This week it’s rockabilly for Song Lyric Sunday, so it’s time to take one step back from the beginnings of what’s generally thought of as rock ‘n’ roll, to an earlier, (even) more innocent time. With the benefit of hindsight, you can see in what direction music was heading back in the mid-1950s, and this…
This week’s chosen genre for Song Lyric Sunday is ‘swamp rock’. I thought I knew what it means, and my suspicions were confirmed with a quick online search. Naturally, the results of this included a number of ‘best’ and ‘greatest’ lists of both songs and performers. In all honesty almost all of them were new…
Ah, bubblegum: mindless, shallow stuff for kids, dismissed snootily by moody teenagers in its late-sixties heyday. Oh, that would be me then. It would be idle to pretend that I’ve ever been a fan of this sort of stuff, but this, it must be said, is pretty catchy. And the video’s probably worth watching as…
So, ‘Sunshine Pop’ for this week’s Song Lyric Sunday. That’s not a description I’d heard before, although sandwiched between last week’s Yacht Rock and next week’s Bubblegum, it wasn’t too hard to find myself somewhere in the ball-park. Naturally, I googled it and, among other things, the search threw up a list of the top…
“I wouldn’t if I were you” I didn’t need to resort to Google when I saw that the genre for this week’s Song Lyric Sunday was ‘yacht rock’. However, I did have a problem in moving past the mental image of the official video for Duran Duran’s ‘Rio’ (it’s here if by some chance you’ve…
“When I have nothing to say, my lips are sealed” This week’s genre for Song Lyric Sunday is New Wave. Well, I’ve a pretty good idea of what that means, although there’s a bit of a risk that it could slide into New Romantic. However, while a band like Spandau Ballet is clearly New Romantic,…
Yee haw. Genre of the week for song Lyric Sunday this time is ‘country’. I think I have a basic understanding of what that is. However, on further reflection there is a whole range of sub-genres, as with last week’s ‘Metal’ (but not like metal obviously). I would not say that I’m a great fan…
For this week’s Song Lyric Sunday, the musical genre of choice is ‘Metal’. At least I didn’t have to look that one up, even though it’s not as straightforward as it seems: heavy metal? thrash metal? Saints preserve us, death metal? And even trickier – at what point does rock music become metal. Well, I…
At this stage of my life, and with the world in its current sorry state, to be perfectly honest, my ideal mode of transport would be armchair-based imagination. If that lacks a certain degree of ambition, then something along the lines of ‘Beam me up, Scotty’ would be good, but the technology isn’t there, unfortunately.…
As chance would have it, I actually referred to my most challenging task yesterday. I refer, of course, to the weekly routine of changing the bed linen. The process can be broken down into four parts, the middle two of which – stripping off the old sheets and pillowcases and putting on the new ones…
I spent most of my working life as a financial analyst in the investment business. As my specialist subject was the European banking sector, I saw plenty of corporate restructurings being undertaken, with mixed success. The key question in such exercises, of course, is how to define success. When announcing restructurings, company managements must perforce…
How many book blurbs have you seen which trumpet the claim that ‘this book will change your life’? Dozens, at least. And how many such books really have had a life-changing impact on you? One? Two? None? I can honestly say that there is no book (and I’ve read a fair few in my time)…
Lucky guy that I am – in so many ways – I must have received many gifts in my life that would generally be considered as memorable. However, I have an abiding memory of one Christmas when I was about seven or eight years old. I can’t even remember for sure if I still believed…
Tracing one’s ancestry has become quite the thing in recent years. I first started looking into mine more than twenty years ago while I was, in acting terms, ‘resting’. Or, to put it another way, unemployed. Back then, genealogy was a labour-intensive process that involved ploughing through fat, leather-bound registers of births, marriages and deaths…
The last few weeks of Song Lyric Sunday have been quite a journey of discovery. I now know that garage rock isn’t the same as garage and that power pop isn’t the same as pop. And now I realise that Paisley Underground has nothing to do with Prince (that would be Paisley Park). Paisley Underground,…
the only deadhead in the hameau 