Don't eat yellow snow

For the first time that I can remember it has snowed in Birmingham, England on Christmas Day. So to celebrate, here are some snow related songs to warm your cockles on these cold winter nights...there will however be NO Snow Patrol under any circumstances.

My Bloody Valentine - Soft As Snow (But Warm Inside)
This lovely little number is the opening track from the 1988 album 'Isn't Anything'. At it's time of release the album paved the way for 1991's legandary opus 'Loveless' (the one that nearly bankrupted Creation Records). Here Kevin Shields and co. display their trademark layered and distorted guitars and dreamy melodies. But this album is an excellent album in its own right and you can see its influence on the 'shoegazer' (ugh!) bands that followed like Ride, Lush and Slowdive.

Frank Zappa - Don't Eat The Yellow Snow
When my friend Dean went to live in Germany for three months, he leant us some DVD's. We refused his Frank Zappa DVD but he secretly left it in the car underneath a seat...the little scamp... There is also an excellent independent record shop in Birmingham called Swordfish run by an old man with long hair. Whenever you go in, it is almost guaranteed to be Frank Zappa or Captain Beefheart playing on the stereo...so this is dedicated to him.

Warsaw - Living In The Ice Age
This is a May 1978 recording, back from Joy Division were still called Warsaw. Presumably, fed up by being constantly asked why they were named after a small town in the Black Country, they changed their name. For some reason Bernard Sumner was at this time calling himself Bernard Albrecht. As a band, Joy Division produced a staggering body of work in just the space of a few years. In the 1978 sessions as Warsaw they are still very much a punk band, but you can see glimpses of something darker, both in the lyrics of Ian Curtis and the music of Hook, Morris and Sumner. This won't be the last Joy Division track featured on Louder Than War.