I saw Richard Thompson, accompanied by Judith Owen (vocals, piano) and Debra Dobkin (percussion, vocals), perform his 1000 Years of Popular Music set at the Corn Exchange in Cambridge (Friday January 16th). This is a great atmospheric venue with good acoustics, but we arrived slightly after 7.30pm thanks to traffic and parking problems, to find [...]
The recent DVD / Blu-ray release of The Who at Kilburn 1977 is a must-have if you have any spark of interest in The Who. I found it utterly compelling. I got the DVD, because I can play it anywhere, and I’m not convinced Blu-ray has much advantage for something like this. What gripped me [...]
Today’s Mail on Sunday in the UK has McFly’s new CD, Radio:Active, as a free insert. Free CDs and DVDs are like confetti in the weekend press these days; but this one is distinctive in that it is new material and comes from a band not yet in the twilight of its career – insofar [...]
In the late sixties we lived in a small village in Oxfordshire (then Berkshire). I have a few musical memories. One is a song covered by Tom Jones, The Green Green Grass of Home. We had a television, and there must have been some programme we watched that followed Top of the Pops. As a [...]
Today’s Mail on Sunday has a giveaway CD with “David Bowie’s own choice of the 12 greatest tracks of his career.” I couldn’t resist this even though I have pretty much everything already. It turned out to be worth it, if only for the two pages of new notes by the man himself within the [...]
As voted by the fine people at Steve Hoffman’s forum. The Village Green Preservation Society Something Else Arthur Face to Face Muswell Hillbillies Lola versus Powerman and the moneygoround Kontroversy Misfits Sleepwalker Everybody’s in Showbiz I asked the question because I’ve pretty much missed out on the Kinks, aside from their very well known singles [...]
Tim Bray writes about discovering Mixed Up, a CD of remixed Cure 12″ singles. I like it too, though not as much as the original vinyl. The Cure’s 12″ singles sound great and feature extended mixes that in many cases are not available elsewhere, even on Mixed Up. Love Cats, Close to me, Let’s go [...]
Many millions, in my opinion. The reason is that I’ve been ripping CDs to FLAC for a slimserver installation. I came across quite a few CDs showing signs of corrosion, the notorious “CD rot”. Almost all are made by PDO. The problem seems to strike the outer rim of the label side first, which goes [...]
Here’s something odd. After my efforts researching the loudness wars, I’ve become more aware of which CDs are mastered for loudness at the expense of dynamic range, and sometimes sought out older masterings of favourite recordings. Yesterday I received a copy of Bowie’s Let’s Dance in its earliest CD release (made in Japan for Europe, [...]
I took a look at the CD swapping site hitflip.co.uk, after seeing it recommended in The Independent newspaper. Here’s the deal: Disposing of CDs You list all your unwanted CDs (DVDs, games, etc). Each one is assigned a value in “flips”, the currency of hitflip. Currently a flip is worth £2.30; CDs tend to be [...]