Musical Musings: Five of the Best - Toad the Wet Sprocket

Two weeks ago, when Jarrett McCall counted down his favourite songs of 2015, one of them came from a four-track EP on a tiny London label, sung by a woman most of our listeners had never heard of. Laura Groves grew up in Shipley, near Bradford, with a radio mast across the road, and she has spent her career trying to bottle the feeling of watching its red light at night. She started out as Blue Roses, making hushed folk for XL Recordings at twenty-one, then reinvented herself in London with electric pianos, eighties synths and a voice that cuts straight through them. She produces most of it herself, releases it slowly, and has picked up admirers including Sampha, Bat for Lashes and the Cocteau Twins' own label, Bella Union. This week I've asked Jarrett back to make the case for her properly.

Ken Cheshire is back on Musical Musings: Five of the Best this week, and he's brought one of the oddest success stories in American pop. Three Dog Night had three lead singers and four musicians who rarely got the credit they deserved. They almost never wrote their own hits. For about five years, few bands in America sold more records. Danny Hutton, Cory Wells and Chuck Negron came together in Los Angeles in 1967. Brian Wilson briefly tried to produce them, and they took their name from a cold-weather saying about how many dogs you'd need to keep warm. Their real talent was finding songs. They took the work of writers like Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman, Laura Nyro and Hoyt Axton and turned it into twenty-one Top 40 hits, three of them number ones. The critics mostly sneered, and the radio didn't care.

Last week Armando Venditti of The Music Den took us through the first half of his ten essential ABBA tracks, and it was the ABBA most people never owned on a single: B-sides, a live encore, an Agnetha ballad and a hit that only Mexico noticed. This week he finishes the job with the top five, and there’s nowhere left to hide, because every one of them was a hit. What makes it interesting is the order. The song most people would put at number one sits at number five. Dancing Queen was ABBA’s only American chart-topper and a number one here and in Britain, and it was recorded more than a year before anyone heard it, under the working title Boogaloo. Above it is Super Trouper, written in a rush as the last song for the album, about a singer on stage holding on to one face in a crowd of twenty thousand. Then comes Björn’s big moment at the microphone, Does Your Mother Know, which began life as a rock’n’roll track with two heavy-metal guitar solos before ABBA polished it into a dance-floor stomper. A rock-and-prog man like Armando was always going to have something to say about that.

This week we start a new series. Musical Musings: Sleeve Notes takes one album and goes through it from the sleeve to the run-out groove: what it means to us, what the critics made of it, the outtakes, and, when there's a fresh reissue, the new mix. First up is the Beatles' Rubber Soul, which came out in a newly remixed and expanded Special Edition on 2 October, and my guest is Ken. In late 1965 the Beatles came off the stage at Shea Stadium and had about four weeks to make an album for Christmas. What they made sounds nothing like Beatlemania: a sitar, a harmonium, Dylan and the Byrds in the air, and John writing about himself in code. It even had to fight Julie Andrews for the top of the British album chart. We'll talk about how each of us first met the record, including which Rubber Soul we had, since the American version is a different album. Then we go through it track by track. Ken plays The Word and I'm Looking Through You; I've gone for George's Think for Yourself and In My Life.

When MTV switched on in America on 1 August 1981, it had a problem nobody had thought through: a channel that played music videos around the clock needed a lot of music videos, and most American acts hadn’t made any. British bands had. They’d been shooting clips for Top of the Pops for years — and for the music shows down this end of the world, where overseas acts rarely toured and Countdown, Ready to Roll and Radio with Pictures ran on film instead. So MTV played what it had, and within two years the American charts looked like a British import shop. Part two of New Wave Friday is about that moment, when a genre that radio had been reluctant to touch found its way into American lounges through the television instead. It’s also about how much of it ran through this part of the world: the first video MTV ever played was directed by a Melburnian, Split Enz were on the channel’s first night, and a Radio with Pictures host went on to run MTV in Europe.