Sounds with Simon Tesler: Tribute (Part 2)

I'm Simon Tesler, back with you again for another hour of great songs on the theme of Tribute. We're kicking off with Stevie Wonder's Master Blaster, in honour of Bob Marley. ** Master Blaster (Jammin') by Stevie Wonder, Moves Like Jagger by Maroon 5 Master Blaster Jammin' by Stevie Wonder, followed of course by Maroon 5 with Moves Like Jagger. Few artists arguably are so generous with their praise than Stevie Wonder, who has written several songs that honour his peers or heroes. Master Blaster Jammin' comes from his 1980 album Hotter Than July that also includes a tribute to Martin Luther King in the form of Happy Birthday, that was the cornerstone of his personal campaign to establish the public holiday in honour of the great civil rights leader. Previously of course Wonder had also written Sir Duke in honour of jazz great Duke Ellington. Master Blaster was inspired by Wonder's own personal friendship with Bob Marley, and it namechecks Marley's own song Jamming, from the Exodus album. The two men had been friends since 1975, when they shared a stage for a big charity concert in Kingston to benefit the Jamaican Institute for the Blind. In 1980, Marley was the opening act on Wonder's US tour, and they were talking about taking that show around the globe. But those plans had to be put on hold as a result of Marley's declining health, and sadly he passed away the following year. And no need to tell you who exactly is being honoured in Maroon 5's Moves Like Jagger, from 2011. Singer and writer Adam Levine is a longtime admirer of our very own Sir Michael J, who is of course famous for his trademark rooster dance. Levine told MTV, "I've been a student at the Mick Jagger School of Interesting Movement for 17 years. I'm graduating next fall, with honours. "His moves are a very carefully calculated, incredible rhythmic experience, in which all of your limbs and every bone in your body is moving at completely different times, and it's impossible to re-create. Nobody has moves like Jagger, that's kind of the point. That's why the song is so fun, it's fun to try." However, the track was also conceived in order to kickstart Maroon 5's flagging career. Their previous album Hands All Over had not spawned any hits, and Adam Levine had recently become a judge on TV talent show The Voice with Cristina Aguilera. She was invited to guest on the Moves Like Jagger track, which they also performed live on The Voice to an audience of millions. Hands All Over was promptly re-released to include Moves Like Jagger, and it finally became a hit. What does Mick Jagger think of the song. "It's very flattering isn't it," He told the BBC, "Hilarious... It's very catchy. I could say I wish I had written it, but wouldn't that be weird? ...Only thing is, it puts a bit of pressure on me when I go out dancing!" In an interview with David Letterman, though, the famously money-minded Jagger had just one reservation. "You don't earn a cent when someone does a song called Moves Like Jagger." Two more musical tributes now. In a few minutes, Prefab Sprout honour the American country & western star Faron Young in the opening track from their second album Steve McQueen -- the album title is another tribute all by itself. First, though, some comparatively early Bowie, from the wonderful Hunky Dory album. This is Song For Bob Dylan. ** Song For Bob Dylan by David Bowie, Faron Young by Prefab Sprout So, Bowie appears to have mixed feelings about the famously prickly Dylan. Early in his career, he was obviously strong influenced by Dylan's music and several tracks on Bowie's self titled second album -- like Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed, Letter To Hermione and Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud -- have a distinctly Dylanesque flavour. By 1970, though, Bowie appeared to share a widely felt disappointment in the former folk hero, who had stepped back from the frontlines of protest against Vietnam and other American issues. That same year, Country Joe & the Fish released a song entitled Hey Bobby, which asked "Where you been? We missed you out on the streets". That same year, the Dylan Liberation Front was formed in New York with the stated aim of "Freeing Bob Dylan from himself". Bowie too complains that Dylan has abandoned his position as a generational leader, asking Robert Zimmerman -- the singer's real name -- to tell his alter ego Dylan "we've lost his poems so we're writing on the wall. Give us back our unity. Give us back our family." Bowie and Dylan did meet several times