So there are some really good video this week. My top three recommendations are:

• As lights fall, Alan Parsons
• Tiny Dancer, Elton John
• Chemtrails over the country club, Lana Del Rey

I think most people watching those three would rate Chemtrails as the best video because it is certainly very well produced and very provocative, with Del Rey's trademark strangeness stamped throughout. However, my favourite video this week goes to the Elton John's Tiny Dancer. I really like this video because it follows the lives of a bunch of random Americans covering a 24 hour period. It covers a very wide arc of human experience from the young skateboarding woman, who wants to exact revenge on her lover by smashing up the windscreen of his car, to a young woman who is driving to a special place to scatter the ashes of a departed loved one, to a young (and old) couple enjoying each other's love, to a group of young women enjoying a girls night out on the town. Throughout the video, the song Tiny Dancer is playing in the background with all these random folk singing along to it as they go about their disconnected and wonderfully varied lives. Overall, it makes the video extremely interesting to watch several times in order to pick up any subtleties in the characters that you may not spot the first time you watch the music clip.

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

An amazing album cover with amazing songs to boot. This song always makes me feel a little sad, it is so melancholic. Update: The video below is a new addition that I found on Youtube in May 2021. It replaces the original one which was just the album cover and that is why in my summary video I said that there appeared to be no video that went with this iconic song. Thankfully I have now found one so enjoy!

Hope this sentiment holds for the USA and that they are never fooled again by a charlatan like Trump. For that matter, I also hope that our Trump-like prime minister's time is also short and we can finally rid ourselves of our aberrant nationalistic hard right wing Conservative Party.

Yesterday I shared the song Heaven by Bryan Adams which I first heard at the tender age of 19. As I mused over the memories of that song, the fact I was 19 reminded me of another great song by the Aussie band Redgum. This song strongly reminds me of the other Anzac song Waltzing Matilda (see Covid Island Discs Day 36) which recalls the origin of Anzac day when Australian forces failed to take Anzac Cove in the Gallipolli campaign of 1915-1916.

In contrast this song tells of a much more recent conflict for the Australian armed forces and that was the terrible Vietnam conflict which left so many young me both physically and psychologically broken; the latter so aptly captured in the song's lines:

And can you tell me doctor why I still can't get to sleep.
And why the channel 7 chopper chills me to my feet.
And what's this rash that comes and goes can you tell me what it means.
God help me! I was only 19

So yesterday I cited the song "Rikki Don't lose that number" by Steely Dan and that song reminded me of this famous one hit wonder by the band Tommy Tutone. I think the chorus of this song is quite clever with the girl's telephone number plastered all over it: 8675309. I always wondered whether there was some poor person in the world who was the owner of that phone number and consequently around the time this song was a hit (1981) got tons of prank phone calls from young rockers who liked to listen to the top 100 charts on their little tranny radios.

Well this song really should have been cited all the way back in week 5 of Covid Island Discs when the theme was crazy tunes, although that theme was tunes of the 1980s and this song came out all the way back in 1977. I am sure it will bring back lots of memories for people who are older than about 50.

This song always reminds me of the most amazing Elton John concert I attended with a good friend all the way back in 1986. This was a really special concert where Elton teamed up with the Melbourne Symphonic Orchestra. One of the songs that really stuck in my mind was this classic from the album Madman Across the Water. I was quite surprised to find an official music video for this song which appears to only be published in 2017. Anyway, the official video's soundtrack is of the original recording although I assume it has been remastered to improve the audio quality.