Mike Tobyn

Mike Tobyn is a Scottish Scientist, and lapsed Pharmacist. Brought up, along with Aztec Camera and The Jesus and Mary Chain, in the New Town of East Kilbride near Glasgow he has lived and worked near Liverpool for the past 20 years. He has recently returned to writing about music when he was reminded that the follies of one’s youth need not be abandoned forever, although the golfball type IBM typewriter he used then could be.

Jun 062025
 

Five Good Covers presents five cross-genre reinterpretations of an oft-covered song.

Arthur's Theme covers

A man with the voice of an angel sings of someone caught between the moon and New York City. It’s easy to imagine a liminal paradise between those two places; perhaps that’s where the angelic narrator resides, watching over the story he tells. He’s not just recounting events; he may be guiding them, placing redemption in the path of a lost soul, for potential entry into Heaven.
Continue reading »

May 092025
 

Five Good Covers presents five cross-genre reinterpretations of an oft-covered song.

Dire Straits

Fact: “Sultans of Swing” is a musical manifesto par excellence. Dire Straits might have a reputation (unearned) for not taking risks, but in terms of a debut single, their willingness to go against fashion and to consider biting the hand of pop norms was a significant statement.

Dire Straits were one of the biggest acts of the ’80s. There is sometimes a sense that a talent as obvious as Mark Knopfler’s would inevitably find a way to be a success. Musical stardom is not like that. Sometimes the gap between a Mark Knopfler and a Vini Reilly is a small one, and the distance between either of them and someone who performs occasionally to a coterie of rapt fans even smaller. We all know of amazing guitarists who are not playing arenas for years on end and are giving lessons to budding future axe-wielders rather than wielding themselves.

There is also the issue of whether Dire Straits would have been the vehicle for that success, had it come at a different time or in a different way. With natural self-awareness augmented by decades of therapy, bassist John Illsley notes that the band members shaped Mark Knopfler’s vision, but it was nevertheless the band leader’s vision, and his songs. The outcome was massive success, and perhaps it would have been anyway. Or perhaps not. Perhaps the polishing and shaping from the different members of the group over the years fully enabled the outcome.

The band came together fortuitously. Mark’s younger brother David moved into a rundown apartment in a proleterian part of London, later followed by Mark, and eventually a four-piece band together came together. Of these, initially, only drummer Pick Withers was making a living from music, as a successful session musician and in-house drummer at Rockfield Studios, recent subject of a fascinating book by Tiffany Murray. The band could see that they had something special, but what band does not? They were willing to work hard, realizing that they might not get many more throws of the dice. What they did not have was a lot of road to take off or any means to turn their aptitude and endeavor into a record deal. Although they could live cheaply, by forsaking any sense of luxury or, indeed, hygiene, they could not do so forever.

As Illsley tells it a legacy from a grandmother, passed on to him by his parents, hoping it would cover rent for a period, was spent on a demo tape instead. The anchor of that tape was “Sultans of Swing,” and it was persistent radio play by a sympathetic believer in the band that eventually got the attention of the record companies, from which the band could choose a partnership. They chose that partnership on the basis of musical fit, rather than succumbing to the ministrations of Virgin, who assumed that indulgent female company might be the way to seal the deal!

As a choice to roll the dice on for the last time, it is a ballsy choice. Musical London in 1977 appealed to the emotions, and often the sartorial sense. Punk was taking it three chords and spittle-flecked frontmen to the irritated front pages of the newspapers and thus to the hearts of the young, disco was in the nightclubs appealing to lovers of all types, and rock was getting rockier and developing a subculture. Dire Straits was practicing, and proselytizing, none of these things. There was no fashion, fans did not form close-knit groups, and the music was not really danceable, nor did it have the rhythms for love.

The song specifically celebrate a form of music that, if it was ever fashionable in the UK at all, it was during a short-lived fad for ‘Trad Jazz’ in the ’60s, and which young people would largely not be aware of. The Sultans of Swing were a Dixieland Jazz band playing in a particularly hardscrabble bit of London, to an audience largely indifferent to their presence. Mark Knopfler found them fascinating. They made no concessions to fashion at all, and were happy with their choices. Partly because some of them had other (less enjoyable?) jobs to fall back on. Or because some of them, for instance the rhythm guitarist, seemed not to want too much success or adulation. They were happy with their lot, because they were playing the music they loved with people that they liked. They were not going to make any concessions for the sake of success. As manifesto and metaphor it was clear. Illsley and Withers provide expert, practiced and nuanced, rhythms to work with, David Knopfler does not make his guitar “cry or sing” but he provides a necessary backdrop. The choice to have Mark Knopfler’s legendary solo go on into the fade sent another message: I Can Do This All Day. 
Continue reading »

Apr 252025
 

Always Will Be
You’ve got a friend in ME! Amy Irving seems determined to let us know what a good friend she is, and can be, and has been. To be fair to her, the evidence seems compelling. She clearly values friendship as a fundamental part of her being. She conceived her new record Always Will Be as a tribute to one specific relationship, but draws on so many other aspects of her friendhood. Her relationship with Willie Nelson started as an on-set affair during the making of Honeysuckle Rose, but has remained close in the 40 years since then. She left Nelson, romantically, for Steven Spielberg, but even though that marriage fizzled out, she remains on excellent terms with the film director also. Of course she also has many friends from many walks of life that did not start as romantic relationships, and she is deeply committed to those also.

