Balearic Breakfast | Episode 213 | Beyond...
- by The Lioncub
- Feb 25
- 18 min read
Updated: Feb 27
Colleen 'Cosmo' Murphy broadcast the 213th episode of Balearic Breakfast on her Mixcloud on February 25th 2025.
About this show. – With a somehow disconnected soul, unexpected yet rooted in its own free and somehow worried spirit, this 213th episode of Balearic Breakfast is another great example of Colleen's ability to share the spur of Life's moments... For various reasons, this show was deep, on many levels, and musicaly of course, too... But we'll dig a bit deeer about that in the listening section of this post...
This morning’s Balearic Breakfast is now archived on my Mixcloud (and please give me a follow while you’re over there). On this week’s show we pay tribute to two greats: Gwen McCrae and Roberta Flack, both of whom have passed to the next realm. Thank you for your song suggestions and for celebrating their life through music. I love seeing that ‘Sounds’ sticker on the Gwen McCrae record – purchased at the St Marks shop decades ago. Old record shop stickers give a sense of time and place and bring back to many memories.
And on the memories front, I also pay tribute to a late friend of mine and colleague from my WNYU days, Philip Smart. The Jamaican born producer/engineer and radio DJ hosted the Get Smart! Show on WNYU and for many years I was on after him with my Soul School show on Friday nights. It was great going up to the studio and seeing Stone Love Sound System or Bobby Konders hanging out. Those were the days indeed.
Today’s show also features your requests and music from#gwenmccrae #robertaflack #themonkees #wnyu #yachtrock @favoriterec @ubiquityrecords @timecapsulesounds @farout_recordings @joeclaussellsplaygroundd @djsaucylady @doctorsoul1 #yellowmagicorchestra @mimistgkobayashi @bbemusic @masters_at_work_official @claremont56 @furebymusic @folkfunkandtrippytroubadour @kennylattimore
Thans for listening!
PLAYLIST
(1989) Sheila Chandra – One
(1993) Better Daze – Golden Brown
(1968) The Monkees – The Porpoise Song
(NOL) Philip Smart – Drifter Dub Part 4
(1974) Gwen McCrae – 90% of Me is You
(1978) Jonathon Hansen – What It Meant to Me
(1982) Kenny Loggins – Heart to Heart
(1978) Izumi ‘Mimi’ Kobayashi – Angel Sky
(2024) Fureby, Moscoco & Faber – Halcyon
(1993) Yellow Magic Orchestra – Pocketful of Rainbows (Heavy Rainbow Mix)
(1971) Roberta Flack – Go Up Moses
(1969) Roberta Flack – Compared to What
(1980) Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway – Back Together Again
(1979) Gwen McCrae – All This Love That I'm Givin'
(1975) Hank Crawford – Madison (Spirit, The Power)
(NOL) The Jones Girls – Nights Over Egypt (DoctorSoul Giza Dancefloor Re-Therapy)
(2025) Saucy Lady – Falling in Love
(1998) Kenny Lattimore – Days Like This (Lattimaw Soul House Mixx)
(2025) Far Out Monster Disco Orchestra – Black Sun (Joe Claussell’s Classic Mix)
(1982) Gwen McCrae – Keep the Fire Burnin'
THE LISTENING EXPERIENCE
Presentation. – Disconnected from reality, you're shifting from one place to another, but you don't know where you are, you don't know what time it is, you don't know what you should do, what you have to do, nothing make sense, you wish you would not have to be here, now, you wish you were elsewhere, yet the pain reminds you that you're stuck in this inexistent now you know nothing about, and the sickness doesn't stop. Disconnected, you're just a ghost passing there, to another somewhere, another tangible somewhere, one day, in a few years, it's a detachment, an active phase, a hideous phase of losing someone you loved with all your soul, and nothing can bring that person back, everything is Beyond, Beyond your grif, Beyond your sorrow, Beyond today, Beyond Tomorrow... Disconnected, you're Beyond, already... But you don't know it, Yet...
To Rick (and to everyone grieving over a loved one)
Today's episode is all about that feeling of being absent from yourself. This happens in a moment where you face loss, but also in a moment where, tired, you don't have the strength to pull yourself out of the maze surrounding you. Still, you try to keep moving on, because, after all, there's nothing else you can really do. A Vast Majority of the songs selected by Colleen in this 213th episode of Balearic Breakfast have that disconnection at the very Core of their musical existence, and this feeling is of course reinforced by Colleen's immaculate mix, one of the finest she ever did.
