A 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 […]
From 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, […]
How 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 – […]
Imagine 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 […]
As 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, […]
Lynnrd Skynrd‘s Sweet Home Alabama had two things going for it (more than many songs): A riff to launch a thousand ships, and an authenticity that was carved into the song by both its lyrics and delivery. Its two-fingered salute to Neil Young was just part of it. This song stood on its own merits, […]
In the same year that Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel topped the album charts with Bridge over troubled waters, Gil Scott Heron recorded his debut album A New Black Poet – Small Talk at 125th and Lenox. The difference couldn’t be more stark, both in terms of outlook and reception. Simon and Garfunkel were at the […]
Irish poet, Patrick Kavanagh, put his finger on it when he wrote in his 1950’s poem Advent, ‘We have tested and tasted too much lover, through a chink too wide comes in no wonder’. Experience too much of something, and you become immune to its splendour. So, it should come as no surprise that it’s […]
The Rolling Stones have, with a few honourable exceptions (sympathy for the devil, and perhaps Street Fighting Man), had very little of consequence to say over their lengthy career. It’s the skill and swing with which they’ve presented their unbearably light offerings that has made them one of the greatest rock n’roll bands of all […]
I’m a fence-sitter (as painful as that may be, literally and metaphorically) when it comes to the dread argument about Politics in music. Like most things in life, it all depends on how it’s done. When you forget the primacy of the song, whilst evangelising, you’d be better off – and equally effective, which is […]
