Delilah, ‘Love You So’

Delilah

I’ve done a proper, almost considered review of her album for NME, but we do of course need to appraise Delilah frivolously – and with input from a seven-year-old.

Delilah’s all 21st century trip-hop, which sounds like a creaking bore on paper until you appreciate what she could’ve been. She was a vocal foil for Chase And Status, the hollow-hearted Apollo 440 for nos jours. We could’ve had another Kosheen on our hands. In the circumstances, some lush, gorgeously sung trip-hop is manna from Heaven.

Junior’s musical muscle memory isn’t weighed down by the plodding mass of Morcheeba or Sneaker Pimps, so she can sit here and enjoy ‘Love You So’. There’s a trace of sarcasm in her “fantastic” verdict and the cherry on top is the wavering thumb, neither up nor down.

Junior’s mum just spends three minutes trying to remember the name of Finley Quaye’s ‘Even After All’.

Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan, ‘Especially For You’

Kylie and Jason

A very minor consolation for the epic gig we’re all missing tonight. Don’t know about you guys, but I couldn’t wait to stand in the tipping rain making amazing gags about what a ‘Tragedy’ it was. But even gnat’s piss-weak jokes would’ve been worth it to see Kylie and Jason turning on that half-arsed chemistry again, to have Donovan make us yearn for the glory days of Keith Washington, to hear this wan melody squeaking over a vast PA. Oh, alright, I quite like it – but back in 1988, something made me take against ‘Especially For You’. There was something irritating about that hairsprayed sock puppet Donovan draping himself all over the delectable pocket-sized goddess Kylie that I can’t quite put my finger on.

Junior says this is “boring”. When I put on ‘Better The Devil You Know’ she says it’s way better. I think we can all detect the uncommon factor, kids.

Justin Bieber, ‘Boyfriend’

Justin Bieber

Junior is seven today. And this is her first record – well, the album is. Maybe her record-buying development’s been arrested by Jukebox Junior because you’d expect her to have her own records by now, wouldn’t you? Sure, she has Disney Princess compilations and nursery rhyme CDs, but she doesn’t need to go out and buy (or ask for) One Direction or Rihanna albums because nice people send them to Daddy anyway.

So Justin Bieber’s Believe will be the answer to that first record question in years to come and it’ll all be because Bieber’s UK label thought Junior’s dad would rip it and spray it all over the Internet, so they didn’t give it to him.

This is just streaming. It doesn’t count.

To my ears this is a pale Trousersnake retread, but I just don’t get it, do I? Junior does the patented family shoulder roll and Junior 2 already knows all the words. It’s quite chilling how the Cult of the Belieber has infiltrated my house while I was trying to win the family over with clean edits of Azealia Banks tracks. This is just a taste of my powerlessness to come.

Talking Heads, ‘Life During Wartime’

David Byrne and Brian Eno

For all Talking Heads’ – and Brian Eno’s – clean lines, ‘Life During Wartime’ has a touch of the melodramatic. Equating living in Manhattan with enduring life in a city under siege is extending a metaphor until it’s stretched enough to believe in itself, but David Byrne is a panic-eyed master of the paranoid, and here he and the rest of the ‘Heads scratch and jerk until they’re a twitching bug of insecurity.

Maybe New York felt like that in 1979 if you were strung out enough. After all, they were CHANGING THE FACE OF POPULAR MUSIC. “You oughta know not to stand by the window,” not while the style mag snipers are perched on the rooftops.

But how does it feel, coming to Talking Heads cold in 2012? “My head is talking right now,” is Junior’s literal response. More abstractly she and her sisters dissolve into a mess of muso faces and electroshock shimmies – a reasonable reaction to ‘Life During Wartime”s troublefunk.

After it fades there’s a moment of reflection before Junior decides the track is “in the middle”. But they were at the vanguard! They were pushing rock forward! “It sounds like a song from the olden days.”

David Bowie, ‘Always Crashing In The Same Car’

Brian Eno and David Bowie

There are more obvious BowiEno collabs but when we got onto ‘Warszawa’ there was a pretty poor reception all round. I’m not wild about it myself. I prefer my glacial synths with Jim Kerr making an arse of himself over the top.

I don’t actually, but I liked saying it.

Anyway, to add to the – ahem – car crash of this whole experiment, I had meant to play ‘Sound And Vision’. The plan was scuppered by Junior arguing about which cereal she was going to have for its entire three minutes. We then trumped the futility of this row by debating who was playing guitar on ‘Always Crashing…’ – Robert Fripp or Carlos Alomar? – for its entire three and a half minutes. Turns out it was Ricky Gardiner.

Nobody’s a winner. But this, like most of Low’s first side, is crisply depressing and that’s about all you can ask for.

Brian Eno, ‘Music For Airports 1/1’

Brian Eno

A bit of music we could really experiment with, but first some questions for Junior:

Do you like ambient music? “I’m more like *mimes thrashy guitar and disco dancing*”

Do you understand what Brian Eno’s trying to do here [I’m reading out the sleevenotes]? “No.”

