Happy 70th Birthday Stevie Wonder!!

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25 years since Blur v Oasis & 'The Battle of Britpop'

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It's 25 years since Blur's Country House and Oasis' Roll With It went head to head in the UK Singles Chart on 14th August 1995, a battle fuelled by differences in taste, personal opinions, geography even class. It was engineered by Blur's label Food Records who intentionally moved the release date for Country House - the lead single from Blur's fourth LP The Great Escape - to the same date as the new Oasis single Roll With It, itself the second lead single from the new yet unreleased album (What's The Story?) Morning Glory . Of course the ploy worked wonders as the story captured the zeitgeist of the mid-nineties, as Britpop peaked in popularity with the story making the front pages of magazines, newspapers the world over. It even made the 10 o'clock news - see above - which is extraordinary because no one had died (why the arts can't have more of a place and replace the sensational oddities lower down the news stories I'll never know). Of course th...
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A music critic could look at 2023 through the same prism as the years 1973, '83, '93, 2003 and 2013 - years that let's be honest did not set the world on fire. But unlike those years which were very much on a journey as music continually evolved, 2023 was driven not by exciting new genres or even artists but my new challenges that haven't impacted any of those years above, namely climate change and technological change, principally AI. And Taylor Swift... This was the first year that AI created the possibility we could be listening to artificially created music and possibly an artist's work being  mimicked . Climate change is now far better understood than ten years ago but such inspiration appears largely lost in today's musical artists. Russia continued their assault on Ukraine whilst Israel-Palestine conflict became brutally and sadly physical. My song of the year is a beautiful and timely reminder on how beautiful music can be: Saint Levant's From Gaza, ...
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THE 100 GREATEST B-SIDES EVER

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Little Labours of Love - The 100 Greatest B-Sides Like the English electric lightning that's features above on Suede's excellent B-side compilation Sci-Fi Lullabies , the B-side is a humble relic from a bygone era.  L eaving both a mountain of aural rubbish and a small but largely untold legacy of great music when artists dared to experiment, dared to take risks, dared to push themselves. B-sides were tracks that accompanied singles - or A-sides - and were their literal flipside, on vinyl or cassette that could be turned or flipped over. In the fifties and early sixties two songs could be recorded and radio would choose their preferred song to play and these became the single. So for example Bill Wither's Ain't No Sunshine was originally a B-side to the single Harlem before Radio DJs saw the obvious error and played the B-side instead. Examples such as these were purely down to chance however.  The idea that a B-side could be worthy of being taken seriously was perhaps ...
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