Sometimes it’s amazing how a rather ordinary moment can be turned into something quite interesting due to the amount of information that’s on the internet. Websites like Wikipedia have a plethora of data that often lead me into strange and interesting directions. What happened today was just one of them.
Kate and I were sitting in front of the TV with our laptops doing various things. Dirty Jobs was playing on The Discovery Channel in the background of which we were only somewhat paying attention to. During a commercial break, both of us hear a song coming from the TV that both made us wonder, “Who is that song by?” The internet knew the answer of course.
The song was ‘Magic’ by a group called Pilot and it was released around 1974. Google was able to give me that answer after I did a search using some of the songs lyrics. I had heard the song before and I started to wonder if Pilot had any other songs that I might know. Little did I know where this would take me.
The man who wrote the song from the group Pilot was David Paton who also played in the Bay City Rollers and the Alan Parsons Project. It also came to my attention that the Bay City Rollers were actually from Scotland and this is something I had no idea about. While David Paton is from Edinburgh, I couldn’t really detect any accent in his vocals. This I found interesting and I decided that I wanted to know more about the guy.
Low and behold, he has a website! Okay, it’s 2010 and a lot of people have a website. It made me happy to see that he hadn’t dropped off the face of the earthy like so many musicians seem to do. I was also happy to see that he runs a project studio and has been very active with it for some time. As I start browsing through his site, I check and see what projects he’s been involved with in recent years. That’s when I discovered Beagle Hat.
It seems that David Paton had recorded a couple of albums with some other musicians he met in Japan this group called Beagle Hat. While it seems that they are no longer active, I was curious to see what their music sounded like. After listening to a few clips, I was happy to hear music that seemed to be teleported from the 70′s. I noticed that the vocal sound was quite familiar to the song ‘Magic’ that I heard on that commercial just minutes before. It seems that it indeed was David Paton singing in Japanese!
While I couldn’t tell you what the commercial was that spawned this whole internet journey, I can tell you that I’m now interested in listening to the two albums that Beagle Hat have recorded. I truly find it interesting when a band takes a style from another cultures past and brings it into the present. So, now I’m in a mad search to see if I can purchase these albums via mp3 since copies of the CD seem to be going at a premium. Isn’t the internet wonderful?