And so she shouldn’t. A six-year-old is after constant stimulus, not a “tint” to the environment or space within which to think. If possible, thinking should be kept to a minimum. But I think Music For Airports is quite beautiful – whether or not it’s just sitting in my earbuds, not being too intrusive when I’m writing about something completely different – so it’s worth pursuing Eno’s enquiries. “Ambient Music…must be as ignorable as it is interesting,” he says, so is it?

Junior walks around the living room attempting to ignore it. Did it work? “I couldn’t hear it.”

But when you listen, is it interesting? “No.”

Roxy Music, ‘In Every Dream Home A Heartache’

Brian Eno

For Lent this year, we at Jukebox Junior are giving up all music that isn’t connected in some way to Brian Eno. To celebrate the Enoxification of our Lord, if you will. I wonder what that involves. A patina of magic dust maybe.

So let’s start at the very beginning (or near enough). After all, as Julie Andrews – another artist capable of doing amazing stuff with just a spoonful of sugar – says, it’s a very good place to start. On For Your Pleasure’s ‘In Every Dream Home A Heartache’, Eno stands at the back wearing a feather boa and “playing tapes”. What would ‘In Every Dream Home A Heartache’ be without tapes? It would be an airless piece of prog with a mannered Bryan Ferry vocal. With Eno’s tapes, it’s an an airless piece of prog with a mannered Bryan Ferry vocal and some whooshy phasing (technical term). Genius.

Junior’s not up on sound beds and production jiggery-pokery (she will be by the time we reach Easter), but from the audio alone she detects a man gritting his teeth as he plays guitar. Phil Manzanera’s fretwork is clearly so meaty it’s almost corporeal. She decides there’s “a little too much guitar” and the song is “too quiet” when Ferry dominates. Bring on the tapes then. Examining the inner sleeve, she declares Andy Mackay “the fashion one, the cool one” and points out that Eno “looks like a girl”. We’re on our way.

[1] Chris Brown featuring Benny Benassi, ‘Beautiful People’

Chris Brown

It’s not my fault, it just happened. The little worm has probably used that line too.

Anyway, I searched my conscience and found that this is a Benny Benassi record, so all good. And all good it is – I’ve not heard a record that so perfectly captures early 90s club euphoria since… since…

Read not too closely between the lines and this is deeply narcissistic, of course. Could Chris be singing about himself, kids? Isn’t he a little bit beautiful inside as well? Maybe he has rather smashing internal organs. Still, taken purely as an audio experience ‘Beautiful People’ is dashing, thrilling, direct, hangs on a superb hook and is about the only rave-synthed tune of the last five years that sidesteps a cheesy doom. Come on, it does.

All these songs are purely audio experiences for Junior. That’ll change, but right now she and her sisters can just enjoy chanting “Everywhere, everywhere…” and puzzle over how Brown can be singing both the title and the woah-ohs. We’ll discuss studio techniques another time.

Anyway, we agree on this one – “I like it the most of all the others. Bom-bom-bom [‘Super Bass’] and live your life [er, this] are *thumbs up*, the others are *middling thumbs* and *thumbs down*.” So there.

Next up, 1980 or 2002.

[2] Bon Iver, ‘Calgary’

there’s a fire going out,
but there’s really nothing to the south
swollen orange and light let through
your one piece swimmer stuck to you

I think this is ‘Astral Weeks’, and the whole album is a son of Astral Weeks the album. It has a poetry wrapped up in the fug of memory, of magic, heartbreak and lost places. ‘Calgary’ is a rising storm with hooks too beautiful to remain composed in the face of, and anyway, Justin Vernon could make the TV Burp theme sound like a distraught elegy for Old Yeller.

Junior picks this up. “Oh, I know this one. Is it about someone dying?” Well, who the hell knows? It’s the impact that matters. As for her opinion – “The same thought that you think” – she’s learning Iverese.

So it should be No.1. It’s my favourite song of the year, but top spot goes to clearly the best single of the year. And it’s a disgrace.

[3] Junior Boys, ‘Banana Ripple’

Junior Boys

Now I love a nine-minute record that doesn’t waste a second as much as the next man, so no doubt we’re all delighted to see this has placed so high. My wife says it’s very me, by which I’m sure she means it’s funky, addictive and a joy to have around the house rather than over-polite, unsexy and called Jeremy.

Jeremy Greenspan isn’t a very rock’n’roll name, is it? Further evidence from Junior: “I don’t like the singing. It’s not rock’n’roll like ‘Firework’.” Well, nothing’s as rawk as Katy Perry. Not even P!nk. Junior’s in the mood to examine this record, dismissing a banana ripple for more foodstuff-based suggestions: “What about one potato, two potato? You rip the skin off them too.” There’s, um, food for thought for Junior Boys’ fifth album.

In the end I catch her doing a strutting hip dance – moving like Jagger once more – in secret. That’s Junior Boys really, dance music to be enjoyed in private.