A few weeks ago I was talking to a friend who has a beloved dog called Lola. Anyway, she was on Australia's answer to Desert Island Discs a while back and chose The Kinks' "Lola" as the song to play herself out to.
I found this endearing, and was slightly disappointed at the thought that if we wanted to enshrine our cat's name in song, we'd have to turn to this sort of thing.
But it got me thinking about songs I love, and about songs I'd like people to know I love because they mean a lot to me and make me happy and I want to share the love.
Of course, it is so like a boy to be making lists of songs he likes. But WHATEVER.
This is 'Nice and Easy' by Susan Cadogan. It would be on my desert island playlist because Kate loves it so much and it makes me think of her. Also, it's quite a weird song in lots of ways. Susan Cadogan made pretty much one single album in the mid-1970s with some Jamaican dub and reggae producers. In that sense I think she was a bit of a manufactured act, but she did have this amazing, ethereal voice and the Pete Waterman to her Kylie was Lee Perry, who brought out the weirdness of her singing with some too-much-echo ghost-train dub atmospherics.
Two other things about Susan Cadogan. The fun fact is that she's now a librarian at the University of the West Indies in Kingston. How cool would it be if your university librarian had a hit with Lee Perry?
The other thing is that we saw her at the Jazz Cafe in London a few years back. It was an odd experience in a number of ways. I've occasionally thought about writing fictional short stories about people entangled in different ways in the music industry, and this would have been perfect material.
The concert was basically brokered by the Mad Professor, a dub producer who's also become a bit of a svengali of the touring revival reggae scene - he's also the person who digs up Lee Perry every summer to wheel him around the summer festivals. The Mad Professor had produced a new album for her, which was I think more or less her first since the 1970s, and Kate got a signed copy at the end. Essentially, it felt that he'd produced the album as a favour for her, and out of respect for what she'd done. There really didn't seem much commercial imperative - it was a one-date tour in London from Jamaica, with a tiny Jazz Cafe audience, so probably lost money.
Susan Cadogan herself had some great stage presence and the same fantastic voice, but shorn of Lee Perry's stylings the stuff she was singing was really pretty run-of-the-mill reggae and lover's rock. Which, given the fact that she's approaching 60 and hasn't been making music commercially for the best part of three decades, is probably what you'd expect (and for what it's worth, lots of people who *have* been making music for three decades end up playing run-of-the-mill stuff; in fact, that's the result more often than not).
I don't really know the point I'm making with that. I think it's probably that it's best to leave some heroes preserved in the aspic of distance and memory. Susan Cadogan was a good performer and she clearly loved what she was doing, but that song from 1975 is something unique and almost timeless; by comparison, the live performance felt a bit like really, really good karaoke.
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