I heard the song Some Velvet Morning on the radio a number of times last week. Lee Hazelwood who wrote it passed away over the weekend
Lee Hazlewood: 1928-2007 | News | NME.COM. DJs were pulling out their Hazelwood records and Hazelwood cover songs. There are a lot of Hazelwood covers out there
Songwriter, Singer Lee Hazlewood Passed Away. Blixa with Einsturzende Neubauten covered both Sand and Morning Dew. Now we'll never know about Phaedra. That's how that song goes: "Some velvet morning when I'm straight. I'm gonna open up your gate. And maybe tell you about Phaedra..." That was one of the songs he sang with Nancy Sinatra. His biggest success came when he wrote "Boots" for her, quaintly a mainstay of the Doc Martens era in the early 80's.
Another death last week was Tony Wilson founder of Factory Records and Manchester's Hacienda club
King of 'Madchester' music scene dies | News | Guardian Unlimited Music. Think Joy Division, New Order, Vinny Reilly, Happy Mondays. They made a movie of all that a few years ago, Steve Coogan played him in that one (Craig Parkinson plays him in another). I was thinking of the Cath Carroll song "When it all comes down" (which she did with Miaow) a couple of weeks ago. She was a Hacienda regular at one one point, before moving to the States. Tony Wilson seemed to have died young at age fifty-seven, but - I'm now put in mind of that LCD Soundsystem song all my friends - its hard to tell what is old for 24 Hour Party People.
More untimely was the death of Solvieg Dommartin earlier this year. I hadn't even heard about that. She was the trapeze artist from film Wings of Desire; Himmel Uber Berlin, Der (1987). I just got around to watching that last Sunday for the first time. I recalled all my friends who saw it said how great it was. I made a mental note to see it at some point. It just took seventeen years or so. I went to imdb after watching it, and saw that she had died of a heart attack in January.
To balance the somberness of this post I'll consider someone I'm not sure I had ever heard of before, who is still very much alive: Francoise Hardy. She was a French chanteuse from the 60's Francoise Hardy - Wikipedia. Apple of Tran's secret pop side. Previously Tran has admitted only to an affection for traditional Vietnamese folk music. I did catch some of that at this years Smithsonian Folk Life Festival, which featured the cultures of the Mekong river. This French pop is something new. I refer to to Hardy as a chanteuse, which she may be, but mainly because I have ever typed the word chanteuse before in my life.
Tran pointed out two of her greatest songs Tout les garcons et les filles, and Mon amie la rose. The majority of her records are sung in French, but she also recorded songs in English Spanish Italian and German. I've spent some time looking over her video samplings in YouTube trying to pick out songs from her iconic early work. She never stopped recording, there are records from the sixties, on to the present. I can't think of what english or american singers were similar, Dusty Springfield maybe? I was thinking of Marianne Faithfull briefly, but we would need a somewhat different Marianne Faithful than the one we have. Perhaps there is no one really like her.
