Magnet and Paul Giovanni’s “Gently Johnny” from The Wicker Man Soundtrack: Songs for A Year In The Country 1/26

It seems rather appropriate to begin this yearly cycle of Songs for A Year In The Country with a visit to Summerisle via this song which conjures a sense of a timeless and atemporal world…

 

Links:

• Stream “Gently Johnny” at Spotify
• The soundtrack on CD at Silva Screen’s site
• “The Wicker Man Soundtrack and a Summer Isle Mini-Industry” post at the A Year In The Country site

 

Notes on Songs for A Year In The Country:

This is the first of 26 songs for A Year In The Country, which is a sort of Desert Island Discs but with 26 songs rather than eight, so effectively one posted per fortnight throughout this year.

The selection will include some of the songs that I find myself repeatedly returning to, ones that I’d “save from the waves” or bundle up to take into the storm shelter if a Wizard of Oz-esque twister appeared on the horizon.

Some “rules”:

1. No songs by or featuring myself or any of the other contributors to the A Year In The Country albums (more on those another time perhaps…)
2. No TV intro sequence theme tunes etc that haven’t been commercially released on record, CD, streaming services etc.
3. One song per artist.
4. Only one version of a song and only one appearance by each performer.
5. All songs must be available to listen on the various mainstream streaming and download services (Spotify in particular but hopefully they’ll also be available at Apple Music, Deezer etc).
6. One image per song, which will be the relevant cover art.
7. Reflecting the cycle/weeks of the year, each post will include no more than 52 words on each song.

For ease and simplicity I will post the links to stream the tracks on Spotify. However, as “they” say, other streaming services are available…