Poets and lyricists had long desired to use words that phonetically imitate the sound they describe. Philosophers from antiquity to the modern era, linguists of all schools and several noted East Coast beatboxers have all attempted to capture the majesty of sound in words. However, it wasn’t until three brothers from Tulsa, Oklahoma under the band name Hanson had the breakout genre redefining hit “MMMBop” in 1997 that the concept of onomatopoeia was fully realised in song form. Hanson’s song...

Learned folk have often disagreed on the origins of the bass line. Today, the daemonic bastard child of the drums and the guitar is the undisputed driving force beneath all of our favourite modern popular songs, but there was a time in the recent past when records were tinny and bland and completely devoid of funk. Some blokes down the pub would have you believe that the bass line was invented by noted Italian guitar manufacturer Oliviero Pigini, who, having had the misfortune of losing both...

It would be facetious for a music podcast to go for any length of time without acknowledging the Beatles - as has been observed many times, the undisputed greatest album of all time is The Best of The Beatles; anyone who tells you different is selling something. With the acerbic lyrical wit of John Lennon, the edgy, genre-defining lead guitar work of George Harrison and the rhythmic dependability of everyone’s favourite Beatle, Ringo Starr, the Beatles reshaped the cultural landscape of the...

It is easy to forget, in these times of endless drought, burned tundra and an inevitable future when our children choke on atmospheric red dust whilst android overlords decide our reproductive rights, that there was once a time when very small pieces of water would fall from the sky. That’s right, tiny pieces of that miracle fluid would descend from heaven - in older times they called it rain. Rain would then make plants grow - plants are those yellow and brown things on the ground. In the...

Billie Holiday’s invention of the phrase “Me, Myself & I” with the song of the same name in 1937, had led her at the time, quite undeservedly, to be described as “The Narcissist’s favourite chanteuse.” However the first person singular has, in recent and perhaps more egocentric times, become a popular and widespread opening to songs of all genres. From John Lennon reading the news today to Bob Marley shooting the sheriff (although I believe Bob was wildly exaggerating his tale of a...

Nineties Michael Jackson baiter Jarvis Cocker once asked in song “Do you remember the first time?” The song’s narrator is quick to add that he “can’t remember a worse time” – this is particularly ironic as Cocker’s debut outing with Pulp, 1983’s “It”, is perhaps their worst record. Likewise, only real die-hard fans will attempt to compare the debut albums of David Bowie, Elton John or Prince with the rest of their celebrated oeuvre. However, not everyone makes a hash of things the first time...

The Sakoku Edict of 1635 made Japan an isolated state, cutting off trade relationships with most other countries of the world and banning foreigners from entering Japan upon pain of death. Over the next two hundred years, the land of the rising sun would become a place of mystery for the rest of the world, and from this period of isolation it is thought that the West’s fascination with all things Japanese sprang. Indeed, many learned folk trace the first instances of Japanophilia to the 1894...

In the first of what could be an on going occurrence of No Stairway EPs, Bill ventures into his self-styled “crying corner” to give you a 60 minute playlist of sadness. A sad song can keep you moving, raise your spirits, or even get you even lower than before you even heard it. Which ever way, Bill has brought you a collection of 11 songs which he thinks will do any of of these, or even all at the same time! Bill’s playlist

Cover versions of popular hits are often much maligned as lesser copies of their more authentic (and therefore somehow superior) original recordings. However, while no sane person would defend the Take That cover of “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, there are exceptions to this perceived rule. For example, the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest winning performance pails into insignificance when compared to ABBA-cadabra’s rendition of “Waterloo'' witnessed by yours truly on a particularly wet Thursday...

Joint winner of the 1952 Nobel Prize for Physics, Felix Bloch, famously recounted a walk he took with his doctoral supervisor, Werner Heisenberg, pioneer of Quantum mechanics and himself a Nobel Laureate in 1928. During this walk Bloch remarked that, following his recent reading of Hermann Weyl’s “Space, Time and Matter” it was obvious to him that space was simply the field of linear operations. “Nonsense” rebuked Heisenberg, “space is blue and birds fly through it.” The accepted reading of...

It is often remarked that Santa Claus’ famous red suit was first popularised by the Coca-Cola company in 1931, however many other facets of our supposedly traditional Christmas are much more recent inventions than we might like to think. For example, Santa’s sleigh was thought to have been pulled by huskies before a highly successful but mean-spirited initiative led by Bernard Matthews in 1978 to undermine the then-lucrative Christmas venison market. Likewise the annual excitement for the...

Halloween, a contraction of All Hallows’ Eve, marks the beginning of the Western Christian season of remembrance known as Allhallowtide - comprised of Halloween, All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day, it is traditionally a time to remember the dead. Then in 1962 an enterprising young singer-songwriter named Bobby Pickett wrote and recorded a catchy parody single called “The Monster Mash” which topped the US Billboard singles chart that Halloween. What followed appears to be either some kind of...

