Musical Essays

Well, here we are again and it isn't even summer... Round my way the last few days have been, well, scorchio! At least three of recent days here in southern England, have breached 30°C (86°F) in the day - and barely dipped below 20°C (68°F) at night. Now, that might not be much for many of you, but for us, that is something akin to standing in a volcano. So here we are with another round of scorchio playlist tunes (90s British sketch show reference for the uninitiated) - we u

I have finally gathered together another selection of stories with a musical connection, which, as the title suggests, you might hopefully find at least a little interesting. There are a few sporting links in this one, some copycats and a brush with tragedy. If you have missed past installments, you can always catch up: Part 1: Shooting Pigeons here Part 2: Punch Drunk here Part 3: Die Another Day here Part 4: On The Skids here Part 5: Christmas Edition here The Jazz Footbal

I remember reading about Grant McLennan’s death in Rolling Stone. “Grant’s first love was words, but his true genius was with a tune.” (Robert Vickers, 2006) Having read the British music press a lot in my late teens (1980s/90s), I was aware of so many bands and knew so much about a great many of them, without ever really knowing anything about them. That was because much of the stuff being written about would not be played on daytime (or even early evening) mainstream radio

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