Sometimes – like when it’s raining outside, and you’ve got boring chores that need doing, and all you can think about is why nobody loves you, and you can’t work out why you’re so ugly, and you’re pondering why that film star never replies to your handwritten declarations of love – you just need to sit down with a load of ballads and weep your stupid bloody heart out.
Ideally, these ballads will have some kind of visual stimulus to prevent you from staring into space as you have a good old blub. So it’s fortunate that a site called Best Ballads Videos exists for that very purpose.
Taxi rides provide you, mostly, with short journeys of around two or three songs long (if you live in London you could probably get five of six prog tracks in). Usually, you hear one ballad, one MOR track and one soft-soul swinger. Looking at the latter, let’s have a stone-cold bona fide taxi gem… and that’s the Hues Corporation (man! I wanna work there) with their incredibly inoffensive Rock The Boat.
[video: Luiscmck70xI]
Posted by
Stuart Waterman on
Monday January 14th, 2008 at
1:31 pm
Taxis are a great place to dig the sounds of your guilty pleasures. I mean, you ain’t gonna invite your mates round for a drinking session whilst slipping on an ELO LP are ya? You’d get kicked around the house. Whilst in a taxi over the weekend, I heard the glorious rump of All Night Long by the unusually-faced Lionel Richie. Of course, Lionel has a glorious back catalogue, including “Dancing On The Ceiling”, “Say You, Say Me” and “Hello”. No-one in their right mind would admit to liking this lot… but, if we keep it quiet, we can all slowly make sales of this album go up. Oh, this is a secret and guilty pleasure… but pleasure all the same! [video: simie65]
Posted by
Stuart Waterman on
Monday January 7th, 2008 at
1:16 pm
Any Sopranos fans will probably be pretty familiar with this beauty by now. It could equally go down as a Taxicab Classic, as could any number of Journey’s clenched-fist classics.
“Don’t Stop Believing” was a huge hit in the 70s, and details several reasons why children should keep faith in the legend of Father Christmas. OK, maybe not. The song received an unexpected new lease of life after featuring at the end of The Sopranos’ final episode, with iTunes almost imploding with the number of folk looking to get the full Steve Perry goodness.
Check out this concert footage and just try not to put your foot on the nearest monitor-shaped object. Impossible.
I have a confession to make. Normally, musicals make me spit. Grease is the worst of the lot. I’ve wanted to die when I hear the strains of that one that goes rama lama bonk biff boing rama dingly dingo dink bonk tit. However, I shamefully love Hopelessly Devoted by Olivia (eye of) Newton John thanks to a late night with some dark rum and a MW radio station.
The croon of devo-ted fills me with a warming embarrassment. I’ve even learned the tune on my guitar. There’s a bit that goes maw-maw-m’maaaw that I love to the point of fainting. Of course, the mention of medium wave means it’s a bona fide taxi behemoth. Click over, watch and secretly love. Note the cold stare of killer on the face of Olivia in the vid…
There’s no two ways about it. Taxis tune into radio stations that play one of two kinds of music. MOR and disco/soul. This essentially means summat for ‘the dads’ and summink else for ‘the mums’. This doesn’t include Clint’s Disco Taxi in Bolton, which lets you sing away in the back of the cab to various pop atrocities.
For me, top of the disco pile (and my mum would agree) is Diana Ross‘ sublime “Upside Down”. The track is taken from the criminally underrated 1980 LP “Diana” and hit number one all over the world. The song is from the pen of Chic masterminds Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards, apparently on a whim after Ross told the legendary songwriter-producer duo that she wanted a song her children could dance to. And how! Click over to listen to the bona-fide, stone cold, dance floor classic.
I’m not sure what radio stations taxi drivers listen to, but whatever they are, they’re hell-bent on trying to make cold drab Britain sound like golden-hued California. Step off a rainy street into a taxi and you’ll be transported into sunnier, more easygoing climes.
It’s for this reason that The Eagles are a driver’s band of choice. Hotel California is the classic tune, but coming in second is the two-thumb trucker fave, Take It Easy. It ticks all the right boxes; easy to singalong with, easy on the ear and makes you feel a bit like Smokey and The Bandit. Bona fide!
“Sailing” by the weird, mewing Christopher Cross sold a billion trillion copies when released in the (dreadful) ’80s. Its lilting, woozy, watery sounds captured the hearts of the fawning and brainless back then, leaving Chris Cross (pants on the right way ’round) to make a million bucks and go on to have another smash-hit with Dudley Moore in “Arthur’s Theme”. According to the song, “the canvas can do miracles”… and so can a big chubby face and a double-necked guitar. This is one of those terrible records that is strangely beguiling, sung in a voice that can only be described as “a bit deaf”.
Over the weekend, I found myself sat in a taxi. I’d done the old “pacing around my living room with my coat on waiting for it to turn up for 40 minutes prior for absolutely no reason”… and when it finally showed, in I hopped and was greeted with a bona fide taxicab classic.
Yessir, in the dark days of the 1980s, every two-bit soul singer fancied a bit of Michael Jackson’s action and, as such, any bloke with a falsetto and a set of hair straighteners got a job (think Terence Trent D’Arby). One bloke was the squeaky spinning top of Jermaine Stewart who graced the airwaves with his We Don’t Have To (Take Our Clothes Off).
When Gilbert O’Sullivan burst onto the pop scene in the early seventies, nobody could quite believe their eyes. Is that a fully grown man… dressed… as a Victorian schoolboy? Yes indeed… and this particular lad ‘appens to ‘ave the best fistful of tunes you could ever hope for too! Gilbert’s first LP is full to bursting with pop goodness and cryptic lyrics which dazzle and beguile. Gilbert may not be the chin stroker’s choice, but by God he’s a talented lad with a gift for making cheeky pop and achingly gorgeous tunes… just like the stunning string laden Nothing Rhymed.
I have a confession to make. Normally, musicals make me spit. Grease is the worst of the lot. I’ve wanted to die when I hear the strains of that one that goes rama lama bonk biff boing rama dingly dingo dink bonk tit. However, I shamefully love Hopelessly Devoted by Olivia (eye of) Newton John thanks to a late night with some dark rum and a MW radio station.
There’s no two ways about it. Taxis tune into radio stations that play one of two kinds of music. MOR and disco/soul. This essentially means summat for ‘the dads’ and summink else for ‘the mums’. This doesn’t include Clint’s Disco Taxi in Bolton, which lets you sing away in the back of the cab to various pop atrocities.
Over the weekend, I found myself sat in a taxi. I’d done the old “pacing around my living room with my coat on waiting for it to turn up for 40 minutes prior for absolutely no reason”… and when it finally showed, in I hopped and was greeted with a bona fide 
