Though it’s officially springtime, celebrating the sunshine I find myself paradoxically listeing to Paddy Casey’s Ancient Sorrow (rather than the more appropriate Sunnyside of the Street by the Pogues) – a song that, with a brave production that highlights the voices of Casey and the real foundation given by the soulful singing of Terry Sutton. […]
When I think of John Martyn – who sadly passed away on the 29th of January – I think of friends, spread out across time and space, with whom I’ve listened to his music. It’s natural, because for decades Martyn was an artist to be discovered. He only periodically existed on radio/tv or in the […]
It may seem like heresy (and a rip-off of a Chuck D. line), but the Clash didn’t mean shit to me when I was growing up. I was six years old in the summer of ’77, and by the mid eighties their punk revolution had already long-been mainstreamed , commercialised (some would argue also by […]
There’s an oldish interview with Glen Hansard (the frames / swell season) in TMO, where he talks about poetry, saying “Poetry stirs the blood. Poetry makes men go to war. If you listen to any of the speeches from Bush or the statements from Al-Qaeda, it’s all poetry, and that’s what makes men kill. ” I […]
It’s harder than you might think, choosing seven songs that in one way or another stamped themselves indelibly on your year. Far easier would be a round up of albums (which would certainly include those by lisa hannigan, robert plant & alison krauss, noah and the whale, and elbow), but that’s not, sadly, in my […]
It could hardly be more rock n’roll – the frontman dies, and the group disbands with one member going off on a crazed visionary tangent. St. John, beloved disciple – the only one, according to the gospel, to stay awake in Gethsemane while Jesus swept blood – according to tradition ended his days on the […]
There’s an embarassing moment that happens to nearly all students of a foreign language, when they over-eagerly grasp to a similar sounding word to that of their own native tongue, only to find out that it’s a ‘false friend’ with a completely different meaning. Approaching Kate Rusby’s fragile and beautiful No Names, from the album […]
It’s one of those ironies, that I was given a collection of Miriam Makeba’s music just last week – that is to say, a week before the South African artist died, suffering a heart-attack after having sung at a solidarity concert for Italian author Roberto Saviano (who is living under escort, after the Neopolitan mafia […]
In a bizarre mash-up, caught between Andy Warhol’s ‘famous for fifteen minutes’ dictum and the moment in Spartacus when Tony Curtis cries ‘No, I’m Spartacus’, Italy’s hugely unpopular Education Minister Mariastella Gelmini has confessed that she too is Obama – or rather that her ‘reforms’ are inspired by Barack Obama. Gelmini’s ‘reforms’, which are primarily cuts […]
A friend once decided on a whiskey drinking project as a new year’s resolution. She decided she would sample a different whiskey each week through the year. More a gift than a resolution for many, but for her it was an arduous task, given that she didn’t particularly like whiskey. Her thinking was far from […]
