Music
I was initially resistant to the dance music takeover in the late Eighties and the replacement of guitars with laptops, synths and samplers. But I was converted by songs like Pump Up The Volume, S Express – and this.
I’ve loved Mexican music for a long time and the first time I heard it was on Ry Cooder’s 1976 album Chicken Skin Music. And the songs that stood out were the ones featuring the accordion of Flaco Jimenez.
I was late to the party with R.E.M. I didn’t really discover them until they put out their sixth album Green in 1988 and this song was a minor hit.
Johnny Cash’s recording of God’s Gonna Cut You Down, recorded just before his death in 2003, became all the more poignant when this posthumous video was released three years later.
Chet Atkins never became a household name outside his genre of country music – but was recognised as a legend within it.
This song immediately evokes a poignant childhood memory for me, from a family holiday in Cornwall in the summer of ’69.
Sometimes I choose a song not because I particularly love it but because it’s the right one at the right time. Like this.
This long-forgotten garage band was the first group my friend Craig Poland Smith ever got to see, at East Aurora High School in upstate New York in 1965.
Frankie Goes To Hollywood had already upset the Mary Whitehouse brigade with their naughty chart topper Relax when they followed it with this song.
Sad to hear of another rock’n’roll death, this time of George Kooymans, lead guitarist and co-founder of Dutch rockers Golden Earring.