Musical Essays

There was a period of time before the whole East - West thing froze solid again, and after that original coldness had started to thaw out, that it seemed like Western Europe / USA and Russia / USSR would be friends. It was Mikhail Gorbachev who really wanted to be our friend and started the unthawing, or perhaps more accurately he wanted his country to be less poor and stuck in the 1950s. So, what you ask, has this got to do with music? Well, for much of the so-called Cold Wa

I thought I would start another occasional series of playlists, that slowly trawl through a bunch of songs that have come into my life at different stages. As has been mentioned before, I think I probably was already quite obsessive about music from a fairly young age, hence why this first bunch of tunes start in 1978, when I hit the golden age of 5. Not all of the tunes in each playlist period, as you will see, actually come from that timeframe, they more relate to how they

Nigerian multi-instrumentalist Fela Kuti was a visionary bandleader, the creator of the high-energy Afrobeat genre. Beyond music, he was a fearless political activist who used his platform to expose government corruption, military abuse, and post-colonial oppression in Nigeria. His is a name I am very familiar with, but I wanted to find out more about his life and work... Photo: Celluloid Records Olufela Olusegun Oludotun Ransome-Kuti was born into an upper middle class Niger

As I promised / threatened in a Playlist recently, I am doing one completely devoted to the genre of films defined by the actors that starred in them - the Brat Pack! The Brat Pack is the label given to a handful of films made over a relatively short period of time (roughly 1982 - 1989), defined by the actors that appeared in them, and which tended to centre on young person / teenage themes, with many of them being written and directed by John Hughes. The term had been coined

Nina Simone, the High Priestess of Soul, was many things; accomplished pianist of everything from classical to jazz and soul; baritone singer; songwriter; civil rights activist… but, she had another side to her; a woman with a huge temper; often prone to violent and aggressive outbursts; and ultimately, as a result, a convicted criminal - all ultimately, and belatedly, diagnosed with bipolar disorder. So, a complicated lady, with a complicated life… but also one of the most i