over the following years, but didn't get on. In an interview with Playboy in 1976, Bowie said "I saw Dylan in New York seven, eight months ago. We don't have a lot to talk about. We're not great friends. Actually, I think he hates me." Just as Dylan had been an important influence on Bowie, so Bowie too was of course a huge influence on an entire generation born in the 1960s. Including Paddy McAloon, founder and frontman of Prefab Sprout. Yet McAloon always tended to regard songwriting as almost an intellectual exercise. He told The Guardian, "I didn't have music lessons but I was drawn to music that I read about and devoured everything from T Rex to Stravinsky. It's almost embarrassing now, but I dreamed about influencing the course of pop. I'd been writing songs since I was 13, but after David Bowie's Station to Station came out, when I was 19, I started to study his methods, likes and dislikes. He didn't like country and western, so I wrote Faron Young from the worldview of someone who disliked country music." So despite the fact it namechecks Faron Young and his popular country & western song It's Four In The Morning, McAloon is actually complaining that that's the only song playing on the radio. And as for the album title Steve McQueen. "It came to me in a dream," he said. "It doesn't mean anything, but I decided to use it and we shot the cover using a motorbike like the one McQueen had in The Great Escape." More actors now. We had Clint Eastwood in part one of the show; here are three more. First up, the troubled American star Montgomery Clift is the subject of The Right Profile by The Clash. After that, Michael Caine and Robert De Niro. But more about all of them in a few minutes. ** The Right Profile by The Clash, Michael Caine by Madness, Robert De Niro's Waiting by Bananarama So The Right Profile from The Clash, Michael Caine by Madness and lastly Robert De Niro's Waiting from Bananarama. The inspiration for The Right profile was the Hollywood actor Montgomery Clift, widely regarded in the 50s as one of the industry's brightest new stars. He made his memorable debut alongside John Wayne in the Western Red River, and followed that with leading roles in a series of prestigious pictures including From Here To Eternity, Alfred Hitchcock's I Confess and A Place In The Sun. However he was already a fragile and troubled individual, a closeted gay man hiding his sexuality because it would have destroyed his career. Drink and drugs were already damaging his career, but disaster occurred in 1956 when he was involved in a serious car accident that broke his jaw and smashed both cheekbones. Months of plastic surgery followed but his recovery was not complete and for the remaining ten years of his career he insisted that only his right profile be seen onscreen because the left side was still, he felt, too disfigured. The drugs and booze intake increased and he eventually died of a heart attack in 1966 at the age of just 45. During the sessions for the London Calling album, The Clash's Joe Strummer was looking for inspiration for songs to fill out the double album, and producer Guy Stevens, who had his own drink and drugs issues, thrust a biography of Clift into Strummer's hands. "If you're going to write a song about somebody, write one about Montgomery Clift!" No such trouble for the much loved and famously level-headed British actor Michael Caine, who contributed his own voice clip to this song from Madness's 5th album Keep Moving. Bizarrely, though, the song itself has nothing else whatsoever to do with Caine himself but is about the sectarian violence on Northern Ireland in the 1970s. Not a lot of people know that! as Caine might say. It's written and sung not by Suggs but by backing vocalist Carl Smyth -- formerly known as Chas Smash -- who spent some of his childhood in Northern Ireland and had vivid memories of the underlying every day atmosphere of suspicion and violence. At the time the British government was recruiting informers to help them combat the IRA, and these individuals would subsequently be given witness protection and live the rest of their lives under a new identity. That's why the singer's character wishers he had a word or a photograph to keep at home to remind him of who he used to be. Smyth was reminded of the Michael Caine spy thriller The Ipcress File in which Caine's character Harry Palmer keeps repeating to himself "I am Harry Palmer, I am Harry Palmer" to avoid being brainwashed by foreign spies. Smyth took a big chance and approached Caine himself to do a voiceover. At first he turned them