So this week there are some good videos which are well worth taking the time to watch. The top three in my view are:

1. Penny Lane, The Beatles
2. Californication, Red Hot Chili Peppers
3. Lithium, Evanescence

Penny Lane is a great video as you see the Beatles riding horses. If you watch closely, the ride doesn't go as smoothly as perhaps the band hoped. In particular, Ringo seems to get caught between two of the horses when he tries to dismount to head to the outside dining table which is quite amusing. The video itself is also interesting visually and rather arty considering how long ago it was made.

Californication is a great little video with the song being performed by the band while the video cuts between the band members and their avatars inside a video game. The video game snowboarding sequence is interesting and fun to watch.

Yet once again Evanescence takes the best video of the week with Lithium. Not sure why but all of Evanescence's videos are a real gothic work of art with intense imagery that so nicely complements the intense music they consistently produce.

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

I really love this song, the lyrics are so beautiful. The last verse is especially poignant:

Tears and fears and feeling proud
To say, "I love you" right out loud
Dreams and schemes and circus crowds
I've looked at life that way
Oh, but now old friends they're acting strange
And they shake their heads, they say I've changed
Well something's lost, but something's gained
In living every day
I've looked at life from both sides now
From win and lose and still somehow
It's life's illusions I recall
I really don't know life at all.

This is another song which captures the human condition for many quite nicely. It pictures life's progression as being on a runaway train. I particularly like the chorus which goes:

Runaway train never going back
Wrong way on a one way track
Seems like I should be getting somewhere
Somehow I'm neither here nor there

Another sad touch to this video is notices of real people who have gone missing. Finally, love the acoustic base guitar.

I remember exactly what I was doing when I first heard this classic track from Brian Adams. I was working in a Woolworths shop in a place called Manly (Sydney Australia). It was a University vacation job and I was working on the back cash register (from here it was about a 3 minute walk to the glories of Manly beach). If only I appreciated the beauty of that wonderful place as I do now. For some reason I associated this song with a girl I used to like at the time even though the lyrics were completely inapplicable because we never actually went out. Ironically, the line in the song that resonated with me (and which now brings a smile to my face) is the line "thinking about our younger years". I first met this girl when we were both at school in about '82. Apparently the song was released in 1984 although I definitely couldn't have heard it on the Aussie charts until 1985 as this was my first year at the University of Sydney. As a very young 19 year old, 3 years was like a lifetime ????.

Time for some more Aussie music I feel. This is another classic from Cold Chisel and the video is well worth taking the time to watch. Some great footage of 70s Sydney chicks 😍 and a great sax solo to boot.

This one of the Police's strangest songs. I cite this song straight after yesterday's song by Dido Life for Rent because apparently it is about a guy submitting to his girlfriend in a relationship but in the final verse he turns the tables on her and she becomes wrapped around his finger. Again these songs capture the more adversarial aspect of boy/girl relationships where both parties are trying to establish dominance over the other rather than acting in love which ideally looks to putting the other person's interests first.

Well this was a youtube find. This was the first performance of Joni Mitchell's Woodstock by the artist herself. This was recorded a few weeks after Woodstock in 1969. It never ceases to amaze me how this 3 day rock concert would become such a famous iconic event that would be remembered even in the 21^st century. Tomorrow I shall cite the more well known rendition of Woodstock as performed by Crosby, Stills and Nash