Fifty for Fifi

Full confession, before Fi and I were together there was some flirting going on.

She was quite the fashion queen in her time (and still can be when she chooses) and she’d post outfits on Twitter for review. I’d comment honestly that the outfit would look great and the only thing that could improve it would be a smile.

Yes, I know, I was doing the refined Twitter version of telling a woman she’d look great if she just smiled. It wasn’t the vibe I was intending to come in with and thankfully it wasn’t the way Fi received it. I’d be rewarded with a picture of her brilliant smile while she was wearing an already great outfit. Her smiles for me were (and still are) very genuine and made (and make) me very genuinely happy.

In the context of today’s song I guess I’m perhaps the crafty one.

She’s Crafty was released by the Beastie Boys on their first album, Licence to Ill. Driven by a hook stolen from Led Zeppelin, it is an irreverent narrative of an encounter by one of the newly-famous band with a cute fan. On his way through getting to know her he hears rumour after rumour which he disregards only to find at the end that she’s stolen the entire contents of his apartment. Despite all this, as the chorus says, she’s just his type.

Fi is not, of course, a home furnishings thief but she and I do share a connected love for early hiphop and the journey of that artform through to modern examples. For me this particular album was a favourite until it was confiscated and disposed of. I mentioned that loss on my personal blog as one of the factors that contributed my approach to working in the library profession, and of course working in the library profession led me to meeting Fi.

So there you go.

Just before I drop the track, I’d like to introduce an awesome resource discovered while researching today’s post: Who Sampled. Pretty nifty.

I have to start today’s post with an erratum, an addendum.

I oversold things in the 1983 post. It turns out, as i was told this morning, that Fi has not met U2.

Was her brother Sean local tour manager for U2 when they came to Brisbane? Absolutely. Is Larry Mullen Jr.’s motorbike involved in the story? Again, absolutely, he is well known to love his Harleys. Did Fi herself ride on it perhaps securing herself by holding on to Larry Mullen Jr.’s strong drum-player’s shoulders? Absolutely not. That is a story fabricated in the author’s memory and followed through on because asking the subject of the exercise for details of her connections to particular bands spoils the surprise.

As I mentioned to Fi when she told me, not only do I not mind getting things wrong, errors and their exploration are a key part of the blogging process for me. Which is what everyone says after they get caught in a blunder. Something something tapestry something.

For the record, Fi owns a onetime part of the bike in question – a headlamp to be specific. Apparently it needed to be replaced due to damage and Larry ask (brother) Sean to dispose of it for him. Sean asked Larry to sign it for him as a favour to his sister and the whole band joined in on the signings. I am told it is still in the house somewhere, I have not dared to ask for fear I’ll be asked to move some boxes.

Today’s song again takes us back to the precious times at the start of our relationship. It’s a song about the excitement of being together. When I first lived in Australia, our plan was to date up close for six months and move on with our plan to start a family, a compromise between the reality of two very complicated people merging their lives together and more basic biological timelines, given the ages we both were when we met. You do the maths.

I rented a little one person house behind the railway tracks in Caboolture. It was tiny but perfectly adequate with a mysterious tree in the backyard that was slowly growing what seemed to be grapefruit but once out of the green stage turned out to be the most delicious, juicy and frankly huge oranges we’d ever encountered.

We didn’t spend all day every day together but weekends were a little slice of what life together could be like.

After that wonderful time we agreed to go to the next step, moved in together and started work in earnest on the task of making a family. As some will know, Fi fell pregnant with our daughter almost immediately. Fi has been known to express a wish that we had more time in that early dating phase. I’m just grateful we had the time at all.

Close to Me includes one of my favourite approaches to music writing, in which elements are added line by line until a full music picture builds up. It is a hugely fun bop with an amazing example of the state of creativity in music video creation in the 80s. Enjoy.

You know what, date night was a late night and I’m tired. This is my second post of the night I’m catching up from not doing yesterday. I’ve been denying myself a phone it in for several nights now because it turns out writing an essay a day, even a small one, is an effort but tonight’s the night that I let the song do most of the speaking for me.

