The Mixtape: Jim Mora

Sunday Morning host Jim Mora tells Trevor Reekie about his passion for music and some of his all-time favourite songs.

Jim's playlist: 

Emma Paki - 'System Virtue'

"I've never heard of Emma Paki. And I walked out of the TV newsroom into the corridor one day and out of a sound booth came this voice. I walked in, and I said to them who is this? They said it's Emma Paki.

"I followed her. I've never met her. I followed her career. She had a slightly rumpety time about 20 years ago, singing the national anthem. Interestingly, the national anthem is mentioned as this marvellous first song of hers. Thirty years ago it was, this absolutely majestic sound and a song that was about the troubles of the world but also the ways to heal them. It was just an astonishing composition and contribution from a woman so young, and I've never forgotten the song.

"Every so often I play it and think 'Wow, what a talent'."
 

The Killers - 'Human'

"It's a great dance song because Brandon Flowers can write good songs and The Killers are a great band. Once I was researching it for one of the shows I was doing, and I came to realise that 'Human' by The Killers is one of the most discussed songs in the history of the internet.

"Nietzsche had this theory about eternal recurrence - the universe continually repeating itself and the same with our lives, which I shan't go into because I don't understand it and I always wondered what the point of it is.

"[He writes of being] in a rocky valley beside a pyramidal piece of stone ... [Killers] fans have pointed out that video for 'Human' fits in that exact sort of locale.

"Certainly Nietzsche thought that we were all … evolving towards dancers or not even dancers, but the dance itself. he said that we were stretched chords … between presumably Neanderthals in the old days and what we're going to become. Humans are only a passing presence in the universe.

"I'm guessing that Brandon Flowers wondered if this process could see us saying goodbye to all the virtues that have kept humanity glued together and safe and sound for millennia because he talks about that in the song. I think there's an awful lot of heavy weight in this for a dancing song… I love a song with mystery.

"Brandon Flowers is an interesting chap because I've always thought of him as kind of the Tom Cruise of popular music - clean-cut, very self-disciplined. I've seen him on stage and he is a rock star. He does a rock star thing. But he does have a very disciplined, almost non-rockstar manner, which is probably in keeping with his upbringing as a Mormon.

"It's an intriguing song and postulates lots of things."

 

Gerry Rafferty - 'Baker Street'

"I instantly liked the song and of course, we all fell in love with the saxophone solo from Raphael Ravenscroft.

"The story of that composition seems to be that Gerry just had a big empty gap in that song. Raphael was hanging around the studio and said 'I just happen to have an alto sax in the back of a car. Why don't I go out, play that and see how it goes?'

"Of course, it's one of the immortal saxophone solos. Sometimes songs can contain an element of foreboding, a kind of foreshadowing of what might come in your life.

"That famous line 'you used to think that it was so easy, but you're tryin' now'. Goodness knows that happens to a lot of us. It was always a song about 'me' in a certain place and time … not the same life. That is just how I felt. It's a great song."
 

Maria Callas - Aria from 'La Wally' (composed by Alfredo Catalani)

"It's a lesser performed opera but of course the aria's famous. This is the young Callas before a lot of her travails and troubles. Fame didn't do her any favours. She felt the pressure to live up to all the adulation and to continually be at the top of her game. Her voice deteriorated and they said it was because she had lost 30kgs in a hurry at one point.

"But she herself said, and I've heard other sopranos agree with her, that what she lost ... later on was her confidence. She was supremely confident when she was young.

"She was enormously glamorous. She was hugely charismatic. She was bel canto but she had a voice that was different from other sopranos. It had an enormous resonance, enormous accent on tone.

"Hers is a voice that seems to go straight from her soul to your soul without anything in between. She's the only singer I've ever listened to who I regularly get tears in my eyes. Not just because I'm thinking of her life but because of the 'something' in that voice. This is a fairly simple aria but she sings it, everybody agrees, to absolute perfection. it's not particularly taxing her like other arias did, but she's just note-perfect.

"It's her saying 'Well, I'll leave the village to marry the man I love. I'll go out to the snow' and she does and she dies in an avalanche. The song's about seeing hope in the golden skies but no hope below them. It's not particularly cheerful but it's absolutely lovely."

 

Shona Laing - 'Soviet Snow' 

"It wasn't literal like some of her songs ... it does have some literal lyrics in it but it's also full of metaphor.

"There was a review of it, I remember, that said "a very strong song, strong performance from Shona Laing but a bit anachronistic now with the Cold War over, because it's about nuclear danger and Russia. They wouldn't be saying that now. Its dark moment moment has come again.

"It's a super song, it's an international-class song. A lot of really famous singers will probably have given their eye teeth to compose a song [like that].

"She sings it beautifully … I just think it's a great great song."

 

The Angels - 'No Secrets'

"I've always liked Aussie rock … I do like a lot of rock. And The Angels were a very good band. This has got a good guitar solo in it. They had a great frontman in Doc [Neeson].

"Also, this is such an interesting song. You wonder about "Amanda the actress" and her relationship with her mother and the man in Japan.

"I think for its era it was an interesting attempt by a bunch of blokes to explore feminism. It's a song of its time but it rocks along. It's musically of good quality and it's got a story, a mystery of sorts, which kind of leaves you wondering."

 

Elton John - '60 Years On'

"I walked out the back door of our house one day when I was young, and I heard Elton John's voice and it was like it was with Emma Paki. I thought 'what is that voice? Who is that?'.

"I heard Elton John's singing '60 Years On' and I immediately fell in love with Elton John. Album after album was tremendous. Then he became more of the showman, more of the Liberace - but with more talent, and I kind of drifted away but still with affection. Those early albums - Madman Across the Water… even the country-and-western album that he did with Bernie.

"This is a fairly sombre way to say goodbye to you, but gee, for a young piano player it's pretty amazing."