DIGRESSION:

For Christmas I got Never Had It So Good, the first part of Dominic Sandbrook’s huge new history of Britain in the sixties. Here’s what he says about the project:

“This book seeks to rescue ‘from the enormous[…]

In Incredible Hulk comics there’s often a scene where the ’emerald man-beast’, cast out from human society, finds something of fragile beauty – a flower, maybe, or a baby deer – which he then accidentally crushes with hi[…]

Farlowe starts “Out Of Time” as conversation but it quickly turns into romp, a cathartic splurge of breakup bile and joyful venom. With most kiss-off songs you can dredge the remains for some spark of former finer feeling, but this perfor[…]

Hepper, but less charming rerun of “Summer Holiday” with the intrusive horn arrangement acting as your hustling tour guide and stamping out any moments of excitement. By the coda Georgie Fame sounds awfully bored. Gotta go. Get away. Go. […]

I have a vivid image of Summer in the 60s, heat-hazed beauty, dollybirds in floral print minidresses, everything rich and green and the whole English countryside suffused with light. Since I wasn’t born until 1973, this can’t be from memo[…]

An awful lot of comedy records have got to number one. Not many funny records have. This is one of them, as with every line the dreadfulness of this slush pile nightmare is more obvious. “It’s a thousand pages, give or take a few / I&#821[…]

“Strangers in the Night” has a theme – the chance wonder of meeting the right person – that I usually rather like. And you can see the outlines of a sweet song in Sinatra’s statesmanlike, somewhat bombastic reading. His […]

Mick Jagger sings “Paint It Black” from the point of view of a man whose lover has unexpectedly died. This happens in real life, of course: it has not happened to me, I hope it never does. But it’s happened to friends of mine, one v[…]

The girl in the song – a flash of colour in everyday guy-land – maps onto the flamingo metaphor itself, that odd flutter of inspiration in a heavy-handed song. The image of the flamingo-girl gives the song a hook and title but not a cente[…]

How to deal with a great voice? It’s a pleasant problem for an arranger, but a problem all the same. Nowadays the answer is often tied up in a wider question – how do you market a voice as great? For every imaginative answer there’s[…]