It Starts With a Birthstone...

80. Marmalade     'The cows have gone home. To put their coats on.' So many songs about rain that sound a bit like this. A ...

  A bit of Joy Division lite for Boxing Day.

  While we're on Garage Bands. Here's the b side of a record that will no doubt turn up later on higher up that chart.

90. Ides of March   I realised eventually that the guitar riff was lifted from Tired of Waiting.   89. Fire     The first...

  I guess this is technically Vince Guaraldi who arranges the Charlie Brown music. Happy Christmas! This is also for a friend who this ...

  I've had a morning of listening to Kinks songs. Quite remarkable how many great ones they had. They even had a decent Christmas r...

An almost totally arbitrary countdown to give me something to do during an otherwise quite quiet Christmas time. Almost all of these songs w...

As I have time on my hands I was thinking of compiling a chart of favourite Garage Band songs. This doesn't quite qualify as it's...

  Courtney Barnett didn't actually release any new records this year. She still pretty much took over this blog through fairly cons...

  Christmas seems very Belle & Sebastiany this year. Here's their 2007 Christmas song. 

  From an album that interested me this year, the group's debut, Departure . Sure, every note they make is informed by their heroes...

A year and a half in and I've done forty album reviews which were the main incentive for starting the blog in the first place. No m...

  Joe Strummer died twelve years back on this day aged fifty. I can still remember how shocking the news sounded.

  I keep coming back to Christgau, a man with a stalwart reputation as a Rock journalist and his quite remarkable opinions about the re...

  Fields. American Rock and Roll scene-maker, manager and publicist Here's a document of cool he came out with in 1967.    

  Not the best song in the world. But one that reminds me of two people. A bloke at my local in Newcastle who likes it and once threate...

The album I'm looking forward to early next year. From a recent article in The Guardian. But of course the band is twee. Always will be...