Balearic Breakfast | Episode 247 | Everlasting Sacred Grounds...

Colleen 'Cosmo' Murphy broadcast the 247th episode of Balearic Breakfast on her Mixcloud on November 18th 2025.

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ABOUT THIS EPISODE

On August 3, 1990, President of the United States George H. W. Bush declared the month of November as National American Indian Heritage Month (You can find more information on the dedicated website, here), and of course, there would be no Balearic Breakfast if we didn't celebrate it all together musically (and I think it's the first time we celebrate Native Americans on the show, although we did pay tribute to the late Chris Faiumu a few months ago). Our Captain love these shows just as much as we do, we always come together stronger whenever we celebrate black prople, gay friends, female pioneers... All of these people made strong contributions to Music as Music always served their battles in the best possible of ways...

Today's episode has that grandeur, it was a relaxed musical moment, with a very slow and nice rhythmic evolution, allowing the listenner to dive into the music and let his mind wander on these everlasting sacred grounds...

On the chat, we were all talking about the music – with Bert sharing with us "FYI: The Native American Music Association Hall of Fame has a great source of native american heritage artists" – and Barry sharing his Friend's Instagram (kwadepatton) – more about his artwork on his website, here – and we also exchanged about some places to see! Our friend Barry recommended to visit the black hills in South Dakota, saying "The drive through Custer state park is amazing. Free roaming buffalo and mountain goats". In any case, the chat was a warm place to be today, despite some dropouts in the audio with Mixcloud ultimately and unexpectedly crashing here in France right during the last song of the show!

This morning’s Balearic Breakfast is now up on my Mixcloud and today’s show is mainly your requests which includes a set dedicated to Native American Heritage Month. Thank you for your song suggestions – there are a lot of great stories surrounding these songs and artists and I’ll be digging more into the music of R. Carlos Nakai and the Halluci Nation over the next week – that’s for sure.

So, I listened back to last week’s radio show and I certainly talked a lot! I guess there was quite a bit that I needed to get off my chest. There’s a lot going on in the world – both positive and negative – and at the end of the day, we’re just trying to keep it together and music and community can help us do just that.

Next week will be the Balearic Breakfast Thanksgiving Special and the request line will go up on my socials on Saturday. Until then, try to keep your head above water and thanks for listening.

Listen back to the 247th episode of Balearic Breakfast:

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THE PLAYLIST

(2008) R. Carlos Nakai – Song of Darkness

(1971) Jim Pepper – Witchitai-To

(1994) Robbie Robertson – The Ghost Song

(1967) Jimi Hendrix – Little Wing

(1971) Link Wray – Fire and Brimstone

(2005) Willie Nelson – The Harder They Come

(1973) Redbone – Clouds in my Sunshine

(2013) The Halluci Nation – Look at This (Remix)

(2025) Random House Project – Opus for One (A Tribute)

(2006) Massive Attack ft. Terry Callier – Live with Me

(2025) Mohinder Kaur Bhamra – Mainu Apne Pyar Wich (Mystic Jungle Remix)

(TBR) Lovetempo ft. Mattison – Wanna Be with You (Turbotito Remix)

(2025) Eric Hilton ft Natalia Clavier – Lost in the Light

(1990) Julee Cruise – 'Rockin' Back Inside My Heart (Tibetan 12-inch Remix)

(2023) Sweet Reaction – Take It Easy

(1979) Discotheque – Disco Special

(2025) Emma-Jean Thackray – Thank You for the Day

(2012) Elements of Life ft Josh Milan – Children of the World (Roots Mix)

(2025) Gledd – Move Me

(2025) Close Counters – I'll Be There For You

(1978) Willie Nelson – Stardust

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ANNOUNCEMENTS

(from Colleen's presentation)

Our next London Loft Party will be held on the 7th of December, and reservations are going very quickly as it seems everyone loves the new Riverside venue in Hackney Wick. If you want to join us, head over to loftparty.org, and you can hop on the Friendship Train tab and enter your name into our mailing list, as the next invitation goes out this week, so please do it soon.

(...)

