Birthday post

Fifteen years ago last night, Any Major Wife and I were chilling out on a Friday night, awaiting news of the induced birth of the baby of friends of ours. The mother was my AMW’s bridesmaid, so we were quite excited. Our baby was due around Christmas. Where bridesmaid’s baby was in no rush to [...]

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Bouncing echoes in the wind

Should there still be people who think of Google as t-shirt clad rebels against The Man, let them be disabused of their folly. Quite in contrast to the image Google seeks to portray, they are a corporate branch of The Man, not the Internet’s equivalent of cuddly mineral-water drinking Ashbury Haights hippies.
Among Google’s service is [...]

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Gone to the chapel: R.I.P. Ellie Greenwich

The astute observer of popular culture may have noticed that 2009 has been a pretty bad year for celebrity deaths. But none gave me a cold shiver upon learning of somebody’s passing (well, MJ’s was a bit of a surprise), until I learnt of Ellie Greewich’s death today.
For those who need reminding, she co-wrote with [...]

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Dust, Crackle and Pop: Vinyl cuts

Today, August 12, is International Vinyl Record Day. To mark the event, here are a few songs I’ve ripped from my LPs lately. I have old LPs stashed all over the house. Most of them – almost all of them – have not been played in more than a decade, some in more than [...]

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Killing me softly again…

The item on Killing Me Softly With His Song in The Originals Vol. 30, posted on Friday, repeated the most commonly repeated story about the genesis of the song; that is, original singer Lori Lieberman had written a poem about seeing Don McLean in concert, which lyricist Norman Gimbel adapted to form the lyrics for [...]

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Songs about fathers

I don’t really care much for Mothers’ Day or Fathers’ Day, mostly because I’ve had neither mother nor father since I was 18. Still, as a father I damn well expect to get breakfast in bed today. High hopes… Fathers’ Day, of course, does bring to mind my late father, who died suddenly when I [...]

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Great covers: Herb Alpert – Whipped Cream and Other Delights

I cheerfully admit that I like this album cover for all the wrong reasons. The picture is not exactly, to use the dreaded and misleading term, “politically correct” (less so in an age when the troubling terminology of bukkake is gaining mainstream currency). The woman is objectified, of course. The whipped cream is not supposed [...]

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Great covers: The Mamas and the Papas – If You Can Believe Your Eyes And Ears

In this series of album covers I would hang up on my wall, I previously featured the artwork of Dexys Midnight Runners’ Searching For The Young Soul Rebel album, which features a defiant looking Belfast lad named Anthony O’Shaughnessy. A couple of weeks ago, Anthony commented on that post, which marks the first time the [...]

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South African pop for election day

Today South Africans go to the polls to elect their new parliament, which in turn will elect the president. It’s a foregone conclusion that the African National Congress will win a majority; the only question is whether they will repeat their two-thirds plus majority of 1999 and 2004. Of interest will be also how the [...]

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The Nazis and the funksters

A source of unceasing amusement for me is the coincidence that the acronym AWB, which music lovers will associate with the multi-racial funk group Average White Band, applies in South Africa to the white supremacist, neo-Nazi organisation known as the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (Afrikaner Resistance Movement). Indeed, they were very much a band of average white [...]

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