We should stop dignifying people with high minded descriptors. Sometimes people are Just Cunts.

Dave Clark's somewhat sporadically scheduled version, shown in...
😏🕶️😎
...bits and pieces.

A couple of days ago, I'd have thought this was about Slot.

Yeah, it's hard for me to get past thinking of it as a Desmond Dekker tune because I heard it at youth club discos and school dances as a kid. I didn't see the film until my mid-late teens, and on reflection international audiences will probably also know it as a Jimmy Cliff song because of that.

All that said, I stand by my broader points, namely that a) both songs are more closely associated with peers of his rather than with Jimmy Cliff himself, and b) the Guardian is shit. I will be making no further comment and I now consider the matter closed. 2/2

I think Tainted Love is a bit different, though. The Gloria Jones version is a Northern classic of course, but it wasn't a pop hit and didn't reach the mass audience that Soft Cell did, so I think they're entitled to a bit of credit for that. Plus, they did something original with the song as well.

BTW, there are some great versions of YNWA out there. Jackie Wilson's version is amazing, and there's an incredible live version by Louis Armstrong, recorded at Carnegie Hall, I think. It's like a New Orleans funeral march.

Yeah, absolutely. A mate of mine once told me it was one of his favourite songs and I offered to give him my copy. He declined; "I'd play it all the time and I might stop liking it so much."

I'd have gone with Many Rivers To Cross, Sitting In Limbo, Wonderful World Beautiful People before two songs that were much bigger hits for his peers than they were for him.

Yeah, all this has since been pointed out to me, so I'm obviously not on solid ground here. But I feel as if the broader point here - and I could be wrong about this too and it's just a personal thing on my part - is that his isn't the name most immediately associated with either song.

Heh.

I dunno, though. Someone pointed out to me that he did have a hit in the 90s with I Can See Clearly Now, but to me it's like saying Satisfaction was a hit for Britney Spears and, while that's factually correct, hers is not the name the majority of people would associate with that song.

I mean, FFS www.theguardian.com/music/2025/n...

I couldn't get over what else they were kicking around during those sessions that they never recorded at all; Jealous Guy, All Things Must Pass, Back Seat Of My Car...there must have been at least one more great album in them apart from what we ended up with.

Frankly, my money's on Karen Attiah.

I grew up in Liverpool when the Beatles' music was in the air we all breathed, and I'm astonished at how it still has the power to amaze me. Watching the Peter Jackson film a few years ago and seeing Macca pull Get Back out of thin air at the exact moment I was opening my 9th birthday cards...🤯