Next week is a Thanksgiving special on Balearic Breakfast, and we can interpret Thanksgiving beyond just the implications of the American holiday, although, you know, it is great to get together with friends and family. When the request line goes up this week, let's focus on songs about gratitude for the gift of being alive, gratitude for other people, and any other songs by Native American musicians are also welcome, songs about food, whatever Thanksgiving means to you, regardless of where you're from.

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ABOUT THE SONGS

(from Colleen's presentation)

Song of Darkness by R. Carlos Nakai, a Native American, flautist of Navajo and Ute heritage, and Nakai's father served as the chairman of the Navajo Nation from 1963 to 1970. As a child, he would audition tapes for a Navajo language radio show hosted by his parents, and in doing so, he heard a recording of William Horn Cloud, a Lakota musician from the Pine Ridge Reservation, playing the flute. But when he enrolled at the Colorado River Indian Reservation High School, he was assigned brass instruments, and he played those for years until a car accident made it impossible for him to continue brass.

And after a brief struggle with drugs, he was given a flute, and since that time, he has released more than 50 albums, and he's collaborated with many musicians, including Philip Glass. He has 11 Grammy nominations, and I'll be digging into his music a lot more. In fact, I was listening to a lot of it this morning, and it would make a great soundtrack for our Thanksgiving dinner, and to recognize and honor America's Indigenous founders, and thank you to Rick Van Veen for that request.

This next one from Alex Elliott. It's by the late American saxophonist Jim Pepper, who was of Kaw and Muskogee descent, and his career took off in the late 60s as a pioneer of jazz fusion, and his band Free Spirits with the late guitarist Larry Correll. Pepper also wove Native American music in with jazz, and he played at powwows and supported the AIM, the American Indian Movement, a grassroots movement founded in 1968 to address the systemic issues of poverty, discrimination, and police brutality experienced by Native Americans.

  The saxophonist's debut album, Pepper's Powwow, opened with this next song he learned from his grandfather, and is derived from a peyote, from a peyote ceremony of the Native American church. Jim Pepper with Wichitai-To.

Robbie Robertson from this 1994 album Music for the Native Americans. We heard The Ghost Song, and that's from a compilation album with music by the former leader of the band and the Bob Dylan guitarist, along with other colleagues billed as the Red Road Ensemble, and the album was sort of a soundtrack for a TV documentary of the same name. Robertson was of Native American heritage.

His mother was Cayuga, a Mohawk, and grew up on the Six Nations of the Grand River Reservation in Ontario, Canada, and that's where a young Robbie spent his summers, where he was exposed to Indigenous culture and music, and he reflected this in both his music for the Native Americans and also on his score for his long-term friend and collaborator, director Martin Scorsese's film Killers of the Moonflower, I think it's called. The Ghost Song was requested by Gina Lapsley, and I'm also sending it out to Carl Banatov, who asked for Somewhere Down the Crazy River, but I've played that before, Carl, so sending that one out to you as well.

Little Wing by The Jimi Hendrix Experience from their second album, Acts as Bold as Love, as requested by Artur in Paris, and Hendrix, of course, is one of the world's most influential guitarists of all time, and he was of both African-American and Cherokee descent. The Cherokee descent was from his paternal grandmother's side, who told him Native American stories and made him clothes inspired by her Cherokee roots.

And here's an interesting tidbit. As you know, Hendrix's career was launched in the UK, and he was signed to a British record label, Track Records, and he told them he wanted a record cover that expressed his Indian heritage rather than saying Native American, and the Brits interpreted that as culture from India, and that's why the album cover is inspired by Hinduism with the god Vishnu. And Hendrix didn't get final approval of the album cover, which is shocking, and there was a lot of controversy around the cover when the album was released.

Ahead of that, we heard a request from John Weir for Link Wray, his track Fire and Brimstone, from his self-titled 1971 LP, and on this album, the late pioneering guitarist adopted more of a country rock sound to better illustrate the songs that depicted the hardships of Wray's early life as a poor Shawnee child in the Deep South. This included living in mud huts without electricity and heating, going to school barefoot, and having to hide out from the Ku Klux Klan. Wray had a few songs named after Indigenous people, Shawnee, Comanche, and his big hit Apache.

