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 his thumbs in a kneading machine accident as a child, miscounted the number of strings on his new range of guitars in 1946.
The new 4 string guitar was an instant hit amongst less able players all around the world and thus the bass guitar was born. However, that is an old wives tale. The truth is that the bass line was invented in 1879 by Nebraskan fisherman Valentine McConaughy. Valentine had specialised in catfish and trout fishing until a working holiday in the Caribbean caused him to fall in love with bass fishing – so much so that he developed his own range of extra thick fishing line for this purpose. Alas, back home in his landlocked home state there was little call for bass fishing, however, his “bass lines” proved an instant hit amongst local thick thumbed banjo players, and the modern banging donk was just around the corner. Many Thanks, Mr McConaughy and your fat thumbed friends!
In this week’s episode, Bill accuses Carl of being disingenuous about Soft Cell, Tim accuses Bill of being “sublime” and Carl accuses OutKast of being a “bourgeois disgrace”. It’s the usual stuff, on a different day.
This weeks playlists:
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 twentieth century. Also, the bass player’s wife made some superb textured vegetable protein sausages. You may think that there is nothing left to be said about the Beatles, but we’re the guys that did an entire podcast on the best way to soundtrack a hangover, so we’re pretty sure we can find something new to offer.
In this week’s episode, Tim doubles down on his controversial opinions about Paul McCartney, Bill blames a childhood of playing in brass bands for his hatred of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” and Carl’s hot take for the week is that Ravi Shankar’s tracks are quite good but just a little bit too long. It’s classic stuff.
This week’s Playlists:
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 olden days plants were green and would grow and turn into flowers, fruits and vegetables. Seriously, when you write it down it seems very sci-fi, but this was actually how things used to be. Rain happened in other seasons, before the brutal and endless summer that the world is currently enduring. These “seasons” were called spring (mainly rain), autumn (cold rain) and winter (rain so cold it became semi-solid, like a flavourless slush puppy caught in the wind). The commemoration of these mythical “seasons” is the focus of our playlists this week. Of course, not everything went to plan - we blame the heat. Firstly, the fabulous Olivia Newton-John, the patron saint of Summer Nights, passed away whilst we were in post-production and we thus missed the opportunity for a proper send-off. Then, to add insult to injury, Bill admits that Bombay Bicycle Club are shit after all, Tim laments the lack of songs about artichokes, and Carl takes his ability to deliberately misunderstand things to a level which strains credulity. The whole thing is a shambles. This week’s Playlists:
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 book “Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan” by Greek writer Lafcadio Hearn. In this work Lafcadio detailed many fascinating and foreign aspects of Japanese culture, descriptions of the striking and romantic landscapes of a pre-industrialised Japan, and gave illuminating explorations of the Shinto and Buddhist religions, both relatively unknown to the West at the time.
At No Stairway, however, we understand what truly makes Japan cool - Godzilla, Ninjas and some of the greatest and most insane popular music ever made. Come with us as we explore dubiously named power-pop combos, Super Mario sound-tracking super bands and the peerless genius of Sheena Ringo. You’ll have to use your imaginations for Godzilla and the ninjas, but in all honesty if these playlists don’t invoke images of 300 feet tall lizards breathing nuclear fire on an army of robotic ninja warriors, then frankly there’s no hope for you. Ikimashou!
This week’s Playlists:
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 Christmas number one single was manufactured in the mid-nineties following a disastrous and clearly drunken appearance on daytime television by Mr Blobby.
It is a little known fact that since 1996, all Christmas number one singles have been written by tax-averse Poundland Elton John impersonator Gary Barlow and then vetted by a committee of luminaries which includes Ant McPartland, Neil Morrissey and noted real estate expert Nicki Chapman. And so we come to the most recent of Yuletide traditions - The No Stairway Christmas Special.
In this most festive of episodes we take a look at the year’s play listing offerings and formulate our top 5 “ones that got away” from the Golden Shuffle the first time around and then offer up three festivus playlists for each others’ criticism. Bill’s crying corner takes a sinister turn at Christmas as he outs himself as a sprout-hating Scrooge, Carl gives his favourite post-Christmas sandwich recipe and Tim finally breaks Carl’s electronic apathy with a barnstorming 19-minute version of a Bing Crosby classic.
