- Feb 26, 2021
FIFTY3 FRIDAYS: MAKING TIME FOR LOVE
When your limited listening hours each week are focused on new music, and specifically on what to feature in this column, it is not always easy to find space to revisit audio delights from times past. When I do, it is surprising how often the artiste in question turns up in a new guise very soon after. Not that 2017 is that long ago but I happened to listen to Will Stratton’s album from that year, Rosewood Almanac, again the other week. Originally from California, the Hudson
- Feb 19, 2021
FIFTY3 FRIDAYS: CAN’T GET WHAT OUT OF OUR HEADS?
Perhaps the most fascinating slice of television programming I have encountered in some time is the six-part BBC documentary series from Bafta-winning filmmaker Adam Curtis, aptly titled Can't Get You Out of My Head. With due deference to Kylie, he’s not talking here about a boy. Mixing sequences of strangely compelling archive footage with stories of historical political activists and ideologists while icing them with great splodges of odd yet perfectly matched soundtrack, C
- Feb 12, 2021
FIFTY3 FRIDAYS: THE WEATHER FORECAST
Traditionally we British are obsessed by the weather and right now it’s pretty cold out there. Not full-on Arctic cold maybe but quite enough not to watch another advert for Coors Light without wincing. So, to take your mind off the white stuff, consider the new musical offering of one who adopted The Weather Station as her trade mark originally so she could put ‘weird atmospheric recordings with no vocals’ up on MySpace and have fun pretending to live in an abandoned arctic
- Feb 5, 2021
FIFTY3 FRIDAYS: TAKES YOU BACK
Who remembers Keith West? He was the good looking lead singer with Tomorrow, a 60s psychedelic band which also mustered Yes guitar supremo, Steve Howe, in its ranks. West had side projects as a solo act too and is probably best known for singing "Excerpt from A Teenage Opera", a #2 UK Chart hit in 1967, in which he pleaded for a character called Grocer Jack to return, as you might, to save a town from starvation. ‘Grocer Jack, Grocer Jack, get off your back / Go into town, do