The best camera, and all that.

Earlier this year, there was an ad for John Lewis with a cover of Billy Joel’s “She’s Always A Woman”. The internet came through and told me that the cover was by a lad named Fyfe Dangerfield, from his album Fly Yellow Moon which came out at the start of this year.

It’s an interesting kind of cover. In arrangement it stays very close to Billy Joel’s recording of the song, yet it manages to still be quite different in feel. There’s a little more space in the production, with a slightly more live feel to it. The rawer piano tone and the singer-songwriter vocal style combine to give the song a much more contemporary feel than Joel’s original.

I’ve listened to the two versions back to back several times now, and I’m having trouble getting my head ‘round how they can be so similar and so different, all at once. If I had to pick one, I’d say that Dangerfield’s cut is the one I prefer — and I’m something if a closet Billy Joel fan. (Don’t worry. I didn’t have any credibility left to lose.)

This song interested me enough to buy Fly Yellow Moon. The album’s a grower. Lots of gentle pianos, mixed with some more Brit-poppy moments, and a vocal that reminds me a little of Damien Rice, only much better. The opening track, “When You Walk In The Room”, is a blinder, with “High On The Tide” and “Livewire” other standouts. Definitely worth picking up.

On a sunny day while I'm waiting on someone to come and open the office, this could definitely be worse.

A couple of weeks ago, my wife suggested to me that I do a bit of tidying up in the room I use as an office. (It was a fair enough suggestion.) I was digging through a pile of old CD-Rs, cassettes and floppy disks, and turned up a tape I’d sort of half been looking for for months.

One side of the tape was a set of demos from 2001, five from Iain Archer and a few from The Amazing Pilots. The Archer tracks are from before Flood The Tanks, and include a couple of songs in very different forms to the ones that made the album.

The best of them is “Mirrorball Moon”, which I remember hearing first at a small acoustic gig in Edinburgh at what must has been roughly around the time these were recorded.

Archer’s music has changed quite a lot over the years, and you wouldn’t thin, listening to more recent albums, that this was the same guy who recorded the lightweigt “Wishing” not that long ago. These demos are probably the most recent recordings I have from him that I genuinely enjoy. The tale in “Mirrorball Moon” of an old dance hall’s changing character over time reflects the change in Archer’s music — not necessarily for better or worse, but definitely changing in character. Sadly, that change has left me behind.