In the summer of 1971 a group of school-leavers embarked on a trip to Russia. The 19-year-old Crotchety Man was one of the party. In those days, a political Iron Curtain separated Europe from the U.S.S.R. and we were warned to behave ourselves. High jinks and selling our Westerner's jeans to the locals could lead…Read more Ukraine
Playlist
Lightning Blog
Crotchety Man is spoilt for choice and pushed for time this week, so this will be a lightning blog covering a very mixed bag of musical delights. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/30KeiOLVyhGOxkhIwhxkPd?si=1bff15e7d15b4b0e We start this Spotify playlist with a band I damned with faint praise in this post back in January 2020. But Rick Mitarotonda's Goose has a knack…Read more Lightning Blog
Mercury Music Prize 2021
This year's shortlist for the Mercury Music Prize was announced on 22nd July. The prize celebrates albums by artists from the UK and Ireland released in the qualifying year. According to its website it is "the music equivalent to the Booker Prize for literature and the Turner Prize for art". Allowing for some understandable self-promotion…Read more Mercury Music Prize 2021
Lucky Dip
Hear My VoiceLiquid EvolutionLord It's a FeelingThe Gift of LoveClocks For this post I'm offering an assortment of easy-on-the ear pieces: three songs and two instrumentals. Click on the images above to enlarge the picture; click the caption to go to the corresponding YouTube video. Alternatively, all five pieces have been collected as both a…Read more Lucky Dip
Order! Order!
Looking through my recent 'likes' I see several pieces worthy of a mention in these pages. So it's time for another playlist, methinks. But how do you choose the order of the tunes? Are there any rules? Or does it just come down to personal preference? And what happens if you get them horribly out…Read more Order! Order!
Radar Blips
My Release Radar this week included several interesting new pieces by not-so-new artists spanning a wide range of styles. I'm featuring them in another Spotify playlist this week. But before we get to that, I must pay tribute to Peter Green, who's death was announced yesterday. Rolling Stone placed the blues/rock guitarist born Peter Allen Greenbaum…Read more Radar Blips
Butterflies
Summer has returned to central England. The sun is shining, the grass is green, the flowers are blooming. In the corner of our garden there's a large buddleia bush full of blossom and the butterflies love it. So, by way of celebration, here's a short playlist of 'butterfly' songs. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_hAakygTXsEDpHf_cKehh-wAqVTVEAWJ Tracks (with Spotify links) Dog…Read more Butterflies
New Release Pick & Mix
Today you can pick your own treats from an assortment of recent releases that tickled the Crotchety taste buds over the last week or so. Two of these songs came to my attention via Josh Gering's Fortnightly Playlist; the other three appeared on my Release Radar on Spotify. --- *** --- First up we have…Read more New Release Pick & Mix
Indie Interlude
Now that the humans are all stuck indoors some of the shyer animals have come out to saunter through our gardens and streets. While they take over outside I have been drawn to those easy-to-listen-to songs that the Indie bands do so well. And, with time on our hands, I thought the Crotchety readership deserved…Read more Indie Interlude
Pavlov’s Dog
Ivan Pavlov was a Russian physiologist. He was born in 1849 and in 1904 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Pavlov was studying the digestive system in dogs when he noticed that his test subjects would salivate as soon as the research assistant who normally fed them entered the lab. In…Read more Pavlov’s Dog
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