I’m back and I’m scared! After weeks and weeks of touring in a generally freakishly warm America, I arrived in England yesterday evening to Siberian cold. So the flu has ravaged the US in a winter of extremities of hot and cold but did you now about the pandemic in 1918. Tens of millions of […]
Halloween…and as October comes to an end, this will be my last post on the theme of death. There are few smarter talents out there, few more perceptive narrators that can articulate the human condition, the absurdity of life, the rules we pander to and our legacy in death, than the inimitable Roy Harper. On […]
It’s just one of those songs where everything came together at once – the beat, the words, the guitar parts, the guitar sounds, the bass, the sing speak delivery, the attitude, the look. It was a hit – except only America seemed to notice, the song reaching No.38 in the mainstream chart. It was another case […]
Although Lou Reed declared that the lyrics to The Black Angel’s Death Song were without meaning and were just about the sound of the words, it’s the closest that Lou Reed ever got to Bob Dylan with colourful language. Written in 1966 and released in 1967 – at this point Dylan was on his eighth […]
Although it would be their last, Strangeways, Here We Come might just have been The Smiths’ best album and although it follows the formula of Morrissey’s words and melodies over Marr’s concise jangle, there’s something different about it sonically – a maturity. A Rush And A Push And The Land Is Ours opens the album […]
At the end of Public Image Limited’s performance of Death Disco on Top Of The Pops, presenter/DJ Mike Read refers to the band as Johnny, Jah and the boys – one camp baiting the establishment by their mere existence, the other camp not really understanding what they were so angry about and failing to draw […]