This week’s Song Lyric Sunday has a military theme to it. Following on from last week’s Clive Davis fest, I recalled that one of the great man’s very first signings was the Irish folksinger Donovan, and I certainly remembered this protest song from my schooldays. Donovan released his cover in 1965, although the song’s author,…
There’s an intriguing twist to Song Lyric Sunday this week, with the theme being artistes who at some point have been signed by the legendary producer Clive Davis. I had heard , almost peripherally, of Clive Davis. Thus, I knew that at some point he had signed up the Grateful Dead to his new Arista…
I must have been doing Song Lyric Sunday for too long, because this week, for the theme of ‘thought’ (broadly speaking), I realised that I had already deployed my first two choices: Pink Floyd’s ‘Brain Damage/Eclipse’ and John Lennon’s ‘Mind Games’. However, this is surely up there with the best of them: a vision that…
Song Lyric Sunday this week takes ‘rain’ as its theme. The real standout choice for me would be Carole King’s ‘It Might As Well Rain Until September’; unfortunately it’s such a standout that I’ve already deployed it. Same with my second choice, the Grateful Dead’s ‘Looks Like Rain’; indeed, I used that for Helen’s prompt…
Entries for this week’s Song Lyric Sunday should make reference to musical instruments. Right then, here is Chuck Berry’s seminal rock ‘n roll classic – the tale of a young guitar prodigy. You may have heard it before…. Deep down in Louisiana close to New OrleansWay back up in the woods among the evergreensThere stood…
This week’s Song Lyric Sunday should make reference to a fruit in it’s title. This somewhat fruity piece from Led Zeppelin’s second album fills that bill. I should have quit you a long time agoOh, yeah, long time agoI wouldn’t be here, my childrenDown on this killing floor I should have listened, baby, to my…
The Book of Revelation’s four horsemen of the apocalypse – war, pestilence, famine and death – constitute the cheery theme for Song Lyric Sunday this week. My first thought was this very early classic by Bob Dylan, released on the ‘Freewhelin’ album in 1963. Although I would only have been about eleven or twelve at…
As Jim is kind enough to give us a few weeks heads up of his weekly themes for Song Lyric Sunday, I’ve known that ‘Automated, Mechanical, Robots’ has been looming for some time. Jim himself rightly pointed out that it could be difficult to find something that matches this rather unusual brief (I was certainly…
Grammatical contractions form the theme of Song Lyric Sunday this week: ‘don’t’, ‘won’t’ and, of course ‘can’t’. This is a song about jealousy. Or maybe the patriarchy. The Beatles, from ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, the album of the movie, released in 1964. I got something to say that might cause you painIf I catch you…
Back in the late sixties there were lots of space-rock bands in the UK, most of them now mercifully all but forgotten. For me, though, there were two stand-outs: Pink Floyd, of course, but also Hawkwind. As pretty well everybody surely knows, Floyd developed away from their original hard(ish) rock roots to their characteristic expansive,…
the only deadhead in the hameau 