Another chance to enjoy this smooth and spreadable Lazy Sunday post, smothered thickly on toast by Martpol... In recent years there has been a proliferation of products that you didn’t know your body needed (or more specifically, that women didn’t know their bodies needed). Barely a week goes by without the discovery ... Read More...
Pop/Rock/Jazz/Folk
In honour of Mod cyclist Bradley Wiggins, we go back to the sixties... Our lugubrious new bicycling hero Bradley Wiggins (above, with Paul Weller and designer Paul Smith) is an interesting character for a number of reasons, not least his self-identification as a Mod, with the haircut to prove it. The ... Read More...
Few pop songs can bear too much reality when it comes to sexual politics. Here are four that tell it like it is... Boy meets girl, is happy. Boy loses girl, is sad. And reverse the genders. With those four plots you’ve covered most pop, which as a genre doesn’t tend ... Read More...
Exploring one of pop’s strangest sub-genres, the spoken word hit… Commenting on my post about the deeply strange Peggy Lee hit Is That All There Is?, Worm laments the dying out of spoken word recordings. And indeed the Golden Age of the pop recitative does seem to be long gone. Let's go ... Read More...
On this Jubilee weekend, an eclectic musical mix with a royal theme… “I was there at the Coronation” claims Young Tiger in his 1953 Calypso hit and to back up this claim the Trinidadian lists the things he saw at the ceremony in painstaking detail. There’s a pleasing McGonagallishness to the ... Read More...
Pop this week, as Brit unleashes a quintet of songs in which everything is louder than everything else… One recent Sunday morning I caught the above song by Ren Harvieu on Radio 2 (Aled Jones’ programme, I often listen to it on the way to my weekly 5-a-side matches, his mix ... Read More...
Something a bit different this week, as Brit examines the genealogy of a deathless folk song… The above bit of Japanese bootleggery is, as far as I can gather, Bob Dylan’s first ever television appearance, on a curious show called ‘Folk Songs and More Folk Songs’ broadcast in the US in ... Read More...
"You buy a bag of peanuts in this town, you get a song written about you"... This week Brit considers the musical legacy of Orson Welles’ masterpiece Citizen Kane... The gloriously awful singer Florence Foster Jenkins, as featured in Mahlerman’s post about unserious music, put me in mind of the opera scene ... Read More...
We appear to be growing a weekly beard feature. Today Daniel Kalder combs through some notable beards from the world of popular music. Last week Susan offered us a fine post on Biblical beards. Among the images selected to illustrate the text was a photo of Billy Gibbons, lead guitarist for ... Read More...
Earlier this month the world’s greatest living Welshman turned 70. Fellow (albeit northern) Celt Daniel Kalder pays tribute. John Cale is 70. But this does not make him a joke. He never seemed young, nor was his art inspired by adolescent desire or angst, unlike most rockers. Even in the Velvet ... Read More...
