Music
Last night I celebrated Samhain with an aptly Hallowe’en flavoured night of ghostly gothic dream-folk in a church, performed by Marissa Nadler. (more…)
To celebrate Samhain – or Hallowe’en if you prefer – here is my latest autumnal playlist. We start and finish with radically different versions of Ghost Town, from almost 45 years apart. In between there’s something old-but-new by T.Rex and more Glam from Sparks and Suzi Quatro. Plus a lot of steamy early-’70s funk and jazz-funk, and some Soft Cell in tribute to my old pal Dave.
Lankum transform The Specials’ Ghost Town into an otherworldly Irish folk-drone-techno banger for a new generation. (more…)
In the second half of the Eighties, punk/New Wave misfits XTC briefly became another band dedicated to Sixties psychedelia, The Dukes Of Stratosphear.
Siouxsie Sioux channels her inner Shirley Bassey to sing the best Bond theme never to appear in a Bond movie.
I’ve always been a sucker for sad songs, and songs rarely sound sadder than The Way It Goes by bluegrass revivalist Gillian Welch.
R.E.M. broke through to the big time in 1991 after a decade as indie darlings, with what would soon become their signature song.
PragVEC were one of the first of the post-punk bands to emerge in London in 1978 and sounded unlike anyone else at the time – or since. (more…)
Tom Misch’s jazzy house update on Roberta Flack’s 50-year-old chart topper Feel Like Makin’ Love is the kind of thing you might hear at a beach bar in Ibiza.
Still digging into early-Seventies soul, I have to admit I’d never heard of Brick and consequently I’d never heard of their disco and jazz hybrid that they called “dazz.”