to this song are also quite fascinating:

Now, Andy, did you hear about this one?
Tell me, are you locked in the punch?
Andy, are you goofing on Elvis? Hey, baby
Are we losing touch?

Say what? Also the line "hey baby are we losing touch" sounds like it is sung by the late great Roy Orbison

The day John Lennon was assassinated I came home from school and my Mum told me the news as I came through the front door of our house in Gurney Crescent Seaforth. At the time I actually did not know much about the Beatles but this was all to change as over the following months Sydney radio stations were full of Beatles music. As I got to know their music better, I began collecting some of their albums and one album I bought was a compilation called the Beatles Ballets. This was one of the tracks on this album and at the time I think it became one of my favourite Beatle songs. Unfortunately, I could not find the original recording of "The Fool on the Hill" on Youtube so the best I could do was get this performance of the tune from Paul McCartney which is pretty decent.

Now this was originally meant to be the final Covid Island Discs song as the UK was scheduled to come out of lockdown on the 21^st of June. However, due to the UK government not shutting down travel from India, as post Brexit they wanted to get a quick trade deal with this nation, we now have the Indian delta variant spreading rapidly through the UK population. This means that the government announced on the 14^th of June that they are delaying the removal of lockdown restrictions until the 19^th of July. So I will continued posting on this web page new songs for another month.

Another classic song from Dido. The video is particularly evocative.