When I was a child there was music which was, whether you liked it or not, inescapable. I have never – and this is not a boast – deliberately or actively listened to a song by Michael Jackson, Madonna, Phil Collins, Duran Duran, Roxette, Take…
Between the ages of 14 and 16 or thereabouts, the things I probably loved the most – or at least the most consistently – were horror (books and movies) and heavy metal. These loves changed (and ended, for a long time) at around the…
It’s that time of year again; I’ve had to make some end-of-year lists for various places, so this will be a short-ish version. 2018, like most years, has been a year full of terrible and excellent music and mostly there’s no difference between the…
In Richard Linklater’s reputedly anti-nostalgic, but actually still quite nostalgic 1993 film Dazed and Confused, Matthew McConaughey’s Fonz-like character Wooderson articulates his Fonzhood in a way that – as far as I remember – the actual Fonz never does*: “That’s what I love about…
What a shock; I haven’t even slightly kept up with weekly (or even monthly) updates on here and now we’re in July already. Everything in the world seems so grim that it’s hard to actually do anything at all so I shall fall back on…
The self-titled debut album by Wreche, a duo consisting of John Steven Morgan (piano/vocals), and Barret Baumgart (drums), released by Fragile Branch Recordings back in May, is undoubtedly one of the most eccentric and striking releases of the year. Almost certainly a love/hate kind of record,…
As seems so often to be the case, I am & have been working very slowly, with many distractions, on various relatively substantial bits of writing, but playlists are easy and fun to do, so here’s a sort of roundup of some of the stuff I’ve…
Where does your taste in music come from? Why do you like some things but not others? It’s mysterious, but to try and find out, I thought I’d look at the issue from the (my) beginning. So what is the first music you remember…
Some more highlights… Lauren Redhead – Ijereja (Pan Y Rosas Discos) Probably the least conventional release of the year on my list, I wrote about Lauren Redhead’s ambient/noise/found sound opera for Echoes and Dust, so will keep this short. An intriguing mix of music and…
It’s Halloween next week; and what better time to write a few words about the parallel universe of outsider music? ‘Outsider music’ is one of those nebulous but still quite useful terms that litter the language of music. Like “singer-songwriter”, it doesn’t really denote a…