This Week’s Playlists:
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 years, we have therefore much ground to cover as we traverse material from before Beethoven’s big comeback to album work all the way up to music contemporary with Paul Weller’s fourth (and to date final) haircut.
In this week’s episode Tim finally identifies the cause of Jazz’s superfluous notes, Bill invents the Drunken-Style of playlist criticism and Carl comes to realise some hard truths regarding his opinions about Post-Rock.
This Week’s Playlists:
Bill: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0Di0gCIEOV347Ob5SlbdSt?si=49799cb3b34142aa
Carl: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7DcjdMDYmzq7DpnnVuATwp?si=03e152412d004060
Tim: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2mY9TYpomVyqsUj0nwVF8p?si=868626f658084309
The Golden Shuffle: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/41uQWC10T9PaKi7YPjMlVB?si=2cfe9ca85050449d
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 that is our quest this week, to find songs that you probably can’t understand but can love anyway. The risk, of course, is that we find the only music worth listening to is written in the English language and we end up being the official playlisting poster-boys of some hideous totalitarian mix-taping regime. Were that to come to pass, we would of course graciously accept the commission from our narrow-minded overlords but we’d like to think that we would nonetheless attempt to change the system from within, slipping the odd Nusrat Fattah Ali Khan track into our state-sanctioned broadcasts.
Highlights this week include Bill recategorising all of world music into either “Dance Hall” or “Iron Maiden Rip-offs”, Carl risking a double-prejudice by declaring his hatred of French Hip-Hop, and Tim continuing his one-man war against The Smiths, expertly going off-topic to put the boot into Morrissey’s singing voice once again.
This Week’s Playlists:
Bill: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5ZrIfAHqlQVDfR3N0GFbJE?si=03c86841892f410f
Carl: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1E5qLEHazQO4hSaXXKJWU6?si=b2f829c2868b4902
Tim: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3BgevJ00G1ZAko2TmK06B7?si=e6e6f6fef6724321
The Golden Shuffle: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/41uQWC10T9PaKi7YPjMlVB?si=5adbf88426644031
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 songs. This is in direct opposition to Carl who, after a misspent decade in the company of Radiohead and early Leonard Cohen, can now only listen to upbeat music for fear of otherwise suffering yet another embarrassing public breakdown. Tim is famously happiest when being a contrarian, so this week puts him in a particularly difficult position. Highlights this week include three Yorkshiremen having an ill-informed discussion of the advantages of living “down in the bayou”, Tim (somewhat inevitably) attempting to quantify human happiness using a spreadsheet, and Bill finally nailing his Dan Ackroyd impression after three decades of failed attempts.
This Week’s Playlists:
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 flugelhorns and all things reed-less and shiny in between. In this week’s raucous episode our gang of blow-hards discuss the frankly scho-wa-do-lally origins of scat singing, Bill makes the seemingly intellectually impossible connection between Marty Feldman and David Lee Roth, and Tim opens the Pandora’s box of Star Trek themes. If any listeners have strong feelings about Star Trek themes, I would encourage them to not listen to this episode.
This Week’s Playlists:
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 or necessity of production, are under two minutes in duration.
Events of note this week include Carl expounding a theory on the origins of club-style singing, Tim detailing an episode of orthopaedic surgery of singular importance in the history of 90’s college rock and Bill’s ability to ignore dodgy lyrics leads to his name being placed alongside Michael Gove’s on the No Stairway watchlist of potentially problematic people. Ironically, this turned out to be quite a long episode - our editor assures us there wasn’t a second of superfluous material that we could in all good conscious lose.
This Week’s Playlists:
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 probably smell the same. It would sound the same too, I’m sure. I’m pretty sure that was Shakespeare’s point, but I’m no expert. Dustbins aside, these are the exact furrows into which our intrepid audiophiles delve this week. Herein, Carl explains his sinister plot to subliminally control Tim’s mind, Bill launches a scathing attack on the modern lyricism of grime music and Tim risks alienating most of our North American listeners by speaking ill of Country music legend, Mr Jimmy Buffet. This Week’s Playlists:
