- Oct 30, 2020
FIFTY3 FRIDAYS: PARTY LIKE IT’S 2018
How the years do roll on. I think back to 2018, the first year I properly attempted a ‘Best of…’ Spotify playlist as opposed to a conventional year-end Mixtape. The former suffered from me not knowing quite when to stop adding tracks. The latter offered the built-in discipline of limiting the number of songs you could include to, say, 18, before the disc was full. That meant tough choices but more chance of keeping the listener onboard. I had long since abandoned the medium o
- Oct 23, 2020
FIFTY3 FRIDAYS: KEEPING UP
How faithful are you? Keeping up with musicians whose work you love is always the intention but less often the reality. The ephemeral nature of music makes it easy to lose touch unless the artiste is constantly bringing out new tunes, or heavily posting on social media. I first became aware of Dublin, ROI singer-songwriter, Ailbhe Reddy, in 2017 and soon after was privileged to see her play a captivating solo set on a pocket-sized, bicycle-powered stage in Glastonbury’s green
- Oct 16, 2020
FIFTY3 FRIDAYS: NICE TO SEE YOU
While it is undoubtedly uplifting to uncover new music from artistes often entirely new to you each week, it is equally a pleasure to reacquaint yourself with acts you have enjoyed listening to before but with whom you may have lost touch. A case in point is Norwegian trio, I See Rivers, who I first saw play a lovely yet surprisingly feisty and humorous show at London’s St Pancras Old Church getting on for two years ago. The girls actually met while studying at Liverpool Inst
- Oct 9, 2020
FIFTY3 FRIDAYS: GET HAPPY
Forget your troubles, come on get happy. So goes the song from the 1930’s made famous by Judy Garland in the fifties while David Cassidy fans may recall an entirely different song – “C’mon Get Happy” – as the theme tune to The Partridge Family TV series in the 70s. Ah, the hair and those fashions. Before we lay waste to any further decades, the point is we can always do with a little happiness in our lives, especially in these viral times. Enter, quite feasibly stage left, Th
- Oct 2, 2020
FIFTY3 FRIDAYS: A WHOLE NEW SLANT
Fashions and styles in music come and go. Some you’d love to see the back of and some you’d love to see back. This week’s Fifty3 Fridays offers a selection of musical styles united by a common thread; that each act is offering its own angle on oft experienced emotions or scenarios. Now where do you stand on glam rock…? Female-fronted extrovert five-piece, Slant, brings a refreshing idiosyncrasy to its music. The band, all friends from student days in Brighton, has just releas