The theme song is called ‘Hollow Talk’ by a Danish band Choir of Young Believers and was first released on their debut album This is for the white in your eyes (2008). Part of what hooks me about this song is the fact that initially it is difficult to make out what language it is sung in (it’s English but with a strong Danish accent and a deliberate blurring of the words). Language thus becomes something suggesting meaning rather than denoting it. (The Cocteau Twins did the same thing back in the late 1980s).

Musically the song is constructed from two sequences: D5-F-G-Bb/D with a piano D pedal note running through it. It is a good example of the power of a pedal note to create a hook. Later in the song when this is supplied a bass-line it becomes Dm-F-G-Bb(6). A second section goes Em-Dm-G-Dm/F, where the Em chord comes as something of a shock. The first couple of minutes are very quiet and ambient, with a cello supplying some mournful low phrases, and then the dynamic goes right up with a loud and forceful playing before sinking back down.

You can hear it on youtube where there is a studio version with a lyric supplied and also a live performance (featuring a turquiose Strat!) recorded in the U.S.

I’ve been busy recently with preparation work for the five summer school courses, so my musical work has been rather pushed to one side unfortunately.

I’ve posted before about Weinberg. I recently bought the Chandos SACD of his Symphony 20 and Cello Concerto. The latter is very good on first hearing; the latter will take some work.

Almost by accident I’ve found myself unexpectedly enjoying a trio of ‘late period’ albums which I’ve just got on CD having once owned as vinyl (I gave up on vinyl some time ago for want of space for a decent turntable, but not out of any dislike of the sound, and I still have a few vinyl albums).

The Jam’s Sound Affects (late 1980) was their 5th studio album (there was one more to come) and shows the trio trying to broaden their guitar-based power-pop with changes to production and arrangement with mixed results. The most well-known tracks on it are ‘That’s Entertainment’ and ‘Start!’ (sure to be enjoyed by anyone who likes ‘Taxman’) but my favourite is ‘Man In The Corner Shop’ with its lyric of urban mundane life and political idealism, and poignant swings between the keys of D major and B major.

The second of the trio is The Who’s last studio album with drummer Keith Moon, Who Are You (Aug 1978) which saw the band struggling to find a way to develop their post-Quadrophenia music further. If you can banish from your mind the archetypal power-chording, windmilling, stage-pounding, drum-thrashing, microphone-swinging Who, Who Are You is more engaging than I remember, with some effectively quirky arrangements that make good use of synths. The title track is the most famous song on it, memorable for the change from the bludgeoning main riff into the gently oscillating middle section with a piano octave melody over the top. I have a soft spot for ‘Love Comes Down’, an expressive ballad built on an Ebmaj7-F change and some other unusual key / chord changes, in which Roger Daltrey delivers a vocal which is more sung and doesn’t rely on his usual bark. In retrospect it is full of sunset colours, bringing the Who’s career to a kind of ending. Keith Moon died only a few weeks later.

Which brings me to Peepshow by Siouxsie and the Banshees from 1988, the 9th of the 11 studio albums they would make. The first three Banshees punk albums never registered for me. I climbed aboard the good ship Banshee in 1981 when Ju-Ju was released. Here was supernatural gothic rock with John McGeoch’s splintered guitar riffs inhabiting some distant guitar galaxy where pentatonic blues-rock never ventured, and Sioux’s wailing vocals sounding like the offspring of Grace Slick and H.P.Lovecraft. Live the songs were even stronger. With the next album A Kiss In The Dreamhouse the band swathed themselves in the sensuous eroticism of Klimt’s 3-D gold. Around this time critic Paul Morley was hailing the live version of ‘Nightshift’ as the closest you could get to the stomping epic of Led Zep’s ‘Kashmir’. Hyena was a slight dip in the magic, but they were back with a vengeance for Tinderbox mostly thanks to the brilliant guitar-work of John Valentine-Carruthers. And then came Peepshow …

Peepshow saw a change of personnel and a very considerable change in arrangements. Valentine-Carruthers left and the guitar played a smaller role. In came dance rhythms, keyboards, synths, accordions and studio trickery. At the time I thought it was okay and I went to see them at the Royal Albert Hall but it felt like the end of an era. Listening to the album now it seems to me full of delights, with very inventive presentations, and in ‘Rapture’ a song where certain aspects of the Banshees tendency to dwell on the darker side of things actually meets a subject that merits it – namely oppression in the U.S.S.R. (I vaguely recall reading somewhere that this song was inspired by elements of the life of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich). Where before they could seem morbid, obsessive, cruel, or merely theatrical, in this song there rises a sense of grandeur and righteous indignation.

