Cooker #43

April 2020. Coronavirus holding sway. First thoughts go out to those directly affected by the threat and who are showing or suffering from it’s symptoms. Many others, bravely, deliberately and as safely as possible, are fighting the virus at close quarters. I salute them and hope that everyone else is doing the much easier job of supporting them by staying the fuck at home.

In Lockdown World where we have so much more time on our hands other people are coming up with all types of charitable donations to distract and entertain us. Knowing how familiarity breeds contempt I thought I’d give you the chance to sneer at my impudence. The impudence of sticking to the worn old groove of presenting a few tracks of music to accompany your cooking exploits.

Maybe - if you can source the necessary ingredients - you are doing a little more cooking as you wait for the green shoots of exit strategy to appear. That’s a beautiful thought. The process of cooking can be just as sustaining as the cooked results.

Here is my latest offering. May you find at least a few items to your taste. No cutlery needed. Just a click on the graphic as usual.

And for the first time in these parts - rather than my bloggy pages - I feel compelled to share a tasty suggestion which was cooked along to those sounds just a couple of days ago.

We signed up to Gousto for a few weeks before Christmas two or three years ago. It was a successful strategy to leave more time for planning and cooking the other seasonal meals.
We kept the recipes and now return to favourites after adding the ingredients to our home shopping.

This one has much flavour and is a step up from the crazy Canadian idea of cheesing and gravying your chips. Vegetarians can stop at the cheesy chips and just serve with the garlicky greens! Find the recipe here or cook what the heck takes your fancy.

Either way, results are guaranteed to taste all the better if prepared along to the tunes of my Cooker #43!

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Cooker #41

A jingly, jangly twingly, twangly opener for this one. Followed by a more reverential tune from the same stable. The ensuing musical filling (not filler!) is sandwiched at the end by a track which it appears has not appeared on the graphic below. Do stay and listen to the haunting voice of Rory Block singing a song composed by Andy Barnes. Composed over thirty years ago. The message is still filtering through and getting more and more urgent.

Practise your mouse skills - hover over the above image, click - and see what happens!

Cheoff's Kitchen Cookers #36 Spotify Daily Mix

Here’s a lazy effort from me. I sporadically press ‘Play’ on one of my Spotify Daily Mix selections. Based on my listening habits. No doubt relying on a fiendishly clever algorithm similar to that which my supermarket uses to tailor delivery of the money off coupon I’ve always wanted.

So I allowed the tracks to build up and grabbed wodges of them to construct what you see - and what you might soon be hearing.

All I had to do was ‘Skip Duplicates’ which tended to crop up. Before I knew it over ten hours of listening had assembled. This is a focused assembly which by no means reflects the full scope of my music tastes. But it doesn’t throw up much that I would edit quickly in shame.

Have a listen. I’ve done all the hard work for you.

Oh… no, I haven’t really, have I.

Cooker #27

A bit of rough with the smooth in this one. The ‘rough’ being just an awkward way of describing the contrasting, jingly jangly tracks punctuating quite a bit of relatively soft and gentle stuff.

Santo and Johnny round off the whole affair by transporting us to places more Hawaiian than the pizza which should never be ordered (#controversial)

Before we get there, you’ll find twenty minutes of the Orb and the track with which John Peel had a love/hate relationship. He loved it for itself… and resented it because including it would limit the time to play other music on his shows.

You could, of course, simply flip straight to this one after preparing risotto ingredients. By the end of “A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules from the Centre of the Ultraworld” you have had a stirring countdown to grains which are sticky but still have a bit of bite.

Listen out for a Minnie Ripperton sound-alike!

Click on the playlist above to... erm... play my playlist. 

Cooker - Guest Playlist

Wow... this happened and I am swimming in a sea of sonic smashingness.

Link through this cartouche for immediate transport to a steady stream of Matthew's good taste in music 

The very giving and truly wonderful Mr Moore has come alongside with his own flotilla of fabulously defibrillating tracks.
He came uninvited but softly and with grace. His unexpected offering gives me the glorious chance to share his generosity and spare you, for a while, from another of my own paltry playlists.
I have already spliced my main brace… come and join me on the poop deck and let’s enjoy this together!

Thank ee most kindly, Cap'n Matthew.
 

Matthew's ability to produce sweet, sweet music from his vocal chords and twanging instrument are being further developed and refined at this very moment. Be assured that a link to his YouTube channel will be forthcoming as soon as it has come forth.

Cooker #16a... Moore for your money

This is so hot on the heels of Cooker #16 that I'm sure you'll be demanding some very fine reason. Very well.

Mr Moore is a good friend and sometime work colleague of my two sons. I have spoken to him for scarcely more than a half hour on our only meeting. After being so impressed by Matthew's assured manner, perfect politics and jauntily angled cocktail parasol, I vowed to maintain links at a respectable distance on social media... social media which has alerted me to his imminent celebration of the day on which he arrived on this earth. 

I have already tempted, tinted and tainted this young man with my own musical tastes. Here is evidence that he is in deep trouble as he listens to a gentle offering from my beloved Captain 

You are just one click away from spiralling right into Matthew's Spotify splendour

What birthday treat for the person who desires nothing but to give his earnest goodness to a waiting world? Aha - more music is the answer. Of course, present giving is best guided by the premise that you should offer something which you would be glad to receive. So, without further explanation or apology, please allow me to send out assembled sounds which I don't mind listening to. I don't mind you listening to them either. But don't you dare do so before the birthday boy has taken his fill... that would spoil the gift, wouldn't it.

Thank you.

Cooker #14

Sorry... SORRY!

