I toyed with the idea of a post celebrating Europe last summer around the referendum vote, but frankly, I was too damned down about the whole thing to even consider it. Debate has raged, of course, in the press, in person, on social media, just about everywhere, and there is certainly no doubt that the […]
Next week marks ten years since I began the Tuesday Ten series, at the end of March 2007. I was 28 then, and much has changed in the decade since.
This has been a quiet year.
I’ve mentioned before that I have a notes file (saved in multiple locations) that I’ve used since I started this Tuesday Ten series back in 2007. As a result, I have ideas and concepts for lists that have languished half-completed for years, while others get thought of and posted within weeks. I guess it is […]
Part four of my monthly rundown this year of tracks from 1996 that broadly, I still love now.
In a time where far-right sentiment is ever more in the news again – see this disturbing story from Liverpool this week, the sentencing of a fourteen-year-old boy for a racist knife attack on a teacher in Bradford, demonising of immigrants, apparent revisionism over Golden Dawn in Greece, or upvoting of Nazi propaganda on the […]
One of the interesting things about writing this series is that occasionally one post (and not necessarily at the time of writing it!) will inspire another, and then will have me wondering how I didn’t think of it before.
This year: 170 bands, 57 days worth of gigs. Five festivals, three countries, eight cities/towns. From venues holding thousands to those holding tens. Due to personal issues and, frankly, being too damned busy for much of the year, I didn’t get to write about many of them aside from the festivals, so writing this list […]
Here we go, then, with the run-down of the best tracks of 2014 – according to me, anyway. 2014 has been an odd year, as friends will know – life has rather got in the way in a number of respects, which has cut down the amount of writing I’ve been able to do, but […]
There has been a lot of “twenty years since…” features this year on “classic” albums. But then, the more I think about it, 1994 really was quite an awesome year for what we call alternative music in its various forms. I was sixteen that summer, and the torrent of new music covered all kinds of […]
Hurtling into summer, and nearly halfway through 2014 already (!), here are this month’s ten great tracks.
The television appearance is an important part of the promotional armoury. Not a video (I’ve covered these in various posts before), but simply a live* rendition of a current song that maybe gets a band out to an audience that otherwise might not know about them. I’ve also excluded TV-aired festival appearances, too. One thing, […]
In a time where inequality is rising faster than in a long while, austerity is all the rage (despite the warnings that this is only making things worse), and the various results of the Euro crisis, to mention but a few things, I’d perhaps expect a rise in political comment from music or even comedy, […]
I’ve looked at band reunions before (144: Back For Good?), but I’ve not looked at the glut of album reissues, remasters and other ways that record labels have found to help bolster their physical sales numbers that little bit more, as digital sales continue to increase. And while I have a bit of a distrust […]
In this era of downloads, the B-side has almost become a dead art. And what a shame, when you consider some of the astonishing tracks hidden away on the flipside of a single over the years. Not to mention that a number of B-sides have become accepted as some bands greatest songs, or have become […]
It won’t have escaped anyone’s attention in the UK at least that there is a wedding of two privileged people this Friday that will take place in front of a worldwide audience, shutting down the normal workings of much of central London for the day – and indeed the rest of the country as an […]
The weird thing about writing these Tuesday Tens is that the ideas for some take a long time to come together. Others can have a whole load of suggestions come at once, particularly if an idea for a subject pops up while I’m in the pub, or out with my girlfriend (especially in the car, […]
For my first Tuesday Ten proper in about two months, I’m looking at guest appearances. I thought I had covered this before, but somehow it appears that I haven’t. Anyway – guest appearances are either used a little cynically (to get the guest artist more exposure, or even to get the other artist more “credibility” […]
The use of sampling in music has been around for some time now, and at points the use of it has approached levels of extraordinary musicality and ingenuity. At other points, of course, it’s been used in obvious, unsubtle ways – and as a result frequently becomes something of a monster hook. And why not? […]
Onto part four of my 90s album run-down. There is again a Spotify playlist accompaniment to it, which is again only missing a couple of entries.
