Chopin Etudes: Op 25, nos 6 & 7

It's New Year's Eve, I've run out of drink and I feel jaded. Nothing can refresh my palate better than Valentina Lisitsa playing Chopin. Rehydration for the soul.

Gloomy Sunday: Suzanne, Leonard Cohen

Well, we had to have Laughing Len sooner or later. Here's one of his best songs. Listen and weep.

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Movie Soundtrack of the Week: Blue Velvet

A film that haunts with music that sends shivers down your spine.

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Lancashire Hotpots: Chippy Tea

Today's my ninth wedding anniversary, so what could be more appropriate than the Lancashire Hotpots singing Chippy Tea?

It's Friday night
I'm within me rights
I want a chippy tea

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Billie Holiday: Strange Fruit

One of the most haunting songs. I never imagined I'd see footage of it. An astonishing performance.

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Liu Fang: Traditional Pipa Music

Liu Fang plays traditional Chinese Pipa music. A refreshing and elegant start after a wet and dismal Christmas Day.

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You can buy a limited amount of Liu Fang's music from Amazon

An interlude...

...Happy Christmas

Bach: Christmas Oratorio

Bach's Weihnachtsoratorium. John Eliot Gardiner conducting (good man) and the wonderful Bernarda Fink singing.

It's not the most heart-tearing performance, but it's good and it suits the seasonal mood perfectly.

Merry Christmas all.

Gloomy Sunday 3: Jesse, Scott Walker

Just listen. It is astonishing.

Movie Soundtrack of the Week: The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle

A bit of a cheat this week because I've chosen a film about a band - The Sex Pistols. Unsurprisingly, most of the songs on the soundtrack are by, erm, the Sex Pistols. God Save The Queen. Anarchy in the UK. Sid Vicious's version of My Way. That sort of thing.

One gem, though, which you may not recall is the French version of Anarchy in the UK, with Jerzimy (whoever he is or was). Press the YouTube thingymajig above and you'll hear it in its full chic glory.

Moi, je suis l'antéchrist
Moi, je suis l'anarchiste
Je ne sais pas ce que je veux mais je l'aurai
Je sème la terreur dans la rue

Car moi, je veux l'anarchie

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All the teenage punks at my school had this album, ooh, a good seven or eight years after it came out. They were, of course, so cool.

Bonzo Dog Band: Jollity Farm

It's Friday. I'm ill. I need fine and familiar amusements.

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A must-have album. You've probably got it.

Ramsey Lewis: The In Crowd

I'm tired, my family is alternately ill or demanding: what better way to cheer up than to listen to Ramsey Lewis?

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I'm sure you can all work out where to buy Ramsey Lewis's stuff. If not, bad luck: I'm off to bed.

Inouratomoe: Uchukazoku

Let's face it, there aren't many all-female Japanese klezmer bands that play space-age songs. That's why it's always a pleasure to find a new one. Here's Inouratomoe playing Uchukazoku ("Space Family").

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You won't find Inouratomoe on Amazon, so try their website.

The Cure: Other Voices

The sorts of school I went to used to think they were turning dirty-fingered oiks into respectable young gentlemen with the ability to command. What they were really doing was getting hold of reluctant teenagers and inflicting on them the exact conditions that would make them develop lifelong Cure habits.

I was no exception, and still am not. Here's Robert Smith, Lol Tolhust and the rest of the band playing one of my enduring favourites: Other Voices.

Sibelius: Violin Concerto (Oistrakh)

A very long time ago, I saw my then girlfriend's mother heading towards me down the High Street of my home town. She had not clapped her hate-filled eyes on me, and I certainly did not want to look closely into them. So I took the only manly course available to me and dived in through the doors of Woolworth's.

Whilst in there I bought a copy of Beethoven's Violin Concerto, played by David Oistrakh. It was one of the first Compact Discs I ever bought and I was astonished by the quality and the texture of his playing.

I've been a big fan ever since, not least because he saved me from running headlong into The Woman Who Could Have Been My Mother-in-Law; but if I had to choose a favourite performance, it would be of Oistrakh playing Sibelius's Violin Concerto. Above he's giving an incredible peformance of it with the Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra, directed by Gennady Rozhdestvensky.