But before you explore these late period albums try these recommendations: All Mod Cons (The Jam), Who’s Next, Quadrophenia (The Who), Ju-Ju, Tinderbox (Siouxsie and the Banshees).

Chord for guitarists: 3×0202 which is Gmaj9. Try moving it up to the 8th fret.

An example of this is Gerry Rafferty’s hit from 1978, ‘Baker Street’. A recent TV documentary about Rafferty, and a BBC radio series called ‘Soul Music’ which featured ‘Baker Street’, provided some interesting background to the song. There are at least two demo versions of ‘Baker Street’, one of which has the song in a different lower key, and the other has Rafferty playing the famous saxophone motif on electric guitar with a wah-wah pedal. These demos make it abundantly clear that ‘Baker Street’ would not have been an international hit without its final arrangement complete with declamatory saxophone, slide guitar touches, and a change of key. The arrangement changes were crucial. It is a salutary lesson every songwriter should remember.

‘Baker Street’ is also interesting from a lyric point of view, as an example of what I think of as ‘metro-pop’: a lyric bound to strike a chord in a vast urban audience who regularly travel to work in the world’s cities. If a songwriter ever gets stuck for a lyric subject suitable for a hit, something which evokes the routines, hopes and fears of these peoples’ lives is a good choice.

I’m making some progress with a new project – more on that when I can give it. I’m also planning an album of ambient acoustic guitar music.

I always thought this was something of a classic Sixties single, full of a certain innocence. Hearing it suggested a couple of songwriting points. The first is the way the verse melody moves through a number of peaks and dips, covering more than an octave. The chorus starts with the two highest notes of the song. The second point is that the chorus provides an example of what I call in my songwriting books ‘displacement’ – in this case, the positioning of the home chord, chord I. The song is in G major. The chorus sequence is IV-V-III, IV-V-VI, IV, I (C-D-Bm, C-D-Em, C, G). (I’ve stopped annotating when it reaches chord I just before the word ‘day’.) You can see that chord I is delayed until well into the chorus. I think this sequence illustrates the point about how displacing chord I can make  a progression sound more mobile. The poignancy of the first two lines of the chorus owe something to the way chords IV and V end up landing on two minor chords (III and VI) rather than I.

You can hear a similar displacement in T’Pau’s 80s hit ‘China In Your Hand’ where the chorus starts IV-V and then (one beat to each chord) I iV VI V – and there chord I only gets one beat, followed by IV-V-III-IV-V, etc.

Here’s a guitar chord for you to try: x65046 (x = an unplayed string, other numbers are fret numbers). Hold down a standard C chord (x32010) add a G at the top with your little finger (x32013) and then move it up three frets to get this unusual Eb chord. I was reminded of it when looking at Big Star’s ‘The Ballad of El Goodo’. Guitarists don’t normally write songs in Eb without a capo or detuning by a semitone, but this shape might come in handy anyway.

This time it’s Symphony no.3 by Mieczyslaw Weinberg written around 1950, which I’ve listened to about half a dozen times in the past week or so (and I mean listened to, not  ‘had it on in the background’). Weinberg (1919-1996) was born in Poland but lived much of his life in the USSR and was a friend of Shostakovich. His music is generally tonal from what I’ve heard, and this 32-minute symphony makes a very good starting point. Part of its accessibility is its use of some folk themes. I particularly recommend the first and third movements. The third movement has a very beautiful example of changing from a major chord to its tonic minor (i.e. G to Gm), this idea being used as an important musical idea in the movement. It’s very expressive.

