Just Another Social Profile Really

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, 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 [...]

It seems that along with talking about the weather, and wondering when the British man will get knocked out of Wimbledon, discussing the headliners for Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage has become an annual summer tradition. A few years ago Jay Z really got  the ball rolling, before knocking it out of the park, making the Eavis [...]

I know that I’m hardly breaking new ground by posting this, but I’ve been listening to the new album by Elbow on rotation for about a week now, and simply can’t get the refrain from Lippy Kids, which gives the album its name, out of my head. It’s as plaintively beautiful as Oasis’ classic D’Yer [...]

If there were an official list of bands that it’s cool to hate, U2 would surely be #1 (possibly tied with Coldplay). They may be the biggest band in the world™, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no surer way of proving your indie cred than by dissing the boys from Clontarf. They’re overblown; too [...]

It seems quite apt that after James Brown, the next artists I should find as part of #shfl11 is Jim Hendrix. In many ways he’s been as influential as Brown, and is certainly as close to my heart as The Godfather of Soul. On top of the fact that he rbought an entirely new dimension [...]

It’s quite apt that the latest track to pop up on my iPod as part of my plan to listen to, and write about, a random song every day in 2011 (I missed this weekend as I was travelling), is by The Beatles. Not only has it just been announced that they have racked up [...]

When you stop to think about it, it’s amazing that The Beatles ever broke America: whilst their music was, and is, quite obviously brilliant, it’s also, often, very, very British. And parochial, eccentric British rock is something our former colonial cousins have never taken to – something the Small Faces would have been able to [...]