We can take for example the way Colleen mixes Better Daze's Golden Brown with The Monkees' The Porpoise Song, nicely followed by Philip Smart's dubby Drifter Dub Part 4, leading the way to Gwen McCrae's trippy 90% of Me is You, perfectly ending this Beyond moment with Jonathon Hansen's What It Meant to Me... Colleen pushes this feeling in the second mini mix of the show's first hour, reaching rhythmic perfection with the way Izumi ‘Mimi’ Kobayashi's Angel Sky follows Kenny Loggins' Heart to Heart, not speaking of Fureby, Moscoco & Faber's Halcyon nor of, for instance, Go Mosses !
One last thing that struck me, when thinking about it, is that Colleen ends the show positively with Gwen McCrae's Keep the Fire Burnin'. Now, don't you find that this ending perfectly reflects today's post title? Going beyond pain and keeping the Fire Burning in one loving and intellectual unity... Is it me or is there a beautiful circle right there?...
The Wow Moment. – For the disconnected feeling, the drunken wavy spirit leaving you lost in a place you can't disguise, for the cohesive, delicate mix, and the musical flow that truly reinforces your drunken feeling, I must say today's show's first hour wins The Wow Moment! If you want to get high, do it and listen to this show, you'll meet your new self walking somewhere, there... Beyond... This first part is so Mean... One of the meanest Colleen ever did, like really!
I also must add that I love how, starting the second hour, Colleen takes a direct turn, leaving the lost, drunky and blurred-out feeling towards a more concrete and happier musical place yet keeping that estranged feeling intact... Once again, her musical choices from our requests is astoundingly precise!
PS: Thank you so much Ana for your help in correcting this post! Fluffy hugs from the Lioncub!!
COLLEEN'S PRESENTATION
Sheila Chandra with One from Paul Hillary's Folk, Funk and Trippie Troubadour's volume 3 compilation on BBE. And that was requested by our friend Rick Van Veen in the Netherlands who very recently lost his mother. He said the show Balearic Breakfast was a huge support in difficult times for him, and it still is. He said, my mother's lung disease and taking care of her, which became more and more intensive, made life difficult, and he had little time for himself and to relax. And he said, but Balearic Breakfast and the community, and he said Ana and Artur have become good friends, help enormously. Everything is still very unreal. Her death in the past few years have gone through my mind as he wrote to me. I've planned to keep listening to music a lot but that does not always work. Recently, I heard the song One by Sheila Chandra for the first time, and somehow the song suits me perfectly at this moment and is constantly on repeat. I like to believe we are all one and if we are all one we will never be separated...
I'm so sorry for your loss Rick, and thank you for sharing those beautiful words with us. Good morning Balearicans, I'm Colleen Cosmo Murphy hosting your weekly Balearic Breakfast live from my record room until high noon, and greetings to all over on my Mixcloud Live and thank you for joining me as always. Well, it's been a while since we've had a request show, and I won't be able to get to most of them again this week, so those songs will stretch over to upcoming weeks as always. We recently lost two major artists: Gwen McCrae and yesterday Roberta Flack, and we will pay our tributes to them and their music later in the show, and I'll also pay tribute to one of my former WNYU compatriots, the late reggae dancehall dub DJ producer and engineer Phillip Smart.
But first, let's get in some of your requests, and this next one is from David Puzzi for a song by Better Days the duo of Andrew Jervis and Paul Scriver who released one album on Ubiquiti in 1996 called One Street Over and a year later they did an album of remixes from that album. The album melds together all different genres folk, funk, Bill Laswell style dub and more. David asked for the opening song to the album Here Are Better Days with Golden Brown.
What It's Meant to Me by Jonathan Hanson, self-produced and self-released in 1978 by Jonathan, and it's a perfect recipe of the AOR soulful style lovingly reissued by Favorite Recordings. And they spoke with Jonathan and he said What it's meant to me was a song I wrote about the breakup of a band as with a lot of my songs I always write them to be more about more than one thing, primarily relationships and you can find that on Favorite Records Bandcamp.
Ahead of that 90% of Me is You by the Queen of Rare Groove the recently departed Gwen McRae and that song is from her debut self-titled album released in 1974. The Florida-born singer, where she performed in clubs as a teen and then in 1963, she met and married a sailor by the name of George McRae who went on to have a massive hit with Rock Your Baby which was released the same year as Gwen's debut.
And George also does backing vocals on the album. Prior to that, in the 1960s, they recorded together as a duo, and they signed the label TK Records which in the next decade was the leading southern disco label, and Gwen had success as a solo artist on TK subsidiary Cat Records with a cover of Bobby Bland's Lead Me On, and then Ed Townsend's For Your Love, and then she had a big hit with her own song Rockin' chair. The song we heard 90% of Me is You is much beloved on the Rare Groove scene, it was also featured on that great BBE compilation Strange Games and Things, and thank you to Bert Francois in Brooklyn for that request, and we'll have more Gwen McRae later in the show.