Always Will Be, Irving’s second record (she released her debut, Born in a Trunk, in 2023), features ten songs that people associated with Nelson. Here, she curates them to tell stories about friendships rather than hold them together by a specific musical thread. With a vast back catalogue to abstract from, the friends could no doubt spend many evenings agreeing, disagreeing, and ultimately coming to a consensus on the narrative they wanted told. The resulting product is celebratory and revelatory, and a reminder of what is important in life.  The Goolis Orchestra (aka New York musician Jules David Bartkowski, and friends) provides the musical accompaniments and arrangements.  Along the way, other acquaintances drop in to provide support, including Nelson himself.

A key aspect of being a good mate is to be able to empathize and, perhaps, mirror your buddy. In life this can establish trust (if done organically and naturally), and in music indicates that you are honoring the original artist. Irving does not have a specific vocal style established for herself, so she is able to adapt to Goolis’ arrangements, but also can sound like other people.  On a track like “It’s a Dream Come True,” a song written by Nelson specifically for Irving during the filming of Honeysuckle Rose there are phrases that sound like Nelson himself, in a higher register, but when paired with Steve Earle on “I Wish I Didn’t Love You” she sounds more gruff and hardscrabble, but also more sympathetic, in line with her collaborator, and produces something poignant and resonant.

Sometimes friends decide to do new things, outside their comfort zone, and Irving does indulge this tendency here. As with those experiments they can be fun-ish, but you might not try them again. I’m not sure that the rock ‘n’ roll on “If You Want Me To Love You I Will” is everyone’s forte here.

Not all friendships survive the test of time, and this is also marked. This can be painful, as is the loss of someone from a friendship where both parties wish it to continue. The standout track from the album is “Always Will Be,” taken from Nelson’s 2004 album of the same name. Irving turns it into a celebration for her late friend Judy Nelson. The emotion is not maudlin, and is more like the kind of funeral wake where the passed person has indicated that they want the time to be spent in the way that they enjoyed, in a dive bar with friends, music and some libations. Star band leader Louis Cato provides something special for Irving to work with on “Everywhere I Go.”

Overall there is love in every track on Always Will Be, and something to treasure overall.

Always Will Be Track Listing:

It’s a Dream Come True (feat. Lizzie No)
Yesterday’s Wine (feat. Goolis)
I Guess I’ve Come to Live Here In Your Eyes (feat. Chris Pierce)
I’d Have To Be Crazy
If You Want Me to Love You I Will
I Wish I Didn’t Love You So (feat. Steve Earle)
Getting Over You (feat. Goolis)
Everywhere I Go (feat. Louis Cato)
Always Will Be (feat. Amy Helm)
Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground (feat. Willie Nelson)

Apr 222025
 
Nouvelle Vague and Hannah Hu

The latest iteration of Marc Collin’s Nouvelle Vague project, now 20 years old and still going strong, sees him and his musical partners delve deeper into the New Wave sounds of the ’80s, whilst not restricting themselves to bossa nova as the vehicle for interpretation or working only with his regular, mainly Francophone, female singer-collaborators. Their latest single is a case in point. British vocalist Hannah Hu provides vocals and, no doubt, context for a cover of a B-side from a single of Colour Field, a short-lived vehicle for The Specials frontman, the sadly now-late Terry Hall. It may be the first recorded cover of “Sorry.” Continue reading »

Apr 152025
 
chet baker tribute album

Chet Baker was an outstanding trumpet player, but it was his voice that immortalized him. His speaking voice was able to convince lovers, partners of lovers, concert promoters, fellow musicians and people he had borrowed money from of the plaintive platitudes that accompany the life of the hopeless dope fiend. His singing voice was a unique thing of exquisite beauty, apparent simplicity and, crucially, vulnerability. His love songs are timeless, and retained their punch long after Baker’s trumpet playing lost its shape, due to a drug dealer ruining Baker’s embouchure with some vicious dental work. At one of his final recordings in 1988, his “I Fall In Love Too Easily” is poignant, emotive and, almost, optimistic. You could, almost, believe that all would be all right. Those times are captured so well in the elegiac, poetic film Let’s Get Lost.

Blue Note is about to release a new tribute album to Baker’s songs, titled re:imagined, and Matilda Mann has contributed her version of “There Will Never Be Another You” to the compilation. Continue reading »