It Starts With a Birthstone...

  Not a favourite song but hey this is Ronnie...

  Dazed & Confused  was a pivotal film for me. Music is the fundamental thing for me. Hence... erm .... this blog.  Dazed & Confused...

  'Look at that mama spider crawling on the bouganvillea' Day Two of the World Cup. And while I eagerly await witnessing the best fo...

  Funeral was a big deal and so were Arcade Fire for quite a while. Never ones to shy way from melodrama. the quixioic. The grand gesture. ...

  Queen of the Stoneage don't lose their ability to plunge in the knife when that's what the scene and the moment require. Life afte...

  The original incarnation of Fleetwood Mac are the rare kind of band that make you long for a bygone time.There's a fluidiy and flair, ...

  The turn of the century was definitely a turning point you realise ,usically. Musically bands like Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev came into ...

                                      'INTENSE1' A Repo Man's life is always intense.' Repo Man If you like intensity you mi...

  When I was nineteen I went for six months to a hotel in Switzerland. It was pretty much the best six months of my life though I've had...

  Shredded Sun come motoring out of Chicago, Illinois with waterpistols blazing on latest album Never Odd Or Even. They trip through the tul...

  'It's been a long time since...'. Our Space . Twenty years to be precise. There are people who went to school with the Arctic...

  It's always interesting to find a band that seems to be bending Rock & Roll into fresh shapes, seventy years an more down the road...

  Buffalo Tom chimed and clanged like a Paisley Underground band reborn throughout the early Nineties.Dream Syndicate. True West. True value...

  If you read many Uncut Magazines publications you are likely going to be directed to a lot of Bob Dylan product. You may well have made ...

  I'm in the mood to listen to little remembered second albums by mid ranking little remembered left field American bands who surfaced a...

  Yes, yes, yes. it's my autumn almanac. All the leaves are brown. And the sky is grey. But the great records keep flowing up the pike ....

  Grumpy. Nobod'sy favourite of the Seven Dwarves. But a canny band from Brooklyn. They swagger and sway in the queasy Southern sunlight...

  Cale's first album sounds like sloppy early Glam before the event on Colombia Records. Cale himself is dismissive of the album saying ...

  There's an unorthodoxy about Joanna Newsom's work which in itself is remarkable and noteworthy. But then you listen to her records...

  Steff Chura has a good pedigree. She's from Detroit, Michigan.Tight band .Neat formula. Three or four minute New New Wave songs that h...

  When you were young you could hold a shell to your years. And hear the murmur of the oceans. The enchanted state of childhood. Chancing up...

  Not the happiest person by all accounts. But a supernova talent. Influenced by Bach. Sounded like the Karen Carpenter of the drugged Under...

  I kind of dig Arab Strap. They come from Falkirk .They're drawn to the darkness. The bleak. The disturbing and uncanny. .They drag me ...

  This is 50 minutes long. A pretty ideal length for a vinyl record. I bought it at the time on CD and played it a lot and liked it a lot th...

  A Monday afternoon. Grey and overcast in Canterbury. Nothing better to than listen to When You Smiled & Turned Away the latest album f...

  I've surprised myself by falling hard for American Football's self tutled fourth album over the last couple of days. It's spac...

  Intertextuality. Texts feeding in to other text.  A Grand Doesn't Come For Free feeds off The Oddysey, Ulysees, Good Fellas, Eastender...

Hip Hop takes different pathways. I confess I sometimes find its narrowness slightly difficult but Shabazz Palaces stand apart from the herd...

  It's July. But frankly it's hotter than July. I've just taught three online classes in a flat where it sometimes felt like I w...

  I was in Marks & Spencer's in Canterbury today. Lovefool was playing on the retail sound system. It made me think of my oldest ne...

  An artist who mkes life rich. Where every album feels like an event. Meeting up with an old friend after a couple of years of down time. N...

  'When I look out my window..... so many people to be..... You got to pick up every stitch. Must be the season of the witch !' Well...

Uwinds like a hot afternoon on the porch with a pitcher of something potent shared between friends.

  So many album like these come out on a regular basis these days. Albums made by willowy artists in flowing dresses summoning back the gold...

  Michael Kiwanuka's latest album  Fudge is immediately a sunlit meadow and a great way for the weekend to begin. Soul flecked utopian s...

  Another day, another series. I plan twenty of these and haven't made my list yet. Just a set of evenings and experiences that stick ou...

  Cometh the hour, cometh the sound and the scene. Chicago's TV Buddha's debut album Hallelujah Anyway is unhinged on any number of...

  I find myself coveting albums I never imagined myself coveting. And in vinyl form. The act of ownership is something we couldn't reall...

  You see it quite often in Rock & Roll. Quite a lot in life. John The Baptist and Jesus Christ. Two thousand years down the line Televi...

  Stories They Don't Teach You At School where should we start. How about Meryl Streek's latest. A one man rant from Dublin. Twelve...

 

  Sometimes only Cribbins will do. A mainstay of many British lives. A reminder of the nice stuff. Listening to this and you're at home,...

  What I'm in need of right now I need somewhere to escaps at the end of a work day and I am coming to the conclusion that there are few...

  Kim Gordon's Play Me is a textbook 'how to' guide on growing older on your own terms and thereby staying young. It' came o...

  Mammoth the latest album from Flora Hibberd is rich fare. A playful  Poppy and literate record that dances between the raindrops. It'...

  Listening to records like these in 2026 genuinely feels like a visitation to a vanished realm .Some of this obscure British Folk stuff whi...

  Bob Dylan started the new millenium with Love & Theft. He sounded like Ezekiel after having over indulged on the communal punch. Plent...

  Bevis Frond have become an Indie standby over the last few decades. Something to check your watch by. A speaking clock with lilting power ...

  Understanding ourselves and the reasons we do the things that we do. The great sturggle and journey of life. Never mind understanding othe...