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No StairwayNo Stairway 32 (Season 2, Episode 9) - OnomatapoeiaPoets and lyricists had long desired to use words that phonetically imitate the sound they describe. Philosophers from antiquity to the modern era, linguists of all schools and several noted East Coast beatboxers have all attempted to capture the majesty of sound in words. However, it wasn’t until three brothers from Tulsa, Oklahoma under the band name Hanson had the breakout genre redefining hit “MMMBop” in 1997 that the concept of onomatopoeia was fully realised in song form. Hanson’s song was, of course, wildly successful, being voted number 20 in now long defunct television channel VH-1’s poll of the “100 greatest son...2023-01-021h 41No StairwayNo Stairway 31 (Season 2, episode 8) - All About the BassLearned folk have often disagreed on the origins of the bass line. Today, the daemonic bastard child of the drums and the guitar is the undisputed driving force beneath all of our favourite modern popular songs, but there was a time in the recent past when records were tinny and bland and completely devoid of funk. Some blokes down the pub would have you believe that the bass line was invented by noted Italian guitar manufacturer Oliviero Pigini, who, having had the misfortune of losing both his thumbs in a kneading machine accident as a child, miscounted the number...2022-11-271h 53No StairwayNo Stairway 30 (season 2, episode 7) - The BeatlesIt would be facetious for a music podcast to go for any length of time without acknowledging the Beatles - as has been observed many times, the undisputed greatest album of all time is The Best of The Beatles; anyone who tells you different is selling something. With the acerbic lyrical wit of John Lennon, the edgy, genre-defining lead guitar work of George Harrison and the rhythmic dependability of everyone’s favourite Beatle, Ringo Starr, the Beatles reshaped the cultural landscape of the twentieth century. Also, the bass player’s wife made some superb textured vegetable protein sausages. You may...2022-10-141h 50No StairwayNo Stairway 29 (Season 2, episode 6) - The Four SeasonsIt is easy to forget, in these times of endless drought, burned tundra and an inevitable future when our children choke on atmospheric red dust whilst android overlords decide our reproductive rights, that there was once a time when very small pieces of water would fall from the sky. That’s right, tiny pieces of that miracle fluid would descend from heaven - in older times they called it rain. Rain would then make plants grow - plants are those yellow and brown things on the ground. In the olden days plants were green and would grow and turn in...2022-08-261h 52
No StairwayNo Stairway 28 (Season 2, episode 5) - Me, Myself and IBillie Holiday’s invention of the phrase “Me, Myself & I” with the song of the same name in 1937, had led her at the time, quite undeservedly, to be described as “The Narcissist’s favourite chanteuse.” However the first person singular has, in recent and perhaps more egocentric times, become a popular and widespread opening to songs of all genres. From John Lennon reading the news today to Bob Marley shooting the sheriff (although I believe Bob was wildly exaggerating his tale of a lawman’s murder for dramatic effect) the opening of songs with “I this” or “I that” now hold the song apprecia...2022-07-291h 51No StairwayNo Stairway 27 (Season 2, Episode 4) - Songs from Debut AlbumsNineties Michael Jackson baiter Jarvis Cocker once asked in song “Do you remember the first time?” The song’s narrator is quick to add that he “can’t remember a worse time” – this is particularly ironic as Cocker’s debut outing with Pulp, 1983’s “It”, is perhaps their worst record. Likewise, only real die-hard fans will attempt to compare the debut albums of David Bowie, Elton John or Prince with the rest of their celebrated oeuvre. However, not everyone makes a hash of things the first time around – I potted a ball from the break with my first ever stroke of a pool cue in 1989. I...2022-06-251h 47No StairwayNo Stairway 26 (Season 2, Episode 3) - Three Chords and Everything About JapanThe Sakoku Edict of 1635 made Japan an isolated state, cutting off trade relationships with most other countries of the world and banning foreigners from entering Japan upon pain of death. Over the next two hundred years, the land of the rising sun would become a place of mystery for the rest of the world, and from this period of isolation it is thought that the West’s fascination with all things Japanese sprang. Indeed, many learned folk trace the first instances of Japanophilia to the 1894 book “Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan” by Greek writer Lafcadio Hearn. In this work Lafcadio detail...2022-05-132h 09No StairwayNo Stairway E.P. 1 - Sad Songs that are BangersIn the first of what could be an on going occurrence of No Stairway EPs, Bill ventures into his self-styled “crying corner” to give you a 60 minute playlist of sadness.
A sad song can keep you moving, raise your spirits, or even get you even lower than before you even heard it. Which ever way, Bill has brought you a collection of 11 songs which he thinks will do any of of these, or even all at the same time!
