30 April 2022. An auspicious day in musical history for sure. It marked the passing of country star Naomi Judd, not to mention Mac DeMarco's 32nd birthday. But wait - what else happened that day? Well, this labour of love for me, Dreaming of Birds That Are Blue, published its very first post on that very day! So, why don't we celebrate these last four years. As many of you know, it has never really been about the numbers - it is all about music being a safe and happy space fo

I.R.S. is a record label that has interested me for a long time; well since I started to get into R.E.M. in the late 80s and saw that until recently, they had been on that label. The name interested me - I knew enough about the USA to know that there was some government association with this initialism. Before we dive a little bit into the labels history and some of the key bands that were a part of it (we will focus on the original version of it, rather than the time since 2

West End Centre, Aldershot: Friday 17 April 2026 I first knowingly listened to some of Ian McNabb's work in the autumn of 1991. It was my first term at college, and someone added a few Icicle Works songs onto a mix-cassette I had some space on - and I was hooked. While the Icicle Works were already pretty much done by that point, at least in their original format, I have stayed in touch with McNabb's work through his solo career, with perhaps the main question remaining - why

It is time for another musical meander, as we travel along Six (ish) Degrees of musical separation from our chosen starting point, in bizarre eccentric circles towards our end point - the King of Shoegaze, Kevin Shields. So, this time we kick the journey off with one of Britain's, I think it's fair to say, unfairly undervalued musical talents, Mr Robert Ian McNabb. A founder of one of Liverpool's impressive arrays of post-punk bands, the Icicle Works, since the early 90s he h

We bring news of a couple of new releases that may have passed you by. U2: Easter Lily EP Photo: Anton Corbijn I have to confess that I totally missed the boat on U2 s first new music in a few years (first original stuff since 2017s Songs of Experience ), when the Days of Ash EP came out in February, and that has now been swiftly followed by the Easter Lily EP . With the promise of a new album later in 2026, these two precursor EPs have taken some different angles. Days of A

I have focused on here before on some of my favourite guitarists , bassists and drummers , perhaps thinking that singers get enough of the limelight as it is. But there is one particular group of singers that has intrigued me for a while. When I think of the great singing voices of the last sixty years or so, the really great ones I mean, there are some clusters across the years. There was a high volume of supreme singers coming out of the high-end jazz of the 1950s/60s (Ell