Wednesday Top 5.

Last weeks Top 5 may have been a little too much for some people, all that rudeness in one posting. I have decided to tame things down a little for this week, well not Tame as such but not really about making oneself go blind.

Today marks many things, the birth of a member of Brotherhood of Man, Tina Turner, Natasha Bedingfield but also the birth of John Mcvie, of Fleetwood Mac, there is quite a lot there to do a Top 5 with, but to be fair to John McVie he isn’t in particularly good company Bedingfield tends to soundtrack tampon ads, Turner only appears to release greatest hits albums, Brotherhood of man, well it’s Brotherhood of man. So if it came down to it I could if pushed do a Fleetwood Mac top 5, but I am not.



Todays Top 5 then. The Top 5 songs that someone who doesn’t really like or know anything about reggae may refer to as reggae but probably aren’t, but he does like.



Bit of a mouthful that.



The first one is a song from my distant youth, or more realistically, childhood. I spent a short period of time as a child in Trinidad, when my parents hear this song they tend to go all doe eyed and do that swaying that the elderly do to songs that have a beat that is more compromising than a Celine Dion song, I guess partly because my parents in 1982 were long off elderly. That song is quite a schmaltzy but rather perfect version of Send me the pillow by Cynthia Schloss. I guess this is best described as lovers rock.




Send me the pillow by Cynthia Schloss





Second is the song Sitting In Limbo by Jimmy Cliff. Taken from the soundtrack to the film, The Harder They Come and personally the stand out track from one of my favourite movie soundtracks.

I first heard Jimmy Cliff in the early eighties as my sister had the title track of this album on 7”, I really liked it and I never not once sneaked into my sisters room to play it, not once.

A few years ago I got hold of the album as I kept hearing snatches of songs and realised that I loved it, that’s when I heard the fantastic Sitting In Limbo and decided that one day when I am a pop star and have to fall back on a covers album to fulfil the tenth contractual obligation album, Sitting In Limbo will be on that album, that and Car Chase City by Tenacious D!




Sitting in Limbo by Jimmy Cliff.


Number three is a pretty well known song, it’s Uptown Top Ranking by Althia and Donna. I own this on 7 inch, it’s one I like for its music and beat as opposed to the singing. In the days of yore when Jupitus was on the breakfast show on 6 music, he used to play a fair old bit of reggae, soca, bluebeat, ska etc, I never listened to him mind as I was usually on a bus hurtling towards Telford cursing at the ne’er do wells playing 50 cent at ridiculous volume on mobile phones. I will come back to Jupitus in a moment, anyway, in the days of yore, the lofty wife told me that Uptown Top Ranking was based on a song with the refrain 3 piece suit and ting, my wife, no she knows an awful lot about 80’s pop but chuff all about the music of the West Indies so I poo-pooed her and said she was talking out of her arse. Turns out she was correct and after further prodding, it seems Jupitus had played said track earlier and furnished her with the trivia. That’s my Uptown Top Ranking tale. I can see you are mesmerised by it, you want to hear my Resurrection Shuffle tale?




Uptown Top Ranking by Althia and Donna


Onwards to number four in the Top 5, and that be Dillinger with the infectious Cocaine. A song bought to my attention as a 15 year old child by a teacher. You know however I say that it sounds dodgy, a teacher played me an LP by Dillinger that had the song Cocaine on it, still dodgy. I guess we went to an enlightened school but through some odd ITV telethon type affair for kicks we had a sponsored stay awake at the school, one of the teachers decided to set up what could only be called a sound system and one of his albums was the Dillinger album, it was biddly biddly bong, that’s a good enough description anyway, I later bought the album and appreciated it more as I got older, mainly as I saw a VU reference in a knife a fork a bottle and a cork. I don’t own the album anymore.




Cocaine in my brain by Dillinger


Finally we arrive at 5. I am going to write a glowing eulogy to Peel, I am going to do it now, so in all briefness, 5 is Lion Rock by Culture, he played, I heard it, I loved it.




Lion Rock by Culture