Bill’s playlist2022-04-1627 minNo StairwayEpisode 25 (Season 2, episode 2) - Covers that are better than the originalsCover versions of popular hits are often much maligned as lesser copies of their more authentic (and therefore somehow superior) original recordings. However, while no sane person would defend the Take That cover of “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, there are exceptions to this perceived rule. For example, the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest winning performance pails into insignificance when compared to ABBA-cadabra’s rendition of “Waterloo'' witnessed by yours truly on a particularly wet Thursday night in Wakefield some time in late 1998. Similarly, almost everyone who has sung a Bob Dylan song with a comprehensive school standard issue nylon string guitar has a better...2022-03-031h 45No StairwayEpisode 24 (Season 2, Episode 1) - SpaceJoint winner of the 1952 Nobel Prize for Physics, Felix Bloch, famously recounted a walk he took with his doctoral supervisor, Werner Heisenberg, pioneer of Quantum mechanics and himself a Nobel Laureate in 1928. During this walk Bloch remarked that, following his recent reading of Hermann Weyl’s “Space, Time and Matter” it was obvious to him that space was simply the field of linear operations. “Nonsense” rebuked Heisenberg, “space is blue and birds fly through it.” The accepted reading of Heisenberg’s remark is that it is foolish to describe nature in terms of idealised abstractions far removed from the evidence of actual observ...2022-01-281h 42No StairwayEpisode 23 - The Christmas SpecialIt is often remarked that Santa Claus’ famous red suit was first popularised by the Coca-Cola company in 1931, however many other facets of our supposedly traditional Christmas are much more recent inventions than we might like to think. For example, Santa’s sleigh was thought to have been pulled by huskies before a highly successful but mean-spirited initiative led by Bernard Matthews in 1978 to undermine the then-lucrative Christmas venison market. Likewise the annual excitement for the Christmas number one single was manufactured in the mid-nineties following a disastrous and clearly drunken appearance on daytime television by Mr Blobby.
It...2021-12-091h 35No StairwayEpisode 22 - Halloween SpecialHalloween, a contraction of All Hallows’ Eve, marks the beginning of the Western Christian season of remembrance known as Allhallowtide - comprised of Halloween, All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day, it is traditionally a time to remember the dead. Then in 1962 an enterprising young singer-songwriter named Bobby Pickett wrote and recorded a catchy parody single called “The Monster Mash” which topped the US Billboard singles chart that Halloween. What followed appears to be either some kind of mass hysteria or collective social malaise, as ever since the entire world has associated an otherwise little known Christian Festival with werewolves, pumpkins a...2021-10-291h 28No StairwayEpisode 21 - Instru-Mental!To paraphrase the great Dr Emmet Brown, “Words? Where we’re going, we don’t need words” as this week we delve deep into instrumental music. Lyrics, as every historian of music down the pub will tell you, are a relatively new invention - they were first trialled by The Police in 1980 with their masterpiece “De Do Do Do, Dah Dah Dah” and arguably perfected by American Beat-Combo Crash Test Dummies’ wordy 1993 hit “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm”. Since the golden age of modern pop lyrics lasted a scant 13 years, we have therefore much ground to cover as we traverse material from befo...2021-10-151h 44No StairwayEpisode 20 - Songs not in the English LanguageXenophobia is a perennial problem facing humanity as a species. It would seem one way to tackle this particular kind of small mindedness is to spread far and wide the artistic outputs of all cultures for everyone to enjoy, and thus cultivate a commonality to better aid mutual understanding. And whilst the written word requires either translation or additional work by the reader, we can all tap our feet to the tunes that popular beat combos across the globe are churning out - or can we? For that is our quest this week, to find songs that you probably...2021-10-011h 23No StairwayEpisode 19 - B-sides that are better than A-sidesMixtapes may be a moribund art form, but the B-side is well and truly dead. There are currently fully grown adults, human beings that you know and perhaps even respect, who are sufficiently young to have no idea what a B-side is. These are your bus drivers, your chartered accountants and your compliance managers the world over who have never experienced the joy of preferring the throw-away freebie which used to come as a party favour when you purchased the physical media version of the latest pop banger. This week on No Stairway we dive headlong into this oft-neglected box...2021-09-161h 47No StairwayEpisode 18 - "This is the End" - The Last Songs from AlbumsThe icing on the cake, the cherry on top, the jewel in the crown - final flourishes have long been held to be the very best things that humanity can experience. This week we ask the question “are albums finished in the same way as cakes or crowns, with the best ingredient reserved until the finishing touch?” The short answer is no - anyone who argues that the best track on Revolver is “Tomorrow Never Knows” is clearly selling something and is to