You Will Throw Your Arms Around Me was created by Hunters and Collectors in 1984. It’s a song about romantic love so tonight I’ll dedicate it to the romantic love of my life with this lovely version of it featuring Kate Cerebrano in duet with original vocalist Mark Seymour.

I first met U2 when my brother bought Unforgettable Fire, closely followed by earlier albums Boy and War.

Fi… met U2.

I journeyed with the band from that time through my own purchase of The Joshua Tree and then Rattle and Hum.

Fi, if I recall correctly literally journeyed with the band in the form of riding on Larry Mullen’s motorbike with him. At least that’s how I recall her telling of the story.

Fi’s brother Sean, may he rest in peace, was among other things a music promoter. Their father’s Irish connections may have helped him be the local organiser for the band when they came over to Australia . You can have a guess as to which tour that was on, or Fi might tell us in the comments.

I grew apart from U2 after Rattle and Hum. For me they were doing something on a scale and from an approach that took them away from what I liked about them in the first place. The anger of the earlier albums served well to prepare me for my soon to come journey into punk.

Sunday Bloody Sunday was a response one a horrific incident that formed part of The Troubles occuring in 1972. The staccato music is reminiscent of volleys of bullets and Bono’s piercing wail evokes the distress a witness to the incident might have expressed.

If you talk to Fi about Ireland’s history, it doesn’t take long before you hear of these and more horrific incidents that took place. Sunday Bloody Sunday is one of the more eloquent protest songs asking to redress a past that has damaged so many.

We don’t get to date as often as we’d like, but we do make sure to keep dating. Dating is about the feeling of being an adventure together – sometimes a simple adventure with maybe a movie and some dinner, but an adventure all the same. Something different from the usual.

Tonight’s song is about going on a date. Joe Jackson is an interesting character, and very much a musician’s musician. While my favourite track from him is his cover of Common People with William Shatner, I absolutely love Steppin’ Out with its driving bassline and it’s sparking piano chords. I manages to evoke the feeling of being young and out together.

Fi and I didn’t really get to be very young together. It’s one of the regrets we share in life. That being said who we were when we met each other was who we needed each other to be. Fi’s better than “if only” and “what if” than I am; I try to be in the now and look to the future.

The future involves further dates. Further steppin’ out. By the future, I mean specifically tomorrow night. Have a nice weekend anyone and everyone who’s reading.

Fi and I love dumb jokes. Like really dumb. One category of dumb jokes started for us while rewatching the muppets with our daughter. Introduced as “The Leprechaun Brothers”, the Swedish Chef, Animal and Beaker sang their version of “Danny Boy”.

It’s chaotic and stupid. The Swedish Chef Bork Borks, Beaker Meep Meeps and Animal who notionally can speak some English doesn’t know many of the words of the song so just repeats the words “oh Danny boy” in different orders (oh boy oh boy oh Danny) for his lines. One of our spin off jokes is to sing it to each other using only the words “the pipes”

I remember The Human League coming on to the scene. The rumour about them as told to me by my brother is that they didn’t use the “normal instruments”, they only used these things called synthesisers. This was related to me as if to suggest that they were engaging in truly dark arts. As someone who’s written multiple songs using only software, this seems hilarious now.

Their breakout single was “Don’t You Want Me”, a song sung between two characters reaching the end of a failing romance. I’ll share the original at the bottom, but the connection to the topic of this post is one very confident guy’s karaoke version Fi discovered on Tiktok one day:

We’re going two Kiwi songs in a row, and this is one that really speaks to me about the early stages of us.

Poor Boy is one of Tim Finn’s contributions to the Split Enz oeuvre. It tells a simple tale of love at a distance built around Eddie Rayner’s exquisitely constructed broken keyboard runs.

Long distance was fine before we met in person. I mentioned the trip in question in an earlier post. After that, long distance was hell even with the comfort of a shared world to game in. At that point in the year, New Zealand was three hours out from Queensland, and I’d spend the morining waiting for Fi to wake and the late evening fighting against fatigue just so I could spend a little more time with her.

On the most difficult nights, we’d both go outside and look at the same moon together.

What more could a poor boy do?

