Alex de Campi: Gojira!

I've had funk on the brain since that screening of Milano Calibro 9, the best crime-noir film you'll never see. Its insistent, squelchy Euro-funk soundtrack hooked me.

Also, August in London lends itself to a bit of dirty, sexy funk: coming in from a day on Primrose Hill, skin smelling of sunshine and fresh-cut grass, throwing the windows open, slinging a cold bottle of beer out of the fridge and dancing slowly around the flat as that eternal, wonderful English summer evening stretches its rosy self across the sky.

But this mixtape? It's Doris Day's fault.

Me and Doris, we never really got along. You see, I'm the sort of girl that boys go out for a martini and a cigarette with. She was the sort they married. Doris always wondered what we got up to during that smoke, the lads, Bette Davis, Myrna Loy, and me.

Well, mostly we talked about her. "Ask her out to dinner, you dolt. She'll say yes." (Or sometimes we just got drunk and made fun of Greta, sitting in the corner all in black and carving her ex-boyfriend's name in her arm.) But if Doris asked what we talked about, we just smiled mysteriously. "Oh, this and that. You know."

She didn't know. It drove her crazy. We liked torturing her, because she was perfect, and there's a specific joy to be had from hurting perfect things.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago. I am sitting in the back of Dan Evans' car, on the highway between LA and San Diego, reading the liner notes on a Sly & The Family Stone CD I had just bought. I realise with awe and wonder that I owed Doris an apology: "Que Sera, Sera: Sly's greatest transformative act of all is this version of the Doris Day standard. Cut amid rumours of an affair between Sly and the film star..."

Instantly I am seized by an image: Doris burying her bare toes (nails done in blush-pink lacquer) into white shag-pile carpet, in a room filled with afternoon sun. She's just come out of the bath, and she's wearing nothing but a stage coat and hat of Sly's. The coat, several sizes too big, is wrapped around her tiny frame like a bathrobe.

She pulls the hat - a hugely exaggerated trilby, butterscotch-brown leather, turquoise and crystals, down over one eye. Sly sits back on a cream leather sofa, that gorgeous, feline half-smile of his lighting up his face.

Doris grins at him, reaches over, lifts the needle onto a record, and begins to dance.

My imagination did a quick couple of laps of the galaxy with that in its teeth, and I haven't fully been able to drop it since. Pink feet, long white carpet, a leather and rhinestone coat slowly slipping to the ground. A hand absently tapping rhythm on a glass and chrome table. Since my head is a land where all lies are true, I choose to believe this really happened. The Day Stone Affair is its soundtrack. Enjoy. As usual, listen first blind, then go read the liner notes.

Please note: I have made this mix as a way of introducing friends to some music I adore and think should be better known. If you enjoy the mix, please purchase these or other tracks by the artists. If you are a rightsholder or the representative of one, and you object to this mixtape, please email me and I will take it down immediately. I am not making money off this, and I do not have lawyers.

( 7:32 PM )

2 Comments:

Regarding your last mixtape -- Though the band is no longer together, Soul Coughing's breakout album Ruby Vroom is well worth a listen, especially for the track "Screenwriter's Blues," arguably the best track about Los Angeles you'll ever get from a New York-based band.

Doughty's free verse, delivered in a voice which I first swore was Dan Ackroyd, uses imagery of a late night drive to nail the city cold:
It is five am, and you are going to Reseda, to make love to a model from Ohio whose real name you don't know... ...And the radio is on and the radio man is speaking and the radio man says 'Women were a curse. So men built Paramount studios and men built Columbia studios and men built Los Angeles. It is five am and you are listening to Los Angeles.'

Mike Doughty is still recording solo, and most of his guest appearances on other people's records are noteworthy. His ramble on BT's "Never Gonna Come Back Down" is amazing.

Oh, and the name Soul Coughing is apparently a euphenism for vomiting, much like "Technicolor Yawn", or HST's old favorite "The Big Spit." More than you wanted to know, undoubtably.

By Mike Meyer, at 7:14 PM

Mike - I think SC hit it big while I was off in Asia being the Playgirl of the Eastern World, or near enough. I recently DL'd about 6 of SC's most popular songs from the Favoured Store, although sadly not "Screenwriter's Blues", which I shall acquire at my soonest convenience and thank you very much for the tip.

So far, my favourite of what I've DL'd is "Circles", although "True Dreams" is a very good song to be very badly drunk to (see also: Bob Mould).

By Alex de Campi, at 10:04 PM