be distrusted. However, if we relied on the short answer here at No Stairway, you, Dear Listener, would be...2021-09-021h 37No StairwayEpisode 17 - Feel GoodMuch as one man’s pain is another man’s pleasure, so too is one man’s trash another man’s treasure. This week at No Stairway Towers, we become acutely aware of this as everyone disagrees as to which music is best placed to lighten our mood, to put a bounce in our steps and smiles on our faces - feel good music, it seems, is as divisive a topic as exists on the planet. Bill (of Crying Corner fame) has of course previously defended his dubious theory that nothing makes one happier than sad songs. This is in direc...2021-08-191h 34No StairwayEpisode 16 - Getting Down to Brass TracksThe high water mark for brass instrumentation is obviously the Hovis bread advertisement from 1973 which launched the careers of both Sir Ridley Scott and Antonín Dvořák. Since then, despite a brief renaissance thanks to noted horn blower and record breaker Roy Castle in the late 1980’s, brass has sadly been completely ignored by popular culture. That is until today, as No Stairway turns it’s playlisting attentions to the wonderful world of labrophones, from trumpets to euphoniums, cornets to flugelhorns and all things reed-less and shiny in between. In this week’s raucous episode our gang of blow-hard...2021-08-051h 28No StairwayEpisode 15 - Short 'n' SweetPascal contended that long letters were written by people who lacked the time to make them shorter - the implication being that by eliminating the extraneous material the final product is thus improved. This leads one to wonder, are songs the same? Once the guitar solos, spoken word intros and jazz-harp middle-eights are removed are we left with a superior and more satisfying track? Cue the most intended pun of the year, as our ‘brief’ this week is songs that, either through authorial design or necessity of production, are under two minutes in duration.
Events of note this...2021-07-221h 19No StairwayEpisode 14 - Methods of CommunicationTalk Talk, Television and, of course, Hear’say. It is perhaps an ontological inevitability that musical artists select stage names which reference human methods of communication, given the aural nature of music itself. However, if we were to delve into deeper furrows than mere nomenclatures, would we expose a more fundamental relationship between music and the base human need to communicate? After all, what’s in a name? By any other name Ned’s Atomic Dustbin would surely smell as…well, it’d probably smell the same. It would sound the same too, I’m sure. I’m pretty sure that was...2021-07-081h 25No StairwayEpisode 13 - Film SoundtracksHigh drama at No Stairway towers this week as a civil war breaks out between the laissez-faire hippy attitude of Carl and the spreadsheet-based rule following to which Tim is more inclined. Thank God for Bill who, true to form and to everyone’s relief, had forgotten which rules we were meant to be following and thus was perfectly placed to act as peacekeeper, referee and international court of playlist justice all rolled into one.
Once the dust settles and we move into act 2, Tim reaffirms his extreme legislative programme by banning musicals and Disney soundtracks, Carl lam...2021-06-241h 21No StairwayEpisode 12 - The Great Common DenominatorsWhat is the commonality which binds all the souls of humankind together? Is it the affection we feel for our nearest and dearest? Is it the shared dread we have for the inevitable finality of life? Or is it something else, something more tangible? Is it, perhaps, the 1982 smash hit “Africa” by popular beat combo Toto? Or perhaps it’s just pizza, Toy Story and The Beatles? These are the philosophical questions we ponder this week as we search for songs which everyone loves, regardless of gender, age, race or creed. Herein Bill admits (in a potential medical first) to his “B...2021-06-101h 37No StairwayEpisode 11 - The Comeback playlistsIt is a little disputed fact that the greatest comeback of all time is that of Lazarus, although many learned men give spirited arguments in favour of both Elvis in ’68 and Dennis Taylor in ’85. History will ultimately decide who is right on that one, although I doubt even Lazarus would’ve got out of his chair for that ninth frame. This week we applaud the life of the recently deceased Lou Ottens, inventor of the cassette tape and therefore godfather of the mixtape. Sadly, there’s no possibility of a comeback for Lou, but musical comebacks are thankfully commonplace - herein w...2021-05-271h 44No StairwayEpisode 10 - The Morning After - The Hangover PlaylistsNo one can be bothered with this, can they? Opening the curtains is about as far as we’re prepared to go today, I reckon. Whoever volunteers to go down Subway with everyone’s order will forever be a hero, but otherwise we’re all resigned to slowly dying in front of endless repeats of Only Fools and Horses on Gold, yeah? This week, through the gin-soaked fog of middle-aged hangovers, we groggily identify the Wurzles as one of the greatest British folk acts of all time, Carl makes an overly impassioned (and possibly still inebriated) case for the God-li...2021-05-131h 32No StairwayEpisode 9 - GezelligControversy continues this week as what starts as a mundane and normal dive through the mail funbag descends quickly into a barrage of hate levelled against the darlings of popular music, Pink Floyd, Queen and New Order included. Quite