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Gloomy Sunday 2: Dido's Lament

A thing of almost impossible beauty and the finest performance of it I have ever witnessed. I wish I had been born 20 years earlier so I could have been there.

Wipe away your tears and read more about it here.

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An earlier recording, but I intend to buy it.

Movie Soundtrack of the Week: Repo Man

It happens sometimes. People just explode. Natural causes.

There's a sort of orthodoxy amongst blokes of my generation - and I am talking about the ones who spend their adolescence in the 1980s stuck in small provincial towns - that Repo Man is the film with the best soundtrack of all time.

They ought to grow up. It's not. It is, though, a damned good soundtrack to a weird and witty film. It has Iggy Pop. The Circle Jerks. Black Flag. The Plugz. Even the bloody Andrew Sisters. It certainly beats the Persuasions doing Papa Oom Mow Mow in E.T.

I'd strongly recommend getting the album, if not the film itself. Indeed, if you do the latter, let me know so I can borrow it: I haven't seen it for about 16 years or so.

On the other hand you can get a flavour of the soundtrack by listening to these performances from YouTube:

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Henri Salvador: Juanita Banana

Take one French singer from the Carribean, dress him up as a banana-growers' daughter from Mexico and endow her with operatic ambitions, and this is what you get: sheer hilarious brilliance.

At least, I think so.

(You can find the English lyrics here).

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If you only buy one Salvador album, then this must be a serious contender. Brush aside the jokiness of Juanita Banana for a moment and listen to the clips on the Amazon site. Faire des ronds dans l'eau is particularly charming.

Eric Dolphy: 245

Given the name of this blog, I thought it high time I added some saxophone music.

I first thought of John Coltrane and Charlie Parker. Then I thought of Stan Getz and Michael Brecker. But then I decided that Wagner would have hated Eric Dolphy most of all - so here he is playing on German TV in 1961.

Rauchen.

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Two excellent Dolphy albums from Amazon.

Poplavski: Salo

I know nothing about this video other than it's sung by Poplavski and is about Salo, a popular kind of Ukrainian pork fat. But it makes me laugh and it has a Christmassy feel, so it's this week's world music offering.

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If you like this I can only recommend you try out some Verka Serduchka too: like this. If only our wannabe Eurovision entrants were so stylish.

Sonic Youth: Tunic (Song for Karen)

Bearing in mind the some of the sphincter-gazing gothic crap I used to listen to at 16 - bands like Clan of Xymox, Christian Death and (shame, oh shame) Creaming Jesus - it's astonishing that I've dragged any albums from the early 1990s into my present-day iTunes library.

One of the few is Sonic Youth's Goo. I listened to it again and again as I travelled round the south of France in a battered Volkswagen camper van [cool], driven by a friend's parents [not so cool] which also contained my friend, his brother, and his brother's girlfriend [who subsequently ran off with a middle-aged hippy pal of the VW van-owners and was next spotted on page 3 of The Sun after chucking herself, nude, into the river at Oxford - way too cool for me].

Anyway, the Sonic Youth binge was brought to a premature end as the van's big end went, just as the band was singing Tunic (Song for Karen), which contains the entirely appropriate lyric "You aren't never going anywhere".

So, for years, Tunic was a song I always equated with the "Nous sommes en panne" routine and with running in and out of siesta-deserted shops and restaurants in search of change for the telephone (muttering schoolboy rubbish like "Pouvez-vous changez ca [waving 50 franc note] pour cinq pieces de dix francs - s'il-vous plait?").

Still, given the fact that we subsequently had to travel on a train from Marseilles to Calais with bugger all food, and with no access to the other carriages, it's easy enough to remember that this particular song is actually about anorexia - Karen Carpenter's anorexia.

I don't think I knew that at the time, mind you, as I was more hung-up about my hair - whenever I looked in the mirror it only seemed to be backcombed about a quarter as much as it actually was.

