Rocks In The Attic #1204: Pink Floyd – ‘Obscured By Clouds (O.S.T.)’ (1972)

There are a bunch of records I want but might take me a while to get around to buying. I really want them, but I know them so well from having them on CD back in the ‘90s that I can’t bring myself to paying reissue prices, or inflated second hand prices. 

The Brian Johnson AC/DC albums after BACK IN BLACK fall into this category. I love most of these up to and including THE RAZOR’S EDGE, but I just can’t bring myself to paying $60 or more for something I know like the back of my hand. 

I’m missing a couple of Bowie’s too, and some earlier R.E.M., and those ridiculously overpriced Nirvana live albums (LIVE AT READING, LIVE AT THE PARAMOUNT). I’ll get around to them one day, but my familiarity with them is the thing that prevents me paying over a certain amount. 

So, I was happy to see a fellow Auckland vinyl head selling a tonne of albums at a sharp price to fund an overseas trip. I picked up Fleetwood Mac’s MR. WONDERFUL, Pink Floyd’s OBSCURED BY CLOUDS and Yoko Ono’s YOKO ONO/PLASTIC ONO BAND all for $30 each – well under their going rate. Good things come to those who wait. 

It’s quite strange that I’ve been waiting so long to pick up OBSCURED BY CLOUDS. It’s my favourite Floyd record after MEDDLE, and captures the band right smack-bang in the middle of their purple patch, written and recorded in a break from the sessions for THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON. They had written, rehearsed and party recorded that other monolith of an album, before they got called away to quickly write and record some music for Barbet Schroeder’s film LA VALLEÉ. 

It shouldn’t be as good as it is, given that it’s something they quickly churned out in comparison to the lengthy sessions which produced TDSOTM. But some of the shine of that more well-known album rubbed off on this, and it’s a fucking cracker. Material-wise, it fits more closely with MEDDLE, and works better as a companion piece to that album. 

As for the film, LA VALLEÉ, the Pink Floyd music is unsurprisingly its strongest bow. Schroeder’s film is  the usually late-‘60s / early-‘70s hippy fluff, but the one thing I can’t get out of my mind after just one watch is a horrific scene where we see a Papua New Guinea tribe kill a pig (for reals). An awful sight. 

I’m a fan of Schroeder’s later films SINGLE WHITE FEMALE (1992) and KISS OF DEATH (1995), but I haven’t seen much else by him. I do need to check out MORE (1969), the other film that Floyd provided music for, and EXTREME MEASURES (1998), which I possibly may have seen. As for Schroeder himself, he appears in a cameo in Wes Anderson’s THE DARJEELING LIMITED as the owner of the garage where the trio’s deceased father’s Porsche has been stored. 

Hit: Free Four

Hidden Gem: Obscured By Clouds

Rocks In The Attic #1203: Yoko Ono – ‘Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band’ (1970)

I’d always mean to get around to picking this up. I love John’s record under the Plastic Ono Band moniker, one of my favourites of his solo albums, and I wanted to get this more out of completeness due to its companion-piece design. The fact that its Yoko Ono doesn’t put me off; I quite like most of what I’ve heard of her work, particularly her half of DOUBLE FANTASY, although I would usually shy away from her more screamy, experimental avant garde stuff. 

But then I heard Jason Carty and Steven Cockroft, the hosts of one of my favourite podcasts, the Beatles-centric NOTHING IS REAL, gush about their love of one particular song on this record, and particularly its blazing Ringo Starr drum track, that I had to make finding a copy of this record a priority. 

The song is Greenfield Morning I Pushed An Empty Baby Carriage All Over The City, and it is a stonker.  As with the rest of the album, the track features John on guitar and what sounds like Ringo destroying his drums, and even George turns up to provide a sitar part, his only contribution to the album. 