how The Smiths escaped unscathed is a minor miracle. From this undoubtedly un-gezellig beginning we try in desperation to be more welcoming and cosy via the obvious medium of sociolinguistic translation. Conviviality thereby restored, Tim introduces us to the gezellig funk majesty of Luiz Bonfá, Bill takes everyone on yet another sonic trip through his disturbing subconscious (both beginning and e...2021-04-291h 21No StairwayEpisode 8 - The WorkoutControversy this week as Tim calls his semi-professional playlisting reputation into question by deploying a potentially illegal method of sequencing. It’s not an exaggeration to say that, were it not for the distance allowed by cyberspace, it may have ‘got physical’ in No Stairway HQ. Thankfully, the World Wide Web allowed peace to prevail and Bill has calmed down somewhat since. Elsewhere this week, we establish that Carl continues to live, somewhat sadly, in the shadow of the 1980’s as a whole (and of Jean-Claude Van Damme in particular), and Bill explains the internal architecture of his doom spiral w...2021-04-161h 16No StairwayEpisode 7 - SamplesTalent borrows, genius steals, so goes the common mis-quoted phrase. The truth of that particular idea is examined front and back this week as we dive into songs which have been famously sampled by other artists. We also debut our new quasi-regular feature of delving into our mail fun-bag, confronting the shadowy internet figure of ‘Al the Canary’ along the way. Further to this we roundly rubbish the state of contemporary songwriting, Carl reluctantly yet repeatedly calls Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter a talentless thief, and everyone agrees that New Order could save themselves a fortune by singing instead of paying for d...2021-04-011h 08No StairwayEpisode 6 - Food and Drink“Please, Sirs, can we have some more?” you may well have asked. Yes, of course you may, our young Dickensian friends! We have plenty of No Stairway to gorge upon this week as we theme our playlists around food, glorious food, and a drink or three. There’s lots to chew on here as Carl realises that lamb chops are a foodstuff, Tim burns his bridges with his former friends at the “Butty Van” and Bill hints at a dark incident from his past involving some kind of tinned fruit…
This Week’s Playlists:
Bill's playlist
...2021-03-1850 minNo StairwayEpisode 5 - Great Opening Tracks from AlbumsHere at No Stairway we are often accused of starting well and quickly fading - from P.E. teachers to wives and girlfriends, it has very much been the story of our lives. This week strong openings are our main concern, said the Bishop to the choir, as we investigate the best first songs on albums. In this episode Carl is outed as a luddite, Bill is outed as a Hall and Oates fanatic and Tim inadvertently votes himself out of the Pulp Appreciation Society. Be warned of the usual coarse language - we are an unapologetically warm blooded...2021-03-0458 minNo StairwayEpisode 4 - Famous PeopleSocrates was once reported to say that “fame is the perfume of heroic deeds”, although quite how this definition explains Kim Kardasian is a philosophical quandary for better men than us. Heroic or not, celebrities of all eras are our topic this week and in particular those of sufficient renown to have been immortalised in song. As we amble down these gilded halls of fame we note the celebrity-inducing properties of public execution, admire The Boss’s brave deployment of a glockenspiel and recount how a chance encounter with a friend of Sean Lennon’s may well have saved Billy Joel’s c...2021-02-1855 minNo StairwayEpisode 3 - Time TravelThe power of love is a curious thing; it makes one man weep, but makes another man sing. Of course, what Huey Lewis failed to comprehend is that the power of time travel is even more curious, and that is our subject here today. Herein we apologise for the amount of work involved in listening to the podcast, demonise Nicholas Lyndhurst’s character from “Goodnight Sweetheart” and deep dive into some of Axel Rose’s greatest ever lyrics. As usual, there is lots of crude language from the outset and, somewhat inevitably, we properly spoil the ending of Quantum Leap.2021-02-0454 minNo StairwayEpisode 2 - Great tracks by terrible artistsThis week your hosts discuss how to reconcile your loathing of an artist with your love of the great tracks of which even the most egregious creators are sometimes capable. Along the way the boys discuss the horrors of the first Steps album, the complexities involved when trying to enjoy the music of Eminem and marvel (from a sensible distance) at the depth of Tim’s Eurovision Knowledge. If you’re not a Eurovision Song Contest fan, please be aware that Tim’s enthusiasm for that particular enterprise is infectious. Suffice to say, if you walk away from this experience withou...2021-01-201h 11No StairwayEpisode 1 - The Party PlaylistsIn this inaugural episode of No Stairway, your hosts discuss what makes the perfect party playlist. What is a party like around their houses? Well, it transpires that Bill is down with the kids, Tim is actively trying to alienate the kids and Carl just wants to sit the kids down in the corner and lecture them on the failures of capitalism. If they don’t sound like three absolutely riveting evenings, then I don’t know what does. Along the way the boys discuss the enduring charm of Andrew WK, whether Tim’s inescapable narcism is actually that much o...2021-01-031h 15