The Man With the Child in His Eyes was written when Bush was just 13, and recorded in 1975, when she was still only 16. That is remarkable, yet not so unusual when placed in...

I’m a little too tired to do lyrical justice to the beautiful layers, loops and motifs of Transportation, taken from Julia Kent’s 2013 album Character, so I’ll just let her explain a little about the...

He can deny it all he wants here, but you know deep down that Stuart Murdoch really does want to dance all night like he’s a soul boy. Why else would Belle & Sebastian have...

Time for a quick and easy game of connections: Yesterday’s track was Candy by Ash, which featured a sample of Make it Easy on Yourself, originally by The Walker Brothers. That song was...

Since the 20th anniversary of their debut release on March 5th, Ash have been steadily adding tracks to Soundcloud. I listened to that debut, Jack Names the Planets, in no small state of shock at...

Poor old George Lazenby never gets the plaudits he deserves for his one-film Bond residence. In turn, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is also often overlooked in favour of the campier or grittier films in...

I think we can probably agree that composer John Barry’s Japanese infusion for the soundtrack of You Only Live Twice was a tad more convincing than Sean Connery’s. Roger Moore cops a lot of flak...

This is a slippery one, and no mistake. I’ve been listening to it for about three-quarters of an hour now, and I every time I get to the delicious outro the rest of the song...

After Les Fleur yesterday, today’s track features another great Charles Stepney arrangement and if Les Fleur is springtime-in-bloom exciting, then California Soul is summer-in-a-can joyful - a perfect go-to track when everything’s...

Les Fleur or Les Fleurs? Either way, it must surely be impossible to be uncheered by a spring classic sung, as you do, from the perspective of a flower.

One Band One Day is a series of mini-projects in which I spend an entire day listening to one artist and one artist only. The goal for the day is to write a review of...

The fantastic Public Service Broadcasting took their box of tricks, clicks, samples, banjos and the rest to KCRW, Los Angeles the other day, on their way to Reno Austin...

One of the most beautiful songs from an album that completely blew me away the first time I listened to it. And that’s no mean feat considering I was standing at a listening post in...

Written during the Out of Time recording sessions, but not completed until later, Nightswimming was, for a long time, a simple, circular piano pattern that Mike Mills established gradually. Holding the track back from Out...

Maybe it’s because I’m on album 15 of 15, and it’s exceedingly late, but at this point, as delighted as I am by R.E.M’s late career rock flourish, I’m cursing them a tiny bit for...

What makes Accelerate a great album is not just that it followed the largely unremarkable, humdrum and painfully middle of the road Around The Sun, and followed it by heading in the opposite direction. No,...

It’s safe to say that Around The Sun is the one R.E.M. album that would be the easiest to lose forever. Once you get past its first single and opening track Leaving New York there’s...

After the uncertain times around Up, to the relief of many, R.E.M. elected to continue recording. Reveal would take until 2001 to appear; in the meantime the band scored music for Man on the Moon,...

If ever an album needed a bit of revisionist loving, it’s Up. Coming after the departure of Bill Berry, to some it was the first post-R.E.M. album, to others it felt like a long time...

After the fairly uncompromising rock of Monster, on their 1996 album New Adventures in Hi-Fi R.E.M. recaptured some of the variety and creativity of earlier albums. Largely recorded on the road at soundchecks during the...