Those increasingly large apologies are most sincere, I assure you. Three days between my last two offerings and here we are seven weeks later with not a sniff of a #KitchenCooker. Except... here it is. So all that sorry can be completely ignored as I withdraw it (even though it was most sincerely offered)

I reckon there is a spot of rise and fall with this selection. Not meaning a variation in quality as far as I'm concerned... I leave you to be the judge of that. Rather, there is a spread of approaches and musical styles which, perhaps more than usually, reflect recent events. The need to suppress resentment and anger in the face of politics, religion and just plain-old nutty world news is a good excuse to rally music to the rescue. You should be aware that there is much of happiness here as well. Very dearly loved people continue to do wonderful things which enrich my life back to default joy. One in particular accounts for the Thompson Twins track as she PhDees her way into a shiny future.

Please share my mixed emotions but be assured that the sunny side is always there to grab if you have a mind to grab it.

Let's not be sorry at all, eh.

Now click away on the screen capture below, escape my ramblings here and fire up the thruster rockets of Cooker #14. 

Cooker #13

It's a Monday. It's a Bank Holiday. But it's not that one where you have to stay up and watch the end of the snooker final.

Whatever you're doing, whatever you've done (today, I mean... I'm not here to talk about your entire lifespan, you know) here is a cheeky addition to the #Cookers collective. Cheeky for the reason that it is rather close upon the heels of Cooker #12. Please, just go with my generous flow and enjoy a holiday selection with which I am finding it hugely difficult to find fault. Think of this as Cheoff's 'Baker's Dozen'... one more for insurance purposes.

Whether it be a three minute track or an eight minute behemoth from those Madchester men celebrating the Easter story, I am confident that you have here an untarnished cluster of silvery sounds to flap in the face of those final few hours before the return to work in the morning. As an indication of my own enjoyment, allow me to tell you that I have derived as much pleasure from this selection as the successful squeezing of eleven ripe blackheads one after the other. 

Not much left of the long weekend now... I'd best publish this and be damned.

Oh, if you are going back to work in the morning, please message me and remind me what it's like. Being retired for almost five years now means I really miss that feeling! :p

Cooker #12

Here you have the dozenth of my hearing tests. 

A seventeen minute track included, and still I can't offer a whole hour of audio. That does give you the chance to maintain focus on my selection and to give the music a chance to elicit something explicit.

At the very least, I recommend you allow the vestibulocochlear nerve in your inner ear to transmit information to the temporal lobe of your brain.

It was rather lovely to be nudged into releasing this particular episode by the horribly young, handsome and hip Matthew Moore. I freely confess that his Spotify play history provides a few pointers for my own choices. Hey, rush over and find out what he's putting on his intricately tuned turntable... not before you've hit my Cooker #12 link, of course!

Thank you for listening.

Cooker #8

It's no good. I have tried very hard to dislike at least one of these offerings. Failed completely. So... here you are.

(If you repeat this one nine times you'll have as much listening as last time's Cooker!)

Cooker #7

This playlist is built, chopped and changed regularly. It’s pretty much for my personal enjoyment so I make no apologies for some very obvious choices or for the staggering omissions. It might never have seen the light of day except that I caught the Steve Lamacq 6 Music show on the Friday before Christmas. Noel Gallagher was in the studio to help pick tracks for a ‘Christmas Party’. No real Christmas music whatsoever on their playlist but much enthused chatter about the wealth of quality offerings from the Sixties. I’m sure I once heard that Noel plays ‘The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society’ every day. No-one could possibly censure him for that. The programme and Mr. Gallagher in particular stiffened my resolve to go public with the selections here.

The first pop LP (no albums back then!) to appear in our house was ‘With the Beatles’. Neither brother Paul nor I can lay claim to spending pocket money on it. Just after my twelfth birthday Mum brought home and continually played this vinyl. Yes, she loved the music… But I think most of all she had fallen for John Lennon and his “lovely set of teeth”. Mum had high standards when it came to long-haired popsters!

So, I was privileged to enter teenage years with no barriers to enjoying the outpouring of a stunning flood of music. Luxembourg, pirate radio, Radio 1 and the listening booth at Rhythm Records in Church Street, Reigate, all pumped fabulous sounds into my very receptive ears.

Cliff Michelmore lived in the centre of our town and his wife, Jean (Metcalfe), appeared at church fetes selling signed photos of Cliff Richard, Marty Wilde and Billy Fury who were riding on the back of what had happened in America. I’d missed the first-hand excitement of Fifties’ Rock ‘n’ Roll but the Sixties was a hell of a starting point for my introduction to the music-driven popular culture of Britain at the time.

I know some of you will find it tough getting past a Leonard Cohen opener. Please persevere. If you like, you could discard a few (not too many, please!) and add your own tunes. If you do, please let me know. I’ll very likely edit the listing - so watch out for my changes.

The music here has stood the test of my critical faculties and continues to be an important part of my life. It was the very insistent background to my youth and has, for the most part, aged better than I have.

I really can’t pick a favourite but if you get all the way through to my final track you will hear Lou bringing me into the Seventies. The fact that he accompanied just about my every last disco dance with a rather special lady at the time is good enough reason for inclusion. The fact that Jan is still with me means I now have the best music and the finest wife. I've done nowhere near enough to deserve either… But I’d struggle horribly to live without them.

Cooker #6

Much as I loved bringing you a bellyful of blues last time I feel a more mixed medley of music should make an appearance. But I commence with a quick comparative argument as to whether Blue men can sing the Whites (the blood-spitting Sonny Boy does it every time for me) There follows a definite nod to my recent, hugely enjoyable holiday in France. Saian Supa Crew were sought out in a Fnac outlet by my sons on a visit many moons ago. Francoise Hardy has been ever so slightly sexy since well before rap was invented and I can't resist the delivery of the other ladies here present. Your 'cool-down' takes the form of a bit of blissed-out burbling from Roger Waters with his song in praise of the British countryside.