It's funny, sometimes, how one thing leads to another. For want of a nail the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe the horse was lost. For want of a horse the rider was lost. For want of a rider the message was lost. For want of a message the battle was lost. For…Read more Local Boy …
Familiar
The 'classical' tag appears in these posts from time to time. Sometimes it refers to music from the years 1600 - 1900 but more often it indicates modern music in a style that owes a substantial debt to that period. Familiar is one of those more recent compositions. It is a single taken from Agnes Obel's forthcoming album Citizen of Glass…Read more Familiar
Light Flight …
I have always felt that the five members of Pentangle were pulled together by a mysterious force. It must have been some kind of benign sorcery to be capable of making such a sublime creation. Perhaps somewhere in a small town in England a macabre ritual took place. Welcome, sisters, to the White Witch (Tewkesbury) Temple of…Read more Light Flight …
China In Your Hand
Back in 1987 I was a freelance software developer. In the autumn of that year I was working on a contract at offices some 15 miles from Leicester where I lived then, driving north up the A46 in the mornings. It was an easy journey. The road was fairly straight and not too busy. And it wound…Read more China In Your Hand
River Song
The times seem to be changing at Crotchety Mansions. Recently, I added another couple of blogs to my list of followed sites. As if to balance those beginnings the first music blog I followed since starting this one, Vinyl Connection, has just ceased publication and this week The Maccabees announced they are disbanding. It's sad…Read more River Song
Diamonds and Rust
Nimble fingers pick gently at the strings of an acoustic guitar. Dark hair tumbles around her face. Her features and her music speak of Spanish ancestors as she gazes into the pale yellow light of a rising moon. A little while ago the phone had rung and the voice on the line stirred memories from years ago. Precious memories of…Read more Diamonds and Rust
Aviation
So far this year there have been about 40 posts on the Crotchety Man blog. Of those only six have carried the 2010s tag and one of them was an appreciation of that great old campaigner Bob Dylan - not exactly up-to-the-minute news. I felt I was in a temporal rut. It was time to break out, to find something…Read more Aviation
The Fairground
In the previous entry in this blog I mentioned A Trip To The Fair, a track on the Scheherazade And Other Stories album by Renaissance recorded and released in 1975. That song recounts a spooky incident at a funfair. Now, there's an eerily similar song on Ralph McTell's 1969 album, Spiral Staircase; it's called simply The Fairground. The two…Read more The Fairground
Scheherazade …
The trouble with classical music is that it has no punch. The notes have no attack; melodies wander aimlessly; movements stagnate. Where is the zing of a plucked metal string, or the thwack from a flick of a hickory stick on a taut sheet of calfskin? The trouble with rock music is that it's all Punch…Read more Scheherazade …
Big Yellow Taxi
It's been a rather miserable summer in the UK so far. Here in the middle of England there's hardly been a day when it didn't rain or at least threaten to. There have been sunny periods, too, but I've lost count of the times we planned to go out for the day and at the…Read more Big Yellow Taxi
Crotchety Man 