I’ve been dreading reaching this stage of my Music Lexicon because I’m damned if I can think of an artiste or artistes that I give more than half a hoot about whose name begins with ‘N’. The only group I could come up with from when I was in what passed for my pomp was…
“Got your spell on me, baby” Helen is looking for a song relating to ‘Magic’ this week. There are plenty out there, certainly. To be perfectly honest, the first one that came into my head was Barry Manilow’s ‘Could It Be Magic?’ Hmmm…oui, mais non, as the French are wont to say. More attuned to…
This week’s theme for Song Lyric Sunday is a bit of a tester. Helen has asked us to post a song with a word that describes a sound in the title or lyrics, but I don’t think I’m entirely sure what she means. Are we talking about onomatoepia – which is when a word is…
You may not have been expecting this one. Here we are at the halfway stage of My Music Lexicon and so far, by and large, it’s been a litany of guitar-heavy rock, with a dash of folk/protest. Well, it’s what I like. But I have a softer side too, especially for well-crafted songs with lyrics…
“Oh let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone Let me feel you moving like they do in Babylon” A song about Dance or Dancing is called for this week by Helen at This Thing Called Life One Word At A Time, so here is a well-known example from what I call ‘second-stage’…
“Daddy made whiskey and he made it well. Cost two dollars and it burned like hell” This week’s theme is ‘Alcohol’; I can deal with that. It’s been a month since I last featured a Grateful Dead song, but here’s one that meets the brief. There is a popular misconception about the Grateful Dead, in…
We’re not quite halfway through this musical lexicon and we’ve already had a few examples of musical epiphany. However, for sheer power and immediacy there has never been anything to match the very first time I heard Led Zeppelin. By the time we got to the Lower Sixth (first of two years of A-level studies),…
I don’t know about you, but I find that the older I get, the lower my boredom threshold sinks. And the shorter my attention span becomes…. Sorry, what was I saying? Oh yes: boredom. Perhaps a jaded appetite is simply an inevitable consequence of having been shuffling around this mortal coil for a long time,…
Looking back at my music lexicon so far, it’s pretty obvious that I’m a child of my time – more specifically from about the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies.That isn’t an apology: I suspect that most people’s musical tastes are largely defined by their formative years. Lucky me. As we reach the letter ‘K’, however, while…
This week, Helen wants a song with a name in the title. No shortage of them, that’s for sure, but to give everyone a rest from the Grateful Dead (‘Althea’, ‘Bertha’, ‘Cassidy’, ‘Corinna’, ‘Loose Lucy’ et al) here’s a very early (1967) single by one of the greatest – and certainly the loudest – rock…
the only deadhead in the hameau 