The news that Mike Ratledge has died knocks away another of the props on which my formative years were built. Ratledge was a founder member and keyboard player for the Soft Machine, a man whose furious, buzzing organ sound – somewhere between a frentic soprano sax and a power saw – burned itself into theRead More
It’s time for my regular December round-up of favourite cultural highlights from the year, broken up into different topics, the first of which is music. Much of the music I listened, or saw live, over 2024 was old favourites, but there was some exploring among favoured genres: jazz, experimental, guitar music. Here, then, are someRead More
When I saw Bob Dylan play in 2022, I felt that maybe it was time for him to give up singing live. In the studio he had developed of late a meditative voice of limited range but haunting depth; live, in an amplified setting, his 81-year-old voice was completely shot. I wrote a blog postRead More
Bob Dylan is an artist I hugely admire. I always have done. But no artist can be excellent all of the time and a good many of those who have enjoyed a long career have produced much that is average and a fair amount of that which is terrible. William Wordsworth, having written sublime poetryRead More
There is no time for complacency, the next attack on knowledge is about to happen. Richard Ovenden, Burning the Books (2020) The British Library has been a news story of late, and not a happy one. On 28 October 2023 the Library fell victim to a cyber-attack. A criminal group named Rhysida infiltrated the Library’sRead More
Another year, another soundtrack. The first in this site’s regular summings-up of the cultural year from my perspective is music. Spotify’s annual account of your listening statistics informs me that I listened to 3,427 songs lasting 20,271 minutes in total (or fourteen days), representing 1,416 artist performing across sixty-three genres, headed by folk, avant-garde jazzRead More
Bob Dylan’s latest album, Shadow Kingdom, is an intriguing puzzle. The album is the soundtrack of a 2021 concert film, Shadow Kingdom: The Early Songs of Bob Dylan, directed by Alma Har’el. The film was released as a one-off on the live streaming platform Veeps.com, with little information provided beforehand on its form or contents.Read More
The best-selling song in Britain in 2022 was Harry Styles’s ‘As It Was’. It runs for two minutes and 47 seconds. In a recent piece in iNews, Adam Sherwin argues that that popular music is getting shorter because of the attention spans of the TikTok generation. In the mobile world, a song needs to captureRead More
Next in my reviews of the year is music. Spotify loves to hit you with statistics at the end of your listening year (November to November is how they calculate it), and this year I am told I listened to 1,158 artists performing 2,832 songs spanning 61 genres, for a total of 20,072 minutes (orRead More
Bob Dylan keeps on going. Though there have been hints that he may announce a retirement, at least from touring, at the end of his 2021-2024 Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour, when he will be eighty-three, there is no certainty beyond life’s inevitability. So it is that, after the artistic triumph of hisRead More