Sounds with Simon Tesler: Numbers (part 1)

Hello, this is Simon Tesler with more great Sounds from the Rock, Soul & Reggae Archive and a few of the stories behind the songs. Each week I select tracks with a specific theme, and this week the theme is NUMBERS. Coming up, more than 20 numerical tracks from Fleetwood Mac, Massive Attack, Billy Idol, Kraftwerk, Bob Marley and many more. But we start with the number Seven with The White Stripes and Seven Nation Army. ** The White Stripes make their debut on Sounds with what is probably their best known track, the opening cut from their 4th album Elephant, and a song that transcended its comparatively modest origins to become widely used not only in ad and movie soundtracks but also as a mass crowd chant. It started at football matches across Europe in the early 2000s before arriving at Liverpool FC in around 2007. No one knows though how it turned into this at a rock festival just outside Liverpool in May 2017. ** Jeremy Corbyn of course was at the time leader of the UK's Labour Party, then heading towards a general election. Corbyn rode the crest of that pop culture wave throughout the summer of 2017. But, since we're talking about numbers, it wasn't enough to win him the keys to one of Britain's best-known numbers, Number 10 Downing Street. None of this bears any real relation to the song itself. It's actually a song about the unbearable pressure of the fame that the White Stripes duo Jack White and Meg White were struggling with, and especially about who they were each dating following the breakup of their marriage. The name of the song was just a convenient working title, based on an obscure childhood joke -- Seven Nation Army was how Jack used to mispronounce the name of The Salvation Army when he was a kid --- but was then retro fitted into the song for the line "I'm gonna fight them off. A Seven nation army couldn't hold me back." So numbers is our theme, but don't expect them in a sequence like one to ten, because we're going to be bouncing back and forwards for better musical effect. So next up, a Two and another Seven. In a few minutes, Fleetwood Mac with Seven Wonders, but first another wonder in the form of Teena Marie and the gorgeous Just Us Two. ** Teena Marie with Just Us Two from her 1990 album Ivory, and then Fleetwood Mac with Seven Wonders from what was probably their last great album Tango In The Night, released in 1987. Now I know you know who Fleetwood Mac are, but I'm not sure how many people will be familiar with Teena Marie. She was an extraordinarily versatile soul and R&B singer who enjoyed several very different phases to her career. She was born Mary Christine Brockert, to Caucasian parents, but when she was a teenager the family moved to a predominantly black suburb of Venice, California, and she became steeped in the area's music culture. After starting her own soul band she was signed as a solo artist to Motown records, and was taken under the wing of rising star Rick James with whom she recorded several duets. When she made her TV debut on the popular TV music show Soul Train in 1979 she was its first ever white female performer, and she appeared on the show nine times in all over the following years, more than any other white singer. However her biggest successes came after she left Motown. Her biggest hit was Lovergirl in 1984, from the album Starchild, but my personal favourites are the albums which followed, the superb Emerald City in 1986 and then Ivory. Seven Wonders is one of several great songs on Fleetwood Mac's Tango In The Night album, including Big Love and Little Lies. After years of turbulence and infighting and romantic makeups and breakups, the members of the band were already by then working mostly independently of one another, each developing their own material separately. Seven Wonders was actually written for Stevie Nicks -- who performs the vocals -- by another female singer songwriter Sandy Stewart, who she'd already been working with on her solo album, and it was brought to the band fully formed. The rest of Fleetwood Mac just played the music. OK let's roll the dice for our next two numbers... and we have a six and a three. In a few minutes, Massive Attack with Three, but first, 6 Underground from Sneaker Pimps. ** The descriptive term you're searching for is trip hop. Two prime examples there from that mid-90s musical movement which was spawned in Bristol before permeating throughout the nation, eventually reaching as far as Hartlepool in County Durham, where Sneaker Pimps hailed from. Massive Attack were among the prime movers in trip hop and that lovely track Three is from their second album Protection. Massive Attack had a knack for picking fabulous guest vocalists, like Shara Nelson on their breakthrough song Unfinished Sympathy, Tracey Thorn of Everything But The Girl on Protection and Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins on Teardrop, and in this case Nicolette Suwoton. Before that, the first and most successful incarnation of Sneaker Pimps, which featured vocalist Kelli Dayton, who worked with founders Liam Howe and Chris Corner on their debut album Becoming X, before the old chestnut of "musical differences" led to her abrupt departure in 1998. I think it's fair to say that nothing Sneaker Pimps have done since matched the standard of that first album and its standout tracks 6 Underground and Spin Spin Sugar. What does 6 Underground mean? It's the same as "six feet under" explained Sneaker Pimps co-founder Chris Corner. He told the website Songfacts "It's about death in a small town environment. You grow up in this lousy town and you yearn to get out. We just can't survive in a place like that, so the essence of the song is that living in a small town is like dying." You may recall that a couple of years ago, 6 Underground was also by sheer coincidence the name of a movie starring Ryan Reynolds about a group of undercover vigilantes who fake their own deaths to stage a coup against a ruthless dictator. A brief footnote on samples, which tended to be one of the defining features of trip hop tracks. 