For ‘W’ it could only be The Who. Having, notoriously, slept right through their performance at the Isle of Wight in 1970, I finally got to see them at the opening night of the Rainbow Theatre in November 1971. They tumbled onto the stage at the end of a line of high-kicking chorus girls, Moon…
I’m British and saying ‘Sorry’ is what we do. Besides, experience has taught me that it’s always best to apologise, even if only as a precaution. More seriously, has there ever been a better song about regret for causing unintended pain than this? I was dreaming of the past and my heart was beating fast…
There’s almost an embarrassment of riches when it comes to songs about ‘Fire’, the theme set this week for Helen’s ‘Song Lyric Sunday. And not just any old songs about fire – really good ones. I thought about James Taylor’s ‘Fire and Rain’, but after last week’s rather gloomy offering, I finally decided on something…
As a teenager in the late sixties and the beginning of the seventies, the Stones or Led Zeppelin were your go-to sources of vicarious debauchery. But if you wanted to crank it up another notch – to vicarious decadence – then it had to be the Velvet Underground. Narcotics and BDSM: I mean, c’mon. But…
I was never a party-pooper, you understand – at least I hope not – but at most of the parties I went to in my youth I’d most likely be the one on his own in the corner, crippled by tongue-tied shyness, avoiding eye contact and trying not to be noticed. ‘Twas ever thus. So…
Throughout this year of stately progress through my music lexicon, it’s become pretty clear that the late teens is the most important time for the development and fixing of musical tastes. Much of that, naturally, has to do with the music that was current during that period of seething hormones and general angst. So, lucky…
“Just to be the man who walked a thousand miles To fall down at your door”” Lots of songs about travelling out there to fit Helen’s theme for this week, of course. My first thought – as it usually is – was something by the Grateful Dead, and there’s certainly no shortage of them either.…
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…
the only deadhead in the hameau 