It started life as a South Bank Show profile, with Neil & Chris suggesting some staged inserts relating to their upbringings, so it wouldn’t just be the usual talking heads interview scenario, then SBS regular d […]

Well, yeah, I geddit, but I can’t help feeling there must be some middle-ground between (say) The Office UK (14 episodes) and The Office USA (201 episodes)… and bearing in mind the US version was one of the […]

I loved the series overall, though I agree there was a slight dip in quality in series 3, not helped by having to shoot around Claire and Sister Michael’s various issues, but I really enjoyed the finale, which […]

Marc Almond has tended to alternate “hits” tours with those with more obscure setlists. He’ll throw in plenty of one-off covers (I’ve seen him do Richard Thompson, Sandy Denny, Syd Barrett, Bill Fay and Lewis […]

It’s a fine movie, but actually a bleak, rather nasty indie drama that would fit well in a spiritual double-bill with Mean Streets, but just happened to have a zeitgeist-setting disco subplot and an era-defining s […]

It must be especially difficult for one-hit wonders… much as I love Fountains Of Wayne, I was annoyed when I saw them and they tossed off Stacey’s Mom in a different arrangement (semi-acoustic bossa nova) that […]

In the sage words of David Hepworth (formerly of this parish), “most rock stars are either poorer than you’d think, or richer than you can imagine…”

Who knows quite where Phil Collins comes on this scale… […]

I came back to this thread to double-check no-one had mentioned this track, and I can’t believe it didn’t instantly come to mind for me… one of those outros that actually takes up half the track, it’s the album […]

Shame on you BC 🙂 for not mentioning Depeche Mode’s New Life… with the verses & choruses out of the way, each Mode joins in one at a time into 4-part harmony, before exploding into a “whoah!” and a whole new syn […]

80s edition:

1) The “old man” in the spoken part of The Human League’s “Love Action” is Lou Reed. The sub-title of the song is “I Believe In Love”, the name of Phil Oakey’s favourite Lou Reed track.

2) Wh […]

Only because this thread made me think of it, here’s the gameshow “Homonym!” from the peerless 30 Rock…:

(And in Iranian!)

That would be “What Are You Going To Do With Your Life?”, and yes, it’s great (I prefer it to “Evergreen”, to be honest…)

… and I couldn’t help noticing that “Evergreen” came only 10 years after the last […]

More than anything, I’m impressed at how much like “Abba” these songs sound, which I know is ridiculous (who else would they sound like?!) but they’re reassuringly of a piece with their later catalogue, though […]

As John Oliver put it, cryptocurrency is “everything you don’t know about finance, multiplied by everything you don’t know about the internet”…

I believe he may have been living in Japan for a while now, which could well have given him a good head start in the NFT field and crypto in general…

… though he did have a song called “MC Escher The Impos […]

Epping, since you ask – how about yourself?

Believe it or not, bearing in mind I’m trying to sell my 2 tickets for Leeds on the 28th, I might be interested, as Norwich is reach-able for me and I can make the 21st, but I can’t justify it unless I find a home […]

As a lockdown project last year I used http://www.blackcatvideo.com/cinefilmtransfer.html in Potters Bar in Herts. to convert my shoebox full of 8mm films. They’re local to me so I did it in person, but they’ll do […]

Sometime around 1980-82, there was a BBC documentary where they gave David Hockney a then-brand-spankingly-new digital paintbox to try out and see what he thought of it.

The artwork he did was so-so, but he […]

Thanks for the wise words Paul, I’ll be sure to cover all fronts one way or another!

And yes, should be a great gig – I think Green still has Rhodri Marsden in the band, who’s done an amazing job of recreating […]