New music

I used to find new music the way most people did: the radio. I was never a big radio listener but I heard enough at various times throughout the day, at home, at work or in shops to pick up on what was going on. TV supplemented this diet, from the heyday of Top Of [...]

Pop quiz, hotshot

I’ll give you a shiny new penny if you can tell me what these two 80s hits have in common. And another one if you can tell me where the blogpost title comes from.

Musical Alphabet: Z

So, we’ve reached the end. I’m a little ashamed to admit that I had to cheat for Z. Zakir Hussain should technically go under ‘H’, but I couldn’t find anything else suitable on YouTube from the one or two other Z-artists I liked. We were lucky enough to see Zakir and his “Masters of Percussion” [...]

Musical Journey: Y

I first heard this during an episode of Six Feet Under, when Nate goes to visit an old girlfriend, and this song plays as he walks up to her house. It struck me immediately, and so I went to the HBO website and found the music listing for that episode. I’d never heard anything by Yo [...]

Musical Alphabet: X

Not an easy one, this. I don’t own any music by an artist beginning with X, but a little research threw up the name of a little-known group who once collaborated with David Byrne on a single I heard once on MTV. The only alternative was an old XTC song which turned out not to [...]

Musical Alphabet: W

You could say that movie soundtracks, moreso than pop, was the first kind of music I fell in love with.  I saw Star Wars at the age of four and subsequently bought (well, it was probably my Dad who bought it for me) the soundtrack double album, listening to it obsessively and memorising every note. [...]

Musical Alphabet: V

I own copies of Suzanne Vega’s first four albums, and all of them contain favourites; songs which are delicate yet tough, romantic, tragic, sad, funny, warm and cold, lush and spare. She once described her voice as being like a pencil, “it’s not very fancy, but it gets the job done”. This one’s from her [...]

Musical Alphabet: U

I remembered this song recently when I was drafting a (subsequently abandoned) blog post on ’80s nuclear paranoia pop. The kind of scenario shown in this video was much discussed in the media and classrooms when I was a child, often framed by the question “What would you do if you heard the four-minute warning?” Some [...]

Musical Alphabet: T

 I got into They Might Be Giants just after they broke into the British pop charts with Birdhouse In Your Soul in the late ’80s, and devoured their first six albums and B-sides compilation. Each album contains a cornucopia of oddity, intelligence and irresistible melodies. The one below is from the album John Henry. How [...]

Musical Alphabet: S

I bought the album Beyond Skin without having heard any of it, purely on the basis of what I’d read about Nitin Sawhney’s work. He mixes traditional Indian music, electronica, jazz, flamenco, soul, hip hop and anything else that takes his fancy with contributions from a wide range of guest vocalists. The track below is [...]