Okay, the one before that is an old friend of mine Philip Smart we heard Drifter Dub Part 4, and Rob that primitive sound put this on my radar. Today is the 11th anniversary of Philip Smart's passing, and Philip Smart was on WNYU when I was on in the 1980s and 1990s, in fact I think he had the longest-running show it went from like 1979, I think to about 2004. And when I did the soul school show it was so much fun, because I was on right after him, and I come up to the studio and there would be like Bobby Condors hanging out, or a Stone Love sound system fresh from Jamaica, and I got to hang out with these guys, and they were just really cool because I was really into dancehall and reggae and dub at that time. In fact, I used to spin it you know and I was spinning house parties back in the late 80s, and early 90s, and I was a regular over at Sticky Mike's which was a great dancehall night.
Well Philip, I mean, he was such a great guy. I used to write for a fanzine called Dub Catcher and I obviously interviewed Philip. He was a total legend and he also took me record shopping at the VIP records distribution, I think it was in Queens. Anyways, Smart's steadfast championing of local reggae acts and could be heard on his popular Friday night show Get Smart, and that was on WNYU 89.1 FM. And he says a Stan Evans Smith who used to to work with him I think he was a digital, I think he used to call himself, I can't remember his name, it wasn't Bobby digital but he used the word digital in his name. He said Philip Smart changed the radio landscape by using New York as a marketplace for New York-based artists. He helped establish dancehall reggae in New York so artists could have careers competitive with their Jamaica-based counterparts, and he was also a really fun personality, very strategic with his on-air approach.
And he compelled other New York reggae jocks to allocate slots on their Jamaica-centric playlists for New York area artists, you know Philip had his own studio. He was an engineer and producer himself, and he had very very deep roots on reggae's earliest days with connections to Kingston's finest talents, and Get Smart was also a preeminent vehicle for Jamaica-based artists and producers seeking international exposure for their releases. And he also shared the tracks he played, and his vast musical knowledge with other radio hosts he broke records like Shabba Ranks he wrote I think he broke also Dawn Penn No No No No as well so he was just such a great great person and thank you to Rob That Primitive Sound for honoring him on today's show.
Ahead of that we had The Monkeys with The Porpoise Song which is written by Carole King and Jerry Goffin, if you can believe it. And it was performed as a theme song of the monkeys 1968 film Head definitely a trip and we're seeing if you love 60s psychedelia and experimental filmmaking like I do. And the song mainly features Mickey Dolenz on vocals and thanks to Tim of Puerto Montt City Orchestra for that request.
Okay, now did anyone see the Yacht Rock documentary now out on Sky Arts? Well, I did and I've been listening to Yacht Rock playlists ever since all weekend, and Questlove has one that's 51 hours. Anyways when our friend Victor Olteanu in Romania requested this song I just had to play it, and it doesn't need a lot of elaboration as it's a pretty well-known song by one of the best from the genre, and it also has Michael McDonald on backing vocal. Here is Kenny Loggins with Heart to Heart.
The Heavy rainbow remix of Yellow Magic Orchestra's Pocketful of Rainbows from YMO's eighth and final studio album Techno Dawn, released in 1993 when all three members Tsuruchi Sakamoto, Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi had concurrent strong solo careers. And in fact both Sakamoto and Hosono were folding in world music sounds in their solo albums around this time, and it can be heard on this final YMO release, and thank you to Virginia Tsioti in Athens for putting that one on our radar.
Ahead of that, we had Furby, Moskoko and Faber with Halcyon from the Claremont edition series, and that series has been going on since 2020 on Paul Mudd Murphy's Claremont 56 label. It was requested by our friend Tom Torres in Vienna, and the song we heard was Halcyon and that's Danish producer Furby, a close friend of fellow Danes Mike Salta and Peter Visti joining forces with Guy Moskoko and Brian Faber for a gorgeously kaleidoscopic balearic groove for rich and fluttering flute solos simmering disco strings and sun bright electronics.
Ahead of that we had Angel Sky by Izumi Mimi Kobayashi who is one of Japan's leading jazz funk pianists, and she wrote and recorded cult albums with fusion legends at home and abroad, obsessed with new electronic instruments. She penned some of the country's most well-known TV themes. She also pioneered the use of drum machines in anime soundtracks. A star in Japan, Kobayashi moved to Europe to record global hits with Depeche Mode and Swing Out Sister. She toured the world with the Reggae Philharmonic Orchestra, and she also made beats with my friend Tony Mwachukwu from Attica Blues. She's now based in London and she fronts Tokyo Rhythm Band, and Time Capsule Records have lovingly curated an album with some of her most significant tunes called Choice Cuts 1978 to 1983 and you can find out more on their Bandcamp.
