Tuesday, May 02, 2006

Some Velvet Morning

We were chatting about the version by Primal Scream featuring Kate Moss and then it came on the telly! How often does that happen? Quite a lot to us. We do have as a default setting pop music stations though. It wasn't a hit which was a shame. Is it any good? Judge for yourself by comparing it to the original by Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood. It's an odd song with references to Phaedra, whoever that is. The Primal Scream version claims to have been influenced by the excellent Roland S Howard and Lydia Lunch version on 4AD which I must admit is where I first heard the song. Lyrics here
It seemed to have made to No 1 in the Telegraph's great duets here it says
1 Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra
Some Velvet Morning, 1968
Most pop music is quickly forgotten. All too rare are the songs that endure, whose sheer otherness takes your breath away, even 30-odd years after they were conceived. Some Velvet Morning belongs in that company. Around the time that Frank Sinatra sang Somethin' Stupid with his daughter Nancy, she was making other duets which brought a hipper, bolder edge to the format, and which would influence countless subsequent pairings. Nancy conducted these with Lee Hazlewood, a laconic Oklahoman who had masterminded her kitsch anthem of women's liberation, These Boots Are Made for Walkin'.
In 1967, he recorded songs with her for possible inclusion in her first TV Special, Movin' With Nancy. One, incredibly, was Some Velvet Morning – one of the strangest, druggiest, most darkly sexual songs ever written. Somehow, perhaps as a sop to the new demographic opening up during the Summer of Love, it made it on to the show. There are "flowers" and "daffodils", but it's hardly Sonny and Cher. Hazlewood's sonorous, old-manly tones tell of "Phaedra, and how she gave me life, and how she made it end", the reverberating bass sounds surrounding his echoey voice like storm clouds.
The music changes to a skipping, childish rhythm, and Nancy chimes in as Phaedra, innocent but ever more menacing as the verses are intercut more regularly. It's a song whose mysteries have occasioned numerous covers, most recently by Primal Scream, with Kate Moss "doing" Nancy. None, though, can rival the macabre atmosphere of the original – ambitious, beautiful and unforgettable.

Worst duets

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