The recording is on the Chandos label and is a hybrid SACD – so you can play it in standard stereo, SACD stereo or SACD 5.0. Chandos have recorded several other discs of Weinberg.

In the realm of popular music a recent project has set me thinking again about the importance of various different aspects of songwriting and recording. I’ve been struck recently by the way that the musical language of popular music does change over the decades. It might be assumed to be always the same, but there are trends for using certain chord changes or progressions or certain scales for melodies. I’m not sure if anyone has ever written about these per se.

My current research has made me feel more strongly the importance of arrangement in songwriting and recording. In many cases you can line up scores of songs with the same basic progression and structure and what distinguishes them (apart from lyrics and the character of the performer) is the arrangement. Sometimes the instruments you choose make all the difference. I dealt with this subject in my boook Arranging Songs and I may have to return to it.

I hope to have news of the next book project to share with you in awhile.

A couple of interesting points came up during the process. When I started it my intention was to sketch some music for a viola plus string orchestra piece. I chose viola plus piano staves to sketch on so I could focus on the musical ideas without worrying about what to do with five staves of string orchestra (violins I, violins II, violas, cellos, basses). The piano has often been used as a sketch-pad by composers trying out ideas, and I guess this continues to be so even if the piano is a virtual one (on a computer notation system) rather than a physical one. (The computer piano never needs a piano tuner …).

First thing that happened was that about 5 minutes of material in, a melody turned up which simply elbowed my previous structural aims out of the picture. As a consequence I saw that my sketch was going to break into three separate pieces and not be a single span.

The second result came after 6 days, when I had some material for all three parts. I wanted to try arranging the middle section for a small orchestra. The viola melody didn’t sound right on the new instrument I’d planned, and the accompaniment had become sufficiently pianistic that I realised it would take a long time to sort out a way of doing it with a string section. Not having the time to pursue these problems I decided to leave the piece as it started: viola and piano. Maybe I’ll try turning it into a piano quartet or quintet instead. Moral of the story: when sketching on piano beware of many arpeggio figures with the sustain pedal down!

As for the viola plus strings piece, the next step will be to have those six staves open and compose onto them from the start so as to keep the idiom in keeping with strings.

D#m has the highest-pitched root note of any minor chord on the guitar. The root note is on the fifth string at the sixth fret – this is the lowest available D# – but this is also the 11th fret on the sixth string! Almost an octave higher than the guitar’s lowest note, E. When it comes to resonance, D#m stands at the opposite range of the spectrum to Em (022000) or Am (x02210).

[By the way, if you're not familiar with this chord shorthand, x = a string not played, 0 = an open string played, and the numbers are then frets. It goes from the lowest pitched string to the highest 654321, EADGBE]

The usual way to play D#m is with an Am shape (x02210) turned into a barre chord and moved to the sixth fret (x68876). There’s nothing difficult about this, but it is unusual in placing you a fair distance from the comfort zone of the first position and all the easy open string chords. To get to an open string chord involves a significant change of position. The chords that D#m belongs with are likewise mostly barre chords in the middle of the neck.

D#m first appears in the key of B major as chord III, then in F# major as VI and then in C#major as II. Thinking about its enharmonic equivalent of Ebm (the other way of writing it) it first appears in the key of Db major as chord II, Gb major as chord VI and Cb major as chord III. You might also use it as a IVm in Bbm major and a Vm in Ab major. Most of these keys are extreme sharp or flat keys – and the guitar doesn’t like them because it isn’t at its most resonant in them – loss of usuable open strings, lots of barre chords. When guitarists write songs in these keys it is often by the default of either using a capo to get rid of the barres or by detuning a semitone. Detuning the guitar by a semitone gives you D#m with an Em shape. If you capo at the first fret you can treat D#m as a Dm chord and proceed from there; with the capo at the sixth fret it will be Am.

Its the very awkwardness of D#m which offers some interesting possibilities for songwriters on the guitar. Think of it as a jumping-off point that might lead to an exotic chord sequence, or a sequence in a difficult key that could be released into an easy key in going from a verse to a chorus. If you find ways of connecting it to freindlier open string chords you may stumble on an exciting progression.