A request of mine for a cover of Jimmy Cliff's The Harder They Come by Willie Nelson from his superb album Countryman, which I was drawn to not only because of the pot leaf grace in the album cover, but also because it showcases Nelson's deep love of reggae, and I should also say Nelson's counterparts in Jamaica also covered a lot of country songs, too. Nelson's mother, Merle Greenhaw, was predominantly Cherokee, and she was quite a strong and fierce woman, as I recently discovered when I read a biography of Willie Nelson a few months ago. He has certainly had an eventful life, and for a pothead, incredibly productive.

He's released over 150 albums, he's been in nearly 30 films, he's won 12 Grammys out of the 57 nominations he's received, amongst so many other awards, and he's just a fascinating man with an incredibly emotive voice.

Ahead of that, Clouds in My Sunshine from the album Wovoko by Redbone, a band that formed in Los Angeles in the late 1960s, and all of the members were of Mexican American and Native American heritage. Now, you may remember they had a massive hit with Come and Get Your Love. I've played that on the show before, but you may not know they were also banned a few years later with their song We Were Wounded at Wounded Knee, as earlier that year, Oglala Lakota activists and members of the American Indian movement occupied Wounded Knee, South Dakota, and demanded the U.S. government comply with the U.S. 19th and early 20th century treaties, and sending that song out to F. Lauren in Canada and Ana Sancho in Barcelona.

Look at this by The Halluci Nation. They rename themselves after going as a tribe called Red, and that's a duo comprised of Bear Witness from the Cayuga First Nation tribe, and Tim Toolman Hule, a Mohawk of the Six Nations of the Grand River, and they name themselves the, rename themselves The Halluci Nation, a great name, to reflect the evolution of their music and mission, which blends electronic music with elements of First Nation music. Some even call it powwow step.

This year, The Halluci Nation became the first independent Indigenous artist from North America to reach 100 plus million streams on Spotify, so they probably made 10 bucks, and John Boakum recommended Look at This, which was released back in 2013, and you can find the releases through to today on Bandcamp.

This next one landed in my inbox at the same time that my friend Kay McMahon requested it. It's a little bit of musical synchronicity, so I have no choice but to actually play it, and thankfully it's great. It's a new one from Random House Project, just released on his Bandcamp in the last week. His Opus for one (A tribute) to the art of noise on Balearic Breakfast.

Before that, Massive Attack with the late jazz folk soul singer Terry Callier with Live With Me, a track from Massive Attack's 2006 compilation album Collected, and Callier won a United Nations Peace Award for his musical promotion of peace, and Massive Attack are continuing, actually amplifying their political messages, raising climate awareness, voicing their support of the Palestinian people, and speaking out against the censorship of artists, and thank you to Barry Bernitz for that request. And Barry Bernitz lives in the very politically charged Washington, D.C. as well. Goodness me, politics. Well, let's lighten up a bit more with some good music, some music that might take us away.

Ahead of that, Mohinder Kaur Bamra with Mainu Apne Pyar Wich, I hope I got that right, which is the second single from Naya Beat's reissue of an astonishing lost Holy Grail, the first British Asian electronic dance music album ever recorded, and that is Mohinder Kaur Bambra's 1982 masterpiece, Punjabi Disco.

Now there's an interesting story behind that album. The concept for a Punjabi Disco album was subsequently stolen from the Bambras by the very record label that had agreed to distribute the album, and eventually they self-released it with no label support, and Punjabi Disco became a lost relic, unknown to even the deepest of diggers, but not anymore thanks to Naya Beat.

And we heard a remix by Mystic Jungle, who is Dario Di Pace, a central figure in the Neapolitan sound, and that was requested by Susan Chan in New Jersey, who says that is her celebratory request for last week's election outcome in the USA, and I'm sending lots of applause for that.

