All the tired horses in the sun How’m I supposed to get any ridin’ done? Hmm I was brought up on Bob Dylan. My parents had ten records in their music collection (aside from children’s LPs). There were two ‘Classics for Pleasure’ albums, Joan Baez in Content Volume II, a Joan Baez EP featuring herRead More
Category: Music
You’ve never heard anything like it
Time to return to the modest indulgence of reviving musical obscurities from the punk and new wave era which can can be found on YouTube and not really anywhere else. Previous posts, Where’s the New Wave now? and It was easy, it was cheap – go and do it, have revived happy personal memories ofRead More
It was easy, it was cheap – go and do it!
I rather enjoyed putting together a post a few weeks ago on obscure new wave records of the 1979-80 period which can be found on YouTube and probably nowhere else, so here’s a follow-up. We’re back in that marvellous period ushered in by the punk revolution of 1976-77, when all of the rules that supposedlyRead More
Be still
I’ve only collected three autographs in my lifetime (getting friends to sign copies of their books for me doesn’t count). The first was when I was aged 10 or so. It was Bertie Mee, the manager of Arsenal football club. I forget the circumstances, and I lost the autograph long ago. The second was theRead More
Where’s the new wave now?
I want to go where they’ve never seen snow Send my Giro to Cairo Has there ever been, in the entire history of popular music, a finer opening to a song lyric? As I trudged home from work through the snowy wastes of North Kent, the words came back to me – ye gods, fromRead More
Documenting music in Nepal
At the British Library we have been digitising some of our film and video collection. It’s a collection that has been built up not with an overall moving image resource in mind, but rather as a reflection of the interest of particular curators. So the collection does not cover all subjects, instead specialising in certainRead More
A lesson in cylinders
A few months ago I came across two wax cylinders in an antique shop in my home town of Rochester. They both had beautiful cardboard tube covers, one for Edison Bell, the other for Clarion, though as I was to discover the cylinders inside did not match the desciptions of the music on the outsideRead More
Ian and Johnny
Death makes strange bedfellows. The obituaries columns are marking the deaths of Ian Carmichael and Johnny Dankworth, rightly praising each for their contributions to art and culture. Yet though there is no obvious connection between the two, they do share a paradoxical relationship to British film – what you might call invisible significance. Ian CarmichaelRead More