The strangely-named “The RAH Band” burst onto the scene in 1977, with a UK top-ten hit, a bouncy dance track called “The Crunch”. Who were they, this peculiar ensemble, with their strange-sounds? The music industry newspaper Billboard provided the answer: Billboard assumes its industry-savvy readers knew who Hewson is, and fair enough. You know his […]
Category: Dance
If the highest purpose of music writing is to make the reader open up to music which has not previously had much appeal, then the best music writing I have ever encountered appears in a sci-fi novel about a giant rat with magical powers. China Mieville is an endlessly inventive writer of imagined worlds, inhabited […]
The uilleann pipes is a musical instrument of such extraordinary complexity it could only have been invented by the Irish. It is related to the bagpipes, but you don’t blow into it. The uilleann pipes is inflated with a small set of bellows, strapped around the waist and the right arm. It has three sorts […]
I used to be a journalist, and worked briefly for the best-selling tabloid newspaper in Australia. One of the expressions we used, and which I hated, cropped up if a financial institution collapsed, or a con-man was exposed. The story about the victims would gravely begin “They are the mums-and-dads investors …” This has nothing […]
The Village People were a marketing concept before they were a band. A record producer, Jacques Morali, had the idea of a camp disco-dance act, which would draw on gay stereotypes. He secured a recording contract before he even had found anyone to fill the roles of dog man, biker, cop and the others. Despite […]
Arthur Fiedler was one of the great popularisers. He hated the notion that classical and orchestral music were seen as the preserve of a moneyed, snobbish elite. He wanted the music he loved made available to everyone, and as director the Boston Pops Orchestra, that is exactly what he did. He took charge of the […]
“In the dark times,” asked Berthold Brecht, In the dark times Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing About the dark times. He was right and wrong: right about the singing, but not about the subject matter. Has the human race experienced a worse year than 1942? The world was at […]
Sting’s real name is Gordon Sumner. Bono’s real name is Paul Hewson. Madonna’s real name is actually Madonna, but you see where I am going. Many is the artist who has adopted a stage name for a bit of mystique. A little while ago, I discovered the faux (but enjoyable) Latin jazz of Chaquito, whose […]
I can’t dance, not properly. I have never learned to waltz, rhumba, cha-cha or tango. I do not know the fox trot or the Boston two-step or the Charleston. I wish I did, but I came of age when the ability to dance was no longer an essential social skill. The rock’n’roll dances – the […]
It is easily 25 years since I read J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, but I still remember the pivotal scene vividly. Holden Caulfield is speaking to his sister Phoebe, who is pretty much the only person he trusts. “You know that song ‘If a body catch a body comin’ through the rye’? … […]
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