It’s Eurovision Song Contest time again folks! Let loose the glitter bombs of fabulous music now! So, in the seven weeks leading up to the grand final on Saturday 23 May 2015, I will be profiling the acts and reviewing the songs of 5-6 countries each week, giving my unvarnished, unguarded and Continue Reading
Music
Now this is music #49 – Planet Parade, Sekuoia, Salt Ashes, Waldo & Marsha, Inni-K
Life hey? It’s bland, it’s crazy colourful; it’s predictably the same, it’s a thousand kinds of different; a multitude of unceasing demands, an oasis of calm. However it plays out for you, and if you’re like most people no two days are ever truly the same, it’s good to Continue Reading
Back on record – the reasons behind vinyl’s unlikely comeback
The world recently celebrated Record Store Day (April 18), a big day in the life of often-beleaguered bricks-and-mortar record stores, and courtesy of Lee Barron, Northumbria University, Newcastle of The Conversation, we get insight into the ever-increasingly re-popularityof vinyl, and what its resurgence means for the future of the music industry Continue Reading
Now this is music 48: Heems, Katelyn Tarver, Peach Kelli Pop, Coleman Hell, Lena Fayre
Life is a real mixed bag isn’t it? Regardless of whether you approach it from a glass-half-full or glass-half-empty position, it rarely stays in one emotional place for too long. Hence we have great ups and downs, ins and outs, steps forward and lurches back, all of it providing Continue Reading
Now this is music #47: Melwonderland, Karl Kling, La+ch, Lyon and Lowe, Pink Feathers
Life hey? It comes with ups and downs, smiles and frowns (don’t worry I am not planning some sort of weird poetry thing here), peaks and valleys, thrillingly novel events and beige banal moments, and all manner of helter-skelter what-the-hell emotions in and around it all. Articulating how all of Continue Reading
Now this is music #46: ALA.NI, MONOGEM, Marika Hackman, Stonefox, Great Lake Swimmers
There is something utterly wondrous about losing yourself in music. Cut loose from the biting concerns of the everyday, music, particularly the clever, beautiful kind made by the following five artists, is a refuge from a world that sometimes forgets that our souls need to be courted every bit as Continue Reading
The smart sounds and bright colours of Faded Paper Figures
It seems to have been a recurring pattern in my music-appreciating life that the bands I fall for most heavily and with the most passion are the ones that seemingly come out of nowhere. It’s been the case with artists as diverse as Bombay Bicycle Club, who I came Continue Reading
Now this is music #45: Hunny, Steve Aoki and Moxie, Violet Skies, Royal, Anna O
No one ever said being a member of the human race was an undertaking for the fainthearted. Possessed of emotions richly-diverse and maddeningly contradictory, we rarely take the straightforward path through life, seesawing between happy and sad, angry and calm, content and agitated, often all at once. That’s why Continue Reading
You want 20 TV theme songs in two minutes? Daniel Koren can help you with that!
I stand impressed. It is one thing to create a medley mashup of TV theme songs with each segueing reasonably neatly into the other and make them sound like they kind of sort of belong together. But talented New York musician Daniel Koren has managed to not just weave Continue Reading
Waltzing glittery Matilda! Australia to compete in the 2015 Eurovision Song Contest
Fetch me a kangaroo in spandex! A coterie of bowls-playing grandmothers making scones. A phalanx of surfers atop waves made from pure glitter. Pyrotechnic displays that recall the burning cane fields of Broadwater, New South Wales. And a key change as big as the Australian Bight! Australia, yes Australia, Continue Reading