Last week’s selection of songs about drinking seems to have gone down well so it is, I think, a good idea to do another set. This is a mixed bag, though I’m afraid I’m mixing the grape and the grain in that bag. Hopefully we’ll all steer clear of a hangover though.
As you may know if you’ve seen these before, I like to try to get us off to a rousing start. I also like dropping in the occasional obscure song and this one fits the bill on both counts. Have you heard this one before?…
We’re Gonna Be Drinking is a track on dArtagnan’s most recent album Felsenfest, which was released in 2022. They are a folk band from Nuremberg in Germany, who have crossed my path several times before in other collaborations with musicians I follow, though this is the first time I’ve played anything by them. They are fun and this is a great way to start this set. It was, as you will have seen, a collaboration with Blackmore’s Night, and features Candice Night (aka Mrs Blackmore) in a major role. Her old man got a look in too: spot the guy at the bar under the hat. The song itself first appeared as All For One, on Blackmore’s Night’s 2003 album Ghost Of A Rose. The original is lively, but this one ramps things up a bit!
Going a bit more mainstream with this next one:
Cigarettes and Alcohol was a track on the debut album by Oasis, Definitely Maybe, which was released in August 1994 and reached #1 in the UK and #58 in the US. It has sold more than 15m copies worldwide, including 2.4m in the UK and 1m in the US. I had the album, but I didn’t buy it: in those days I was commuting and driving long distances for work and one of the fuel companies ran a promotion which gave you a free album for a set amount of vouchers. I managed to collect enough for three and this was one of them. I wonder if that counted towards those sales figures? This was the fourth and final track to be taken as a single from the album, and did the best of them all in the UK chart, peaking at #7, though it wasn’t a hit in the US.
I said that last one was mainstream, but they don’t come much more mainstream than this:
UB40 released Red Red Wine as the lead single from their album Labour of Love: the single came out in August 1983 and the album the following month. Both reached #1 here, and in the US the single eventually went to #1 and the album to #14 in 1988, having only got to #34 and #39 respectively when first released. The album is a series of covers of reggae songs the band grew up with, and they thought they were covering this as a song by the Jamaican singer Tony Tribe, who had a minor UK hit with his version in 1969. They admitted to being shocked to find out while recording that it was actually a Neil Diamond song, from his 1967 album Just For You. I’ve not seen Neil in concert but I understand that he now plays this one UB40 style in his shows.
This next one is a song with a story, the kind I always like. This is the full version of the video, which includes a couple of minutes of scene setting, but if you’re impatient the song starts around the 2’30” mark. It’s a little beauty of a duet:
As the video shows, that was Brad Paisley with Alison Krauss. Whiskey Lullaby was first released as a track on Brad’s album Mud On The Tires, which came out in July 2003 and reached #8 in the US, though it made #1 on their Country Albums chart. It is a fantastic album – still my favourite of his – and it includes the fabulous song Celebrity which I have played before. This track was released as a single in March 2004, and got to #41 in the US and #3 on their Country Singles listings. Alison Krauss included the song on her album A Hundred Miles Or More, a compilation of her duets with several other singers which came out in April 2007: it reached #10 in the US, #3 on the Country Albums chart, and got to #38 in the UK.
Today’s closer is one that I almost included last week, and as it has been mentioned by a couple of you I can’t possibly leave it out again! This is the one you may have been expecting:
Courtesy of Wikipedia: Whiskey In The Jar is an Irish traditional song set in the southern mountains of Ireland, often with specific mention of counties Cork and Kerry. The song, about a rapparee (highwayman) who is betrayed by his wife or lover, is one of the most widely performed traditional Irish songs and has been recorded by numerous artists since the 1950s. The song’s exact origins are unknown: a number of its lines and the general plot resemble those of a contemporary broadside ballad Patrick Fleming about an Irish highwayman who was executed in 1650.
The first version of this that I knew was by The Dubliners, but my favourite is still this one by Thin Lizzy – the rock style is very much to my taste! This was their first single outside anywhere other than their native Ireland, released in various dates in 1972 and 1973, and was an immediate success, peaking at #6 in the UK, #7 in Germany, and got to #1 in Ireland. It wasn’t included on a studio album, but did make an appearance on Remembering – Part 1, a compilation of their early records released in August 1976, and has since featured on numerous compilations of the band’s hits. It is a long time favourite of mine, and I’m happy to say that they played it both times I saw them in concert.
That is today’s set of five, but I can’t resist adding in a little bonus. In a chat with John Rieber on one of his recent posts, which was about Monty Python, I mentioned that while I was on my MBA course there were a couple of Australian students who hosted an Australian evening for us – mostly an excuse to drink lots of Fosters and Castlemaine XXXX, as I vaguely recall. I made a tape recording of this sketch, which was played a lot during the evening to their great amusement, and I left the tape with them to take back home:
On that note I think I should take my leave of you for today. I hope you’ve enjoyed this selection, complete with the high culture moment of the bonus clip, and I’ll see you again soon. Take care 😊
Take It Easy 