Nothing puts a smile on the face and gets the feet moving like Highlife music. So, to celebrate a century of recorded Ghanaian highlife, here’s a prime example by the late legend Atakora Manu.
Terence Wilson, universally known as Astro, was the percussionist and part-time toaster in UB40, the unfairly maligned kings of UK reggae.
There was so much more to Bunny Wailer than being a founding member of the band that bears his name. (more…)
Quincy Jones came up with the song named after the Japanese arthouse porn film that gave me one of my most memorably horrible experiences in a cinema. (more…)
You’d expect a song by David Byrne to be quirky but even by his own eccentric standards this one is… let’s say idiosyncratic. (more…)
With his big hat and catchy tunes, George Strait was my gateway drug into what the old joke calls my two of my favourite types of music – country and western. (more…)
Jim Carroll’s tragic song, People Who Died, commemorates the friends he lost to drugs during an early life catalogued in his teenage memoir The Basketball Diaries. (more…)
Punk rock meets primitive electro in The Nails’ finest moment, a tribute to the women they met on their journey from the backstreets of Boulder to Downtown New York. (more…)
The venerable denim-clad 12-bar boogie merchants of Status Quo have had a record-breaking 60 hit singles, but only one number one, in January 1975. This is it. (more…)