A is for…Alistair Fitchett, who started this alphabetical ball rolling, somewhat, and gave me the idea for the next 26 entries of ABC playlisting. It’s also for “Amongst The Books An Angel” by Piano Magic, yet another coy meditation on bookish girls from Glenn Johnson. What can I say, I sympathise deeply. “Amongst….” doesn’t really lift off until the mid-point, where mangled middle-Eastern samples suddenly muscle their way into the song: the rest is graceful and melancholic, spoiled slightly by Johnson’s flat voice.
Critic’s Cliche: summing entire genres up on single pages is about as thankless a task as can be. Plenty to disagree with here but if you fancy raising your blood pressure a point or two you could do worse.
Here we go again: “Rock band Radiohead are emerging as the pretenders to The Beatles’ rock and pop throne, according to a wide-ranging survey of musical tastes”. Precisely what definition of ‘wide-ranging’ are they using, I wonder. Wretched Colin Larkin list makes for flaccid column inches once again, shock horror. And once again hand-wringing over lack of black and female artists on the list - incidentally how come nobody ever asks Larkin why this is? They probably wouldn’t like the answer, judging by the crowing over the artistic inadequacy of hip-hop I remember from the first edition of his vile book.
Rachel Stevenson’s article on Spiller encapsulates precisely why any right-thinking person has now got thoroughly sick of “Groovejet”. Once in Theaudience, always in Theaudience, say I. Spiller has exactly two good features: i) it kept Dane Bowers off No.1, and ii) It’s the first record out of Ibiza in a while which hasn’t been formula trance, being formula neo-disco instead. (And yes, I did give it a good review, but that’s pop for ya.)
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