The solo project of Brooklyn's Maddie Safer, the singer and guitarist from The Rapture, and Lovetempo also features Safer's band Poolside, and the song we just heard, Wanna Be With You, features 79.5's Kate Madison on vocals, and we just heard the remix by Turbotito, who is doing some great Balearic groovers at the moment, including ones for DJ Supermarket's Too Slow to Disco label. And thank you to Matt Raistrick for that request.

This next band is from Washington, D.C., if I remember correctly, Thievery Corporation, definitely the darlings of all things balleric, and one-half Eric Hilton is back with a new song called Lost in the Light, composed exclusively for the Cafe Del Mar, and it features the ethereal vocals of Natalia Clavier, a frequent Thievery Corporation collaborator, and it's really warm and wonderful, so perhaps it'll make you feel as though you're watching the sun set on the White Isles. So come on, close your eyes, and just do it as you listen to this.

Julee Cruise with Rockin' Back Inside My Heart, which was written by David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti, and was featured on the late singer's debut, Floating Into the Night, released in 1989, and she also performed that song on Twin Peaks. And I remember I lived in midtown Manhattan in the early 90s, and she lived in the same building. I remember seeing her on the elevator, and one time she couldn't talk.

She was just, you know, had some kind of throat thing where she had to really be careful of her voice, and she was just miming the whole time. In any case, we also sadly lost Julee Cruise back in 2022 during the pandemic as well. That was a remix, a song that we heard, Rockin' Back Inside My Heart. It was a Tibetan 12-inch remix by Greg Ski Royal, and definitely had a very distinct white-lines bass line. And thank you to Asi Sharabi for that request.

A request from Steve Wakley for Take It Easy by Sweet Reaction, which was recently reissued on South African label VoomVoom Records with some remixes, and singer-keyboardist Giuseppe Cotomachio was a central figure of that 1980s band, Sweet Reaction, and they released only one album. It was more of a five-track EP, also called Take It Easy, and you can head over to VoomVoom's Bandcamp to find out more.

Ahead of that, a duo studio project called Discoteque, and they released one album called Disco Tech Party in the year that you would expect, 1979, and the duo was comprised of Dutch producer Bart van der Laar and Belgian musician-songwriter Francis Veyer, who also went by Francis Goya. And a big thank you to David Stoddard for that, for unearthing that obscurity and sharing it with us.

The incredibly multi-talented musician, songwriter, singer, and producer, Emma Jean Thackray with Thank You for the Day, from her latest album, Weirdo, on Brownswood Recordings, and she's just sensational. She gets better and better as she grows, and she's also playing this Thursday at Coco and London, and if you want to find out more about her, there's an interview with her by Tina Edwards for a Classic Album Sunday series called Producer Pioneers, and you can find it on the CAS website. And thank you to A.J. Elliott for that request.

I'm loving this request from our friend Bert Francois in Brooklyn, who requested some uplifting soulful house courtesy of Louis Vega's Elements of Life outfit, featuring Josh Milan, formerly of Blaze. Here is the Roots mix of their 2012 single Children of the World on Balearic Breakfast.

Ahead of that, Italian producer Gledd with Move Me, which just came out this week on Seamus Haji's label Big Love, and I heard it first on Saturday. I was listening to a bunch of promos and promptly played it the same night. It sounded fabulous in the Globus Room at Tresor, and thanks to all who joined us in the Globus Room, and to Tony Surgeon for bringing me back. I love playing in that room. It's a great sounding room, has a wooden down floor as well, and I can play anything I want. I really, really love it.

Melbourne, Australia's Close Counters with I'll Be There For You, and that's from their new album Lovers Dance Academy, as requested by Kieran McCann in Glasgow. And Close Counters is Finn Reese and Alan McConnell, and they're performing around Australia over the next couple of weeks, so check out their band camp for more info.

It's a request from Athanas Koutronis for the title cut of Willie Nelson's 22nd studio album, released in 1978. Reminder, he has released 150 albums. The album Stardust, produced by Booker T. Jones, and which features Willie's covers of 10 of his favorite songs from childhood. And here is the redheaded stranger with his cover of Hoagy Carmichael's Stardust. Thank you for listening.