When I saw that the prompt for this week’s Song Lyric Sunday was ‘cold’, my immediate thought – and one I just haven’t been able get past – was this: a regular on the Grateful Dead’s set-list from the very early days. And it seems particularly appropriate if you have the misfortune to be in…
Unless you’re a quantum physicist with an argumentative streak, you can cope perfectly well just getting by taking as read Isaac Newton’s concept of ‘Time’s Arrow’ (It’s linear and it only goes forward). I must say, though, that I do find a lot of the stuff about the science and philosophy of time quite absorbingly…..well,…
Well now, ‘transport’ is the broad theme for Song Lyric Sunday this week, so there’s no shortage of possibilities to choose from. I do wonder, though, whether anyone else will come up with this particular piece of 1980s anarchic weirdness from the left-wing Liverpudlian (although here deploying an Estuary English accent) comedian, Alexei Sayle. He…
Well now, ‘rodents’ as a topic for Song Lyric Sunday certainly takes us off the beaten track, musically speaking, although it may or may not tell us more than we need to know about Clive’s – who set the challenge – psyche. As it turns out, there are quite a few songs featuring rats or…
‘Sometimes I feel very sad’ A special shout out to Clive for setting this week’s prompt for Song Lyric Sunday: something from an album you’ve never listened to before. This is a great challenge, but also one I found difficult. To all intents and purposes, any music released in the twenty-first century I won’t have…
From December 2014, a grumpy old man rant about a common song lyric trope… Asked and answered “Ask a simple question and you’ll get a simple answer” I was always told when I was a child. Sound advice too, I’ve always thought. The posing of a question is one of the most frequently used of all…
This week’s Song Lyric Sunday challenge is to feature a song that refers to a state, a country or just a place. That’s certainly a huge area full of potential choices. This version of ‘House Of The Rising Sun’ is certainly, from a UK perspective, the seminal one. Released in 1964 it caused something of…
From way back in 2012, a playlist… Life: The Soundtrack Yesterday’s Daily Prompt struck a chord (as it were): “Put together a a musical playlist of songs that describe your life, including what you hope your future entails.” I guess that this is something many people think about doing but don’t actually set about it…
The key prompt words for this week’s Song Lyric Sunday are, rather morbidly, ‘death’, ‘kill’ and ‘murder’. I’m no fan of death or thrash metal, so I suppose that’s a fair part of the pool of possibilities ruled out. Some others that came to mind also had to be ruled out on the basis that…
We watch quite a few TV quiz shows of varying Ievels of intellectual rigour – from ‘Mastermind’ and ‘Only Connect’ to ‘Tipping Point’. One sad common characteristic of them all, however, is the diminishing awareness among the contestants of The Beatles. For goodness’ sake, being from Merseyside we almost literally grew up with them. However,…
the only deadhead in the hameau 