Hi,
I gotta go with Leif and Keith on this.
I'd give 'Joshua Fought The Battle of Jericho' a C to a C- (and an F for
laziness!). I thought the guitar playing and melody wwere dull as
dishwater. It's as if he said: "I ain't gonna give one of my better songs to
charity; I'll give them another stinker like I did with 'Mistakes' and
'Leaves' for the Japanese Earthquake Relief cd. That nut, Richard Lloyd,
thinks my melodies and playing suck ... well wait until he gets a load of
this one!".
The scary thing is, according to a link Claudia sent this summer, and which
shows a photo of Television's set-list scrawled in Verlaine's handwriting,
Television played this song ('Jericho') either in Sao Paulo or Porto Algre,
Brazil in July. Maybe 'live' he re-arranged it a lot. (As a general rule,
I think Tom should stay as far away as possible from African Spirituals (or
R& B/Soul) covers; it's just not his thing/world. When you look up the
definition of 'Caucasian' in the dictionary (or internet) it's got a picture
of a young Tom with his almost pasty, pale, white skin and a gangly bag of
bones. I am not being racist or disrespectful; Tom is just the polar
opposite of black soul music and that's partially a back-handed complement.)