Just Another Social Profile Really

There must be something in the air tonight – Jane Copland posted on Facebook that Uptown Girl was the #1 record in New Zealand when she was born, and The Guardian has a short piece about a track of Joel’s from the 70s called Souvenir. It was whilst watching a video of Souvenir, a track [...]

Well, music’s a funny old game, as Jimmy Grieves might have said. Last year I wrote that Coldplay hadn’t done anything decent since their second album. I also wrote that I thought the Odd Gang Future Wolf Gang Kill Them Alll collective were a horrible shower of idiotic nihilists whom I had no intention of [...]

Well, that’s 2011 more or less wrapped up. Where the bloody hell it went, I have no idea, but, as I do most years, I thought I’d finish it by wrapping up my favourite albums of the year. Now, I should probably add at this point that, because I’m no longer a teenager who buys [...]

I can’t decide whether I love or hate Devlin’s cover version of The Jam’s classic track Town Called Malice. As anyone who knows me, or has ever seen my last.fm profile will know, I think Paul Weller is an absolute genius, and one of the best British musicians of the last 30 years. In fact [...]

Facebook’ made a big push into music last night, but I still tend to head to YouTube when I’m looking for a bit of serendipitous discovery/reminiscing. And today it didn’t disappoint. There are a lot of great things celebrating 20th anniversaries this year: Primal Scream’s Screamadelica, Massive Attack’s Blue Lines, Nirvana’s Nevermind, my GCSE results. [...]

So, he didn’t win the Mercury, though I think he should have done. But he is playing in Dublin next week (I’m going!) and he’s done this rather lovely accoustic version of the, excellent, Us Against Whatever Ever, from the equally excellent début Peanut Butter Blues & Melancholy Jam, for something called The Secret Sessions, which I’ve not [...]

As I said the other day, and again since, I’ve been thoroughly disappointed by Watch The Throne, the album by the (supposed) hip hop dream team of Jay Z and Kanye West. It’s the sound of millionaires coasting, phoning in an album for lulz, recycling their best work and devaluing it in the process. It’s [...]

Whilst my grand plan to hit shuffle on my iPod every day, and then to write about the first track to come along, didn’t last much past the new year, I have been using shuffle a lot recently. But rather than finding individual tracks, I’m using it to hit upon whole albums I can listen [...]

It’s been a funny old week, as the saying almost goes. Last Friday I was visiting the UK, and spent a very enjoyable hour or two sipping ice cold lager in the roof garden of a pub in Wimbledon. 3 days later I was watching the city I called home for most of the last [...]

Many of the news reports on the, horrifically tragic & sad, death of Amy Winehouse will undoubtedly mention the thing that first popped into my mind when I read of it on the cover of today’s Observer: She’s another victim of the curse of 27. Because Winehouse, like Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, Jimi [...]