After The Noise
Everything Is Equal
Tuesday 10 March 2026
Hank Williams, Drifting Cowboys – The Angel of Death (1954)
I got into Hank Williams during my country phase in 2025. Absolute genius. Huge influence on so many people who came after.
This is dark. Short. Sharp. To the point.
Perfect timing too, because the road was doing its usual thing and my patience was thinning. Sirens. Idiots. The usual.
Twits doing a U-turn in the most ridiculous place, despite there being clear No U-turn signs. The rules of the road don’t apply to taxis in particular, it seems.
I shout, then remember getting agitated over this kind of thing gets me nowhere, and calm down.
Hank comes in and steadies everything.
That’s music doing its job.
Gary Higgins – Didn’t Take Too Long (1973)
Never heard of him before. This is from a cult folk album, Red Hash. Nope, still drawing blanks.
Straight from the ’70s textbook, this.
Folky with a slightly haunted warmth. I picture it being played in a marquee tent. Warm beer. Long hair. Strong cigarettes. You know the scene.
Getting me through the morning, this is perfect. Lovely voice. Gentle confidence. The kind of song that makes you want to hear more without demanding it.
It feels like discovering someone new, even though they’ve been gone for decades.
That’s always a good feeling.
Richard Burton – The Extasie (2016)
Richard Burton: The Voice in Poetry. That title says it all. Brash and downright cheeky. Who am I to argue with such a bold statement?
Shakespeare. Coleridge. Donne. Thomas. The classics, read aloud by a voice that knows exactly what it’s doing. Perfectly clear. Measured. Confident. Poetry rolling off the tongue as if it were written yesterday.
This poem was written by John Donne, a poet and Anglican cleric who died in 1631.
Wow.
A whole double album’s worth of wonderful delights. No doubt recorded during Burton’s alcohol-soaked years of the ’50s and ’60s. You can almost smell the whisky in his rasping renditions.
A covers album of poetry. How brilliant is that concept? Someone else’s words, reinterpreted and given new life through tone and timing.
And Burton lets the language do the work.
No theatrics. No ego.
Just voice and verse.
Sometimes that’s all you need.
Neil Young – Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (1969)
The fabulous thing about Neil Young is that he’s more than just an artist. He’s one of those ones. Like Springsteen. There’s always something in the archive. Something tucked away. An incredible body of work that never seems to end.
I don’t think I’ve heard this song before, but it sounds instantly familiar. Classic Neil Young. Bouncing along, loose, unforced. A lovely little taste.
There’s a lyric in there that stopped me. I won’t pretend I caught it perfectly, but that doesn’t matter.
It landed.
Priceless.
This kind of music makes me slow down. Makes me realise I’m tired. Properly tired. Half expecting the clock in my head to finally stop ticking.
Plan for later: decaf with double cream, maybe read a bit. A bit of plotting. A bit of planning.
No pressure to write anything.
That’s the key.
I’ll be absolutely fine.
The Stooges – Ann (1969)
Two songs from the year I was born.
Interesting, this.
The Stooges are one of those bands you think you know. Classics. I Wanna Be Your Dog. Raw, savage, confrontational.
Then something like this turns up and completely wrong-foots you.
This is mellow. I wasn’t expecting that at all.
I’ve seen Iggy Pop twice. Once solo, once with The Stooges at Glastonbury. Incredible performer. And still doing it in his advanced years.
Show-off.
That lived-in Iggy Pop face tells a thousand stories.
When you hit an obscure album track like this, you realise just how far ahead of the game The Stooges were.
Years ahead.
Decades, even.
Bands like this never really had success first time round.
They had influence instead.
Which lasts longer.
Japan – Visions of China (1981)
I was trawling through albums for the playlist the other day and landed on Japan. Tin Drum. One of my favourite albums of the early 80s.
This was a single. It got to a staggering number 32 in the hit parade.
That opening sound is unmistakable.
Nobody else sounded like this.
Nobody.
David Sylvian’s silky smooth vocals. Simply divine.
Japan were briefly pop stars in the early 80s but were nothing like their contemporaries.
Japan always felt like a band slightly out of time. Too elegant. Too precise. Too strange. The kind of band you come back to years later and think, ah, that’s what they were doing.
Very sophisticated.
The cooler people at school liked Japan.
Art rock.
They never really reformed, unless you count the Rain Tree Crow project in the early 90s. And that was something else entirely.
Still recovering from working at the weekend.
The plan is coming along smoothly. And it feels good when it does.
Better today.
END OF LISTENING LOG
The Listening Log 