[WordPress’ ‘365 Days of Writing Prompts’ wants ‘the satisfaction of a list’ today. So here’s one – and it’s about music, for a change] Most songs are ‘covered’, in the sense that they are performed by someone other than the writer/composer themselves. Some songs are so popular that they get to be covered by many…
This week, Helen at This Thing Called Life One Word At A Time is looking for a road-trip song. There’s certainly no shortage to choose from and, as usual my thoughts turned first to the Grateful Dead – who for many years of touring seemed to be on a semi-permanent road trip themselves. They had…
“There’s something happening somewhere baby, I just know that there is” This week, Helen at This Thing Called Life One Word at A Time wants a song from the 80s….. My initial response was that the eighties was a bit after my time really. I tend to associate that era with New Romantics and bad…
And so we reach the heart of the matter. The band that this blog derives its name from, the band that this blogger listens to more than any other. So what’s so special about the Grateful Dead? I’m by no means a natural evangelist, but a bit of background explanation might help. The bus came…
This week, Helen at This Thing Called Life One Word At A Time has set us the theme of ‘Healing’ for Song Lyric Sunday. I was pleasantly surprised at how many potential candidates I managed to come up with in a short time: Marvin Gaye, obviously; The Beatles ‘It’s Getting Better; even ‘Fix You’ by…
When I was eleven or twelve years old, I wanted to be Billy Fury. He could sing, he was handsome, he made the girls scream. It was a very competitive field, British male soloists back then. Let’s be honest, everyone wanted to be the British Elvis. There’s no doubt that the top dog was Cliff…
Got to be honest, ‘E’ hasn’t proved to be the easiest instalment of My Music Lexicon. It’s not a completely fallow field, of course, but I’m trying to keep it honest so resisted the temptation to feign much interest in Echo and The Bunnymen, the Eurhythmics or even The Eagles. `However, this exercise is meant…
D? Dylan of course. It’s really hard to imagine anyone with an interest in music and a serious side to their personality hitting their teens in the mid-sixties who wouldn’t go for Bob Dylan as a major influence. I’m certanly no exception. I was never an enthusiast for the traditional folk music that Billy Connolly…
Until I was about fifteen years old I never realised that you could make music up as you go along. I mean, who knew? Virtually all my exposure to music was through records or the radio – which just played records. ‘Pop’ music came in neat two and a half minute packages that always sounded…
Seeing this week’s theme of ‘Sun’ took me straight to this song by Pink Floyd, and also straight back to June 1973. I had finished my final exams and was occupying the peculiar status known – at British universities any way – as ‘graduand’. That’s the strange no-man’s land between being an undergraduate and a…
