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If there’s a more powerful, pertinent and poignant protest song than Midlife In A Small Town by Dead Sheeran, I’d like to hear it.
When I first heard Nina Simone sing this, and for a long time afterwards, I thought she was singing about a “Sea Lion Woman.” Some time later I found out that the song title, which appeared as the B-side of Mississippi Goddam, is actually See-Line Woman.
Ivor Cutler was an eccentric Scottish poet whose chronicles of Life In A Scotch Sitting Room became popular during the punk era after being championed by John Peel.
You’d be forgiven for thinking this fellow and his home-made guitar, fashioned from a cigar box, had been unearthed deep in the Mississippi Delta. You couldn’t get further from the truth. William Adamson is just one of the alter egos of Rob Gallagher, former acid house DJ, underground poet, new age rapper and lead singer of acid jazz combo Galliano – the first act to be signed to Talkin’ Loud in the late eighties.
Merle Haggard’s self-penned number from 1974 has all the elements of the perfect Christmas song – a sad, sentimental, yet optimistic lyric, and a cracking tune.
Like most of us, I imagine, I spent a lot of time watching the telly over the course of this year. These were my favourites and I think they demonstrate pretty clearly why anyone who wants to “defund the BBC” is an idiot.
RIP Terry Hall (1957-2022).
The Specials were part of my youth, and I saw them several times, including that magical first time with Madness and Dexys and The Selecter all on one bill in 1979.
These guys were never more than a name to me – a name synonymous with psychedelic San Francisco acid rock. So too the name of their virtuoso guitarist John Cipollina.
Some time in 1979 I was at a gig at the Electric Ballroom when a sharp-dressed man with a prematurely balding dome and pallid complexion walked past me. He was not a looker by any means, but he had a stunning girl on his arm. I recognised him as Joe Jackson; and his debut single came instantly and inevitably to mind.