Monday Long Song

Anita Ward went to No.1 on both sides of the Atlantic in 1979 with 'Ring My Bell' and, before the year was out, UK lovers rock trio Blood Sisters put out a bass driven cover of the massive hit. They really were blood sisters too - Ouida, Moira and Yvonne McCarthy. Keeping the family theme going, the band on the recording consisted of five brothers - Errol, E. Lloyd, Jerry, Trevor and Paul Robinson, who would go on to issue a couple of albums of their own in the early 1980s, under the One Blood moniker. E. Lloyd Robinson's bassline is even more prominent on the flipside of the 'Ring My Bell' 12", titled, not unreasonably, 'One Blood Dub'. Blood Sisters issued a mere handful of singles during their recording career, though, as of late last year at least, they are still performing in and around London.

I found 'One Blood Dub' lurking on an old hard drive in an anonymous folder of similar vinyl rips. I've no idea where I got it from and in truth the contents are a bit of a mixed bag, but it does contain one or two other dubs worthy of attention that I might swing back to somewhere down the line.

One Blood Dub

Friday Photo #76

Milkweed is an experimental gothic folk-noir duo, responsible for 'Remscéla', an LP created with banjos, loops, found sounds and glitchy, unsettling vocals. It was very possibly my album of 2025, certainly one of my most played. At the end of the year, they also reissued two earlier cassette only releases, 'The Mound People' and 'Folklore 1979', on vinyl for the first time. The band's lyrics are inspired by folkloric texts and their music is is lo-fi and haunting, claustrophobically enveloping the listener like a dense fog. I was lucky enough to see Milkweed perform twice last year, the first time was in my own home town, where the photo above was taken. 

Exile the Sons of Uisliu

How Conchobor was Begotten

Monday Long Song

In January, a notable anniversary slipped quietly by while I was looking the other way - David Bowie's 'Station to Station' turned 50. It can be terrifying stuff, this aging malarky. The album came a mere 10 months after 'Young Americans' and just a little over 4 years after my proper introduction to the man via 'Hunky Dory'. In real time, the gaps between Bowie's releases felt unremarkable because, as Paul Weller noted, '...life is timeless, days are long when you're young...', but looking back at his extraordinary 1970s output (which for me actually begins with 1969's 'Space Oddity' and ends 9 months into the 1980s with 'Scary Monsters'), it's clearly unsustainably prolific in the long term. 13 studio albums, 2 live sets, a clutch of stand alone singles plus all of the unreleased material that has surfaced subsequently, is considerably more than most artists create over an entire career. What a time to be alive. Such is the stuff from where dreams are woven.

Station to Station