HERE COMES THE SONG

Nick Cave is Picasso, that’s who he is. Like Picasso, he looks at something – or someone – and doesn’t blink. Like Picasso, he devours…

New Orleans. Summer 1977. I was a freshly-graduated 21-year-old with a student work permit arranged under the British Universities North…

Sitting in Caffe Ritazza at Newcastle Airport on Friday, a perusal of the G2 section of that morning’s Guardian revealed an up-to-date photo

We've had many reasons to give thanks to The Unthanks over the years. The adventurous North-east folk band’s decision to interpret The Songs

Stevie Wonder got it just about right when he entitled one of his 1970s albums Songs In The Key Of Life, for that’s how many of us mark, and

In the pantheon of treasured troubadours John Hiatt is a towering presence. The veteran American singer-songwriter has been blessed with…

Depending on whose account of music history you prefer, 1976 was the year punk rock broke through with an amphetamine rush or the year disco

Original and refreshing songs on the complex topic of devotion can feel like a rare treat in the current pop market. Yet, bursting on to the

Just when you thought you’d heard everything about a man’s faithlessness and a woman’s pain comes along an incredibly powerful version of…

It was the day after The Late Show on American television. Emails began dropping in my inbox. OMG, did you see this video? Watch the singer…

When asked in January this year why he had not recorded a pop album since 1993, Billy Joel replied: ‘I thought I’d had my say. I just said,

I first saw The Band when they were still called The Hawks. They were backing Bob Dylan for the electric half of the concerts on his 1966 UK

It did not take this year’s Record Store Day to remind me I had a half-decent vinyl collection, bookended by the early Sixties and late…

From my first steps in bluegrass and country, I have learned that no one who ever found themselves unexpectedly in Mississippi was remotely…

You will shortly be bombarded with guff about the Summer Of Love, the flowering of hippiedom in San Francisco 50 years ago. Newspapers which

April 25 1970 at London's Royal Albert Hall. I had just turned 14 and this was the first live gig I'd ever been to. A few weeks earlier, my…

By the time Joe Strummer recorded Silver And Gold in 2002 he had been an ex-member of the Clash for the best part of two decades, even…

Fifty years on from Sgt Pepper and Waterloo Sunset, where might one go to find that spirit of peculiar Britishness that was a key element in

It’s one of those songs, like Yellow Submarine or I Should Be So Lucky, that many of us feel we were born knowing and, in consequence, maybe

From Route 66 to 34th & Vine via Memphis, Massachusetts and Frisco Bay, the places British singers and bands celebrated in song used to be…