We live in an age of the mashup. Everything can be blended with something else. Is this because technology (manipulation of digital files, sampling, file sharing) has opened up a way of thinking about the world; or have we reached a particular stage in our cultural development in which everything, being equal, becomes interchangeable, andRead More
It is one of the great questions of our time. How many roads must a man walk down? Before you can call him a man, that is. Bob Dylan posed it in his 1962 song ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, and left us to ponder its very unanswerability. Some have tried to answer it, however. DouglasRead More
I first came across the blues through this image. It was on the front cover of King of the Delta Blues Singers, Vol. II, a collection of recordings by Robert Johnson, which by the miracle of twentieth-century production and distribution systems had made its way from the 1930s Mississippi Delta to 1970s Whitstable public library.Read More
It is with not a little relief that I have set aside a half-written, half-baked philosophical post on who can say what and decided to write some lists instead. It’s summertime, and the brain needs a holiday. Arbitrary listings of the purely inconsequential are the answer. I’m going to start with the Beatles. I likeRead More
I’ve been producing a series of posts on my personal cultural highlights from 2017. They have covered things online, music, books and artworks. Last in the series is a list of highlights. These are some of the one-off events or publications that particularly stood out for me in 2017, and against which 2018 will haveRead More
Next in this series of posts of my 2017 cultural highlights is music. This was the year in which sanity eventually overcame parsimony – I gave up on the mind-numbing adverts obligatory with a free Spotify account, and started paying for the service. It has been a marvellous year of discovery. What Spotify does, atRead More
The first jazz record I ever bought was a triple-LP avant garde jazz opera. I was seventeen years old, and pretentious, but there were good things to be found among the shelves of second-hand discs handed in by impecunious hippies to Rock Bottom, Whitstable’s peerless record shop, in the late 1970s. It was in thatRead More
Some shows you just don’t expect to see. The Art Ensemble of Chicago is a group so bound up in legend and an aura of uniqueness, that having them turn up in Hackney in 2017 feels almost absurd. I’ve listened to them, and read about them, for years, but had no inkling of their stillRead More
It was with a degree of apprehension that I went to see Conor McPherson’s new play, Girl from the North Country, at the Old Vic. Sprinkling your theatre production with Bob Dylan songs seems to be quite the thing to do just now, what with the Andrew Scott Hamlet recently playing in the West EndRead More
It’s time to consider singers. I have produced a series of posts on musicians: on guitarists (strictly speaking guitar solos), bassists (strictly speaking bass lines) and drummers. Each has come with a top ten of personal favourites. To complete the ensemble we must have a singer. Other contributors might have been considered – keywords, rhythmRead More