Blog: Another Nickel In The Machine

I first came across The Divine Comedy, like a lot of people, when 'Something For The Weekend' was a hit. I bought the album Casanova and loved the clever arrangements and dry funny lyrics but my favourite song from it was the version of the Father Ted theme tune 'Songs Of Love'. I was working with C4's Adam And Joe at the time and persuaded them to film Neil Hannon at his flat in Battersea for the Vinyl Justice Police section of the show - its quite a long time now but I seem to remember that they [...]

Years ago my neighbour Fred once said to me 'Julie Driscoll used to live just down the road you know', his eyes sort of glazed over and he wistfully sighed 'Ah, Jools...'. I'd heard of her but I wasn't quite sure why, but went and bought a couple of her CDs all the same - partly because the covers were the sort of record covers that you know are going to contain good music . Fred had done me a favour because Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger and The Trinity made some very good music indeed - their most famous track [...]

Paul Robeson was a great man in more ways than one. Near to where I live in London there used to stand a small office block on The South Lambeth Road near Vauxhall that was proudly called Paul Robeson House. It wasn't a architectually amazing but all the same I was pleased that there was a building nearby named after one of my heroes. Unfortunately now it's a Comfort Inn, with all visual connections to Paul Robeson removed without trace. The Paul Robeson Comfort Inn would have sounded great, if just for the fact that people would turn up and [...]

I only came across this record relatively recently, but what a record it is. I'm not sure why but if you put 'Egyptian' in the title of a song it's nearly always a good one - 'Walk Like An Egyptian' and 'Egyptian Reggae' to name but two, but Egyptian Shumba is easily the best ancient-Egypt-themed record of them all. The Tammys were Lou Christie's backing singers in the early sixties and Christie's arrangement was obviously made to sound Egyptian-like but luckily fails miserably. Someone wrote that the song was as good as the pyramids and would probably out last them, which is true [...]

I went along to see the recording of Friday Night With Jonathan Ross last night with my friend Nick ostensibly to see Iggy Pop And The Stooges. They played 'I Wanna Be Your Dog' but beforehand were interviewed by Jonathan who asked Iggy 'without, of course, glamourising what you've done' exactly what drugs he'd taken in his lifetime. Obviously it took about four and a half hours to go through the list, which included, it has to be said, lots of acronyms that I've never heard of let alone tried. However he said that he'd only taken ecstasy a couple [...]

Smoking in public enclosed spaces will be banned in England on July 1st 2007, and the traditional smoky pubs and bars will be gone forever. For a lot of people the habit of smoking while drinking won't be that easy to drop and groups of people will be hanging outside pub doorways and huddling around heaters in beer gardens everywhere. Here is a cigarette ad from a time when cigarettes were seen as sexually exciting and cancer couldn't be further from any smoker's mind. I've never known anyone smoke Tipalot cigarettes - they've never been next to the Marlboro Lites in the [...]

I love Cathy Davey's music and she's an extraordinarily under-rated songwriter with a deceptively good way with words. I first heard the track Hammer Head several years ago on the original demo she made - I fell in love with it and it's still my favourite song of hers. This version is rawer than the album version but it touches a nerve with me that the album version IMHO doesn't quite manage. "It's sweet to share a bed, but when you're fucking with my head...". Fantastic stuff. Cathy [...]

I went to see the excellent, albeit a bit depressing, Jindabyne a couple of weeks ago, an Australian film by Ray Lawrence (who also directed the very good Lantana) and based on the Raymond Carver's short story 'So Much Water So Close To Home'. At the very beginning of the film we see a girl singing along to the radio while driving on a dusty road seemingly in the middle of nowhere. The song on the radio was all about The Jindabyne Fair which I'm not sure if it exists or not. Anyway the tune sounded great to me, in [...]