Burl Veneer’s Music Blog

Brought to you by Bill Murray

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 20:52:47 -0700

I hate to base two posts in a row on TV watching, but tonight's family entertainment was rife with great music that I want to blog about. We introduced the kids to Bill Murray's best movie, the criminally neglected The Man Who Knew Too Little. Murray plays an American schmo in London who thinks he is taking part in the experimental "Theatre of Life," but instead ends up as the key player in the middle of super-secret spy stuff--comedic spy stuff, that is. (Evil lady torturer? Check. Ticking time bomb? Check. Austin Mini car chase? Check.) The film is replete with quotable lines, sight gags, comic coincidences and misunderstandings, all to the accompaniment of vintage and original spy music. Prominent in the mix is the Three Suns' version of "Fever," one of the most-anthologized songs of the 90s lounge/exotica revival:

That whole lounge thing was fun while it lasted: all the reissues of Esquivel, the Three Suns, Martin Denny, Arthur Lyman, comebacks by Yma Sumac and Korla Pandit, and revivalist bands like Combustible Edison, Stereophonic Space Sound Unlimited, and the like, not to mention the cornucopia of compilation discs put out by just about every label. And a lot of it was delectable, glorious spy music. Nancy Sinatra enjoyed a bit of a renaissance, too, and The Man Who Knew Too Little closes with "The Last of the Secret Agents"--

03. The Last of the Secret Agents

Nancy Sinatra

What a perfect ending to a perfect movie! (My daughter even said, "This is the best spy movie ever," and she's seen all the Austin Powers flicks. I don't think she's ever seen a serious spy movie, so she really means spoof spy movie, but that's how good it is.)

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Chris Joss

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 11:49:56 -0700

To the elite group of musicians who have mastered the art of retro-disco-cop-show-funk-o-lounge-a-phonics (i.e. Skeewiff and Shawn Lee) add Frenchman Chris Joss, who since 1999 has built up an impressive catalog of recordings in that vein. His latest album, Teraphonic Overdubs, is out now on ESL Music. Now that I can embed a MySpace player I don't have to try to pick out one or two songs to share, I can simply present what he's sharing already. If you listen to just one track, scroll down to "Luna Rides Back" and listen to that one:

Amazon link:

Teraphonic Overdubs

Chris Joss

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Spy music roundup

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 07:08:07 -0700

Taking me even further afield from trumpets and dark cabaret is my discovery last weekend of another whole box of CDs (about 200!) that I hadn't unpacked since moving into this house eighteen months ago. And in that box was The Fluid Soundbox by the instrumental band Stereophonic Space Sound Unlimited. The lounge music revival of the 90s (see Combustible Edison) brought with it a revival of "spy music," and The Fluid Soundbox is the absolute best example of that subgenre. Ostensibly Swiss (though everything about them seems made up), they are obviously steeped in vintage lounge, surf, spy, and cop show music, to the extent that Soundbox is practically a catalog of those styles. Even their song titles are genius: "Triple Threat," "Formulator," "Robot A Go Go," "Project QX 5;" here is "Dragon City"--

09-Dragon City

Stereophonic Space Sound Unlimited

That was from 1998. One of the best spy-music pieces of this new century was composed by Mark Mothersbaugh, of all people, taking a break from scoring nursery-school cartoons to write the original music for The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. The music accompanying the kidnap-rescue raid on the pirates of Ping Island starts out with the playful motif heard throughout the movie, then adds a brass-and-tympani-heavy orchestra for unbeatable spy-music goodness:

16 Ping Island_Lightning Strike Resc

Mark Mothersbaugh

Okay, I kid, Mark Mothersbaugh has done plenty of work outside of his Rugrats meal ticket (including all of Wes Anderson's films up through this one), but with kids of my own guess what music of his I've heard the most of over the last decade?

Just this week some brand-new spy music has dropped into my lap. One of Mrs. Veneer's net pals, Scott Rupp, composes kickin' action themes and has begun uploading them to imeem.com. On "Agent Koto" he combines two of my favorite styles, spy music and breakbeat:

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The Mike Flowers Pops are my bag, baby!

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 06:24:41 -0700

How the hell did I miss this back when it happened, in 1996?! I remember reading about The Mike Flowers Pops, and they had a song in the first Austin Powers movie, but I didn't actually listen to them until yesterday. Performing songs by X in the style of Y is nothing new (and it wasn't in the 90s, either; in this case X is a variable, and Y is Burt Bacharach), but The Mike Flowers Pops did it better than most. The breakthrough hit was a cover of Oasis' "Wonderwall" in 1995, for which the following video was produced:

Wonderwall

As Louis Balfour would say, "Nice." (It was a cover in the original sense of the word: a competing version released while the original was still on the charts.) Other songs getting the Flowers treatment are Prince's "1999," and the Doors' "Light My Fire" (kind of pointless, it was a lounge song in the first place), and there is even a whole Velvet Underground medley. But Mike Flowers went a step beyond rehashing the songs of others and composed some original tunes, which beautifully capture the whole hippy, trippy vibe of 60s pop. "A Groovy Place" was the title track and leadoff song of the CD, thanks to such classic lyrics as these:

Take time for living things, and they'll make time for you
The birds and the bees and the butterflies, hey, they've got feelings too!

Now that's pure gold! Here's the whole song:

01 A Groovy Place

The Mike Flowers Pops

What a fantastic song and arrangement! The initial Mike Flowers mania fizzled out in 1998, as he tells it, and apart from a reunion show at the Islington Academy he doesn't seem to be up to much now, musically. But he has a MySpace page, just in case.

The current "X in the style of Y" darlings are Nouvelle Vague, who perform new wave hits of the 80s in Bossa Nova style. Yawn.

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