Category: Uncategorized
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New record!
So, at last, here is Eurostar the Musical by The French Pop Dream, produced by Jamie West and me, featuring the lovely voice of Anne Brugière and the award-winning (true) keyboard and accordion skills of Myriam Gasser. I asked Fanny Latour Lambert, a Parisian photo prodigy, much in demand from big fashion labels despite still…
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Ten great Squeeze songs you may never have heard
I was a big fan of Squeeze when I was a teenager – they were probably my first favourite band and Difford and Tilbrook the first songwriters I really paid attention to. There was a great documentary last week on BBC4 about them which you can probably still see in the UK on iplayer. Elvis…
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Some reasons to love Jonathan Richman
When you mention Jonathan Richman to people who fancy themselves as music fans, they usually say: “Oh, yeah, Roadrunner. 1977.” And move on. But Roadrunner sounds pretty much nothing like most of the rest of JR’s back catalogue; it’s a novelty hit that obscures 40 years of, um, novelty album tracks. Or what folk raised…
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Frank Sidebottom to be played by Michael Fassbender.
How amazing is that? Michael Fassbender is to play a character partly based on Frank Sidebottom for a new feature film, co-written by Jon Ronson. As a Ronson/Sidebottom follower I knew that Ronson was writing a so-called Sidebottom biopic before Chris Sievey’s untimely death in 2010. Maybe the intent of the screenplay has shifted now.…
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French pop for the start of summer
Is it the first day of summer/spring where you are? It kind-of sort-of was here in London. Still freezing, but the city looked amazing in the sun, me walking across London Bridge and up to St Pauls. Do I sound like Tommy Steele yet? But, you know, maybe there’s something even more spirit-raising about the…
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Vera Lynn: the original Morrissey. Ish.
I’ve meaning to raise this for a while – in fact, ever since World War II forces sweetheart Vera Lynn topped the charts again a year or so back. I met her once, when I was a child, and her WWII heyday seemed impossibly distant but was, in fact, just 30 years past – about…
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Big in Manila etc
So, apparently I’ve only done three posts since the start of 2010 which isn’t the way to ‘build’ an ‘audience’. So here’s some pop-ish things that have been pre-occupying me of late… Most exciting was the news from the Philippines that Manila’s No 1 indiepop club, The Strict Rules of Polite Society, were theming their…
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That TV licensing song
There’s a TV ad in the UK right now about how to pay your TV license. Are we the only country where the government takes people £140 to pay for the national broadcast service (BBC)? Possibly. Anyway, it is a good thing but the way they enforce it is kind of crazy. Maybe I’ll discuss…
School of Pop 