I only have a surface-skimming knowledge of country music, but it’s pretty obvious what’s great about it: songs about grown-up situations and emotions, with clear, well-turned lyrics, whose singers often have gorgeous, expressive voices &[…]

A strange, not all that successful mixture of boys past, present, and future: a song from teenpop’s hungry birth, big beats and self-consciousness from the fag-end of glam, and a mid-tempo harmony-heavy arrangement which hints at Westlife to co[…]

One reason for this entry’s delay is that I was in Paris being trained on how to research teenage consumers. The training had a great deal to say about how to talk to teenagers, their attitudes and lifestyles – but nothing at all about t[…]

Bread’s closing vision of cosmic apocalypse is curious enough to begin with and becomes frankly sinister in Telly’s hands: “and when the world was through…MMMMMM.” Savalas as the angel of death: a terrifying and somehow […]

Luckily, no one ever said pop stars had to be likeable: Steve Harley spends his four minutes of real stardom on an extended, bitter, glorious great sneer: whether he’s lashing out at ex bandmates, an ex lover, a current lover, the world, himsel[…]

Well, first of all, love the intro and instrumental hook – glam guitars arcing over the track like a Red Arrows flypast – but then? The chorus of “January” seems feeble in contrast, with follow-the-bouncing-ball phrasing no[…]

The billowing harmonies and full-service orchestration on “Ms Grace” are half a bluff, with the doo-be-doo-be backing vocals telling a truer story. This is an old-fashioned song of devotion, the modish mid-70s “Ms” the only re[…]

There are records which could only have topped the charts in January (a phenomenon I’ve always known as the “Babylon Zoo effect”, though it far predates them). And there are records which are somehow January-ish: “Down Down” is one of them.[…]

I give marks out of 10 to every song – based on whatever criteria you like, here’s your opportunity to say what you’d have given more than 6 to from 1974. It’s a bumper crop of 21 tracks, tick as many as you like.

Wh[…]

I was all ready to give this a pasting before seeing the video on TMF’s Ultimate 40 Christmas Songs melted my Scroogeian heart. Or perhaps froze it still further, as what the video did was make me appreciate what a marvellously cynical record this […]