Cheoff

A site about food, drink and other random stuff!

Cooker #16

Much busy, very busy and oh so busy lately. But not so busy as to forget all of you, my faithful listeners. I know you are out there... if I could be a little cheeky and ask you to share this new #Cooker we might just recruit enough devotees to form a water polo team. Yay!

I have given careful thought to the running order of my sweet sixteenth. Of course, you are most welcome to shuffle the deck and even finesse a few of your own tracks into the mix.

As always, thank you for listening.

Cooker #15

A visit to my family home cannot stop the flow of #Cookers. I've dragged my lovely, nearly ninety year old Mum screaming from her laptop keyboard just long enough to publish this. She will return soon and continue sending recipes and filthy jokes to her octagenarian friends. No lamentation for the demise of two deliveries a day from the Royal Mail... Mum can send out a dozen emails before plunging her morning coffee cafetiere.

Definite jazz action entering the fray here. The reliably hippy, trippy, drippy Donovan is on hand to help us focus on our navel area. And there is a spot of electronica.

Lending your ears is appreciated. Thank you for listening.

Cooker #14

Sorry... SORRY!

Those increasingly large apologies are most sincere, I assure you. Three days between my last two offerings and here we are seven weeks later with not a sniff of a #KitchenCooker. Except... here it is. So all that sorry can be completely ignored as I withdraw it (even though it was most sincerely offered)

I reckon there is a spot of rise and fall with this selection. Not meaning a variation in quality as far as I'm concerned... I leave you to be the judge of that. Rather, there is a spread of approaches and musical styles which, perhaps more than usually, reflect recent events. The need to suppress resentment and anger in the face of politics, religion and just plain-old nutty world news is a good excuse to rally music to the rescue. You should be aware that there is much of happiness here as well. Very dearly loved people continue to do wonderful things which enrich my life back to default joy. One in particular accounts for the Thompson Twins track as she PhDees her way into a shiny future.

Please share my mixed emotions but be assured that the sunny side is always there to grab if you have a mind to grab it.

Let's not be sorry at all, eh.

Now click away on the screen capture below, escape my ramblings here and fire up the thruster rockets of Cooker #14. 


 

 

Cooker #13

It's a Monday. It's a Bank Holiday. But it's not that one where you have to stay up and watch the end of the snooker final.

Whatever you're doing, whatever you've done (today, I mean... I'm not here to talk about your entire lifespan, you know) here is a cheeky addition to the #Cookers collective. Cheeky for the reason that it is rather close upon the heels of Cooker #12. Please, just go with my generous flow and enjoy a holiday selection with which I am finding it hugely difficult to find fault. Think of this as Cheoff's 'Baker's Dozen'... one more for insurance purposes.

Whether it be a three minute track or an eight minute behemoth from those Madchester men celebrating the Easter story, I am confident that you have here an untarnished cluster of silvery sounds to flap in the face of those final few hours before the return to work in the morning. As an indication of my own enjoyment, allow me to tell you that I have derived as much pleasure from this selection as the successful squeezing of eleven ripe blackheads one after the other. 

Not much left of the long weekend now... I'd best publish this and be damned.

Oh, if you are going back to work in the morning, please message me and remind me what it's like. Being retired for almost five years now means I really miss that feeling! :p

Cooker #12

Here you have the dozenth of my hearing tests. 

A seventeen minute track included, and still I can't offer a whole hour of audio. That does give you the chance to maintain focus on my selection and to give the music a chance to elicit something explicit.

At the very least, I recommend you allow the vestibulocochlear nerve in your inner ear to transmit information to the temporal lobe of your brain.

It was rather lovely to be nudged into releasing this particular episode by the horribly young, handsome and hip Matthew Moore. I freely confess that his Spotify play history provides a few pointers for my own choices. Hey, rush over and find out what he's putting on his intricately tuned turntable... not before you've hit my Cooker #12 link, of course!

Thank you for listening.

Cooker #10

"I just want someone to talk to... and a little of that human touch"
Right there with Bruce on that one.


This offering starts with a quintet of stuff from American chaps. After those masterpieces it all rather degenerates into common or garden delightful sounds... Enjoy.

Cooker #9

Well, here is less than an hour of listening coming your way. It had better be good listening then, eh.
Sorry, but I am sticking to the hugely selfish approach of, "If I like it, you might". There... That's not too pushy, is it?
Lots to like here as far as I'm concerned. Apologies for one EXPLICIT track... we are all grown-ups, though, aren't we?
'Nuff talk... over to your aural receptors.  

An Apple A Day #1 - 'Heart of Glass'

Here is a vivid, but hazily detailed, memory. I was sitting alone in our VW ‘Beetle’ (KJV 521F). It was dark, I think. I was alone. I must have been a little cold… this was early in the year 1979 and the car heater was pretty much knackered. I can’t properly remember what I was waiting for. It could well have been for Jan to finish work and have me drive her back to our love nest for a quick sherry and three hours ofbook marking and assessment.

Anyway, the radio was on… must have been Radio One back then. I don’t recall ever being too much bothered by the Top Forty. I had always surrounded myself with so much potentially ‘non-chart’ music that a record’s sales success was an irrelevance.

Someone spoke from the tinny speaker and announced a new single release from Blondie. I was two years into marriage, beginning to adopt squeaky trappings of responsibility and was allegedly sort of too old to have been grabbed by the punk era. The next thirty seconds of my listening did grab me completely and formed the unassailable conviction that the track I was hearing would be top of the hit parade very soon. The remaining minutes confirmed my thoughts and I determined to actually keep an eye on the charts for the next few weeks.

All came to pass as had been foretold, of course. I’ll not detain you with a critique of the track. The band and others have supplied more than enough reaction already.

I’ll simply admit to enjoying the music still… and the fact that it is now played without the BBC beeping out Debbie Harry’s ‘arse’.

Click the picture for a Spotify link to the UK single release plus the B side. Or here for a YouTube offering (you'll be restricted to the album version there by the looks of it).

Overcooked #1

Occasionally I put together a rather unwieldy set list which demands more time and attention than the average cooking session allows. These usually follow some theme or a particular strand that has been prompted by a tweet, an internet discovery or even a real nudge from a real person who has just found out I've never listened to their particular favourite and is demanding I explore further. I've already posted one behemoth of Sixties/Seventies pop in its pomp. From now on, I'll prepare you for these lengthier aural treats under the 'Overcooked' banner.

Here is an extended bit of listening which came out of reading this Gigwise article rating Mercury Prize winners. I won't bother reacting to the judgements made. The nature of the prize means that there is an annual  outcry, with the protests over snubs given to much more deserving works equivalent to the number of amateur and professional critics who exist at the time (minus those who favour the winner, of course)... lots of fallout. 

So here is the roster of winners with the 'also-rans' conveniently excised for you. All I've bothered to do is assemble and order the music from an already contentious list on your behalf. I still haven't given it my own fullest attention. Why not follow my example and dip in to whatever takes your fancy. Remind yourself of the ones you cheered along and shake your head in dismay as the undeserving efforts rear their horrible heads again.

Actually, in fairness, let us do the right thing and congratulate all the nominees before listening.

Ah, yes, I've added Benjamin Clementine who won in 2015, after the article went out. October and November this year will see the nominations and another winner declared.

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