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An Spailpín Fánach (Free subscription) | yesterday
Even Van Morrison likes the Sunday papers. There’s something so very – civilised – about them. Even the rags, the oaten husks among the nourishing porridge. There is something soothing about the presence of the Sunday papers, the great, fat lumps of them, the majority of which were printed on Tuesday at the very latest. If any news happens on Saturday evening, your Sunday paper is...
Word Magazine blogs (Free subscription) | 26/11/2009
I was chatting to the local indie record store owner, who is always looking for interesting ways to display his wares and prompt the odd purchase. A lot of the punters are somewhat sheepish, impressionable youngsters clutching their first Led Zeppelin, Roy Harper, Stooges, Floyd etc album and it struck me that it might be worthwhile having a display showing 'How to buy' a particular genre, era or...
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 22/11/2009
Call them 'twitchers' at your peril: how birdwatching has taken off in Britain. By Kate Kellaway Birdwatching – when it is non-birdwatchers you are talking to – produces an almost uniform reaction: amused condescension, as if the sheer harmlessness of the activity were dangerous or put it beyond the pale as a subject. It's the received idea of the "twitcher", the bird boffin...
BigCityLib Strikes Back (Free subscription) | 17/11/2009
...re the now infamous picture of him on his blackberry during Remembrance Day Ceremonies : The picture is fine, actually. It shows me on my BlackBerry, looking serious and intent. What they didn't tell you though, is what I was actually typing. As some of you know, I live-blog events and happenings to my website. That's what I was doing here. The purpose of writing about these events is to give folks...
JazzHQ (Free subscription) | 16/11/2009
Downbeat: The Great Jazz Interviews: A 75th Anniversary Anthology. Edited and Compiled By Frank Alkyer. In July of 1934 the first issue of DownBeat magazine hit newsstands in Chicago. For the next seven-plus decades and counting the publication has been synonymous with jazz. DownBeat has chronicled every facet of jazz; every trend; every new and emerging sound. They have charted the birth and rise...
The Hits Just Keep On Comin' (Free subscription) | 11/11/2009
I should start keeping track of the number of e-mail solicitations I receive each week asking me to review new music. It’s a lot, and most of them I ignore. For one thing, this is not the sort of blog that deals much in new music, and even if it was, many of the solicitations [...]
ice age heat wave (Free subscription) | 09/11/2009
First, I don't remember (or I only think I ever knew) that it's Van Morrison covering Bob Dylan. But then I'm forgiven. He says, "None of the bitches would dance with me when this song came on at high school dances." I say well, one of them will, now. He's always warm. I don't cry. I swear. I don't.
An Island Life (Free subscription) | 06/11/2009
When it comes to romantic music, it’s hard to beat Michael Buble’s soulful sound. He has a way of taking classic songs and making them his own by putting his own little spin on them. His popularity is evident by the fact that his latest CD release “Crazy Love” debuted at the #1 position on [...]
Sweeping The Nation (Free subscription) | 30/10/2009
More of these, in other words. Firstly, though, a complaint. In an update last week Van Morrison's The Complete Bang Sessions was uploaded. What value to this feature is mentioning a selection of Van's work between Them and Astral Weeks? Because, in a bold and magnificent move, the second half is what is commonly referred to as The Contractual Obligation Album. Morrison hated the Bang Records label...
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 25/10/2009
You own 7,000 records, but all she likes is disco … What's the best way to get your children into art without putting them off for life? Our critics reveal their own successes and failures Alexis Petridis on pop 'The Tweenies made me want to drive the car into a lamppost' Three years ago, not long after my daughter Esme was born, something rather odd happened. The world at large seemed suddenly...
Eye On Miami (Free subscription) | 24/10/2009
I am in New York for a Van Morrison concert but I thought I would post this today, my favorite love song by Leon Russell. Let's see if it measures up to what Rick posted on the South Florida Daily Blog.Unfortunately, I cannot get a decent video of Van Morrison (locked out of the code) so here are two links to the best Van Morrison song I could find (I watched them all): Moondance and Domino. If
the nutmeg grater (Free subscription) | 22/10/2009
$353.00?????????? no way. and at a casino????????????????// no way. van morrison is my favorite in the entire universe. i love him. i had never seen him until just a few years ago. someone i insulted (because i believed he insulted me first. he claims he didn't but i know he did. i can be BRUTAL and of course i was. i ended up apologizing. as it turned out he had some connections) gave a friend of...
Word Magazine blogs (Free subscription) | 21/10/2009
Had permitted myself a superior smirk when Vulpes (iirc) made a remark about musical tastes not changing much since one's 20s---so was suitably chastened to find this, when frantically ditching stuff before an enforced office move, a personal Desert Island 12 from 1991, when I was 29: 1. Don McLean-American Pie 2. Beethoven 9th-Bernstein/VPO 3. Joni Mitchell-California 4. Mahler 6th-Karajan/BPO 5....
I.E. Lester (Free subscription) | 21/10/2009
...I just didn't expect it to be by Kiss. I've been a rock fan all of my life. When I was a akid and most of my friends were into Abba, I liked The Who and The Rolling Stones. Three decades later I still do, but in the years getting up to now I've found many, many more artists that I've liked. In my teenage years it was rock - straightforward, simple rock. Bands like Rainbow, Whitesnake, Kiss, Saxon...
NewBlackMan (Free subscription) | 18/10/2009
‘Hearing’ Meshell Again by Mark Anthony Neal Part of the initial appeal of Meshell Ndegeocello, one off the first artists signed to Madonna’s Maverick label, was her effortless exoticism. Arriving on the scene in 1993 with Plantation Lullabies and seemingly from a nether post somewhere between Trey Ellis’s “new black aesthetic” and Biggie’s “Big Poppa,”...
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