Learning to Flinch is probably, overall, my favourite Zevon album.And one of my favourite live by anyone. The 12 string sound is astonishing.

Worth another crowd fund? Or tiny niche labels? I’m thinking the team that put out the recent Dr Strangely Strange and the Duffy/Argent tapes, perhaps.

I’ve started a post, putting forward a case for James Lindsay.

Thanks for that, @kaisfatdad, an obit for Sir Danny I had missed. It also led me to a quite amusing interview with Dave Pegg, the Fairport bassist. The Thompson piece had me wondering about who would be best […]

Chumbawamba: Popular: Tubthumper Authentic: Anarchy Connoisseur: A Singsong & a Scrap

My failure to realise the song you posted was a song I thought I loved.

Until this morning I thought it ‘Nebraska’. Now I would go for ‘The River’. Sure, it is a double, with an album’s worth is disposable, but the good’uns are his best.

Really? Clearly a longer time since I’ve listened to it than I thought. It really isn’t great, compared to how the song brushes up in versions by others. Which is a shock, mind, with muscle memory otherwise c […]

Well, that’s answered it for me, by being a rusty bucket din. A favourite Springsteen song, this is by some distance the worst version I have heard of it. (The original released version isn’t even the best, wit […]

Someone has to, the law of averages and all.

Which particular mot is juste? I’m gunning for “oh”.

I told you so!

They were cool in my house. Before Martyn Ware ate Ian Craig Marsh.

Thanks, Colin. I just don’t much like live albums, I think. It would have been good to read your essay, but I only had access to the music. And at least it wasn’t just a soundcloud stream. But what about the fli […]

Warren Zevon liked a snappy title. “Roland the headless Thompson gunner”

Jesus on a greyhound. (Bus, rather than a runny dog.)

“Love is a bourgeois concept” by Pet Shop Boys. Despite being past their imperial phase waspiness, it is still near perfect.

I like his odd facial tics and shudders, that punctuate every gap between his carefully chosen words. (Or his well learnt lines, I guess.)