Just Another Social Profile Really

This is wonderful. It’s a lovely, lilting drum & bass track. No great surprises there, lots of drum & bass is lovely & lilting. But it’s made up, in large part, from little snippets of sound effects and speech from the Pixar film Monsters Inc. It’s by a guy known as Pogo and reminds me slightly [...]

As I’ve said before, I’ve never been a huge Beastie Boys fan, in terms of buying their albums and listening to them all the way through, repeatedly. But a huge number of their songs have a large hold on my heart, and I’m guessing that there are plenty of people like me who will have [...]

I’ll keep this one short. So, Gilles Peterson, second show on BBC 6Music. Sixth track of the afternoon, a restrained, slow-building house remix of Stevie Wonder’s funk classic Superstition. The remix is by Obol, who I don’t know much about other than the fact that he likes remixing things, and he’s from Switzerland. I don’t often [...]

So, last Saturday saw Gilles Peterson’s first show on the wonderful 6Music, and it was great. Rambling, sprawling, diverse and, most importantly, oozing with a self-evident love of music, it covered everything from David Bowie to Paul Weller, Dr. John to Jamie xx, Quantic to Dinosaur L, and even a weird little cover of The [...]

The two people who have probably had the most influence on the music I listen to are John Peel and Gilles Peterson: Peel switched me on to the likes of The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays, Peterson to a whole world of jazz, soul & everything in between. He’s been given a new show on [...]

I’ve written before about DJ DSK (AKA my old flatmate from Sydney, Nick). And I’ve written about Eric B. & Rakim before. Well, now my Nick/DJ DSK has got together with a rapper called Mystro to do an homage to the Eric B. & Rakim classic I Know You Got Soul. It’s excellent in many [...]

First post for a long time, and I thought I’d fall back on my old friend, Hunch FM. 5th song in, was this, Daydream Believer, possibly one of the most perfect pieces of pop music ever recorded. They may have been made for TV, but The Monkees best material is an entirely different ‘product’ to [...]

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 [...]