To paraphrase the great Dr Emmet Brown, “Words? Where we’re going, we don’t need words” as this week we delve deep into instrumental music. Lyrics, as every historian of music down the pub will tell you, are a relatively new invention - they were first trialled by The Police in 1980 with their masterpiece “De Do Do Do, Dah Dah Dah” and arguably perfected by American Beat-Combo Crash Test Dummies’ wordy 1993 hit “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm”. Since the golden age of modern pop lyrics lasted a scant 13...

Xenophobia is a perennial problem facing humanity as a species. It would seem one way to tackle this particular kind of small mindedness is to spread far and wide the artistic outputs of all cultures for everyone to enjoy, and thus cultivate a commonality to better aid mutual understanding. And whilst the written word requires either translation or additional work by the reader, we can all tap our feet to the tunes that popular beat combos across the globe are churning out - or can we? For...

Mixtapes may be a moribund art form, but the B-side is well and truly dead. There are currently fully grown adults, human beings that you know and perhaps even respect, who are sufficiently young to have no idea what a B-side is. These are your bus drivers, your chartered accountants and your compliance managers the world over who have never experienced the joy of preferring the throw-away freebie which used to come as a party favour when you purchased the physical media version of the latest...

The icing on the cake, the cherry on top, the jewel in the crown - final flourishes have long been held to be the very best things that humanity can experience. This week we ask the question “are albums finished in the same way as cakes or crowns, with the best ingredient reserved until the finishing touch?” The short answer is no - anyone who argues that the best track on Revolver is “Tomorrow Never Knows” is clearly selling something and is to be distrusted. However, if we relied on the...

Much as one man’s pain is another man’s pleasure, so too is one man’s trash another man’s treasure. This week at No Stairway Towers, we become acutely aware of this as everyone disagrees as to which music is best placed to lighten our mood, to put a bounce in our steps and smiles on our faces - feel good music, it seems, is as divisive a topic as exists on the planet. Bill (of Crying Corner fame) has of course previously defended his dubious theory that nothing makes one happier than sad...

The high water mark for brass instrumentation is obviously the Hovis bread advertisement from 1973 which launched the careers of both Sir Ridley Scott and Antonín Dvořák. Since then, despite a brief renaissance thanks to noted horn blower and record breaker Roy Castle in the late 1980’s, brass has sadly been completely ignored by popular culture. That is until today, as No Stairway turns it’s playlisting attentions to the wonderful world of labrophones, from trumpets to euphoniums, cornets to...

Pascal contended that long letters were written by people who lacked the time to make them shorter - the implication being that by eliminating the extraneous material the final product is thus improved. This leads one to wonder, are songs the same? Once the guitar solos, spoken word intros and jazz-harp middle-eights are removed are we left with a superior and more satisfying track? Cue the most intended pun of the year, as our ‘brief’ this week is songs that, either through authorial design...

Talk Talk, Television and, of course, Hear’say. It is perhaps an ontological inevitability that musical artists select stage names which reference human methods of communication, given the aural nature of music itself. However, if we were to delve into deeper furrows than mere nomenclatures, would we expose a more fundamental relationship between music and the base human need to communicate? After all, what’s in a name? By any other name Ned’s Atomic Dustbin would surely smell as…well, it’d...

High drama at No Stairway towers this week as a civil war breaks out between the laissez-faire hippy attitude of Carl and the spreadsheet-based rule following to which Tim is more inclined. Thank God for Bill who, true to form and to everyone’s relief, had forgotten which rules we were meant to be following and thus was perfectly placed to act as peacekeeper, referee and international court of playlist justice all rolled into one. Once the dust settles and we move into act 2, Tim reaffirms...

What is the commonality which binds all the souls of humankind together? Is it the affection we feel for our nearest and dearest? Is it the shared dread we have for the inevitable finality of life? Or is it something else, something more tangible? Is it, perhaps, the 1982 smash hit “Africa” by popular beat combo Toto? Or perhaps it’s just pizza, Toy Story and The Beatles? These are the philosophical questions we ponder this week as we search for songs which everyone loves, regardless of...

TBC

No one can be bothered with this, can they? Opening the curtains is about as far as we’re prepared to go today, I reckon. Whoever volunteers to go down Subway with everyone’s order will forever be a hero, but otherwise we’re all resigned to slowly dying in front of endless repeats of Only Fools and Horses on Gold, yeah? This week, through the gin-soaked fog of middle-aged hangovers, we groggily identify the Wurzles as one of the greatest British folk acts of all time, Carl makes an overly...