Victoria Wood names her favourite songs
The world of acting and music isn’t all that different when you break it down. Each of them involves working off of other people; it usually takes a small miracle to get anything off the ground, and more often than not, there are critics who say that you could have done better no matter how many times you try to make a masterpiece. While Victoria Wood has been known to at least build her foundation based on laughter, her musical taste goes far beyond just the mindless music people listen to on their way to work.
Outside of bringing her act to the stage, Wood always had a fascination with the more long-winded rock and rollers of days gone by. When talking with BBC4 about her favourite tracks, she initially singled out songwriters that were a bit off the beaten path, such as Tom Waits and Randy Newman.
While Waits and Newman each have their own unique sound when measured up against the greatest songwriters of all time, they were never necessarily the flashiest singers in the world. Newman was famously self-deprecating to his own voice, often saying that he sounded like a wounded water buffalo, and Waits was often so ingrained in his performance that he seemed to be somewhere else entirety.
But what if we said that these weren’t singers but rather actors who happened to be playing music? Compared to the other singers who came out of the 20th century, both Newman and Waits knew how to take on characters in their songs, usually adopting certain beliefs to mess with people or putting on different voices to make them deliver the song better.
It’s no different in comedy, which usually involves using different voices to help sell what you’re supposed to say. Anyone can read text off a sheet, but music and acting don’t come alive until someone is able to do that sort of dance live.
Wood didn’t limit herself to just the singer-songwriter category. Elsewhere on her list, she also praised jazz and electronic music, including ‘Birdland’ by Weather Report and ‘Get a Move On’ by DJ Mr Scruff among her favourites. Although jazz doesn’t really mix with the sounds of electronic music all that often, both have one core thing in common: reactionary playing.
Just like any good comedian onstage, the members of the legendary jazz outfit as well as Scruff have made a habit out of taking their craft and changing it on a dime. It might sound one way on the record, but there’s a difference between the recorded output and how the record sounds when it’s being delivered to the people, and that normally means going off on tangents depending on how the audience is feeling.
Wood also may have been slightly ahead of the curve when it comes to her taste in both jazz and electronic music. For the past few years, some of the biggest names in jazz music have been learning to put different sounds into their musical vocabulary, including using beats from artists like J Dilla and incorporating them into their sound.
Wood may have just been looking for the kind of songs that got a rise out of her, but her choices are more than just a collection of random songs. They’re all a case of what can happen when you give someone the freedom to go beyond the conventional way of writing a song.
Victoria Wood’s favourite songs:
- ‘Marie’ – Randy Newman
- ‘Birdland’ – Weather Report
- ‘Soledad’ – Gidon Kremer
- ‘Get a Move On’ – Mr Scruff
- ‘Misery Is the River of the World’ – Tom Waits
- ‘What A Fool Believes’ – The Doobie Brothers
