0001 - Mystery Artist...

I suppose I knew when I decided to start this musical odyssey that I was taking on a fairly herculean task. If you'd asked me at the time, though, how many different artists I had in my music collection, I'd probably have guessed at about three or four hundred, which is only about one thousand short of the actual total...

What I certainly hadn't appreciated was the sisyphean nature of the job - I, of course, am not going to stop buying and collecting new music. On top of that, I also keep finding compilations that I'd forgotten about, although I've hopefully slain that hydra by trawling through all the compilations I have and (rather depressingly) creating a spreadsheet to track what I should be doing. I could make my life easier, of course by being a bit, ah... selective in what I cover - you'd never know if I decided to skip Hoboken or Sinking Cruise Ship Rescue Drama, after all, but I would know and the 4/4 beats of the telltale drum parts would surely keep me from sleep at night.

Now that I'm actually, hopefully, finally organised and ready to go, let's start with an unsolved, and perhaps insoluble, case of identity.

I know what this song is - it's a really good cover of the Pixies' Cactus played by a man at a piano. Cactus is a great song - a couple of minutes of quiet menace, brooding amongst the bang and the clatter that is the rest of Surfer Rosa, it's a prime example of Black Francis's weird-disturbing-songs-about-sex-and-violence period, before moving on to his weird-disturbing-songs-about-UFOs-and-space-aliens period.

The cover isn't so sinister as the original, but it's an interesting, bluesy take - like Jerry Lee Lewis might have done if he'd been born thirty years later - and it's really well sung and played. Who the player is, though, I haven't the slightest idea.

I think I collected this back in the crazy youthful days of Napster, some time between 1998 and 2000 and it was never tagged with a performer. I'd love to know who it is - it's obviously played live, but it could be someone famous or just some guy playing for free drinks in a bar.  I don't know, Shazam doesn't know, nobody knows.

I'm under no illusions that my blog has the global reach (yet!) to have someone read this and say "I know that." But I can hope that one day, someone will read this and send me a message to let me know who he is. It would be nice to think that if it is just some guy in a bar that I can get in touch and let him know that, well over a decade later, someone still listens to his Cactus cover.

Mind you, it's possibly someone I'll be embarrassed not to have recognised, like David Bowie or someone (I know it's not Bowie - I've heard his cover of Cactus and it's a bit rubbish). If you've any ideas, that's what the comments are for.