Ryan Tedder wrote Bleeding Love for Leona Lewis and his band OneRepublic consists of friends from his church in Denver making music for people who think Coldplay are a bit too experimental. They are about as uncool as it’s possible to be without actually being David Hasselhoff.
I love their new album, Waking Up. It’s track after […]
Lord Macca of Loch Kodak on his appearance on The X-Factor:
[Sir Paul McCartney] said he got some great reaction from people about his performance on the X Factor.
“We got great feedback on the streets the next day. It’s my claim to fame now.”
Further to my rant about clueless DJs replacing proper producers, here are a couple of funny little animations about the horrors of being a mastering engineer to today’s “talent”: Mastering: The Movie Part One and Part Two.
And, from an interview this month’s Sound on Sound magazine, here’s Bruce Swedien, studio engineer for Michael Jackson’s Off The Wall and Thriller albums, on Quincy […]
This [HD YouTube video] is a bonkers slab of wonderfully British-sounding soul-pop from V VBrown. Shame about the over-compressed production/mixing/mastering that turns every peak into white noise.
This [HD YouTube video—censored version] is an equally bonkers slab of ironic hair metal from the self-proclaimed “modern Spinal Tap”, Steel Panther. I know it’s meant to be a joke, but […]
On being shown Michael Jackson moonwalking to Billie Jean, a friend’s seven-year-old son shrugged his shoulders and commented, unimpressed:
“Ahh… He’s got wheels in his shoes.”
[Anecdote and title stolen wholesale from JL.]
Via Clive Davis and thanks to YouTube, Esperanza Spalding plays Stevie Wonder for POTUS [Click the “HQ” button for better quality]:
“There ain’t a woman in this town big enough to keep me warm.”
Back in the 80s, I used to be in a band with a guy called Martyn Hope—indeed, we went to school together. Back in the 90s, having read that, surreally, Elvis revivalist Shakin’ Stevens was a closet Red1, I went searching online to find out if he was a member of a late 70s cohort […]
The other day, I was (as one so often is) on the door at the latter stages of a central Brighton soul and Motown event with a mixed-race lesbian bouncer. She leerily told me tales of her days running sapphic club nights, and how the punters only really started to pile in when she imported […]
Brothers and sisters, watch and listen as the universal language of music meets the multimedia multi-ethnic mega-mashup that is teh Interwebz and a groove is born [YouTube video].
Kutiman, a 26-year-old citizen of [sarcasm]the Evil Zionist Entity, isn’t too busy baking the blood of Palestinian babies into matzos[/sarcasm] to do a reggae one, with a ginga Rasta […]
Clive Davis is a champion of singer/musician Curtis Stigers, who had a couple of enormous mainstream hit singles and then made the journey from pop to jazz years ago. Sadly, it seemed at first that only seven people noticed his migration, including Clive—or as, as wardy observed, seven and two ragged tigers.
This year, on the basis of […]
Congratulations to the Web surfer brought here by a search for:
“interracial dates that like Radiohead”
You have hit the jackpot.
The guitarist in the band I’m in has a diploma in (popular) music performance and his music theory is pretty good—certainly better than mine—but he was never taught any music history and he’s only just turned twenty-one. So when, during a discussion about the scores the sax player had written1 for himself and the trumpet […]
Led by The Fat One, Take That are top of the singles charts and will soon be top of the album charts. Robbie Williams is not. I feel about this state-of-affairs the same way I feel about Histon beating Leeds in the FA Cup.
TIGER WOODS WINS 2008 US OPEN DESPITE KNEE INJURY CAUSED BY ILLEGAL KARATE ATTACK FROM EVIL MAFIA GOLFER ROCCO MEDIATE. OBTAINS CRUCIAL PAR SCORE ON SUDDEN-DEATH HOLE USING “CRANE KICK” BEFORE COLLAPSING ON THE FINAL GREEN IN AGONY, MUTTERING “I DID IT FOR YOU, ELIN!”
