Skip to main content

Badfinger - No Matter What

Power pop bands could be ugly, short or totally forgettable. But, they always had good hair. It was an unspoken prerequisite for the genre - as much as the chiming guitars, harmonies and poppy lyrics. Simply put, I love Badfinger's hair. I picked up their greatest hits for a buck at my local thrift store last summer on the basis of the band's hairstyles. 23 songs. I was like, "O.k. I'm gonna become a massive Badfinger fan, dammit!" In the end, it came down to three for me: "Come and Get It", "Day After Day" and "No Matter What." These are as good as any pop songs ever written. "Without You," later made famous by Harry Nilsson ain't too shabby, neither.
Badfinger were the first band signed to the Beatles' Apple Records in 1968. "No Matter What," released in 1970, reached number 8 in the U.S. and number five in the U.K. It was originally rejected as a single by the label. What were they thinking? The tune does that clever little trick of starting the song in the chorus. It's perfect Saturday morning listening. I recommend putting on some headphones and taking a walk with this tune to hit the reset button on a tense week. If you're feeling really liberated, walk down the street to a hair salon and say, "I want a haircut like Pete Ham from Badfinger." Watch the hairdresser smile.

Comments

Post a Comment

Trending Tracks

U.K. - In The Dead of Night

In the late 70s, as punk and post-punk bands spiraled towards their new wave destinies, prog dinosaurs stood paralyzed in the shadows. Bands like the Sex Pistols were meteors, igniting a global firestorm that would trigger prog's extinction. The British music press (Melody Maker, Sounds, NME, etc.), once proponents of prog darlings Genesis, Yes and ELP, now bashed any band releasing songs in odd time signatures and singing about aliens and whales. The punk revolution had turned the U.K. music industry and press on its head within a year (1976-1977). For me, this is one of the most interesting times in pop music. Although prog groups saw their audiences rapidly dwindle (Yes audiences had dropped from 20,000 to 3,000 by 1980's Drama tour), many record labels had built fortunes on the works of prog artists and were willing to foot the bill for some interesting transitional experiments. Yes' Drama , ELPs' Works , Genesis' . ..And Then There Were Three... were p...
Post a Comment
Read more

Belem & The Mekanics - Norvégien

Tonight, I offer you a sampling of progressive circus music for steam punks. Belem & The Mekanics is Didier Laloy (diatonic accordion), Kathy Adam (cello) and the composer Walter Hus. Laloy and Adam play along with Hus' 15-piece orchestra, composed of mechanized instruments (organs, accordions and percussion) that are controlled by a computer. The whole affair builds on the idea of the orchestrion, a machine that autonomously plays music to simulate an orchestra -- think player piano, but on a grand scale. Apparently, these were quite popular in Belgium and France throughout the early 1900s. I chose this song, Norvégien , for its dynamics and spotlight of the mechanical tick-tocking rhythm, which eventually builds into a drumbeat (played on the instruments by a computer). If you're interested in seeing behind the scenes and understanding the mechanics of their music, check this out: Here's a little extra homework assignment. Who else has performed...
Post a Comment
Read more