Like any diligent father, I take my parental responsibilities seriously. I must teach my son to read, to cross the road safely, to behave politely at the dining table, and to appreciate pop music.
I started on that last one early, as early as I could. When he was just a few weeks old, we discovered [...]
Like a lot of people, I often stick iTunes on random and let it play anything it likes (unless I have to concentrate on some work, in which case only silence will do). I also like to rate songs, so that on the rare occasions when I’m devising playlists or transferring things to an iPod, [...]
I think I bought this one in the Folkestone branch of Our Price. I say I think, because it would either have been Our Price or Hummingbird Records, or possibly downstairs in Debenhams in the days when Debenhams still had a music department. But I think it was Our Price.
I don’t know why I wanted [...]
Issue 6 of CRAM magazine is out now, and it includes a couple of things I wrote: Breakfast with the White Stripes and What Radiohead gets.
Elsewhere in the pages of this free PDF mag you’ll find articles about high quality beer, healthy breakfast cereals, and an amusing and informative infographic about coffee. Go grab [...]
So many of my musical discoveries over the years came from listening to the radio, and this, The Shamen’s finest moment, was one of them.
I heard “Jesus Loves Amerika” on the radio and loved it. Hard, brutal rhythms, but a vocal track you could hum along to as you cycled through the bitter Cambridgeshire winter. [...]
By letting people choose how much they wish to pay for their new album, Radiohead are sacrificing a certain amount of guaranteed income. But to offset that loss, the band gathers a great deal of extremely useful data.
For a start, everyone who buys “In Rainbows” (either the download or the diskbox) has to register as [...]
I have 80-ish albums on cassette, purchased in my younger days when my only means of playing music was on a hugely expensive dual-tape stereo system that my mum bought me as a birthday present.
I’m very fond of most of these albums, which is why 80-ish of them have lurked in drawers or cupboards [...]
I’ve found some great musical stuff on the net recently.
First was [Dandelion Radio](http://www.dandelionradio.com/), which claims to be the “the internet radio station inspired by John Peel”, although I suspect there’s more than just the one that was inspired that way. Nonetheless it’s worth a listen, and introduced me to the the poptastic delights of the [...]
This week’s internet column for PA:
American internet radio has been condemned to death.
If you’ve never taken the time to delve into the amazing world of online radio broadcasting, it’s about time you did. There are many hundreds of independent radio stations out there, most of them consisting of one person and their own unique personality.
Many [...]
John Cage’s silent piece, as performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican Centre:
Things to cherish about this: that it was performed by a serious orchestra, in such a serious manner and a serious setting; that the BBC broadcast it (who else would?); that it was given the same serious treatment that any other [...]