Is the rest of the album as strong? No, not even close. Greenfield Morning is easily the standout track, but the rest of it is at least interesting, even if some of it’s a little on the screamy side. Some nice sound effects from the EMI sound effects library too – some train sounds and some birds which sound familiar as though the same cut has been used on a Beatles track – Blackbird possibly, or Across The Universe. 

It makes for an interesting companion to the John record, and while it doesn’t match the intensity, or pouring out of emotion on his record, it probably serves as a better fit to that record than any of his other solo albums. 

What an absolute banger of a track though. Go and listen to Greenfield Morning. 

Hit: Why

Hidden Gem: Greenfield Morning I Pushed An Empty Baby Carriage All Over The City

Rocks In The Attic #1202: Blanck Mass – ‘Calm With Horses (O.S.T.)’ (2019)

I’ve had this film on my watchlist for so long, but have just never got around to watching it. Even when I saw 2022’s TED K, and subsequently heard – and bought – Blanck Mass’ sublime soundtrack score to that film, I somehow couldn’t get around to checking out what he had composed for this film. 

Eventually, the film came to me before I could come to it. My composer friend Tom Matthews hit me up recently about one of our local record stores having a 50% off soundtracks sale, and Blanck Mass’ CALM WITH HORSES score was in there. Instead of ignoring the chance, and then kicking myself six months later when I got around to watching the film, I immediately put it to the top of my watchlist, and hey presto, the soundtrack is now in my collection. 

Director Nick Rowland’s film is a stunning debut, a grubby tale of small town crime in rural Ireland. Cosmo Jarvis plays Arm, the ex-boxing enforcer of local crime family the Devers, who’s manipulated through life by Dymphna (Barry Keoghan), the nephew of the family’s head boss. 

While the narrative is stretched fairly thin, and feels very familiar given I’ve recently seen Paul Andrew William’s BULL (2021) which treads a similar path, the vibe of the film is something else. The acting is great, from all involved, but the characterisation of the leads never feels cartoonish. It’d be easy for the film to portray Jarvis’ character as the big, dumb, angry ape, but he’s such a gentle giant it takes so long for the film to unfold and show that he doesn’t have an ounce of malice in him. He’s just misunderstood, without the ability to fully understand the bleakness of his connection to the Devers or to communicate effectively with his autistic son and the boy’s mother Ursula, played to perfect exasperation by Niamh Elgar. 

Similarly, Keoghan’s character could be shown as the master manipulator from the first moment we encounter him. Instead, the film gradually shows not only his cowardice, but the fear at where he finds himself in the standings of his own family.

A wonderful film, and a beautiful ethereal score by Blanck Mass. 

Hit: The Devers

Hidden Gem: The Cliff

Rocks In The Attic #1201: Various Artists – ‘The Exorcist (O.S.T.)’ (1973)

Good Lord (!), what a film. Jason Miller’s face etched in granite, Linda Blair putting on the theatrics courtesy of Mercedes McCambridge, and the real MVP of the piece for me, Ellen Burstyn at the end of her parental tether.

I can’t separate this and THE FRENCH CONNECTION. They’re both such monumental films, and their impact unfortunately overshadows everything else Friedkin did, whether good or bad. The first time I saw this on the big screen, a Film Society screening at University in the late ‘90s, wasn’t the best introduction to it. I invited some friends and we laughed through most of it. Watching it now, even thought there are obvious sequences that it’s easy to laugh at – for example, the innocent Regan and the first couple of expletives that fly out of her mouth – I don’t think much else is amusing, aside from a couple of effects that don’t look particularly realistic (the swivelled head always looks super-fake to me). 

Still when you’re with a bunch of friends in your late teens, and you go to watch a film together, and – most importantly – you’ve been told all your life that this is the scariest film ever made, so you’re a little on-edge anyway, it’s easy to crack up. In fact, the thing that cracked us up and started to send us over the edge was our friend J.P. licking his lips in one of the scenes where Kinderman talks to Father Karras, and they walk past a young lady playing tennis. Even seeing this shot some 25 years later puts a smile on my face. I still recoil in horror when I think about the older couple, sat near us in that Lawrence Batley Theatre screening, who turned around to shush us. 

