A few weeks ago (what can I tell you? I’ve been busy), the prolific Fandango posted his answers to 21 questions about musical tastes, set by another blogger. This gave me the idea of doing something similar, if only to relieve the thin and no doubt tedious diet of ‘One-Liner Wednesdays’ and ‘Song Lyric Sundays’…
And finally….Frank Zappa – or my brother would want to know the reason why. What I know about Zappa may possibly be more than that of the average music fan: but it’s no more than the tip of the iceberg in terms of the prodigious quantity and range of his output. To be honest, not…
That would be Neil Young, of course. I used to listen to Neil Young a lot in my youth. I was captivated by the first time I heard his distinctive quavery voice on ‘Helpless’ and I owned a couple of his albums – ‘After The Goldrush’ and ‘Harves’t – as well as the live CSN&Y…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Jazz is not like Marmite. When it comes to that disgusting yeast extract you either love it or you hate it – and you now know my position on the matter – but there is some jazz I like and some I just can’t bear. I don’t know why – I’m nowhere near enough of…
It couldn’t really be anyone but the Rolling Stones for the letter ‘R’. Not only were they around in my formative years but – against all odds – they’re still going strong, at least on the basis of their performance at Glastonbury in 2013. It’s one of my biggest musical regrets that I never got…
Let’s be honest, when you reach ‘Q’ in the Lexicon, there’s not an embarrassment of choice. I know nothing of Queens Of The Stone Age apart from their name, but happily there is one group that thoroughly deserves its place here: Queen. There’s a patrt of me that feels slightly guilty about liking Queen, although…
the only deadhead in the hameau 