Some songs that use D#m: George Harrison ‘Awaiting On You All’ (in B), David Bowie ‘Lady Grinning Soul’ (first chord of the chorus), The Jam ‘Going Underground’ (chorus), The Beatles ‘If I Fell’ (first chord).

I was excited in December by the news that a copy of David Bowie and the Spiders from Mars performing ‘Jean Genie’ live on British chart music TV show Top of the Pops had been found. ‘Jean Genie’ had been released as a single and featured on Bowie’s 1973 album Aladdin Sane. It was thought that this clip – first broadcast on January 4 1973 – had been erased by the BBC many years ago. Many classic TV programmes met the same fate. It turned out that cameraman John Henshall had asked for a copy and kept it.

What was special about this performance was that it was genuinely live. Almost all Top of the Pops performances during its long history were either completely mimed to the original backing track, or part-mimed (i.e. lead vocal was live) to a backing track re-recorded by BBC TV musicians and the band. It has always irritated me the way the BBC have constantly devalued the meaning of the word ‘performance’ when describing old TOTP clips by applying it to entirely mimed or mostly mimed appearances – which of course were cheaper and safer for both the TV people and the singers / bands – but are not music-making.

In the case of Bowie’s January 3rd 1973 performance of ‘Jean Genie’ everything was live. If you look closely at the two half Marshall stacks the band are plugged into you can see their lights are on and there are tell-tale mikes in fromt of the speaker cabinets. The result is a glam-rock classic delivered deliciously raw and punchy, and conveys a thrill no mimed version could match. It departs from the studio version in various ways and has the odd mistake (Trevor Bolder on bass switches to the chorus too early toward the end), as well as a wilder Mick Ronson solo and more harmonica from Bowie – including what sounds like two blasts of the Beatles’ ‘Love Me Do’ harmonica riff toward the end.

You can see the clip on youtube.

Several examples came to mind. One was trying to play both parts of a twin lead guitar line. For anyone who doesn’t know what this means, ‘twin lead guitar’ is where two guitarists take a note each and play parallel melodic phrases, usually based on thirds and sixths. With each holding only one note these are generally easy to play and the notes can be subject to typical techniques of bending and vibrato. This arrangement style was characteristic of British bands such as Thin Lizzy and Wishbone Ash, and there are elements of it in Queen’s studio records (where Brian May would overdub such lines himself) and The Darkness. Providing the lines are not too quick, it can be possible to play both at once. This effort taught me some things about how thirds and sixths work on the guitar. To make the lines sound a little different from each other I discovered that playing the lower note with a pick and the higher note with a finger helped. And trying to do a double-trill was certainly a challenge.

Another example occurred when I tried to emulate Mark Knopfler’s playing on some of the early Dire Straits tracks. The crucial technology for his sound was a Fender Strat, often with the single-coil pick-ups in positions 2 and 4, and played with thumb and fingers. I only had a guitar with double-coil pickups, which wasn’t ideal. I found that by winding the tone down a bit, using thumb and fingers and being careful with the touch,  and also playing nearer the fingerboard helped get a little closer to the sound.

A third example arouse when I wanted to emulate the sound of a 12-string on a 6-string. In some accompaniment figures which are based on simple chords it is possible to look for octaves above the notes which are in reach. That goes a little way to imitating the sound of a picked 12-string.

None of these things could replace the original thing. But they all helped my technique in terms of extending what I could get out of the guitar I had and learning more about the fingerboard and how much guitar technique is in the sense of touch.

I recently mentioned Vaughan Williams’ Symphony 8 as great music for this time of year. I could add to it Ravel’s Mother Goose suite (Ma Mere l’Oye), Prokoviev’s Lieutenant Kije (with the famous Troika that featured in Woody Allen’s Love and Death film), Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols, Arnold Bax’s Christmas Eve, Peter Warlock’s ‘Bethlehem Down’, Steeleye Span’s ‘Gaudete’, and Kate Bush’s ‘December Will Be Magic Again’.