Well, we lost another great just yesterday, the American singer-songwriter and pianist Roberta Flack. As a great balladeer, she significantly contributed to the quiet storm radio sound which had a smooth romantic and jazzy sound, in which I've always been a sucker for. She was born in North Carolina and grew up in a large musical family and she used to go to the Baptist Church down the street where she would hear Mahalia Jackson and Sam Cooke singing.
She started playing piano at 9 and got a full scholarship to Howard University at the age of 15, and she eventually changed from piano to voice, she became a teacher herself, and whilst performing in clubs in Washington DC, she was discovered by pianist singer Les McCann. He arranged an audition with Atlantic Records and the rest is history. As a great interpretive singer, her early albums mainly featured covers or songs written by others, and she had number-one hits, but this is one of my personal favourites of hers, and it's one she co-wrote and it's incredibly funky. This is Roberta Flack from her third album Quiet Fire here she is with Go Up Moses.
Roberta Flack with Back Together Again a song she originally did with Donny Hathaway for the second album they did together. And Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway did two albums one in 1972, and the second in 1980 right after Hathaway's passing, in fact he fatally fell from his 15th-floor window after having dinner with Flack. The two were great great friends and professional colleagues, they did so many great songs together including the smash 1972 hit Where is the Love and 1978's The Closer I Get to You and Flack was a great collaborator she also had hits of Peebo Bryson and Maxie Priest, and she was celebrated with the Grammy Awards Lifetime Achievement Award in 2020. She also won several Grammys as well.
Ahead of that we had Roberta Flack once again with Compared to What. It's an overtly political song that highlights women's rights and the concerns of the second wave feminist movement, and also an anti-war sentiment, and that's from her debut album First Take which I believe was probably named because she probably performed everything in one take. She recorded the entire album in 10 hours and she won the Grammy Award for Record of the Year, not the only time she's done that and right from the starting point Flack had hits.
Her debut featured The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face. In fact that was written by folky Ewan McCall for Peggy Seeger, and Roberta's voice also had that kind of folk like quality a pure tonality found in artists like Judy Collins, but Flack also had that elegant soul stylings of you know singers like Dionne Warwick, and you can really hear that on her number one hit Killing Me Softly with this song.
And we started it all off with Roberta Flack's Go Up Moses such a funky tune, and that's from her LP Quiet Fire and Bert Francois is over on the chat group and he said: "Her passing really touched me. My uncle who recently passed was her professor at Howard University and he told me she invited him to hear her perform at a nightclub, and he really enjoyed her performance, and after the show he encouraged her to pursue her singing career". So there you go and also, Roberta Flack also encouraged Luther Vandross to do the same thing, and that just reminds me I watched the Luther Vandross documentary finally Luther: Never Too Much, shed tears, it's absolutely amazing. I mean he did things I didn't even know about like he was on Sesame Street when I was a kid. I can't even believe it's incredible and there's also a documentary about Roberta Flack which Bert told us about I believe it's a PBS documentary as well.
Okay, back to another recently departed American soul great, Gwen McCrae and this next song was requested by Thanos Quatronis, and I'm also sending this one out to David Stoddard and for some of you it may evoke memories of Cassius's French touch classic Feeling For You which sampled it very heavily. It remains a killer record in its own right though, and this time has also been recently reissued. Originally released in 1979, it sees McCrae at her powerful best delivering a potent message to an errant lover over a killer low-slung disco-funk groove, and I should also say DJs and dancers here in the UK really supported McCrae who had hits on the northern soul scene, and she also performed over here and in Europe quite a lot. She recorded for the UK's Rhythm King Records in the late 80s and then recorded an album for British label Homegrown Records in 1996 here is Gwen McCrae with All This Love That I'm Given.
I love love love the original version of Nights Over Egypt by the Jones Girls, but I have to say for a long time I refused to play it, because I heard it so much when I was DJing in the 1990s, we had this like lounge scene you know in downtown Lower East Side in the East Village where me and my friends would DJ, and I would always hear this song, so I just wouldn't play it. But I have to say I absolutely love it. Dexter Wansel of course there, and this is a really great rework by Dr. Soul called the Dr. Soul Giza Dance Floor Re-Therapy, and that was requested by Sue Forrest. I think it's fantastic.
