Through the miracle of the world-wide web, I know that it was the evening of March 1st 1969 that I spent in the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall with my brother (well, I knew that already – obviously) at a concert compered by the immortal John Peel, which featured a sitar player (Vytas Serelis, also a noted…
Helen’s Song Lyric Sunday theme for this week is ‘self-love’. It’s fair to say that this is a topic that’s – well, let’s say ‘open to interpretation’. Keeping it clean, however, as another participant has pointed out, there is a plethora of self-love songs written and performed from a feminine perspective, but for blokes the…
‘Rules”: can’t live with em, can’t live without ’em. Especially the latter. An interesting theme set for us this week by Helen, and not too difficult to find relevant – if not necessarily all that poetic – lyrics. I’m sure that this song – written in 1959 by Sonny Curtis, a member of Buddy Holly’s…
Jazz is not like Marmite. When it comes to that disgusting yeast extract you either love it or you hate it – and you now know my position on the matter – but there is some jazz I like and some I just can’t bear. I don’t know why – I’m nowhere near enough of…
“Well I can tell your future before it comes to pass And I can do things for you that make your heart feel glad” An interesting – and challenging – theme this week from Helen: Fortune-telling or predicting the future. Didn’t see that one coming. Unless you take a very broad interpretation (and there’s no…
“Gonna make you pay for that great big hole in my heart” ‘Vengeance’ is Helen’s chosen theme this week. Almost too easy: there is no question in my mind that the greatest song about revenge ever written is Bob Dylan’s ‘Positively Fourth Street’. However, Dylan does turn up quite often in these Song Lyric Sunday…
Being the latest despatch from the front line of one man’s war on terroir…. Our rural idyll here in the heart of la France profonde is lovely, but there’s one problem. Nature rather objects to us having muscled in and wants to take our little piece back – which it tries to do relentlessly throughout…
It couldn’t really be anyone but the Rolling Stones for the letter ‘R’. Not only were they around in my formative years but – against all odds – they’re still going strong, at least on the basis of their performance at Glastonbury in 2013. It’s one of my biggest musical regrets that I never got…
As Helen says, there are plenty of songs about breath and breathing, but the one that came immediately to mind was this version by The Hollies of an Albert Hammond/Mike Hazlewood song. No coincidence that this came out in 1974, the year we got married. A beautiful song for a beautiful woman. If I could…
Helen has set us a tester this week with the theme of ‘Heat’ for Song Lyric Sunday. I struggled to bring to mind many songs with ”heat’ in the title. Resorting, reluctantly, to other-search-engines-are-available to find lyric references to the word produced plenty of allusions, but these seemed to be mostly in the context of…
the only deadhead in the hameau 