Having spent the last few posts on death, death in song, metaphorical death, philosophical death, personal death, yesterday’s shocking news of a mass shooting of innocent people at a concert in Las Vegas and the shock death of one of my musical heroes, Tom Petty, makes musing about poetic death pale into insignificance when real […]
As I sit here in the archive, playing an American copy of The Kinks’ 1967 album Something Else on the Reprise label, I’m in awe at how prolific Ray Davies was as a writer – but on this album it wasn’t just Ray. Although The Kinks first album, released in 1964, had been made up […]
From Aldous Harding to Neil Finn, New Zealand, like Iceland, brings forth more crucial artists than their population might expect. The Verlaines, led since their formation in 1981 by singer songwriter and guitarist Graeme Downes, first appeared as part of the Flying Nun label’s early Double Dunedin EP release that also featured The Chills, Sneaky […]
Scott Walker was born in Hamilton, Ohio, as Noel Scott Engel in 1943. After much moving around the US as a child he found himself in California in the late fifties where an interest in acting and music saw some moderate success culminating in him playing bass as a session musician and as a member […]
Less than a week after I posted about one of my musical heroes, Holger Czukay, he died. It was so disturbing to me having just spent a few days playing his records, talking about him and even suggesting that we should get in contact with him and go and visit him as he lived in […]
Nine hours on a bus from Berlin to Cologne/Bonn airport where Olivia’s Dad Gerd is picking us up. On the bus, a driver that told us we couldn’t eat and only use the loo in an emergency. “No crumbling food” he said in German, “kein krümeliges Essen”. So I provocatively pulled out my cadbury’s flake […]