While I am grateful to you for bringing to our attention little-known rising acts like Cyndi Lauper and Oasis, I think you’ve got your point about listening with your gut and not your brain the wrong way r […]

There is a circular belief that teenage girls have the best taste in pop, because the best pop is the stuff that teenage girls like, which comes up as often as the idea of guilty pleasures. Although my sister and […]

When I used take an interest in poetry most of the books I read were “Selected poems of ….” which were pretty much the Greatest Hits, and I never felt I was missing much. I doubt even Wordsworth read all of Wordsworth.

At least it will be the end, for the time being, of all those articles by people who aren’t particularly interested in football, but want something to latch their pet obsessions on to: Gareth Southgate and what w […]

Didn’t Richard Branson spend a couple of billion pounds to do more less the same thing yesterday?

I know that if you’re writing history, you have to find some way of structuring it, but I’ve never found the idea of eras or generation much like the real experience of time passing. They lose the flow of lif […]

Their website calls it “A highly vocational course”.

I’d guess that the only way to make a living out of music journalism now is to teach it. I don’t want to be one of those people who snipes at mickey mouse degrees and so on, but are there really any jobs for p […]

Well, I like the Guardian for its news coverage and subscribe to it for that reason. I started the subscription following Amelia Gentleman’s exposure of the Windrush scandal. You’ll only get proper journalism if […]

He was only on the first album, but co-founder with Bryan Ferry, Graham Simpson, died about 10 years ago. There was a film about him made shortly before he died – I don’t think his brush with fame did much for him.

Surely, one cannot forget Chad of Mercia, died 672, Bishop of Northumbria, who converted the Mercians to Christianity.

I heard this mentioned on a programme where they were discussing Anglo-Saxon culture. The […]

This is an interview with David Hood, now the only surviving member of the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, about Roger Hawkins and the team in general, which someone (Damian Counsell) posted a link to on Twitter. I […]

I see Count Binface, recent voice of reason candidate in the London mayoral elections, has also put himself forward. A duo perhaps of Bill and Bin, the Flowerpot Men?

There was an interesting series a few years ago, which I think Neil Oliver presented, about the origins of the British. They were trying to work out where people came from, using a mixture of genetics, written […]

Hang on. Deramdaze, passionate eulogiser of the Golden Age of the Sixties, and stern critic of the “Dodgers” who missed it, was at school in the 1980s?

The world is turned upside down.

In general, isn’t there a greater variety of higher quality goods available then ever before? When my wife’s family came here from India in the mid-seventies, they lived in a small town where they were the onl […]

Well, if this is correct, there’s been an overall 3% swing to Labour across the country. It’s not over until it’s over as I understand they say in football. (Hope the link works).

From data collected and analysed by the BBC (1247 'key wards' across the country), we can calculate an implied swing since the 2019 General Election.

That figure is a 3-point swing toward Labour.

If applied uniformly across the GB, that would be around:

Con: 340 seats
Lab: 221

— Patrick English (@PME_Politics) May 8, 2021

Yes, I thought mid-morning matters was probably the best Partridge show, along with the film. A small digital radio station, with a sidekick who’d been working on college radio (or whatever it was). It was b […]

Yes, it wouldn’t look out of place in Guy Pelleart and Nik Cohn’s Rock Dreams book.