Time takes its toll on all mechanical things. Sooner or later the cog wheels become clogged with a sticky gunge, the hands on the clock face slow to a crawl and the pendulum shudders to a halt. And what applies to the steady tick-tock of a grandfather clock also applies to the fast spinning disks…Read more Time of the Season
pop
Running In The Family
As a schoolboy, Crotchety Man hated the term after Christmas. He never liked the cold winter months and, worse, that was the term we had to go on cross-country runs. The Crotchety lungs couldn't deliver enough oxygen to the blood to sustain even a gentle jog for more than a few hundred yards, so distances…Read more Running In The Family
Fire
The end of the year is a time for looking back. Today I'm going back 50 years, almost to the dawn of the Crotchety Man era. It's 1968, a time when experimentation in pop music was the order of the day and a slew of highly original acts flourished. One of the most flamboyant of…Read more Fire
We Built This City …
For me, nothing sums up the Spirit of Christmas better than this cute and slightly silly video. It's for fun, it's for the family and it's for a worthy charity. And I'm delighted to say that 75,000 people agree with me because it has taken the number 1 slot on the official UK charts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iEB8bfP7wE…Read more We Built This City …
Lily the Pink
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
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
