Just Another Social Profile Really

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 [...]

Well, #shfl11 finally seems to be doing what I’d hoped it would: introducing me to music I have never encountered before, despite it being on my iPod. Today, Happy People by Brass Construction, which is certainly the worst band name we’ve had so far, and possibly one of the worst names ever. According to Wikipedia [...]

Well, after the obscurity of yesterday’s #shfl11 entry comes a song that I know very well, and love even more. James Brown was, arguably, one of the two or three most influential musicians of the last 50 years, if not the entire 20th Century. He essentially created a new genre, funk, and did for black [...]

Well, it really is turning into a rather wonderful summer here in Blighty, isn’t it?And so, to celebrate that fact, I thought I’d post a slice of summer gold and was going to do just that with D’Angelo’s cover of Roy Ayers’ Everybody Loves The Sunshine. Until I remembered I’d already written about it. Not to [...]

Whilst it’s probably a manifestation of the reason that England are always shit in international tournaments, I have to say that I found most of the Germany-Spain semi-final rather dull. Yes Spain passed the ball amazingly well, but they seemed to spend most of the first half doing so in order to stop the Germans [...]

A while back I was doing quite a bit of writing for music site Fly and whilst a lot of the stuff I got was pretty average, there was album that really stuck with me. My Thing, the debut album by Finnish soul singer Tuomo, was an absolutely lovely record: not original or ground-breaking but [...]

It’s Thursday and that means that it’s Popbitch time (hooray!) And amongst the usual scurrilous gossip and terrible jokes (It seems Suggs is marching against racism and homophobia. I mean, it’s just Madness gone politically correct.) there is this soul-gem: the original version of Going Back To My Roots (made famous by disco-funk act Odyssey [...]

I’ve just been updating my iPod with all the stuff I downloaded at Chris’ suggestion, as well as with the amazing GoldieLocks cover of Provider and stumbled across this amazing slice of early 70s disco by Eddie Kendricks. I have no idea where I got Girl You Need A Change Of Mind from as my [...]

I’ve just heard that Isaac Hayes has died and it really is terribly sad. The man was a musical giant, responsible for a huge amount of Stax’s amazing back catalogue as well as his own awesome blend of funk, soul & orchestration (especially on his soundtracks, most famously Shaft). And yet, as the person from [...]

Whilst Ibiza is most famous for its house scene and monster clubs, the thing I enjoyed most on my recent trip there was lying by the pool at the beautiful Hotel Es Vive, sipping a glass of rose as the excellent DJs played some relaxed tunes. One particular day saw one guy play some amazing [...]