Anyway, I found out the real meaning of the song soon enough. And, I'm sure you'll agree once you've listened to it, it's one of those songs that deserves a permanent place in a decent record collection - even if it does fantasise about making friends with Elvis in heaven (though I suppose his cheeseburger supply might come in handy).

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Here's the album: it's a must have.

Ligeti: Poème Symphonique pour 100 métronomes

I normally hate experiments of this kind, but I do have a sneaking admiration for György Ligeti's Poème Symphonique pour 100 métronomes.

The idea is clever, but simple. You take 100 metronomes, wind them all up and set them to different speeds. Then you set them all off at roughly the same time (you'll see a mechanical contraption at work in the film) and let your audience make of it what they will.

There are several things I like about the performance. Firstly, the symmetrical arrangement of the metronomes themselves appeals to my sense of shape. Secondly, it's fascinating to listen as the faster metronomes wind down, allowing you increasingly to pick out the sound of individual 'instruments'. And finally, it's stimulating to listen to the variations in the click, clack, clatter and remember similar sounds: I could pick out the beat of the rain on a split windscreen; the tackety-click of a typing pool in a black and white film; the pattering of boys drumming on desks; someone trampling on polystyrene egg-boxes; and much more.

Enjoy it: it's a lot less disturbing than the video someone has made to accompany Apparitions for Orchestra.

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If you are new to Ligeti, your best bet is to get hold of one or more volumes of The Ligeti Project.

Szomorú Vasárnap: ("Gloomy Sunday" or "The Hungarian Suicide Song")

I've decided to hand Sundays over to sombre music, and what better way to start than with Szomorú Vasárnap, or Gloomy Sunday? This song, written by Hungarian Rezső Seress in 1933 was reputed to be so gloomy that lots of people topped themselves after listening to it.

This was of course nonsense, though it was an excellent marketing ploy. Though there's no denying both tune and lyrics are incredibly sad (any song that ends on "The world has ended" is not going to be laugh-a-minute).

Szomorú Vasárnap has been covered by lots of different performers - including the dreadful Goth band Christian Death - but the most famous version is probably Billie Holiday's. You can watch it here.

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If you really want a copy, I'd suggest plumping for one of the albums below. Just don't listen to them when your cat has just died and you've got a half bottle of Scotch coursing through your veins.

Note: I'm assuming the track is on the Billie Holiday set. Even if it's not, 10 CDs for well under a tenner is still a bargain.

Movie Soundtrack of the Week: Super Fly

He's got a plan to stick it to the man. He's super hood. Super high. Super dude... Super Fly.

Ah, Super Fly. A classic 70s film about a coke dealer who wants to quit, but needs to make one final score. Dealers, mobsters and 24-carat grooviness. Or a bag of old crap, depending on who you listen to.

I've never seen it, but - thanks to Bill who bought it for me - I have got a copy of the soundtrack (which, amazingly, outgrossed the film in terms of sales). It's the album that switched me on to Curtis Mayfield, a bookish-looking guy with a fantastically high-pitched singing voice. If you're new to him, take a look at him performing here. I don't rate him as a live artist, but the Super Fly soundtrack is a must have for Funk fans.

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You can get the deluxe double CD from Amazon:

Randolph Sutton: All by Yourself in the Moonlight

What I love about this song is the fact that, even though it dates from 1928, it's so obviously about why masturbation doesn't quite cut the mustard.

There ain't no sense sitting on the fence
All by yourself in the moonlight.
There ain't no thrill by the watermill
All by yourself in the moonlight.
There ain't no fun sitting beneath the trees
Giving yourself a hug, giving yourself a squeeze.

Hilarious, witty and very good fun.

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I can't find a copy of Randolph Sutton's song on Amazon, but there's an even better version by Whispering Jack Smith on the album Songs the Bonzo Dog Band Taught Us.

Louis Armstrong & Johnny Cash: Blue Yodel No. 9

I've liked Louis Armstrong since I was a teenager, and in my early 30s I finally owned up to liking Johnny Cash. But nothing prepared me for the humour and magic of the two men playing together. This clip, so good natured, so humane, makes me laugh out loud every time I see Louis Armstrong's yodelling. I could never tire of watching it.