6 Underground is built around a lovely little sample plucked from the Bond movie Goldfinger. The track is Golden Girl, from the scene where Bond discovers the character played by Shirley Eaton smothered by being painted head to foot in gold. Here it is again from 6 Underground.... ** and the original from Goldfinger.... ** Let's stay in the 60s shall we. A year after Goldfinger was released, the American blue-eyed soul singer Len Barry released the song 1-2-3. That's up next, followed by Eddie Cochran with Three Steps To Heaven, and then the fabulously named Three Courgettes with their title song; a retro swing tune actually recorded in 1982 but sounding like it was recorded 20 years earlier. But first, 1-2-3. ** Great. So Len Barry was a slightly unusual character; a bit like Teena Marie I was talking about earlier, he was a white soul singer who was steeped in black and also native American culture. His first group The Dovells toured with the Motown revue in the 1960s, the only white act to do so, and also with James Brown, and much later in life he published a novel Black Like Me about a pair of white brothers growing up in a predominantly black neighbourhood. In the late 60s, at a time when consciousness was growing of the terrible treatment meted out to native American communities by invasive white settlers, he formed the group The Electric Indian, also featuring a young Daryl Hall of Hall & Oates, which aimed to raise awareness of native American music. It all seems a little clumsy now from a 21st century point of view, but at the time, it was quite a radical step for a white recording artist. Then we had the wonderful Three Steps To Heaven, recorded by Eddie Cochran in January 1960. It was released in April that same year, but just one month earlier Cochran had been killed in a car accident, at the age of just 21. Bizarrely, the accident took place right here in the South West, in Chippenham in Wiltshire, and Cochran died the following day in St Martin's Hospital in Bath. It's a small world. And finally we had The Three Courgettes, the 80s retro swing group comprising Barb Jungr, Michael Parker and Jerry Kreeger. Barb Jungr has enjoyed a prominent career since then as a jazz singer on the cabaret and alternative theatre circuit. She has come to specialise in very unusual jazz-based reinterpretations of classic songs by the likes of Elvis, Dylan, Leonard Cohen and many others. A complete change of style now for two songs about the number 16. Or to be precise, the age 16. In a minute, Iggy Pop, but this is Billy Idol. ** Billy Idol with Sweet Sixteen from his 1986 album Whiplash Smile, and then Iggy Pop with Sixteen from the album Lust For Life. Now, there are plenty of songs in music culture about girls turning 16 so you might think there's not much of a story behind Sweet Sixteen. Just another rock song about jailbait, you might think. But you'd be wrong. The general inspiration for the song was the fact that Billy was missing his British-born girlfriend Perri Lister, who'd recently broken up with him. But the specific influence for the lyrics -- "Someone's built a candy castle for my sweet sixteen" -- was the story of Coral Castle in Florida, an extraordinary castle and courtyard built by hand out of limestone and coral over the course of almost 30 years starting in 1923 by the Latvian-born stonemason Edward Leedskalnin. The building still stands today and is open to the public. Before Leedskalnin emigrated to America in 1912 he had been set to marry his 16-year-old sweetheart Agnes Skvust, but just before the wedding she broke off the relationship. He was too old, she thought, at 26 and too poor. Leedskalnin was heartbroken so once he was settled in America he began constructing this monument to his lost love. Billy Idol had seen a documentary on TV about the building and it seemed to sum up his feelings for Perri Lister. He wrote in his autobiography "When someone asked Leedskalnin why he had built it, he would simply say, 'It's for my Sweet Sixteen,' referring to his lost bride-to-be who had so heartlessly left him. It was a coral memorial to her. Sweet Sixteen is mine for Perri." Ahhh... I'm afraid Iggy Pop has no such lost love to mourn in his track. This is just a straight-out rocker very much in the style of Iggy's earlier Stooges recordings. It's from the second of the two albums recorded by Iggy with the help of David Bowie, who had sprung him a couple of years earlier from the medical facility where he was being treated for drug problems. Although the first of these albums, The Idiot, was driven musically mainly by Bowie, Lust For Life is more a creation of Iggy's. Famously, most of the lyrics for the songs on the fabulous Lust For Life album were conjured up by Iggy on the spur of the moment in the studio, so sadly there's no great story behind the song. Doesn't stop it from being a killer track though. Time now for two more songs before the break. I'll be back with you after the news for another collection of great tracks. But first, a three and a seven from The Cure and then The Clash.