Girl Groups Week No 2: The Crystals - There's No Other Like My Baby / Uptown / He's a Rebel
So, once the Shirelles had forged the idealogical template, Phil Spector came along and forged the sound. Already a successful songwriter...
Girl Groups Week No1: Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? - the Shirelles
Which to begin with, demands a definition. People often use the term girl groups to describe groups like Bananarama and Spice Girls and...
Too Late for Tonight / Early Years - Laura Cantrell
Having had a room full of modern day troubador men in that bar in Mission beach, it's only right that we should think about the women...
Step Right Up - Tom Waits
Sorry about the delay. I was wanting to complete the songs by the fraternity of poets in Guy Clark's Mission Beach bar and had come to...
Pancho and Lefty - Townes van Zandt
So also in Guy Clark's Valhalla bar at Mission Beach, as we've said, was "poor Port Worth boy" Townes van Zandt, a great and prolific...
The Lake Isle of Innisfree - Polly Bolton
Since the last post I've been to see Michael Keegan-Dolan's wonderful Swan Lake at Sadler's Wells, a superb, uplifting, multi-textured...
Cold Dog Soup - Guy Clark
2016 was the year of many sad things: Brexit and Trump's election to name but two, but to me nothing was sadder than the death of the...
Back in Time - Gillian Welch
Back baby, back in time, I wanna go back to when you were mine. Sixties week is over - the disco for the seventieth birthday is over....
Listen to Me - the Hollies
We'd better have something English and Northern for sixties week, and not much better comes from the "other" Northern city. This was the...
King Without a Queen - Dion (plus Runaway Girl)
A B-side from 1962 by the immortal Dion – he may have been a "King Without a Queen" but he was the King of New York Italian doo-wop....