Desert Island Discs? Pah. How about a single musical morsel for sustenance, one solitary assemblage of crotchets and quavers with which to maintain contact with the life you crave, fuelling longing wh...
When Hollywood makes its Donald Trump biopic, which with horrifying inevitability it will, the soundtrack will be by Black Grape. And the title song will be Dadi Waz A Badi.
Don’t get me wrong. As Jewish as I am, I’m all for Noddy Holder roaring ‘It’s ChrisssssssssMAS!’ or John Lennon hoping war is over or Roy Wood wishing it could be Yuletide every day. They all have the...
Launched into the stratosphere with arguably (in my humble opinion, indisputably) the greatest opening riff in the history of rock, Layla is Eric Clapton’s masterpiece. A proclamation of unrequited lo...
If the 1960s were the decade of the classic single, the Seventies were the decade of what was quaintly called the album. And for the first half of the Seventies Joni Mitchell released a series of reco...
To some, The Artist Better Known As Prefab Sprout occupies an unthreatened throne. A thousand rave reviews, one Top 10 single. A daring debut devoid of choruses. An acoustic version of the 1980s’ fine...
Frankie Avalon, Johnny Tillotson, Brian Hyland, Fabian, Bobby Rydell: by the mid-1960s many teen idols of the pre-Beatles era were already nostalgia acts, living proof of what our parents told us abou...
My Girl the Month of May, Dion’s hymn to her, may have been the flipside of a flop but it inspired two distinctive covers by artists who operated in very different musical milieux yet later become lab...
It is always pleasing when a songwriter you admire greatly echoes a long-held belief. My contention is that the best songs are the beautifully sad ones, and the New York-born artist Gretchen Peters ha...
There cannot be a music lover anywhere in the world who does not have direct personal knowledge of a band who might have made it – could have made it, should have made it, almost made it, had every da...
In December 2015 I slithered back home over snowy Canadian roads from an unnerving trip to my dentist. Unnerving not because of anything that he did to my teeth, but because when I arrived I saw him d...
Comes a time when all you thought was nothing after all. A day will bring you down to your knees. Time conveys our rivers of blood through God’s merry fair, riding on this tumbling ball of clay. And o...
We can consume our music around the clock and everywhere we go – we no longer have to find a jukebox when we’re on the move. We can hear it from our phone or laptop, or ask shops or bars to play our f...
So there I was, choogling to the iPod on the 9.44 from Lewes to Eastbourne, when the ebullient strains of XTC’s We’re All Light chirped up, reminding me of the most poignant email I have ever received...
It is doubtful Donald Trump has a playlist, and even if he has the name James McMurtry is unlikely to feature. The Texan troubadour recorded a song towards the end of the US president’s first year in...
