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Denise Johnson Where Does It Go PART OF the soul and fabric of Manchester before her sad and untimely passing in July, this is Denise Johnson's posthumous debut album. As a proud Mancunian, who's soulful voice has adorned many a Mancunian band as well as some of Primal Scream's higher watermarks, Johnson chose to record 5 classic songs by Manchester artists as well as record 2 of her own. Things start with the well known New Order song True Faith which is a faithful rendition, with the outro particularly working well on acoustic guitar as the chords change.       10cc's I'm Not In Love follows and is spellbinding - it is my pick of the songs here. With such a short selection - with 7 tracks totaling 28 minutes it is more the length of an E.P. - each track carries more weight but none are filler, each having their their own intriguing beauty including intriguing covers of The Smith's Well I Wonder and Sunshine Over The Rain. A poignant eulogy to a beautiful soul....

PRINCE Sign '☮' The Times   ( originally released 1987 ) HIS PURPLE majesty arguably released his greatest album in  Sign  'O' The Times , his ninth studio album and undoubted masterpiece. Purple Rain may get all the plaudits but his first album without his backing band The Revolution is greater, not just in length, but also in scope as Prince went from apocalyptic funk (on the title track), to playful pop (on Starfish & Coffee), to ballads (Adore) and religious epics (The Cross). How it came to be is one of Rock and Pop's most interesting back stories and to understand it is to gain a far wider appreciation of why this release is so important.       Firstly though let's do the basic math: whilst the album itself is a 16 track double album, the super deluxe release is 92 tracks (!), a full 8hrs 2 mins of music. Even if you discount the last 18 tracks of live recordings and 13 of the tracks for being alternative takes or mixes of the tracks that al...

The face said it all... On February 13th 2019, The New York Times reported that several women had accused Ryan Adams, the famous alt-country star of sexual misconduct including his ex-wife Mandy Moore and singer/songwriter Phoebe Bridges. Since then more details followed along with the expected apologies from the star. My initial reaction was one of disbelief at the time. Because I was a massive fan, because I didn't want to think about it, because I loved his music. So I decided to do what most people do when they don't believe something: bury their head in the sand. This blog hadn't started back then and hey there's lots of music to listen to, so what's all the fuss? Alas I guess my reaction was one of bewilderment and confusion. I was a huge fan and as a British indie turned dance kid, Country and Americana was a genre I rarely dipped into but Ryan Adams was, for me at least the one, as he was undoubtedly a major talent, ever since his Whiskeytown days and then ...

Khruangbin Mordechai    DEAD OCEANS  NIGHT TIME STORIES Third album by the American trio from Houston, Texas EVERY NOW and then along comes a band that is a bit different, that doesn't take the novel approach, perhaps even breaks new ground. Enter Khruangbin.  They are a trio, consisting of guitarist and songwriter Mark Speer, bassist Laura Lee, who met Speer through friends and drummer Donald "DJ" Johnson who was subsequently recruited from the ashes of Yppah. They named themselves Khruangbin after, in the rush to get a name before their first gig, Lee suggested 'Khruangbin' - which literally translates as flying engine or aeroplane -  her favourite word in Thai,  a language she was studying at the time. Though in hindsight they have admitted they perhaps would have chosen an easier name to say now they are quite famous, the name signifies the international array of influences, not just playing psychedelia, surf rock, funk and dub but also the sounds of Af...

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...

            A few months ago it was the 40th anniversary of Joy Division's seminal post-punk masterpiece Closer and then last month the 30th anniversary of New Order's great World Cup Italia '90 song World In Motion, which got me thinking....has there ever been a better 10 year musical arc than this? In 1980, on the eve of the release of  Closer,  Joy Division's second and final album on 18th July 1980,  it would have been inconceivable that the same band - for that is what Joy Division and New Order effectively are - would have written a bright catchy pop song with a house beat and a rap less than a decade later but that is exactly what happened when  World In Motion, was released on 21st May 1990:        Closer is just about as far away from World In Motion as you can get, a melancholic and powerful thought-provoking album. It proved to be their swansong but of course they didn't know it at the time; nine gre...

So Q Magazine is no more, it's legs pulled from underneath it by the vicious and unprecedented Corona virus which has devastated the Entertainment industry as a whole. In my estimation, this premier glossy music magazine relied a lot on petrol stations and airport lounges and the like, and now people are not driving and not flying, sales have unsurprisingly plummeted.       It also sheds a light on its market position which like Select, Melody Maker and The Word before it all fell by the sword trying to cater for one and all. The equivalent in the film industry I imagine would be Empire Magazine but it has few rivals as most seem particularly niche (Sight And Sound for example) whereas Q had Mojo and Uncut. Or did it? These two magazines are relatively niche along with several others such as Classic Rock and Mixmag - I think it is fair to say that, though smaller, they know their target audience better and as such are able to pitch better to them and are rewarded with a...