Parish Notices #4

Life can be dull if it is one great big amalgam of the routine. On the other hand I find it’s a comfort to have some routine in your life, it sort of acts as a rock. (Of course something you do that you enjoy you will tend to do regularly if you can so then it can be classified as a routine – ha! going round in circles now!). Anyway, when a pleasurable routine gets upset I end up feeling a little bit unhinged, uncomfortable, restless. Dapping around the music blogs qualifies as one of my enjoyable routines and it has been upset in recent days leaving me feeling distracted. The musical offerings at DavyH’s The Ghost Of Electricity, my new discovery Derek’s Daily 45, and the Scholar’s Souled On zShare links are now all a closed book (or is that unplugged headphones in this case?). It seems that the file hosting sites (zShare, Mediafire, Badongo) their music files can be found on are now inaccessible by me, and I’m not sure why. Doing some research on this – which has become the major distraction to my routine – has led me to some self-help/experience sharing style forums. I don’t normally inhabit these but have found them to be useful in the past. The problem I find with these forums, though, is that usually half the people don’t really know what they’re talking about and the other half are full blown techies who are undoubtedly on the right track but who I struggle to keep up with. A lot of them also seem bordering paranoid. And their paranoia is rubbing off on me. For example I now know more about: the fact that UK ISPs are being actively encouraged to put a lid on “illegal” downloading; the nasty sounding phorm; and that the ISPs are also finding all sorts of ways to not deliver us their headline download speeds (that has been evident on my connection for a long time now). As well as all that I spent almost all of last weekend ridding my son’s PC of a variety of viruses and spyware, and attempting, unsuccessfully, to configure a friends new wireless router. Soon it won’t be worth turning the computer on.

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In light of some of the above I now feel my practice of hosting music files on my ISP is looking a bit reckless. So from now on I am going to put them elsewhere. The music you will find below is on Filecrunch – let me know if have problems accessing it. I was going to use zShare but of course now I can’t and you may find you can’t access Filecrunch – ho hum.

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I featured the B side of Joni Wilson’s sole, and elusive, Volt 45 here recently and again asked for any information on her or the record. Red Kelly has kindly taken up the case over at Burning Questions. Red’s comment regarding the fact that the “Loser’s Seat” song title was a take off of a Hertz ad from back in the day blew me away! It will be interesting to see what can be unearthed.

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In wishing Candi Staton a happy birthday in my last post I featured a track from her 1974 “Candi” album. I hadn’t played it for years having it logged as being rather tame in comparison to her earlier output. I suspect that lasting impression was something to do with my changing tastes in music at the time I “shelved” it, and then my subsequent temporary loss of interest in music generally. Well it’s time to correct that impression. I’ve played this album a couple of times in the last few days and my early memories of it are now returning - it’s consistently great! Although released on Warner Brothers all the tracks were recorded with Rick Hall’s gang at Fame, and I think represent the last of Candi’s recordings there. I believe the tracks were recorded earlier than 1974 but lay unreleased as Rick Hall was having distribution problems with his Fame label. Candi is on fine form throughout this album.

By way of an apology regarding my somewhat dismissive remark concerning the “Candi” album, and to give the Roman Empress another Candi track to listen to as she has probably listened to “Little Taste Of Love” a 100 times by now, here is another track from “Candi”. The choice was extremely difficult, but I finally plumped for one of the three Phillip Mitchell compositions, it has an intro to die for, and then to top it of course Candi sings! Proof that you can have your cake and eat it.


Candi Staton – Can’t Stop Being Your Fool (mp3) 1974