Thursday music corner: This November 1975 A-side of crystalline funk was more in keeping with the Philadelphia soul jive of Bowie’s previous Young Americans album than the album it was the lead single release from, the darkly serious Station to Station. Bowie appeared miming Golden Years moderately accurately on US TV show Soul Train amidst his emaciated, orange-haired L.A. cocaine blizzard phase. The performance helped the song reach number 10 in the US charts, whereas in the UK it did two spots better, reaching number 8. (In the New Zealand pop charts it made it to number 18).
Bowie scholar Nicholas Pegg describes the Station to Station album, Bowie's tenth release, as ‘the precise halfway point on the journey between [Bowie albums] Young Americans and Low. There are enough finger-snapping grooves to keep the American market buoyant, but elsewhere the album prefigures the glacial mechanisation of David’s imminent “European canon”’ [his three Berlin-recorded albums, Low, “Heroes”, and Lodger].
[Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne] borrowed from Roman architecture in the design of churches and palaces such as his main palace at Aachen. Mindful of the Byzantine ban on icon painting currently in force, he promoted representational Christian art through frescoes, the first Christian sculpture, and above all the production of illuminated manuscripts containing realistic depictions of Bible stories.
This touched Charlemagne's foremost concern: education. Low rates of literacy plus a fragmentation of Latin into regional dialects in the centuries following the fall of Rome created problems both for the spread of church teaching and the administration of an empire. Medieval Latin needed to be standardised into a common language for western Europe.
So to Aachen Charlemagne brought scholars from across western Europe. He funded the copying of all surviving Latin texts and the development of monasteries as centers of learning. The driving intellectual force behind Charlemagne's program was Alcuin of York, adviser at Charlemagne's court, then abbot at the monastery of Tours, which he made the foremost training ground for the clergy. Abbey schools such as Tours were not oases of contemplation but engines disseminating Christian learning to the reaches of the empire, and with this came a newly uniform Latin as lingua franca for Europe's educated classes, together with a new and quicker way writing it down using lowercase letters - the way the words are printed in this book.
- Peter Davidson, Atlas of Empires, Chichester, 2018, p.85
Thursday music corner: The impeccable connections of singer and actor Dana Gillespie – who rejoices in the birth name Richenda Antoinette de Winterstein Gillespie – resulted in enduring collaborations throughout her long career, including this single. Recorded by Gillespie for her first album Foolish Seasons in 1968, the song was written by Donovan and amongst the musicians who performed on the album was Jimmy Page, who also produced the record.
Gillespie was renowned for her many famous lovers in the 1960s and ‘70s (Bowie, Dylan, Jagger, Caine, Page, Moon, Connery). David Bowie originally wrote his song Andy Warhol for her, before recording it himself for his groundbreaking 1971 album Hunky Dory. Bowie and Ziggy Stardust guitarist Mick Ronson produced Gillespie’s 1973 album Weren’t Born a Man. She was the original Mary Magdalene in the first London production of Jesus Christ Superstar.
In addition to recording Indian devotional music, Gillespie now mainly performs as a blues artist, and she founded the Mustique Blues Festival in 1996. She released her 72nd album in 2021, and in a wide-ranging interview with the Guardian's Garth Cartwright in August 2021 she noted, “A chap from Universal was just around as they are gathering my first two albums and all the songs I demoed for Immediate Records into a box set. A new hip, and then I’ll get on with life.”
Dana Gillespie – You Just Gotta Know My Mind (1968)
Followers of Rose Matafeo's excellent Starstruck sitcom would do well to consider the work of her onscreen and formerly IRL flatmate, actor-comedian Emma Sidi. In particular, her brilliant 2020 short film La Princesa De Woking, a note-perfect homage to Mexican telenovelas set in glamorous northwest Surrey. Sidi stars as the much-put-upon and never-knowingly-out-acted Becky Hello, who has just tragically lost her mother in a freak chandelier accident:
Elsewhere, you might find her in 2017 exercising some Spanish melodrama in Melbourne, or illustrating her formidable contemporary dance skills in 2015. And perhaps in the 'sketch project with Rose' she mentions in her February interview above, that might emerge some day soon.
Thursday music corner: Teleman are a three-piece English indie band formed in London in 2011, and named after the 18th-century German classical composer GP Telemann. They have released three albums: Breakfast (2014), Brilliant Sanity (2016) and Family of Aliens (2018), the last of which scraped into the UK top 40. The soaring, wistful and uplifting Right as Rain was the first track on their five-song 2021 Sweet Morning EP. For those with long memories, lead singer Thomas Sanders' vocals have a pleasing likeness to those of Karl Wallinger of World Party fame.
I swear that we’re gonna make a universe in our own way Don’t be knocked if it falls down, we start again
