The Blues Brothers is one of the greatest movie musicals of all time, and that is non-debatable. With its beginnings as an SNL skit, and with its budget spent mostly on smashing police cars, it may seem aesthetically miles away from the glories of old … Continue reading Think
Why bother to remix a James Brown song? James Brown, more than anyone, never needed any help in the rhythm and funk department. He had so much funk he was practically exploding with it. Even on unmemorable deep cut songs, you can just about hear … Continue reading There Was a Time
Well, then. Diana Ross sure knew how to deliver the drama. This is as overwrought a love song as anyone in the Motown factory ever wrote. (Smokey Robinson, as it happens.) Frankly, it’s an understated performance given the material. Anyone else would have turned it … Continue reading Then
I want to go live inside of a Donovan album, with psychedelic high tea and a magical sun. Failing that, I want to take a lot of drugs and go sit in the woods. Failing that, I guess I’ll just keep listening to The Hurdy … Continue reading Teas
In 1968, Morocco was the vacation destination du jour for the rock’n’roll demimonde. Rock stars liked it, I suppose, because it was an exotic place where they could smoke copious amounts of hash in relative privacy. It was also glamorous, cheap, bohemian, metropolitan, Westernized, and … Continue reading Tangier
This is a song that movies have been made about, and before it was even finished. Not that Godard’s fitfully unwatchable One Plus One is anything but a footnote to what it just happened to capture; there’s really only one definitive introduction to Sympathy for … Continue reading Sympathy for the Devil
“Collabs” may be one of the clichés of the digital era, in which every celebrity with half a Q-rating is hitching their name to someone else’s in the hope of monetizing their combined fame. In 1968 the collab of the year was Diana Ross x … Continue reading Sweet Inspiration
Obviously, I love a good drinking song. Cult singer-songwriter Laura Nyro has nailed the feel of a tippling song that sounds like it could date back to ragtime days or before. Drinking songs, of course, haven’t changed much; despite centuries of social change, people still … Continue reading Sweet Blindness
As expected, when researching songs about things being sunny, a disproportionate number of them are by Donovan. You can’t blame him for a having a bit of an attachment to sunshine: he is from Scotland, where the climate is not balmy and a sunny day … Continue reading A Sunny Day
This is the most Bri’ish thing I’ve ever heard. First of all, like I’ve said before, only people from countries where it rains 75% of the time could think of the sun in this way. And it’s very British to not only anthropomorphize a thing … Continue reading The Sun is a Very Magic Fellow
Lady Garfunkel's Song of the Day 