down, but then changed his mind under intense pressure from his youngest daughter Natasha, who was a big Madness fan. And finally, Robert De Niro's Waiting by Bananarama, which started when the trio decided to write a song about a girl escaping into the fantasy of having a movie star as a boyfriend, because it's easier than dealing with a real relationship. Sara Dallin told The Guardian "Our favourite actors were Al Pacino and De Niro, but obviously Robert De Niro scanned better. When the song came out, he was in the UK filming Brazil, and he invited us for a drink at a bar in Soho. We were all sitting there when this guy knocked on the window. It was a freezing winter's night and he had a bobble hat and glasses on, and we just thought: 'Who is that person trying to catch our attention?'" "We'd no idea it was him. He had his producer with him, who did most of the talking. I think De Niro was quite shy. But of course the whole place was filled with our friends and boyfriends – all sitting at different tables trying to sneak a look at him." OK, we're heading into the last half hour now, so we'll slow down the tempo just a little for two more of the music industry's most famous tribute songs. In a few minutes, Elton John celebrates Marilyn Monroe -- born Norma Jean Mortensen -- in Candle In The Wind. But first, another timeless classic from the 1970s, Don McLean's American Pie. The full song is an epic 8 minutes and mourns many of the events and social changes that afflicted America in the 60s and early 70s, but the edited single version focuses on the loss of McLean's childhood music heroes, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper, killed in a plane crash in 1959. The Day The Music Died. ** American Pie by Don McLean, Candle In The Wind by Elton John To close the show this week, two more songs that pay tribute to fallen friends. In 1965, the Velvet Underground were just another struggling band playing seedy cubs in New York's bohemian quarter. All that started to change a year later when the band were introduced to the notorious pop artist and budding media entrepreneur Andy Warhol. He took them under his wing, becoming their manager, and funded the release of their first album, The Velvet Underground & Nico, which featured his own image of a pop art banana on the cover. Commercially, the record was a disaster, but it established the band's reputation as edgy heroes of New York's counter-culture scene. The relationship between Warhol and the band, but especially with guitarist Lou Reed, soured quickly, and they split from the artist after just a year. Reed -- a famously temperamental and difficult character in his own right -- nursed bitter resentment towards Warhol for years, and also towards Velvet Underground co-founder John Cale, but for the next two decades it was impossible for both men to ignore the long shadow cast by Warhol over the start of their careers. When Warhol died unexpectedly in 1987 during routine surgery, they both attended the funeral and their mutual friend the artist Julian Schnabel suggested they work together on a memorial piece. This became the album Songs For Drella -- which was a playful nickname for Warhol within his circle, a combination of Dracula and Cinderella. It's a lovely work, poignant and very moving especially in its closing track in which, after years of bitter animosity, Lou Reed finally tried to apologise for the breakup of their former friendship. After that, to close the show, a track from Iggy Pop's The Idiot album, co-written and produced by David Bowie at a time when both men were struggling to overcome their drug problems. After the breakup of his original band The Stooges, Iggy's career had spiralled into disaster, and it was Bowie, who helped to get his career back on track. One melody in particular was stuck in Iggy's brain but he couldn't seem to get a song out of it. He told Bowie biographer Nicholas Pegg, "I only had a few notes on the piano; I couldn't quite finish the tune. Bowie said, 'Don't you think we could make a song with that? Why don't you tell the story of the Stooges?' He gave me the concept of the song and … the title." It opens with Iggy mourning the loss of his bandmates, roadies and later bassplayer Zeke Zettner, original bassist Dave Alexander, guitarist Scott 'Rock' Asheton, and subsequent guitarist James Williamson. These were the dumb days of the late 60s and early 70s and the Stooges were the Dum Dum Boys. But first, Lou Reed addresses Andy Warhol. Hello, It's Me. ** Hello It's Me by Lou Reed & John Cale and Dum Dum Boys by Iggy Pop