Seeking a new theme for this week I was considering what was happening in the world, and from the news the idea of going with black came to me. Brownie points if you can follow my thinking on this! I have posted several times for Black Friday but never for just the colour itself, and there are some great songs for it, so I’m giving it a spin.

Four of these five date back to my teenage years, the fifth is a recent cover of one originally from that era too. They were great days for music, and a fabulous time in which to be growing up and developing my musical tastes. And for the most part these are loud, so crank up the volume!

I couldn’t really start anywhere other than this:

Deep Purple released Black Night in June 1970, at the same time their breakthrough album Deep Purple In Rock came out. It wasn’t included on the album: that had to await the 25th anniversary reissue version. It was their seventh single and gave them their first UK hit: a biggie, getting to #2. It was, however, their sixth of those seven singles to make the US chart, though it only reached #66 over there. It was around the time that I was beginning to buy more of my music in albums than singles, but this one made me get both after they left it off the album. Money grabbers!

And from a few years prior to that:

Paint It Black was released as a single in the US on 7 May 1966 and in the UK on 13 May: it topped the charts in both countries and has sold more than a million copies in each. It was included on the US version of the Aftermath album, released on 1 July 1966 and peaking at #2, but not on the UK version which had been released in April, prior to the single, and got to #1. We got fourteen tracks compared with eleven in the US, but not this one: it didn’t appear on an album here until November 1966, on the UK edition of Big Hits (High Tide And Green Grass), which got to #4 here, including the purchase made by my Mum and Dad for one of my Christmas presents that year. Perfect timing on the Stones’ part, I think: it is a stunningly good album, and again we got the bigger and better selection of songs than our Transatlantic friends. I still think this is one of the greatest rock songs ever to top the UK charts, and sixty years on it sounds as fresh as ever.

This next one is the more recent one, a fabulous cover of a Nick Drake song by my favourite German pagan folk band:

When a band you love covers a song by one of the best – and most underrated – singer-songwriters this country has ever produced, you tend to notice, don’t you? This is Faun’s take on one of the wonderful songs that the late, great Nick Drake bequeathed us after his tragic death in 1974 at the age of just 26. Black Eyed Dog was originally recorded in 1974 by Nick in what became his final session, but wasn’t included on any of the three studio albums released during his lifetime. The song first appeared in March 1987 on a compilation of outtakes, remixes and rarities, Time Of No Reply, and has since been included on a further four collections of his music – ironically, and somewhat sadly, there have been more of those than original records. Nick’s version of the song is ever so slightly slower than Faun’s, but I think they do it really well and the video is absolutely beautiful.

Despite how much I consider myself a fan of the band through the decades, this is still the incarnation of Fleetwood Mac that I think of as the best. Black Magic Woman was released as a single in March 1968, back in the early days when the band was officially known as Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac. It was their third record, and was the first to make the UK charts, peaking at #37. It wasn’t a US hit though: that version of the band only made the US singles chart once, a couple of years later, with Oh Well (#55 in 1969). They had a string of hit singles here, the best performing being the dreamy instrumental Albatross, which was a UK #1. My favourite – and still one of my all time top three songs by anyone – was Man Of The World, which reached #2 here in 1969. If you only know the mega-selling version of the band you could do worse than check out those early singles, as they show a great blues-rock band with a gifted songwriter/lead guitarist. And for those who need to need to be told: Peter Green wrote this song, not Carlos Santana!

And I couldn’t leave today without playing this one, could I:

On 10 December 2007, Led Zeppelin reunited for the Ahmet Ertegun Tribute Concert at the O₂Arena in London, with Jason Bonham taking his late father’s place on drums. According to Guinness World Records 2009, the show set a record for the “Highest Demand for Tickets for One Music Concert” as 20 million requests were made online. Critics praised the performance and there was widespread speculation about a full reunion but sadly it never happened. This performance of Black Dog is from that concert, and I think it shows how good the remaining band members still were approaching forty years after their heyday.

The song was first released as the opening track on the album Led Zeppelin IV (aka Four Symbols) in November 1971, which reached #1 in the UK, Australia, Canada and The Netherlands, and #2 in the US. It is their best selling album, with more than 37m copies worldwide, 24m of those in the US, 2m in Canada and 1.8m in the UK. The track was released as a single in many countries, and among those it peaked at #15 in the US. The band (and their manager) exercised strict control over their UK releases, and never allowed  singles to be taken from their albums here. However, in the more recent days of downloads the song reached #119 in 2007, and has been certified Silver here for 200,000 download sales. It was also included in Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs Of All Time.

The title is a reference to a nameless black Labrador Retriever the band used to see wandering the Headley Grange studio grounds while they were recording the album there. The dog would disappear in the evening and return exhausted in the early morning, before resting all day and repeating his evening sojourns. Robert Plant believed the dog was spending nights with his “old lady,” hence the title for a song about lust!

That seems a good note on which to leave you for this week, and I hope I’ve managed to shake out any cobwebs with this set! I’ll see you again soon, and until then I wish you a good week 👍

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