New Year Birthdays on the Tube

A series celebrating musicians' birthdays.

30 December 1910: Enough of all the seasonal jollity. With any luck, yours was more real than forced. The other side of New Years is, for many of us, a certain existential panic. What happened to the last year? How did we do? How the hell did it go so fast? And, more scarily, though hopefully invigoratingly, how many more do we have left?  Paul Bowles, best known as author of The Sheltering Sky, wasn’t a musician exactly, but was a musicologist (the peerless collections of the Moroccan music he recorded are in the Smithsonian). In 45 seconds, he sums up the feeling. “How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps 20? Maybe less.”

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29 December 1946: The connection of Paul Bowles to Marianne Faithfull is via the Rolling Stones - Bowles wrote the sleeve notes to the album of Moroccan Joujouka music recorded by the Stones' guitarist Brian Jones and she boasted of having slept with three of them. Here Marianne Faithfull is, with her first hit, the very image of the English rose.

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Fifteen years later, in 1979, she has been homeless and a junkie. But this ravaged song performance, with a Super 8 video directed by Derek Jarman, is rather a good advert for having a period on drugs, at least artistically.

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30 December 1942 and 1945: Mike Nesmith and Davy Jones of the Monkees share a birthday. They were never taken seriously by critics who dismissed them as a manufactured band, which they were (and the Sex Pistols weren't?). This tune is a classic by Neil Diamond.

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Less of a good advert for drugs, the Monkees' baroque dopefest of a film Head came out in 1968. Here's the trailer.

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30 December 1928: Some artists, though, seem to change very little once they've hit their stride - Bo Diddley mined his Latin-based signature rhythm through several decades.

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29 December 1876: Pablo Casals playing a Bach Cello Suite in 1954. This really is timeless. Happy New Year.

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