London Calling - if only for London 2012

If only...

Were he still with us Joe Strummer, born John Graham Mellor, would have been sixty today. He was, as the result of a congenital and undiagnosed heart defect, taken away in December 2002.
Were that not so I can hardly imagine that he would not have been on the stage at the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympiad. 'The Clash' was not the first punk band, by any means, but they gave the whole genre wings...
They focussed their anger on sensible issues. In fact the members were from really quite comfortable backgrounds; and while they were genuinely angry they were also rather annoyingly but curiously, simultaneously, disarmingly literate.
This 1979 album was, I think, not just the defining moment of British Punk...

Had it not been for this album, and the inspiration it provided, the whole punk movement might have faded into obscurity - a bright spark, lit for the most part by angry young men in a fit of pique, that lasted for so little time.
There would thus have been no Green Day, just to make a single example.
The bad behaviour in this image is all down to Paul Simonon, who lives on, and so does the bass guitar in question (in bits as destroyed in this rampage, something that he later much regretted doing), in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Cleveland, OH.
The inspiration for the album cover is down to that of Elvis Presley's first.

New Music 2012 - Part 20 - Difficult to resist?

Amazing live in the UK last summer.  She Keeps Bees.  Released July 17, 2012 in the US.

'Blue Moon' is a cover version to be filed alongside such veteran songs as 'Ghost Woman Blues' (1928), as re-recorded by Low Anthem on the 2011 album 'Smart Flesh'. Written a little before (1933-4?) it was first recorded in 1935 and, as it happens, is also the unofficial anthem of the supporters of both Crewe Alexandra and Manchester City Association Football clubs. The exact lyric may not be strictly followed but then even the original lyric had at least four re-writes before it first aired as a bona fide single in its own right!

It has been covered many times down the decades, including that by Elvis Presley on his eponymous début album in 1956, something that without doubt contributed to its early adoption into the canon of 'American songs' although both Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart were English. It appeared in snippets in the film 'Grease' and again in Glee (season 1) and in many other films, performed by a myriad of artists, in the meanwhile. It was originally written for the purpose of film accompaniment but went through three sets of lyrics before it was actually used in a film release. Both Eric Clapton and Rod Stewart have been known to perform live cover versions of it.

It is, therefore, a true song-survivor.