This was all prepared for the month of flaming June some time ago. Considering the current prominence of millions failing to be decent human beings it now looks ill-prepared.
I will not edit it now. There are more important things to do - but listen if you will.
#BlackLivesMatter
One click and Lonnie Mack will be with you.
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!
“February’s over and time Marches on… “
That’s enough of Loudon Wainwright III for now. Mind you, it does prompt me to bung a few more of that ageing fella’s tracks into these lists in the near future.
Who knows if the appearance of another month will always signal a new one of these selections of mine? I’ve no idea - but might give that a go. There are usually a batch of oven-ready #Cookers which I allow to languish for a while. This means that I am tempted to throw two or three towards your audio receptors in a short space of time.
So let’s at least get this one into the public domain and see what happens further down the line.
No suggestion that this ‘Forty-two’ is the answer to life the universe and everything - and no references to HG2G, HHGTTG, H2G2, or tHGttG anywhere in the music as far as I can see.
As usual, I implore you to enjoy.
Click - and play!
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!
Merry happy joy joy to all as I greet you here for the first time in the year 2020. Any year with two ents in it has to be cause for rejoicing among Tolkien fans (tinged with sadness by the death of J.R.R.’s son Christopher last month).
We all need a sustaining spot of fizz, froth and frivolity so I’m sending out this latest #Cooker from my department of cheer. Music has been a great friend to me and I shall continue to use it to sustain positivity. Who knew that Richard Dreyfus wasn’t giving us a mashed potato model of the Devil’s Tower but preparing us for a close encounter with the slag-heap of post-Brexit desolation.
May mountains of music keep us safe from harm.
It’s December at last! You know I don’t like to disappoint. So that can mean only one thing - time for a spot of teasing before my Christmas Cracker #Cooker 2019 appears!
Mrs Cheoff has plans to send me into the loft next weekend for the annual retrieval of baubles, tinsels and 100 year old snow babies who are still too young to understand why they are only set free for a few weeks.
I’ll then be tasked to desecrate the entire house and Mrs C. will rescue everything by magically converting my carnage into tasteful decoration. And when that is done I am minded to post the aforementioned seasonal offering which is 2019’s Christmas #Cooker in celebration of the transformation of ‘Poverty Hall’.
Until then, “Fear not!” No, no. Don’t be silly. It’s still me - angels from the realms of glory are way beyond my purchasing power. But keep fearing not as I bring the glad tidings of this 39th #Cooker - intended to fill the chasm of grief which will exist until the release of Festive Number Forty.
If anyone cheats by listening to last year’s Christmas Cooker please do so very quietly.
This one has been in my pipeline for some time. Best to evacuate, eh!
The rather obvious premise here is that one carefully chosen artiste/band deserves another. I apologise in advance if you have to fast forward past music which you consider the spawn of the devil only to find another one lying in wait.
In my usual spirit of generous camaraderie the playlist is below. You have been forewarned!
You know what to do. Erm, you do know, don’t you!
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.
Christmas Cooker 2018? Gone. Ah, well… soon be Christmas, eh.
In the meantime might I offer this small distraction. I’ll sell it no more than that. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to apply quality control of your own. I do agonise (only very slightly) over track order. You might press ‘random play’ and serendipitously arrive at a running list more in line with your own ineffably good taste.
And there we must leave it. I have a few ear-worms crawling around already which could inhabit Cooker #36 but I seem to be putting at least two months in between posting these playlists. So I have plenty of time to think about the final tracks for next time. Unless, of course, you’d like me to get a shift on and present things just that bit sooner.
Time to alert you to this cooking companion for those long, steamy hours in your Christmas kitchen… my #Cooker to round off 2018 (strong hint that I’ve not bothered to compile a New Year’s Eve playlist!)
Quite a few usual suspects here with some dragged back from my Christmas past to be played again for the first time in a long time. You’ll see that I didn’t put in a filler to stretch this into a fifth hour of listening. You can, of course, line up my tracks and cram it full of your own selections. Christmas is all about the stuffing, isn’t it!
I do hope most of you will be able to share some sort of joy with a few loved ones over the holiday. Remember - where two or more are gathered together in the sight (and sound) of a Cheoff’s Christmas Cooker toe-tapping, barely-controlled gyrating and tasty food are bound to follow.
For anyone who might be lonely, for whatever reason, may you keep yourself together in preparation for what we could all do with… better things in the new year.
Here’s hoping to see you all again in that there 2019.
Hard on the heels of Cooker #33 comes this. I agonised for many hours but finally fell into the ridiculous trap of calling it ‘Cooker #34’. Huge apologies for my lack of creativity. Erk.
Hang on. I withdraw that awkward sorry-saying. Reviewing the tracks assembled here is giving me a small wobble of suspicion that they offer opportunities for a spot of fleeting enjoyment.
My advice is to listen fleetingly… you know what they say about too much enjoyment.
The Spotify thingy will open if you click on this image… allegedly.
I’ve been away rather a while. Sorry. Let’s get going again.
An opener from The Sandals full of surf rock sunshine. Oof, those sixties summers… I was there, you know. In the very same 1966 that The Sandals soundtracked ‘The Endless Summer’ I was listening to tune number two here. I watched ‘The Trap’ at the Reigate Majestic just after turning fifteen. A simmering affair of a film in spite of its Canadian cold setting. I still find myself humming Ron Goodwin’s theme music. The main reason for that is that it’s been revived and sustained in my memory ever since 1981 when the BBC used it to underpin their live coverage of one of our iconic sporting festivals. You should recognise it in that context even if you don’t go back as far as Oliver Reed, Rita Tushingham and me. Heck…none of you is as steaming well old as me, are you.
Please don’t miss the inimitable (unless you include Florence Foster Jenkins) Mrs. Miller who is sandwiched between, among others, the lounge-lizardly lovely Jeff Goldblum and a sultry, touched-by-torch-song Grace Jones.
Great to be with you again.
Serious plans to supply another Cooker very soon. But you know how badly I do serious. Let’s see.
Oh… but let’s listen first.
This is not just a picture. This is a picture that’s a magic mouse-click away from something to look at with your ears.
