I only had the one encounter with Paddy Moloney, the late leader of The Chieftains. It was in Japan. (more…)

The word “legend” gets chucked about a lot but Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry really was one. Keith Richards once called him “the Salvador Dali of reggae.” (more…)

Nanci Griffith (6 July 1953-13 August 2021) (more…)

One is a young Norwegian singer-songwriter who makes minimalist electronic folk music. The other is a legendary Jamaican reggae producer in his mid-eighties. (more…)

Sharon Van Etten and Angel Olsen come together for an emotion-packed vintage-sounding country-tinged duet. (more…)

A Tuareg band playing psychedelic desert blues live on a sandy Saharan street in front of a suburban house in West Africa. If you don’t have a smile watching this, there’s something wrong with you. (more…)

Aria Wells, aka Greentea Peng, blends blues and soul, jazz and reggae and much more into a lazy, hazy sound that’s all her own – a hybrid that’s quintessentially London.
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An anti-racist anti-sexist anthem by a quartet of schoolgirls, performed in a public library, this song broke the internet on its release in May 2021 – and no wonder. (more…)

Here’s a summery reverb-drenched slice of Sixties psychedelia to send the mind spinning back to San Francisco in the Summer of Love. (more…)

I never thought I’d be waxing lyrical about The Stranglers 45 years after I first saw them, supporting Patti Smith at The Roundhouse. (more…)