Category Archive: Modern Music
10 (or more) Songs We Hate
1 Always Take the Weather With You (Crowded House) – [dreary and nasty, almost hostile.] 2. Why Does it Always Rain on Me? (Travis) – [Why don’t you stop whining and buy a brolley?] 3 Born to be Alive (Patrick Hernandez – there is dispute in the TVC house about this one) [Ecch!] 4. Wonderful Christmastime (Paul McCartney) [Worst Xmas song ever.] 5. Happy (Pharrell Williams – there is a dispute here too) [L – unhappy] 6. All That She Wants (Ace of Base) [“she’s gone tomorrow” – why not today?] 7. I Will Always Love You (Whitney Houston version) [a…
Continue Reading →10 Reasons to Hate Bowie
Well, it is easy to venerate Bowie of course, and De mortuis nihil nisi bonum but no major figures are completely loved. Here’s some drawbacks advanced simply in the interests of total candour –
Continue Reading →Vale David Bowie
(photo by Adam Bielawski)
David Bowie (8 January 1947 – 10 January 2016) He was a total original, part of the vanguard of the synthesiser revolution, a singer-songwriter of genius, an innovative producer and arranger (e.g. Transformer), a rather odd but always compelling actor (he is appropriately weird in The Man Who Fell to Earth and The Hunger), and, in the best sense of the term, a trend-setter. From avant-garde to Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, through Young Americans, the Berlin trilogy of Low, “Heroes” and Lodger, and Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps), he mesmerised with his masterful changes of style, change of persona, angelic…
Continue Reading →Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink
(By Elvis Costello) (2015) We’ve been admiring EC from afar and occasionally up close, for a very long time. So we come to his autobiography with relish and trepidation. It is not as good as Speak Memory, the greatest autobiography ever penned, but it is hugely impressive – more a dense memory-book than a straight auto-biog, and much more concerned with music and music people than his own ego. He is obviously and rather charmingly challenged by autobiography, preferring the more oblique method of song lyrics and anecdotes, and saying of the process: “I don’t much care for the subject.”…
Continue Reading →One More For the Road
(Frank Sinatra, December 12, 1915 – May 14, 1998) Francis Albert Sinatra, of Hoboken, New Jersey, is 100 today. Fly him (who created the American songbook) to the moon! His presentation of torch songs was stoic but sad. (Imagine a gambler whose girlfriend – Ava Gardner, say – has walked out on him). He’d come on and spill his heart over the stage, then pick himself up and get back in the race, as if to say ‘That’s life – rise above it.’ For example, at “The Sands”, with Count Basie on piano, he has a full-to-bursting room silent and rapt with a drunk…
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