Ahead of that we had an album that's often in my record bag. Hank Crawford's 16th studio album, I Hear a Symphony, released back in 1975 and I usually play sugar-free but Anthony Nabbit asked for Madison Spirit the Power, and that was certainly a very funky offering from the late Memphis Tennessee born saxophonist, pianist, arranger and songwriter. And Crawford goes way back appearing on a B.B. King record back in 1952, and he was also the music director for Ray Charles before he embarked upon his own solo career.
Okay this is Colleen Cosmo Murphy with you on Balearic Breakfast for another half an hour. I'm still cutting out songs trying to fit in all these great requests and tributes just want to let you know about a few gigs that I'm doing. I'll be DJing over at LA Disco Tech at the Albert Hall in Manchester on the 8th of March, and then the following day it's our London Loft Party. So if you would like to join us here in London on a Sunday for seven hours of dancing and music and fun and food, and if you aren't on our mailing list, please email the London Loft at loftparty.org and we'll get back to you. I'll be at Southport Weekender on the 15th of March, and then I'm heading over to Japan for the second half of March where I'll be playing in Sapporo Nagoya Osaka Guma and Tokyo. So really looking forward to that.
And while I'm gone I'm going to have to do a few interviews and mixes, and I'm hoping to get Saucy Lady up. She has a new album called Love Fest on her own label Dippin Records, and is co-produced with her husband Yuki who's a fabulous producer. And she's a real disco sensation, a Japanese woman actually, a Japanese mother, American dad, an American jazz loving dad, and she mainly grew up in Japan but then she moved to Massachusetts where I'm from and stayed there for university, and ended up settling there. And she has done four albums since 2011, and it's really incredible, her new album is again a standout blend of French boogie electro soul, taking fellow producers and performers Derek McKenzie Yam who and Jay Mumford in tow, and it's a slick 40 minutes, so we will have to get her on the show next month. Matt Raystrick requested her up-tempo cover of Surface's Falling In Love, and here it is on Balearic Breakfast.
Oh my god, absolutely smoking stuff from Joe Claussell. And I want to send this one out to you Tomohiro Yamada, because you asked for a different Joe Clausel record which I did download. I was going to play it, and then I went through my promos and found this. I just had to play it, it's going to be a special one-off limited edition 12-inch release for Record Store Day 2025, so you definitely want to queue up for this one. It's the Far-Out Monster Disco Orchestra with a Heidi Vogel on vocals, they're beautiful beautiful song, and it's called Black Sun, and that's Joe Clausel's classic mix. And the far-out monster disco orchestra have been going for over a decade, and they've hosted esteemed members like as a miss Jose Roberto Bertrami and Alex Malheros, and it's an enlisted and an illustrious roster of remixes over the years including John Morales, Theo Parrish, Al Kent, DJ Spinner, and I just love that one from Joe. And gosh that is just absolutely smoking.
Ahead of that we had American soul singer Kenny Lattimore with his 1998 single remix by Masters at work called the Lattimaw soul house remix, and requested by Ana Sancho in Barcelona. And that was a little bit of Virgo musical synchronicity as I've had that record pulled aside for weeks now getting ready for a play. And I just also found out that Lattimore was also married to another great singer Shante Moore for a while, and he is still releasing records and the latest is 2021's here to stay.
Well this is Colleen Cosmo Murphy, and you know I'm here to stay with the show but not on today's show, we only have one more song. I just want to say I just found out that sadly Donald Fagen has just passed away, and we will definitely pay tribute to him on next week's show. Seems like there's a lot of tributes, I guess must be must be my age it's just kind of part of human, the human condition part of life, I'm afraid. And, but yes very very sad news. Again he is featured on the Yacht Rock documentary which is which is excellent you must see it, it's both you know, it also has a lot of fun, but it's also quite serious too and Christopher Cross is quite a fellow. Oh my gosh you know he, he was tripping when he wrote Ride Like The Wind, I always knew why I liked that song but now I know why. Anyways, um yeah, really good documentary, and next week we will pay tribute to Donald Fagen, but we have one more tribute left, and again this is the last one for Gwen McRae.
This one's going out to Chris Lee Steve Wakley and Alex Elliott now. After TK Records collapsed, Gwen McRae moved to New Jersey and she signed with Atlantic Records, and she had a hit with Funky Sensation, and then she later had a minor hit with this next song, so I just love this song. I think it's a beautiful way to end the show and yes, rest in paradise both Roberta Flack and Gwen McRae, also of course Donald Fagen as well. This is Gwen McRae with Keep The Fire Burning and have a wonderful week, and I'll see you next Tuesday.
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