Song of the Week #147

In this week’s episode it’s pretty much all music. Apart from maybe an attack on the Tobacco Lobby! We’ll see.

Ozzy’s re-mastered CDs and vinyl arrived in the mail yesterday. Along with the music and DVD was a pretty cool coffee table book filled to the brim with photos. I won’t dwell on this box set but will post a separate review on the blog in a few days. This track is an instrumental that guitarist Randy Rhoads wrote for his Mum. He used to disappear from the tour bus and take classical guitar lessons. Pretty cool.

Randy Rhoads - Dee

Since I’m on a bit of an acoustic guitar trip here’s a true master.

Paco Peña - Soleares

So, here we go with a bit of a rant. Bypass it if you like. The tobacco industry has terrible TV ads on at the moment attacking the government for bringing in legislation to mandate plain packaging for cigarettes. Personally I am all on the government’s side. Smoking is dumb. I also read that smoking is about to be banned in a number of prisons. That’s going to be tough but will the end result be worth it? I’m happy for my taxes to go on nicotine patches rather than the cost of treating smoking related illness. The tobacco industry wants us to believe that we can’t live without the taxes imposed on their products. Well, without their products surely the savings in health care would even it out. Remember all the moaning when tobacco companies could no longer sponsor sport in Australia? What a furphy. Smoke at your own risk, not near me and don’t expect me to be happy about funding your treatment for a related illness.

And just to show that I do have a sense of humour…

Motley Crue – Smoking In The Boys Room

With the arrival of some replacement gear from the insurance company (finally) I had to pretty much configure my iPhone from scratch. This was good and bad. Bad in that some tracks I had purchased are no longer, and good in that I loaded on a whole swag of different tunes. I’ll play a couple now…

First up is The Darkness from the UK. They were a great rock band with soaring guitars, cat suits and some wicked falsetto vocals. Standard story – they are no more.

The Darkness – Love Is Only A Feeling (anyone pick the location?)

And one from maybe the best stage musical ever…

Ipi Ntombi Cast - Shosholoza

Last weekend I went to see X-Men: First Class. I’m not a hardcore fan of the comics or anything like that. But the movie was very cool. Plenty of action, some in jokes and a whole lot of fun. You don’t have to look too closely to get the anti-discrimination message either. It was worth the price of entry. One of the actors was Zoë Kravitz, daughter of Lenny Kravitz and Lisa Bonet. In 1991 Lenny released the groovy album “Mama Said”. I got it on cassette free with a 12 month subscription to Rolling Stone. Just as well because the magazine was and is dreadful. But the album rocked. Here’s a track from it written for his daughter Zoë who would have been 3 or 4 at the time. Now she’s on the big screen!

Lenny Kravitz – Flowers for Zoë

But I don’t want to finish on a quiet note. Here’s another track from my current playlist of current. You can just rock out to it or have a think about the lyrics if your brain cells are still functioning this late in the week.

Bad Religion – 21^st Century Digital Boy

People, get ready!

DJ Rob