Whoa there, no messing about with this one. Ask anyone to name an Elton John song & I’d bet that the majority would name ‘Your Song’. And here we are straight in, side 1 track 1. It leaves the rest of the album with something to live up to, although the intervening years have inevitably tainted it with the ‘Our Song’ feeling. Along with 10cc’s ‘I’m Not In Love’ it’s found on many a Valentine’s Day compilation. More prog folk with harpsichords & strings next, before boogying with ‘Take Me To The Pilot’. A couple of moody album fillers (sorry, they’re better than I could write) take us to ‘Sixty years On’, which I have no memory of hearing before but can sing along to. Bizarre. Border Song is another Elton staple, and we spend the remaining four tracks of the album alternating between boogie & moody. I’ll talk about the reissue in a later rant.
Credit where it’s due, he started as he meant to go on. This is definitely an Elton John album, if a little stripped back and not as ‘out there’ as later efforts. It’s all there, the Bernie Taupin lyrics that sound really profound and may indeed be if I could make any sense of them. “For the cat from next door /Was found later at four / In surgical dissection” has just left the speakers and I can’t decide whether I should study it or complain that it doesn’t scan properly. The title track is an eight & a half minute intro that seems like a trap for a while, and he does seem to be pretending to be American on occasion. Something that all singers except The Proclaimers are guilty of at some point.
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I’m not sold on the appearence of jazz-funk bongos but the harpsicord throughout Valhalla is almost a signature, and we’re on very safe but forgettable ground for a while until Skyline Pigeon, the stand out track of the album. Harpsicord again, and a song we can all torture our families with by singing with gusto. I’m sure the version that gets radio time features piano though. And what’s with the jazz pastiche half way through Gulliver / Hay Chewed / Reprise? Play the last two & a half minutes of this and Skyline Pigeon and you’re there.
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The 1990 reissue included four bonus tracks which I won’t mention out of general principle – I’ll save that particular rant for another post.
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So, late sixties prog rock leanings and a taste of things to come. Can we ask more of a 1969 debut album?
I have long been of the opinion that Elton John was a proper muso before he was a pantomime dame. I arbitrarily place the turning point, the last ‘proper’ album, as Blue Moves, which is worrying for me since it was released in 1976 and I remember it well. I couldn’t afford it when it came out, but my best friend Chunky could – he was the class Rich Kid. And being an unforgiving sort I’ve never quiet got over the fact that he bought it on cassette. Why deprive yourself of this? A double album with a modern art cover by Patrick Procktor (don’t worry, I had to look it up) it seemed a very desiracle object to my pretentious album-only-buying 15 year old self. And learning that the original hung in Elton John’s garage only added to the mystique.
For want of something better to do I’ve decided to revisit the Elton John back catalogue from Empty Sky to Blue Moves (1969 – 1976) and disdainfullty ignore the rest.
Made it to Trent Lock, moored up & returning next Friday for the final stint back to Nottingham. That should hopefully see us safely in Nottingham for Saturday night ready for the Sunday trip to Gunthorpe.
The Erewash – definitely filed with ‘do it once so that we can say we’ve done it’.
Number one in a series of one of posts named after tracks by Specimen.
You know, the scenery wasn’t as bad as I’ve painted it on the way back. Maybe because the Sun was shining and we weren’t suffering through rain just after the grass had been cut, it was actually quite pleasant.
Except for the ten locks we did in one day, every single one of them against us. Bastards.
Seven hours and ten locks, we’re now at Sandiacre again hoping to get to Trent Lock tomorrow (three more locks) where we can park up for the week with a view to getting to Gunthorpe next weekend.
We had a bit of a scare while moored at the GNB. The boat developed an alarming list that we couldn’t find a cause for. Port ended up about six inches lower in the water than starboard, and despite removing everything that we could from that side we couldn’t make a difference. There tends to be a slight difference since that’s the side that most fittings are on (wardrobe, bed, bathroom, kithcen …) but this amount over seven feet was excessive, and made standing on the deck difficult – there was a tendency to lurch towards the water. The mooring lines were also quite taught, so there was a chance of some weird canalside effect happening.
Slightly nervously I undid the ropes and pushed the boat out, holding on to the centre line. For a few moments nothing happened & I was starting to wonder about the next step when with a satisfying ‘plop’ she righted herself.
It looks like I’ve sorted how to insert videos properly. The standard WordPress way just gives you text with a hyperlink to Youtube, the Smart Youtube plugin does it properly as demonstrated below with a short extract of us navigating Trent Lock.
For those of you interested I took the video at one frame per second, which disappointingly but predictably played back at 1fps. That’s very boring. I had to drop it into iMove, convert it (?) so that I could increase playback speed and ramp it up by 2400% to give the finished result. Two and a half hours plays back in about 10 minutes, and as time allows I’ll hopefully post the six clips making the entire journey. Be patient, it’s very time consuming …
Somebody To Love by Ramones
Iona School
Victoria Centre
National Ice Centre
