The house is a tip and it’s time to get serious with spring cleaning. Can you help with some inspiring, energetic and uplifting tunes?
I know that time-to-clean feeling. One minute you’re searching for something trivial like a battery, and the next the whole house is totally upside down, drawer and cupboard contents all over the floor.
It’s always much easier to clean up with tunes pumping out of the (dusty) stereo. So let’s start with New Orleans’ greatest masters of funk – the Meters and Do The Dirt, with its chopping guitar and great lyrics: “Doing the dirt, you gotta watch me work... bend your hips.” Keep the room grooving with Betty Wright’s classic, Clean Up Woman.
Get that vacuum going and turn the stereo up loud for British soul singer Alice Russell’s perfect A-Z, from her To Dust album. This woman can do no wrong (apart, maybe, from making this track just 1 minute 33 seconds). Next, let’s move to some Latin American cumbia, with its relentless pulse to help with the polishing: Otro Muerde El Polvo (Another One Bites The Dust), by Los Miticos del Ritmo, is a goodie (on the Soundway label).
When brushing the kitchen floor, who better than Elmore James and Dust My Broom, with that iconic guitar riff. The faster the guitar works, the faster you’ll work, so dust down Chet Atkins’s Yakety Axe (his version of the Benny Hill theme).
Now, you’re almost done. Load up Elvis’s right-hand man, James Burton, and his Cannonball Rag, and with your rag in hand, you’ll shack will soon be a-shining again. End with Dr Horse: Jack, That Cat Was Clean, then change into your glad rags and head to your local for a well-deserved pint. And no inviting people back to yours for a party – even if it is clean.
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