So why did Roger Waters rejoin Pink Floyd for Live 8? Was it the sense of occasion? The putting away of petty squabbles for a greater cause. Maybe he discovered that Nick Mason hadn’t after all pranged his car in the street. All of these are po[…]

Hilary Clinton wants to send 100 00 more troops to Iraq, and when I was trying to formulate a response to this, i-tunes popped up with this song.
Its weird, it seems like i-tunes has replaced the goats stomach, tarot cards and dice as divination too[…]

Someone, somewhere (mixmaster extraordinaire Steve M, an e-mail) mentioned Sunscreem earlier to me. I glibly shot back an e-mail saying that they were great and you should dis them at your peril.
And then I remember. Sunscreem were great. Not great i[…]

The first volume of this great-12″s-of-the-80s was a surprise hit – this second has confessed dynastic ambitions (see inner sleeve). Some staggering pop moments here of course – the widescreen bliss of New Gold Dream, the Annihilati[…]

After the two minutes silence I wasn’t feeling too bad, until I came in and the radio – 6 Music – was playing Sigur Ros, followed by Bright Eyes. It’s a rotten thing to have to do as a DJ, follow up a silence – you can&#[…]

Following a particularly grouchy Stylus singles jukebox I feel I must re-establish my tattered cred by posting an MP3, so here one is:
DJ Marlboro – Super Popozao
I downloaded this four years ago or so and have been raving about it, pushing it […]

Orange Juice – “Rip It Up”
Edwyn Collins and company fake the funk. What’s so appealing about Orange Juice (and Dexy’s, and ABC) is the “let’s pretend” element – they know they’re not a &#82[…]

“The difference between Schoenberg and traditional music might be demonstrated with the help of a bon mot of Schumann’s that one can tell whether a person is musical by his ability to continue performing a piece more or less correctly whe[…]

hmph my final para is very nearly as tricksily coded as the code it aims to decode, so to further murkify i shall just add this… A. cf marcello’s post abt Pink Floyd below; and B. where i think Dissensian Disdain for the Pro-Pop Massive ([…]

Here you can download a Tuvan throat singing duo covering Love Can Tear Us Apart, and its amazing, hard, low, moaning–and as sad as anything, at first its a novelty, but throat singing always seems to be better at tragic then comic, and the bar[…]