It doesn't take much to trigger an avalanche. Sometimes a fresh fall of snow or the warmth of the rising sun on a mountain slope is enough. In this case, though, it was just a brief entry on a social media feed - barely more than a link to this YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASjn1Z83g9c Aimee Mann…Read more Avalanche
Track of the Week
Smoke Gets In Your Eyes
When the Crotchety Kid picked up a bass guitar at the beginning of the seventies, he was completely ignorant of harmonic structure. As a first step to composing bass lines, he bought and read a book in the Teach Yourself series. Those books had distinctive yellow and blue covers, which served as a stamp of…Read more Smoke Gets In Your Eyes
Nothing Left to Say
I'm a firm believer in the adage, "If you have nothing to say, say nothing". And, when I started this blog post, I had nothing to say about Imagine Dragons. So it came as a bit of a shock to discover that they were phenomenally successful in the 2010s, especially in the U.S. They had…Read more Nothing Left to Say
Breathing Istanbul
This track-of-the-week is just under five minutes of cool jazz, courtesy of my Hubzilla friend, Manuel. How he finds these tunes I can not imagine, but his taste is impeccable. https://youtu.be/u0eBHd_VK00 Breathing Istanbul is from Marco Vezzoso's 2021 album, Travel, whose eight tracks take us from the famous Turkish city with its spectacular mosque, through…Read more Breathing Istanbul
Those Were the Days
I well remember the sixties. It was a time of unbounded optimism. Well, except for the Cuban missile crisis and the assassination of JFK, it was. Bright young things were putting a fresh coat of paint on everything - fashion, art, music and even politics. The kids were wearing flowers in their hair, and the…Read more Those Were the Days
Carol of the Bells
East of the North Atlantic Ocean and on the western edge of Europe lies the United Kingdom. At the geographical heart of the UK, slightly to the southwest of the centre point, there is the urban conurbation of Birmingham and, in the balancing position a little to the northeast, is a triangle of lesser known…Read more Carol of the Bells
Stranger in Paradise
A post on Hubzilla this week had me searching the wetware memory banks for a song from the sixties. The tune was familiar, but the title escaped me for a while. In the end it came to me in the shower - it was called Stranger in Paradise, and it was sung by one of…Read more Stranger in Paradise
Gotta Serve Somebody
Normally, I choose the music first and it suggests a theme. This week it's the other way around. The theme is sleaze, and the track I've chosen to illustrate it is Bob Dylan's Gotta Serve Somebody from his 1979 album, Slow Train Coming. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC10VWDTzmU This week a British Member of Parliament, Owen Paterson, resigned after…Read more Gotta Serve Somebody
The Man In The Garden
The LORD God took the man and placed him in the Garden of Eden This little ditty dropped into my Spotify Release Radar playlist this week. It's from a new double album release called Little Eden, and it reminded me that The Bevis Frond has not yet featured in these pages. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Xry1bbx864 The theme of…Read more The Man In The Garden
Distractions
I have been rather distracted over the last couple of days. When the schedule called for blogging I was reading about quantum theory or wrestling with crosswords. But today I'm determined to be productive. Of course, I'm short of time now, so what better way to salve the conscience than to offer two of the…Read more Distractions