The British public have had a strange relationship with this film. It was banned on home video for so long, but never banned at cinemas, and so it was something you could still go and see projected fairly regularly. The home video ban was lifted in 1998, just in time for its 25th anniversary, with the BBFC conceding that ‘while still a powerful and compelling work, it no longer had the same impact as it did 25 years ago.’

I probably next saw the film again a couple of years later when Friedkin’s Director’s Cut was released on DVD, and this led to another amusing moment that’s locked together with the film for me. My friend Vini and I were in Ireland, visiting friends, and following a night at the pub, had gone back to somebody’s house to watch THE EXORCIST. In those early days of DVDs, many people watched them through the PS2, Playstation’s latest gaming console. We popped the disc in, and prior to the film starting, Friedkin appeared in a video introduction, speaking about how the Director’s Cut came about. Vini grabbed the PS2 controller, and pretended to be controlling his gestures and hand movements, while saying things like “Okay, now point to the camera…”. To this day, I still notice every time Friedkin gesticulates in interviews – something he does fairly often – always going back to that thing he does where he holds one hand limply in the other.

My second big screen Friedkin in recent weeks, after THE FRENCH CONNECTION, with more to come thankfully, and a perfect Thursday night screening at the glorious Hollywood Avondale (who I supported by buying some beautiful limited-run Friedkin posters).

Hit: Tubular Bells – Mike Oldfield

Hidden Gem: Iraq – Jack Nitzsche & Krzysztof Penderecki

Rocks In The Attic #1200: Lenny Kravitz – ‘Are You Gonna Go My Way’ (1993)

It’s Rocks In The Attic post #1200 and as always I try and cover an album that means a lot to me for the big round numbers. 

I bought Lenny Kravitz’s third studio album ARE YOU GONNA GO MY WAY on CD the year it came out, buoyed by the lead title track which was all over the radio. It was one of the CDs I chose when I signed up to the Britannia music club, desperate for a bunch of dirt-cheap albums as soon as I started listening to rock music. It’s remained a favourite ever since. 

I was obsessed with Aerosmith at the time, ingesting everything I could about the band. Lenny had co-wrote  and provided backing vocal to Line Up, a song on their new album GET A GRIP, and I even remember them name-checking him when interviewed outside their trailer at the MTV Music Awards that year. When asked why they liked him, Tom Hamilton said ‘Because he plays the original <…>’ and mouthed something starting with a ‘sh’ sound. I’ve never been able to figure out what he said. It’s a mystery. Does anybody know?

I was so new to buying albums I wasn’t even sure whether I’d like the rest of ARE YOU GONNA GO MY WAY. I don’t think I’d heard any of the albums other singles – Believe, Heaven Help and Is There Any Love In Your Heart – by that point. I probably didn’t like much of it on first listen. It’s extremely ballad-heavy, especially in comparison to the balls-to-the-wall rock of its title track. But it grew on me. Big time. My favourite songs ended up being that final single, Is There Any Love In Your Heart, with a music video filmed in a spiral multi-storey carpark, and Sister, a song I still like to play on guitar. 

One of the things I loved at the time about Lenny is that he played all the instruments on the album himself, yet his live band – Craig Ross on guitar, Tony Breit on bass, Cindy Blackman on drums – was always super-hot. On that same MTV Music Awards appearance in 1993, he even enlisted John Paul Jones to play on Are You Gonna Go My Way when they were between bass players – a surefire marker that Lenny was the real deal that ‘plays the original <…>.’

The songs on this album are part of my DNA. I’m not even sure I could name of some of the songs’ titles, I’m just so overly familiar with them. Like all great albums, it’s a collection of songs I know as a collective whole rather than individual tracks. I don’t just love the playing on it either; the production – scaled back on some songs, full-whack on others – is a gem. The only downside is that final song, Eleutheria, which plays like an afterthought and possibly should have been held back as a b-side. Sister, the song before it, plays much better as an album-closer. 

