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...
Pop/Rock/Jazz/Folk
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...
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...
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...
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...
This Lazy Sunday it's time to pull the duvet up tight and get cosy and warm, as Worm casts us adrift on the dark and stormy waters of the North Atlantic... In 1967, a couple of twitchers on a jaunt to the Hebrides to look for migratory arctic birds were met ... Read More...
This week's Lazy Sunday is brought to you by Frank Key, and you're either going to love it or hate it... There is a small number of musicians we might categorise as “polarisers”, those who provoke the passions. Those who like them really like them, love them to the point of ... Read More...
As the autumn leaves fall, here's Martpol with an injection of musical dejection... Sometimes Sundays require music that is upbeat and rescues you from the whole work-next-day gloom. But more often for me, they are about the kind of quiet, tender music that can soothe you as much as it breaks ... Read More...
Some greats of gospel, soul, jazz and teen melodrama this week, with the music that inspired Amy Winehouse... In 2006, just a few months before she hit the big time (and subsequent triumphs and disasters) with the terrific Back to Black album, the late Amy Winehouse travelled to to Dingle, a ... Read More...
