The Quietus - A new rock music and pop culture website

Baker's Dozen

A Tower Of Songs: Sylvie Simmons' Favourite Music
Manu Ekanayake , August 13th, 2020 09:48

Like a gamekeeper turned poacher, rock journalist Sylvie Simmons has a new album of her own music out. Here she guides Manu Ekanayake through 13 lifelong inspirations, from Leonard Cohen to Johnny Cash, Miles Davis and Black Sabbath

The_beatles___a_hard_day_s_night_1597242965_resize_460x400

The Beatles – A Hard Day’s Night
I am an absolute Beatles nut. When they came along it changed my life. I'd been on stage as a kid. I sang and I tap danced and because I was the youngest in the group, I was one of the soloists in these cute little outfits – one of the songs was ‘The Teddy Bears Picnic’ so I was in a little teddy bear outfit, with the ears and everything. We played old American standards and war-era type songs. I was not born during, or even close to after the war, by the way [laughs]. But still, that is what that group was doing. So I loved music. I still think that I filter the music I hear through Beatles chords: I hear them everywhere, even in my own work. So anyway my big brother took me and my little brother to the local ABC cinema that was on Essex Road and we went to see A Hard Day's Night and I was a Beatles maniac from that time on. I have a Beatles rug that I've kept since it was beside my bed as a kid. I mean that’s nuts, I'm terrible about that. Pretty much all my merch is Beatles merch.