LEWIS HAMILTON CLINCHES WORLD F1 DRIVERS’ CHAMPIONSHIP IN HIS MCLAREN, “HERBIE”, DESPITE […]
The Economist plays air plastic guitar:
AS THE music industry searches for a new model in the age of digital distribution and internet piracy, it is getting a helping hand from an unexpected quarter: video games such as “Guitar Hero†and “Rock Bandâ€, which let people play along to songs on simplified imitation instruments. “These games are […]
Some time back, I raved about the freedom my fat, ugly iRiver gives me compared to an iPod. Now you can make your iRiver free-er or liberate your Apple MP3 player with the marvellous new version 3.0 of Rockbox, the open source firmware replacement. It works with lots of other models of portable music jukeboxes […]
This week, I saw John The Savage and Bela Emerson at Komedia.
John The Savage is an experimental post-something-or-other band featuring my friend Richard Brincklow on piano. Don’t be put off by my arty-sounding and vague description. They have tunes and they can play. They groove and they rawk. But they’re also very unusual indeed. Go see […]
INTERIOR. KITCHEN. JEWISH MEDIA FRIEND L IS PREPARING DINNER FOR POOTERGEEK.
POOTERGEEK: Like I said to [JEWISH WRITER FRIEND C] and [JEWISH WRITER FRIEND J] about [UNFUNNY JEWISH WRITER], being a Jewish writer who isn’t funny is like being black and having no sense of rhythm.
JEWISH MEDIA FRIEND L: Were they offended?
POOTERGEEK: Why should they be?
[PAUSE]
JEWISH MEDIA FRIEND L: Actually, you’re right: I’ve never met […]
While I’m on subject of recommendations I thought my parents had made to me but they hadn’t, this year I watched The Conversation for the first time. I thought mum and dad had been telling me for years that I should check it out, but, when I was round theirs a few weeks back and […]
Recently, I was listening to a Marvin Gaye track via last.fm—is it just me or has their sound quality improved lately?—and I noticed this at the top of its user comments:
white person wearing chinos on cruise ship LOVES THE BLACK MUSIC
Which immediately made me think of Stuff White People Like, a blog that’s really about “Stuff […]
A fortnight ago, I shot the Brighton School of Samba at Brighton’s Second revived carnival. Congratulations to them. They went on to win the prize for best band.
Masters of the live hip-hop mash-up, The Roots, displayed their usual relaxed attitude when asked to comment on events at their first headlining show at Glastonbury this week. Early on in their performance, a member of the audience managed to get up on stage and gained control of a working microphone, through which he continued […]
She doesn’t get the fancy sound, lighting, backing band, and monitoring mixer; but then Sara Bareilles is a musician not a filmstar. Even if this amateurish video was planted on YouTube as some kind of cunning lo-fi viral marketing trick, there’s no denying the woman’s talent. Her performance starts well and gets better and better […]
In the space of a few days, My Scarlett Johansson post has become the subject of a round of Bloggese Whispers.
First, Clive Davis linked to my “review” on his Spectator blog. One of God’s little jokes is that Clive Davis, London Times music critic, shares his name with Clive Davis, US record producer, executive, and TV […]
There is an upside to my not being a drop-dead gorgeous superstar: whenever I’m working with a bunch of stubbly musicians and my singing’s not up to scratch, they tell me, bluntly. I got my first paid residency after helping a pianist move a piano to a restaurant. He asked me to take over from […]
While I’m tinkering with multimedia, I’m simply going to steal this from wongaBlog.
Cinco De Mayo Carnival from Andrew Curtis on Vimeo.
I’m so tired with work I’m starting to have hallucinations. I’d swear Richard Dawkins starts rapping 1 minute and 6 seconds into this YouTube video. (Christopher Hitchens throws shapes from 1:49 or thereabouts.) Go here for the torrent.
[via]
It’s not a good idea to take a whole slice of brie out of the fridge, allow it to reach room temperature, eat some, and then re-chill it. If you do this enough times, then, by the time you reach the end, you may well have cultured yourself a nice little dose of food poisoning. […]
I’m busy. Amuse yourself with this. It’s amazing. Type in a song title and an artist name and listen.
[via Lifehacker]
