Ice

Introduction

I was running around doing chores and working this morning having enjoyed some buttered sourdough crumpets. I don't like toasted sourdough bread because it's like eating rusted saw blades, but the sourdough crumpets are very passable. Anyway for some reason the Jethro Tull song "Skating Away On The Thin Ice Of The New Day" popped into my head and I thought what about doing a playlist where all the song titles mention "Ice"?

Winter is here so it could be an appropriate set of tunes for you to listen to.

Three more immediately jumped into my head so I will share them, and a few more with you now, with a few notes on each one.

"Ice" by Peter Lawlor for an Orange Ad

I used to work for Orange on System Test and as a Deployment Executive but that was over ten years ago. The music for this advert is beautiful, and I still love it. It was written by Peter Lawlor who also wrote "Mad Alice Lane" which I wrote about here:

And I used it for this piece of poetry too:

Yoko Ono - "Walking On Thin Ice" (single)

This is an amazing song also a lot of people still won't countenance Yoko for various reasons but she is an amazing cutting-edge artist, and when they finished recording this John told her "You've got your first Number One".

She didn't but she should have done.

Some other quotes and info:

When you are scary and dangerous, you can do scary and dangerous things. This is one of her best & most intense tracks.

The song was released in 1981. She and John Lennon concluded the recording of the song on December 8, 1980. It was upon their return from the recording studio to The Dakota (their home in New York City) that Lennon was murdered by Mark David Chapman. Lennon was clutching a tape of a final mix of the song before it was mastered when he was shot. The song was both a critical and commercial success for Ono.

Jethro Tull - "Skating Away on the Thin Ice of a New Day" from "War Child"

This is the song that initially inspired this playlist. I don't know where Ian Anderson got the concept from, but it could have easily fitted in with "Thick As A Brick" or "A Passion Play". One of my many Tull favourites.

Nazz - "Under The Ice" from Nazz Nazz

This six-minute metal monster from Todd Rundgren and Nazz first came into my collection on the "B" side of a seven-inch single "Not Wrong Long". It still sounds amazing to today love the guitar sound and the descending motif that drives it.

Kate Bush - "Under Ice" from "The Hounds Of Love"

This is the second song in the "Ninth Wave" suite on "The Hounds Of Love" which is my favourite album of hers. It is quite claustrophobic and brilliantly conveys teh feeling of being trapped under ice.

Simple Minds - "Underneath The Ice" from "Black and White"

The Simple Minds from twenty years back again uses ice as an image for being isolated from where we want to be. This is not a song from any of their best of compilations but is still worth five minutes of your time, it rolls along like a glacier, unstoppable.

Pink Floyd - "The Thin Ice" from "The Wall"

Possibly the band's most ambitious album and concept. This meshes with the Jethro Tull song that opened this playlist but being a Roger Waters composition is laced with a lot more darkness. It is the second song on the album but is the one to close this playlist.

I hope you have enjoyed my choices and I have tempted you to investigate some of the artists further.