In the early days of our courtship we were a long distance couple. Before I took the step of moving to Australia, time spent together was spent chatting via any number of methods or videocalls when we could.

One particular favourite way to spend time together was in a game called The Blockheads. It was essentially a 2D (Wikipedia says 2.5D) version of Minecraft. We’d voice chat while doing different activities with our toons in the world, from hunting to mining to building to exploring.

Like most modern games, some things are discovered via research rather than just worked out in the game. In exploring the crafting system, we’d discovered a seemingly useless thing called a carrot on a stick, created by combining a carrot, some string and a stick. Google let us know its use, which was for the riding of donkeys. This made sense to us, except we’d never seen a donkey in the small part of the game world that we’d explored.

Thus it was that we set off for adventure. Blockheads is set on a circular world, and if you walk around it far enough, you’ll pass through four poles and multiple biomes. We headed right and kept going to see what we could find, including a donkey.

Find a donkey we did. Fi equipped her carrot on a stick and tapped on the donkey. Nothing happened. She tried again a number of times… and the donkey died. We double checked our research and just could not work out what had gone wrong.

Confused, we explored further. It was shortly later that we found a larger donkey. Fi equipped the carrot on a stick once again, tapped on it… and mounted the adult donkey we’d found.

Couples have set pieces, stories from their history they trot out together at social gatherings. The day Fi killed a baby donkey on one of our dates in a videogame is one of ours.

Today’s song is the first Kiwi song in the mix, and one of my favourites. It’s the first song I can remember really speaking to me. Like many of the songs I love it has strong electronic elements and a a beautifully catchy musical hook. Astonishingly for a song from New Zealand it reached higher on the Australian charts reaching number one over the Tasman compared to position five in Mi-Sex’s home country.

Dire Straits was a hard band not to like when I was a kid. I first remember hearing them when Money for Nothing hit the screens. The song was great but it was the video that had me amazed. The 3D animation was groundbreaking.

The rest of the album was pretty solid too. Brothers in Arms is a particular favourite of mine. The evocative final track of the album is paced as a prayer and Mark Knopfler’s exquisite phrasing on the guitar is a masterclass.

Sultans of Swing is not on that album. Released in 1978 it’s based on Knopfler’s experience of seeing a band of that name playing to an empty pub.

OK, we’ve established the musical side of what’s going on with today’s post. What’s that got to do with the us side?

Fi and I for a long while were accompanied by my friend Gerard in leading the music ministry at our church. Fi on keyboard and vocals, Gerard on guitar and I was on bass.

At the end of each Mass, after a small amount of time Gerard would play his favourite song, Sultans of Swing. Once he’d started up I’d join in on the bass, syncing in with his rhythm. Some bars in Fi would laughingly round on us and remind us that we were in a church (even a church temporarily set up in a school hall, as St Benedict’s still is) and should not be launching into a jam session.

Gerard and I would quickly cut it out, and that would never stop us starting up again after the next mass we played at.

Anyhow, it’s a nice song.

Plastic Bertrand’s Ça plane pour moi is another song written by the performer and sung by someone else. Or is it? No, it’s not. Or is it? No, definitely not. Or is it? Maybe…

It was written by Lou Deprijck at more or less the same time he wrote the musically identical Jet Boy Jet Girl. Not just musically identical – the same backing track used twice for two markets. Jet Boy Jet Girl made most famous by The Damned but originally recorded by Elton Morello.

There have been at least two court cases where this question has been raised, and Bertrand has gone between apparently acknowledging then recanting acknowledgement that he was not the singer multiple times.

I didn’t know of this song before I met Fi, and songs in other languages have been a major thread through our relationship. Whether it’s originals such as Yelle’s Safari Disco Club or artists catering to non-English Speaking audiences such as ABBA’s German version of Ring Ring she’s widened my tastes out during the time I’ve known her, with my favourite discovery that I brought in to the mix being Yuve Yuve Yu by Mongolian folk metal band The Hu.

I don’t know who recorded the original version of Ça plane pour moi but I’m willing to believe Lou compared his look to Plastic Bertrand’s and decided that he’d have a much better chance to get his song out there with it coming out of a different face. Here’s his version of his song.