I feel renewed in my musical experience this week. I have encountered the delights and joys of ‘Folktronica’.
In many ways it’s like really good 80’s music. I don’t like proper main stream 80’s music, when I was listening to music in the late eighties, and I was only like 7 at the time I really only liked the Beatles, mainly because that’s what my cousin Andrew loved (he was born the day John Lennon was shot, so I think he felt they had a connection), and we sort of copied each other. I copied him more because he was older, but he liked cool stuff like BB guns, commodore amigas and WWF wrestling so that was fine. When I did try to go out on my own and was allowed into Woolworths for the first time with my own proper money, I bought a ‘Right said fred’ album on cassette tape, this could even have been the start of the nineties, but it was tragic, and I quickly went back to the white album until I grew ears. Even when my dad subjected me too music in the dreaded 80’s it was either 70’s Abba, or some sort of Gospel quartet stuff, and I’m going to be honest, that wasn’t great – apart from the Statler Brothers, they just about scraped through, but there definitely was more rough than the smooth with that particular genre.
But this ‘folktronica’ stuff is amazing, it’s like folk melodies and harmonies with beats, and the artist which has introduced me to the phenomenon goes by the name of James Yuill, visit www.jamesyuill.com for some amazing tunes. On his download page definitely listen to his remix of Rod Thomas’s ‘Same old lines’ and his own Prins Thomas Sneaky Re-Edit of ‘This sweet love’.
