To mark his one hundredth Dabble, Mahlerman selects four pieces to provide unexpected pleasure... Glancing languidly at the post-scorecard the other day, I noticed that this would be my one-hundredth essay for Lazy Sunday*, and armed with that uninteresting fact I determined to give myself a treat and, instead of casting ... Read More...

Contrary to popular opinion, Frank Sinatra made some of his most interesting records well into his 'September years', argues Seamus Sweeney... The conventional wisdom holds that Sinatra was, musically, most interesting in the mid-1950s; his collaborations with arranger Nelson Riddle and, to a slightly lesser extent, Billy May produced the classic albums which have ... Read More...

The first Wikiworm of 2014 gets the year started with a wikipedia article about some hard-rockin' crimes against language... A metal umlaut (also known as röck döts) is a gratuitously or decoratively used accent over letters in the names of hard rock or heavy metal bands. Among English speakers, the use ... Read More...

Douglas muses on life, death and the meaning of Lou Reed ... You might have mistaken the cars out the window for lumps of sugar. A series of winter storms had come down from the Gulf of Alaska and dropped enough snow on Seattle to enforce a five-day hibernation. Queen Anne ... Read More...

This was one of John Lennon's pranks that had passed me by; sounds like the sort of thing that Russell Brand would like. Today's Wikiworm uncovers an early example of studenty idealism... Bagism is a term which was created by John Lennon and Yoko Ono as part of their peace campaign ... Read More...

What is the worst opening line to a song ever written? I’ll submit this from Suede’s Savoir Faire (1999): She live in a house, she stupid as a mouse. That epigram was penned by the band’s frontman Brett Anderson, and it pains me to mention it because, aside from Mervyn Peake and ... Read More...

This week Mahlerman celebrates the great Gallic songwriters... Words;  whatever happened to them in popular music?  And why was I shocked a few moments ago, hearing the 'song' that is currently topping the charts?  Talk Dirty by Jason Derulo has sold 160,000 copies in the last seven days.  The second verse ... Read More...

Speak, memory! It is a late afternoon in late summer in Southsea, and a ten-year old boy is in the hallway on hands and knees refereeing a tight football match between two teams of miscellaneous action figurines. An easy sunlight flows through the window in the kitchen where his father ... Read More...

Mali may be economically impoverished, but as Toby Ash explains, it is musically wonderfully rich... I have quite an extensive collection of world music, but only recently did I notice that the majority of the African tracks were by Malian artists. Why Mali? To be honest I’m not completely sure. There ... Read More...

Toby Ash serves up a mezze of Middle Eastern musical delights... There is only one starting point to any post on Arab music and that’s Egypt and the ‘Star of the East’ Umm Kulthum, who is widely lauded as the greatest Arab singer of the twentieth century. Born the daughter of an ... Read More...