Comeback Girl – Republic of Loose
Thursday, December 4th, 2008Paraphrase the famous ‘I may not like what you say, but I’ll fight to the death to defend your right to say it’ into ‘I think your sexual politics are more than a little dodgy, you look unpleasant (and decidedly unwashed), but you’re the first Irish band in history to whose music you can imagine [...]
How She Threw It All Away – The Style Council
Friday, November 14th, 2008What really grabs attention in this belated companion piece to The Jam’s penultimate single The Bitterest Pill (I Ever Had To Swallow), is just how little they have in common. In late 1982 as The Jam’s closing chapter saw them feted as real deal pop stars for the only time, an acrid sarcastic dirge was license for [...]
Khawuleza – Miriam Makeba
Friday, November 14th, 2008It’s one of those ironies, that I was given a collection of Miriam Makeba’s music just last week - that is to say, a week before the South African artist died, suffering a heart-attack after having sung at a solidarity concert for Italian author Roberto Saviano (who is living under escort, after the Neopolitan mafia [...]
Warm Wet Circles – Marillion
Friday, October 24th, 2008A friend once decided on a whiskey drinking project as a new year’s resolution. She decided she would sample a different whiskey each week through the year. More a gift than a resolution for many, but for her it was an arduous task, given that she didn’t particularly like whiskey. Her thinking was far from [...]
I’m Going Left – Syreeta Wright
Thursday, October 16th, 2008From a vast melting pot, its intensity so bewildering Fritz Lang may just be forced to gasp, a proud nightingale tired of the “Oh she’s Stevie Wonder’s lyricist isn’t she?” rhetoric rises, arms thurst wide, eyes glowing, messianic to the frickin’ hilt. This sleek slender Sappho like spectre hovers above sardine tin Northern Soul dancefloors, [...]
Songs for the Credit Crunch
Sunday, October 5th, 2008A couple of years ago I heard novelist Ian McEwan talking about his novel Saturday, lamenting the fact that work doesn’t crop up in novels these days. Characters do everything in the modern novel, other than work – or if they do, there’s no particular detail paid to the minutiae of their trade, unless, of [...]
Alan McGhee can’t see Biffy Clyro
Thursday, October 2nd, 2008How many albums have Oasis released since What’s the Story Morning Glory? The correct answer here is ‘ who cares? they’ve all been shit’. Alan McGee, founder of creation records and the man who pushed Oasis into the spotlight in the first place is convinced that their latest album is (finally) worth listening to – [...]
ELO – Mr Blue Sky
Wednesday, October 1st, 2008Imagine the scene: The revolutionary court stands to order as its three women judges enter. There’s a tension in the air, the atmosphere is electric, as the accused stands in all his fuzzy-faced glory. There was a time in the mid-eighties when all you could hear on the radio had his reverbed vocals, and now [...]
Love Is Hell – Ryan Adams
Thursday, September 25th, 2008As I write, September 25th seems like it’s going to be a long long day. Far too much of what makes the ”average” shrink tick occupies my own allotment of infinity, where laboured breathing buffs up a damp silvery fog incumbent of what should be Thursday. Not for the first time, and most certainly not for the last, [...]