For some reason, I went lukewarm on Lenny after this album. I bought up his two earlier albums fairly quickly, and found those all to be strong efforts, particularly MAMA SAID, which I think is almost as good as ARE YOU GONNA GO MY WAY, but he seemed to lose his way after this. His version of American Woman, recorded for his 1998 album 5 and used onthe soundtrack of AUSTIN POWERS: THE SPY WHO SHAGGED ME in 1999, was an out-and-out banger, but it was a lazy cover. I can’t think of anything he wrote after Are You Gonna Go My Way that matched the energy of that song and album. 

By the end of the decade, he was so far off my radar, I actually walked past him playing on the Sunday afternoon at Glastonbury in 1999, and didn’t stop to watch. Five years earlier, I would have been chomping at the bit to see him. I remember walking past as he played American Woman on the Pyramid Stage and thinking to myself ‘Oh, shit! I used to love Lenny Kravitz!’ I deeply regret this now but I didn’t know at the time that Lenny would essentially turn his back on touring and become a full-time celebrity. I bought tickets to see him a couple of years ago, and the pandemic put a kibosh on that happening. Maybe I was never meant to see him play live. 

Before long, Lenny would be known more for attending showbiz parties, his sometime-acting roles – wearing a distractingly eye-catching set of earrings in THE HUNGER GAMES – and wearing a ridiculously over-sized scarf out in public. What a dude. 

Hit: Are You Gonna Go My Way

Hidden Gem: Sister

Rocks In The Attic #1199: The Band – ‘Islands’ (1977)

I’ve seen Martin Scorsese’s THE LAST WALTZ before of course, but watching it on the big screen on a beautiful 35mm print at the Hollywood Avondale a couple of weekends ago, it really struck me how immense that final line-up is. Joining the Band, all on one stage and sharing microphones, are Bob Dylan, Ringo Starr, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Van Morrison, Neil Diamond, Dr. John, Eric Clapton, Paul Butterfield, Ronnie Hawkins, Muddy Waters and Robbie Wood. Unbelievable. 

The finest concert film ever made? It definitely looks golden. Joining Martin Scorsese’s cinematographer Michael Chapman are Steven Spielberg’s cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmund and Peter Bogdanovich’s cinematographer László Kovács. No wonder it all looks so good. 

A beautiful Father’s Day screening at the glorious Hollywood Avondale, which I managed to enjoy despite the drunken morons on the row in front who thought they were at a rock show and talked pretty much throughout the whole thing.

ISLANDS is one of the Band albums I listen to the least. Their final studio album (as the original five-member lineup), it’s a collection of unused songs that had been mounting up over the years. It was released in 1977, six months after their final concert, and released to fulfil their Capitol contract so that the soundtrack to THE LAST WALTZ could be released on Warner Bros.  

There’s nothing particularly terrible about this album, but there’s nothing particularly great about it either. It’s a collection of songs that sound like the Band, and that can only be a good thing, but you have to wonder why these songs weren’t released before during the sessions for the albums they were originally intended for.

I note that Tom ‘Bones’ Malone plays on the instrumental title track, and it’s always good to see a Blues Brother listed in the credits. 

Hit: Georgia On My Mind

Hidden Gem: Right As Rain

Rocks In The Attic #1198: Beth Orton – ‘Trailer Park’ (1996)

Beth Orton was one of the first artists I saw on the Saturday of my first year at Glastonbury in 1999. We’d found more of our friend group by that point, running into them on the Friday night. Finding your friends at Glastonbury pre-mobile phones was always completely random. You either had to have a plan in place before you got to the festival (unlikely), you could leave them a note at the designated meeting point in the central market (which I don’t think I ever did), or you could just bump into them accidentally. 

