HERE COMES THE SONG

Rob Steen Freddie and Bowie. Crosby and Bowie. Crosby and Nash. Mahalia and Mavis. Aretha and George Michael. Michael McDonald and Joni....

Jason Mandell in Los Angeles There’s a great Julian Barnes line: ‘I don’t believe in God, but I miss him.’ That’s kind of how I felt...

Tim Woods As a parent, you have certain responsibilities towards your children. You need to keep them safe, provide them with a home, put...

Neil Morton Reading the harrowing back story of Allison Russell while listening to her remarkable debut solo album is a humbling...

Phil Shaw OK, so who’s the oldest singer or musician from the rock ‘n’ roll era onwards still performing? When the question was posed at...

Rob Steen So I sat in the attic, a piano up my nose And the wind played a dreadful cantata (cantata, cantata) Sore was I from a crack of...

Shug Hanlan It is impossible to mistake the looks of genuine joy and affection on the faces of the various ‘celebrities’ assembled for...

Tim Woods Record sales that topped 15 million. Eight top 10 studio albums, with two reaching No1 in the charts. Twenty-two singles that...

Ian Malin Fifty years ago, in the second week of March, an album that now has almost mythical status was released and hardly anyone...

Tim Woods There are people out there who don’t like Oasis. Plenty, in fact. Some find the constant bickering between the Gallagher...

Ian Malin Meet the New Year. But to paraphrase The Who it’s the same as the old one. This dark lockdown is worse really than anything in...

Rob Steen Hyde Park, July 3, 2016. For the first time, Carole King, one of the most successful songwriters of the 20th century, is about...

Phil Shaw ‘Our songs crop up in strange places,’ said Eddie Phillips, lead guitarist with The Creation, who briefly rubbed shoulders with...

Sharon Watts in Beacon, New York The name Jennifer has ‘muse’ written all over it. Just ask Kurt Weill, Little Richard, Tommy Tutone,...

Ian Malin Don’t worry it will soon be over. For those of us still standing anyway. The year the music, and pretty much all entertainment,...

Chris Hewett Those of us who have spent the best part of 50 years surfing the mighty swells of Bruce Springsteen’s music – or, just...

Tim Woods There are different ways for musicians to be successful. The most obvious is through the charts: No1 singles or albums that go...

Andrew R McGaan in Chicago One of the Grateful Dead’s most beautiful songs, both musically and lyrically, is a love song, a sermon, and...

Exactly 49 years ago today, on 29 October 1971, a long-haired motorcyclist was making his way through the Georgia town of Macon when he was…

When Covid19 first struck and lockdown imposed, the West Country folk guitarist Gaz Brookfield – a type 1 diabetic more conscious than most…

What do you do in times of Covid19 if you are a musician in a rock band? Rishi Sunak might suggest you retrain as a delivery driver…

Nearly 20 years ago the music journalist Max Bell was invited to a gig of a London-based folk-indie band La Honda in the cafeteria of a…

If you can remember the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival, you weren’t really there. That follows, does it not, because the whole crazy, chaotic…

If the last few gruesome weeks in Britain and America have taught us anything it is that both countries are governed by small men, men who…

Every now and then a band comes along that blows your socks off. Robert Jon & The Wreck are that band for me and this track – from their new

Many of us have a song that evokes a particular time, place or person: that anthem from your youth, or a slushy tune shared with a first…

There is more to the harmonica than meets the lips, to the extent that a careless student of the instrument might blow some serious money on

When the panic swept through England, the scale was measured in loo roll. The supermarket rush for toilet paper evoked the run on Northern…

Jason Isbell tells an amusing tale about meeting Bruce Springsteen a few years back and being bowled over when The Boss began to sing the…

Nostalgia: a sentimental longing or wistful affection for a period in the past. But is it possible to be nostalgic for a time you never knew

Churches and cathedrals will remain silent this Easter so there will be little chance to hear O Sacred Head, Now Wounded, a choral work by…

If poetry is the ‘music of ideas’ – an intriguing definition of the barely definable, put forward by the writer Peter Whitfield – can music…

Has there ever been a sadder, more violent death in pop than that of Pete Ham? Grisly ends are not exactly unique in rock. Think Marvin Gaye

Time for a sheepish confession, or a proud boast, depending on your view. Of the thousands of 7” singles I have bought, blagged, swapped…

Desert Island Discs? Pah. How about a single musical morsel for sustenance, one solitary assemblage of crotchets and quavers with which to…

When Hollywood makes its Donald Trump biopic, which with horrifying inevitability it will, the soundtrack will be by Black Grape. And the…

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…

Launched into the stratosphere with arguably (in my humble opinion, indisputably) the greatest opening riff in the history of rock, Layla…

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…

To some, The Artist Better Known As Prefab Sprout occupies an unthreatened throne. A thousand rave reviews, one Top 10 single. A daring deb…

Frankie Avalon, Johnny Tillotson, Brian Hyland, Fabian, Bobby Rydell: by the mid-1960s many teen idols of the pre-Beatles era were already…

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…

It is always pleasing when a songwriter you greatly admire echoes a long-held belief. My contention is that the best songs are the sad ones…

There cannot be a music lover anywhere in the world who does not have direct knowledge of a band who might have made it – could have made…

In December 2015 I slithered back home over snowy Canadian roads from an unnerving trip to my dentist. Unnerving not because of anything he…

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…

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…

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…

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

Observing Donald Trump over the past few years, I’ve found myself asking more than once, to quote the title of Marvin Gaye’s socio-political