Important Announcement: There will be no Track of the Week this week as Crotchety Man is indisposed. He is suffering from a bad case of this year's seasonal ailment and has completely run out of medicinal compounds. In the meantime, here is a very silly piece of sixties nostalgia, curtesy of The Scaffold, the comedy,…Read more Lily the Pink
pop
Desperate for Your Love
There is no divide - no ditch, no fence, no wall separates the classical from the contemporary - and no band illustrates this better than Sky. All the members of Sky were classically trained musicians who chose to make pop/rock/classical cross-over music. The most high-profile member of the band was John Williams, who was already…Read more Desperate for Your Love
Whole Thing
Back in 1991 Peter Gabriel had a problem. His studios had issued a string of block bookings to successful bands like New Order, leaving no time for lesser-known artists on his Real World Records label who only wanted a day or two of studio time. His solution was to set aside one week for those…Read more Whole Thing
Fernando
Fernando was a veteran of the Mexican-American War of 1846 - 1848. At the start of the war Mexico was considerably larger than it is today. The present day U.S. states of California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico and Texas then came within Mexico's borders. When Texas seceded in 1836 to become an independent republic…Read more Fernando
Curse of the Contemporary
Today is Father's Day and there's a most appropriate track on LUMP's eponymous first album; it's a song called Hand Hold Hero. I was tempted to bring him along as my Track of the Week but he slipped from my grasp when the intelligent lyrics and fluid singing faded out to leave an unappealing exercise in…Read more Curse of the Contemporary
Proud Mary
Yesterday the sun was out, the sky was clear and the birds were singing. Today, the forecasters assure us, will be just as nice. And tomorrow is likely to be the warmest Spring Bank Holiday there has ever been. Feeling unusually full of life the Crotchety Couple set about weeding the garden and cleaning the…Read more Proud Mary
Days of Pearly Spencer
Sometimes I feel I'm losing the will to live. It's usually when I'm ironing - shirts are so darn fiddly, aren't they? So I do my ironing weekday afternoons between 1 and 4 pm so that I can listen to the Radcliffe and Maconie show on the radio. They play some good music and…Read more Days of Pearly Spencer