And so, with a few more members in our group, we went along to the Pyramid Stage to see Beth Orton. This was a notable experience for me, not just for being introduced to Orton’s music (and that beautiful voice), but for her starting the set wearing a pair of sunglasses in the shape of Texas leading my friend Kaj to joke ‘Look at the state of those glasses’ – a gag I still think about every time I think of Beth Orton. 

I don’t think I ever bought any of her albums at the time – although I did fall in love with a dance remix of Central Reservation so much that I included it on a mix CD I gave to my now-wife back in 2004. Still, without owning any of her albums, she now resided in the part of my brain set aside for artists I liked. 

Then she disappeared off my radar. I remember hearing that she suffered from Crohn’s Disease, and wondered whether her illness had somehow stopped her career in its tracks. Or maybe it was because my musical radar went on the fritz around the early 2000s. 

In 2022, Orton’s studio albums TRAILER PARK and CENTRAL RESERVATION were reissued for Record Store Day; an instant purchase and a couple of non-soundtrack records I was happy to pick up that year. I’ve never heard her first album SUPERPINKYMANDY – produced by her then-boyfriend William Orbit – but then again it sounds like most other people haven’t, having only been released in Japan. TRAILER PARK felt like it was her introduction proper back in the late ‘90s, despite what Wikipedia might claim.

It’s the first weekend of spring here in New Zealand. The winter has been pretty arduous here, particularly after a summer of floods and cyclones, and so this record sounds extra special with the sun streaming in through the window. It reminds me of the first time I saw her, on an impossibly hot and sunny Saturday in Somerset. 

Hit: Someone’s Daughter

Hidden Gem: Touch Me With Your Love

Rocks In The Attic #1197: Justin Hurwitz – ‘Guy And Madeline On A Park Bench (O.S.T.)’ (2009)

Essentially a dry run for LA LA LAND, but without the story beats, or the acting, or the colour…

That said, GUY AND MADELINE ON A PARK BENCH works as a nice little film school project – which it was originally intended to be, before Damien Chazelle left Harvard to finish it off – and has some nice energy. Its biggest downfall is just a lack of a clear narrative. Instead it feels like a bunch of disparate scenes cobbled together. 

But the real MVP here is Justin Hurwitz who really hit the ground running on the music side of things. I never thought I’d see this get a vinyl release, and it now takes pride of place next to my soundtracks for WHIPLASH, LA LA LAND, FIRST MAN, and BABYLON; my favourite composer / director partnership outside of John Williams and Steven Spielberg. 

The whole vibe of Guy walking around in this film with his trumpet reminds me of one time I was at Glastonbury in the mid 2000s, pitching my tent up at the top of Pennard Hill on the Wednesday morning. A ginger kid a couple of tents away pulled out a trumpet and started blowing some jazzy licks. Wow, I thought. How nice is this? Five days later, it wasn’t as pleasurable to hear. 

Hit: Overture

Hidden Gem: It Happened At Dawn

Rocks In The Attic #1196: Shirley Bassey – ‘In The Still Of The Night’ (1961)

Some pre-GOLDFINGER Shirley Bassey here, recorded in 1961, just a few years shy of the John Barry / Leslie Bricusse / Anthony Newley song that made her a massive star in 1964.

The trademark Shirley Bassey voice isn’t as loud and brash here. It’s still powerful, but there’s something much more restrained about it. She even comes close to that sad and longing feel that Amy Winehouse would later perfect, and I’d never usually think of putting those two singers together in the same sentence. 

This album caught my eye as she’s backed on this release by Geoff Love and his orchestra, and I’ve got a soft spot for the kitchsy soft funk of Geoff Love’s soundalike soundtrack compilations. But just like Bassey not sounding exactly like her future self, Geoff Love and his guys also sound quite different to what they would later become. It feels very much like a respectable, pre-Swinging Sixties big band recording. The Beatles haven’t truly landed yet, and the adults are still very much in charge of entertainment.

This is a New Zealand pressing of her fourth studio album, simply titled SHIRLEY for its original release in the UK. 

Hit: Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye

Hidden Gem: For Every Man There’s A Woman