Was there really a Golden Age of pop music? Yes, argues Brit. It was circa 1950 (or possibly earlier) to the present day... Three weeks ago Mahlerman asked whether classical music was dead. Interestingly, people ask the same question about pop music with far more frequency and surely much less reason. In ... Read More...
Lazy Sunday Afternoon
Dabbler music
With the Grammy Awards imminent, Mahlerman casts his eye over the nominees and identifies the gems amid the dross... Next Sunday at the Staples Center in Los Angeles the Rapper LL Cool J will host the 55th Grammy Awards, the annual bean feast set-up in 1959 by the National Academy of ... Read More...
Rootsy railwaymen and a bellyful of lead - a look at some of the artists that made Van Morrison... A previous Lazy Sunday post entitled Amy’s Other Voices looked at the musical influences on the late Amy Winehouse, and a comment from Susan prompted me to do the same for that ... Read More...
Mahlerman gives us a tour d'horizon of the serious music scene in 2013, and he pulls no punches... Or is it just dying, very slowly, and the priest is on the way? Writing this in the shadow of the closure, after more than 90 years, of the HMV music chain (following ... Read More...
This week the London Underground celebrated its 150th anniversary, so to mark the occasion here are four Tube Station songs... I love the Tube (except, of course, the Central Line at rush hour) and have done since I was a child and first grasped the elegant logic of Harry Beck’s map. ... Read More...
From his base in Andalucia (aka Eastenders-on-Sea), Mahlerman's thoughts turn to birdsong and its influence on great music... Close to where I live in London, the gentrification of the old East End continues apace, and if Doug and Dinsdale Piranha were spreading their reign of terror today, they would discover that ... Read More...
Tired of Wizzard and Cliff? Here’s some alternative festive fare…. Scientific studies show that nobody can bear to listen to any of the standard Christmas pop hits (Slade, Band Aid etc) after 9am on Boxing Day. But here we are, still in bloody Christmas, so what to do on a musical ... Read More...
An early Christmas present, from Mahlerman... Working in and around Notre Dame (Paris) from the middle 12th Century were a group of composers who came to be known as the Notre Dame School of Polyphony - polyphony being, briefly, a style of composition employing two, or more, simultaneous but relatively independent ... Read More...
This week: Makeba, Masakela and two giants of Cape Jazz... As Andrew Marr noted in his recent, erm, ambitious History of the World, everyone on the planet can trace their DNA back to a single woman in Africa. Humanity’s most recent common matrilineal ancestor is known as Mitochondrial Eve (sadly she ... Read More...
The world has been robbed of too much great music, says Mahlerman... Back around Christmas of 2010, I posted on a quartet of composers (Gershwin, Bizet, Schubert and Mendelssohn) who had achieved greatness, immortality some would say, but left us with the burning sense that, had they lived for just a ... Read More...
