Just Another Social Profile Really

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

So, for the first time since starting #shfl11, clicking shuffle on my iPod brought up a track that I’ve never listened to, by a band I’ve never heard of, off an album (The Art Of Chill 4, compiled by The Orb) that I’d forgotten I owned. Which was kind of the idea of this rather [...]

Around 11 years ago I returned from a great year in Australia, though when I got back to the UK I was very happy to be able to find great music without having to wait for a Gilles Peterson tape to be sent by a kind friend. And, so, one of my first buys after [...]

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 [...]

When the Arctic Monkeys released Favourite Worst Nightmare, the album Fluorescent Adolescent is taken from, they were known not only as the band who had taken Hear’Say’s crown for the fastest selling British début (notching up  360,000 sales in a week in the process) but also as the MySpace band. Along with Lily Allen, many [...]

Whilst Kid A, the album that How To Disappear Completely is taken from, may have been named by Pitchfork, Rolling Stone & The Times as the best album of the noughties, I’d guess that for those of us who aren’t music critics or die-hard fans of the band, it doesn’t get anywhere near as much [...]