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There are so many brilliant Louis Armstrong and Johnny Cash records that you might as well buy any that you don't have. You won't regret it.

Françoise Hardy: Tous les Garçons et les Filles

There's no point pretending that Françoise Hardy is a musical genius. She's not. But ever since I got my hands on this album, I've been enamoured by her brand of pop, from her touching performance of Mon Amie la Rose to her incredibly sexy rendition of Traume.

Here she is singing one of my favourites, Tous les Garçons et les Filles. The lyrics are here and, unless my French is completely beyond repair, they roughly translate as "all the boys and girls my age have much better love lives than I do".

Frankly, that's Françoise's fault for shacking up with Jacques Dutronc.

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If you're new to Françoise Hardy, your best bet is to get hold of one of her compilation albums. Below are a few of the best.

The Orb: Little Fluffy Clouds

Two things have the power to broaden a teenage boy's musical taste within 24 hours. The first is trying to get into the knickers of a desirable girl who listens to thinly-disguised rubbish. The other is a new-found interest in mind-altering drugs.

I dabbled in both. But whilst my efforts to be desirable and sexy led me to affect a taste for All About Eve and Sinead O'Connor (oholymotherpleaseforgiveme), the enthusiasm I developed for smoking doobies blossomed into an appreciation of dance music, which seemed to do far more interesting things to my head than the supposedly melon-messing Pink Floyd, Tangerine Dream and similar stonage fodder for geriatrics.

Being 16 years old and short of cash, most of the dance music I amassed was taped from friends or off the radio, with a fair bit also coming from the compilation albums you could get in Woolworths. One was Dance Energy, which had - amongst the dross - some excellent tracks that included Massive Attack's Daydreaming, 808 State's Cubik and - best of all - The KLF's What Time is Love. All stoned people get fascinated by boring and trivial things, and one that appealed to me was watching the woofers on a big pair of speakers pulse and jump to that last track.

I was watching just that in an acquaintance's room when he passed over the joint he was smoking, then stuck on a track he had only just discovered. It was Little Fluffy Clouds by The Orb and listening to it was like having your brains strained through a golden mesh and polished with champagne bubbles.

And though it's years since I stopped smoking doobies, I think it still is.

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The best way to get a copy of Little Fluffy Clouds is to buy The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld. It's an amazing album.

Glenn Gould: Bach's Goldberg Variations

Jerome K. Jerome wisely pointed out that you could either be a rider of bicyles, or someone who overhauled them. He knew it was folly to mix the two enthusiasms.

It's the same with people enjoy music. There are those who quest for technical perfection, both in performance and recording, and others who simply enjoy listening to music that lights the touchpaper of thought and emotion.

I'm squarely in the latter camp. I couldn't give a donkey's toenails whether a piece is technically irreproachable and recorded with glacial clarity. What I'm interested in is how it is interpreted. And if something wonderful is played to me amidst the (digitally remastered) scratches and crackpopples of a 78rpm record - like Beecham's breathtaking Zauberflöte - then that's just fine by me.

Even so, nothing prepared me for my first encounter with Glenn Gould. Sure, I'd listened to and admired lots of Bach. I'd also listened to enough pianists that I was starting to pick out favourite performers, notably Vladimir Ashkenazy, Maria João Pires and - above all - Clifford Curzon.

Then, when I was 15 years old, someone lent me a tape of Glenn Gould playing this interpretation of Bach's Goldberg Variations. Listening to it was like sitting in a bathtub filled with sweet cocktails whilst someone chucked in a three-bar fire.

Yes, you can hear Gould humming. But I'd rather listen to that any day than endure the coughs of the concert hall, or witness the smug little notes that vulgarians pass from one to another when listening to classical music in public.

Listen. Hum yourself. Then, when you're thoroughly hooked, go and listen to this and watch all of these. And remember that perfection is always flawed.

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Although I most admire Gould's 1981 recording of the Goldberg Variations, I strongly recommend you compare it with his groundbreaking 1951 performance. The differences of style and insight between the two are startling.