I’m in Dixons Currys.digital, buying a new computer keyboard. What sounds like a competent cover version of Starship’s We Built This City is playing. For a moment I wonder if it’s the start of one of those godawful trance retreads of 80s guitar hits. You know the sort of thing: Owner Of A Lonely Heart/Max […]
Talking of recycling, it looks like producer Timbaland has some explaining to do to a Finnish computer musician about a backing track that Mr Land laid down for Nelly Furtado. [The previous link goes to YouTube, but you can follow these links to MP3s of the tunes.] There’s something amusing about a deep-voiced multimillionaire hip-hop svengali […]
I’m busy so, instead of writing my own stuff, I’ll just point at the efforts of some other bloggers. This at Fisking Central is a point worth making over and over again: Utopia doesn’t refer to a better world; it’s used to describe a perfect world. Belief in human perfectability—and its accompanying rejection of all that is imperfect—is […]
If you have ever spent any amount of time in conversation with cokeheads in London then you will be able to testify to the authenticity of “Diary of a London Cokehead”.
If you can YouTube and you aren’t tone deaf then I guarantee you will enjoy this. (The guy performing reminds me of my guitar teacher who would liven up lessons by reducing the entire career of any artist I named to a needle-sharp one-minute musical pastiche. Much as I admire the songwriting of The Police […]
According to ITVNews the somewhat erratic former superstar and object of Osama’s lust Whitney Houston “is convinced that the 21-year-old [X-Factor TV talent show winner Leona] will be an international superstar and has even offered to mentor her.” Sister, you need Whitney Houston as a mentor like you need Michael Jackson as a babysitter.
According to Technorati, one of the most listened-to albums of the moment is Hinder’s Extreme Behaviour. The cover features a red-lingerie-clad cleavage and a PARENTAL ADVISORY: EXPLICIT CONTENT sticker. It’s trying harder than a small-town 14-year-old with a bum-fluff beard, hanging around outside Happy Shopper waving a spliff and a can of lager. To my […]
I refuse to believe that this man exists.
Yesterday evening I went to see Passenger—featuring Richard Brincklow on piano, keyboards, and bizarre Fisher-Price blowy thing—play at Komedia. They were excellent, but I knew that already. Great gig, guys. Reader, buy their single. What I didn’t know is that Carrie Tree, the support to the support band, is astonishingly good. She completely overcame my musical […]
Someone at Harry’s Place comments that Until now, I thought Gwyneth Paltrow was Welsh.” which reminds me of being in a video rental store in NYC in the late 90s with a local. An old Tom Jones song starts playing. “Well, I never,” says I to my native companion in my conspicuously British way, “This is […]
Police find marijuana, cocaine, and a firearm in gangsta rapper’s car… …George Michael in public park, blood at O J Simpson’s place, inconsistencies in statement from Jeffrey Archer, poison in enemy of Russian Mafia and KGB, Houses of Parliament adjacent to Thames…
With the massive success of the new Take That single, Patience, I am praying that this is the moment when they become the post-break-up David Gilmour-led Pink Floyd and Robbie Williams becomes the post-The Wall Roger Waters. Same initials see, see?! Take that, Mr End-Of-The-Pier karaoke compere!
I don’t have perfect pitch. One of my long-suffering former Flatland music tutors would however be amused to read that the other day I noticed that my toothbrush was playing the key note of a Kelly Clarkson song and I wandered over to the piano and played the scale along with it—first time! I never […]
This post is intended to test the effect of Damian’s upgrades on the Bloggers4Labour aggregator. You may comment on it only if you manage to work a Lennon and McCartney lyric into your text somewhere.
Squander Two is a clever fella and his impatience with irrationality is (almost) always welcome in my comments boxes. He is also a new father who has endured rather more worry than most recently. I hope his wife recovers completely and quickly. He probably came up with this brilliant revision of Alanis Morissette’s Ironic during […]
Did you know that Brighton’s 80s slightly-more-than-one-hit-wonders Frazier Chorus covered Anarchy In The UK? They did. It’s more subversive than the original.
Close friends of multi-hundred selling music legend Pete McDoherty expressed their concern today at his plans to wed one-nostrilled supermodel and charity campaigner Heather Moss. “I’ve nothing against her personally,” claimed a member of McDoherty’s inner circle, “but Moss has a reputation for marrying a certain kind of man and you can see why a […]
It would be so much easier to dismiss The Guardian if it didn’t employ some excellent writers. Its television critics, for example, are usually more entertaining than the programmes they review. The reason I still buy the paper on Fridays is because the “music” part of the film and music supplement actually covers popular music […]
Do you think it’s too late for me to hang out in an African children’s home in the hope of being adopted by a superstar? Despite his best efforts Derek was unable to get all of Damian’s hair in frame. For some reason I am reminded to tell you that Our House gallery in Brighton is […]
Thanks to Gur Hirshburg for pointing out that music on the site I linked to a couple of days ago is track number 15 on Chava Alberstein’s Songs Of My Beloved Country, the poignant Ballad Of The Horse With A Spot On His Forehead.
www.iiiiiiii.com [requires Flash and a noisy office]
In the small ads of a musicians’ magazine I subscribe to this month I read the following: Gospel music like you’ve never heard it before! Totally FREE full song downloads. www.dalestrand.com Having listened to it [MP3, 3.3 Mb], I’d say the description is accurate.
Those of you who didn’t know it already will not be surprised to learn that there is a Finnish symphonic rock outfit called Nightwish. They have recently sacked their soprano lead, so, if that’s your bag, now’s your chance to put on your horned helmet and boob-armour and record a demo for them. This YouTube […]
My darling readership has solved two PooterGeek mysteries. Remember the “hair guitar” version of Pachelbel’s Canon? This New York Times article [PDF] tells the tale behind it. A couple of weeks back, on the way back from the site of a wedding reception, I managed to get myself stuck in one of the few actual undulations in […]
A couple of times in the past I’ve linked to snippets of multi-part vocal harmony [MP3, 770kB] here. Thanks to digital audio workstations like the marvellous Sonar and audio interfaces like this, I can record myself singing the various parts of the arrangement, overlay the harmonies, set them in an artificial space, and create my […]
Yesterday evening, while I was eating me tea, I had the Cambridge Folk Festival on the radio. Luckily I wasn’t paying too much attention to the introductions so I had no advance warning of Salsa Celtica’s “signature blend of big-band Latin dance music with Scottish accents”. They’re tight as a Highland midge’s nether parts and […]
Here are two of the scariest things I ever saw on national TV, in the days when I watched it. The Black And White Minstrel Show: a once-popular entertainment featuring some white people who couldn’t dance very well and who wanted to look like black people (temporarily) Michael Jackson’s Thriller: Image excerpt provided by Clipland a once-popular entertainment […]
Trevor Rabin, 80s hair-guitarist-with-pretensions and the man who wrote Owner Of A Lonely Heart (one of the greatest pop singles of all time) while sitting on his toilet, has scored the orchestral music for Snakes On A Plane! Does it get any better than this? The film is so important to me now that I fear […]
This video of a guy playing Pachelbel’s Canon on his electric guitar starts sedately enough, but after a minute you’ll have one foot propped up on your PC base unit and a window open so that the breeze blows through the cascading ringlets of your bubble-perm wig. For some reason the guitarist keeps his face hidden […]