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¶ “All of the heavies were light as a feather“ | “I Had a Dream” was sung at Woodstock by John Sebastian. It’s the second of five songs from a new project, Super Hits (!) of the Sixties! I’m aided and abetted here by my old pal Mark Pringle on guitar. ¶ On August 16th 1969, John Sebastian took to the stage at the Woodstock Festival with an acoustic guitar borrowed from his old friend,…

Paul was a great British artist with a unique worldview. It was deeply saddening to hear that he had passed away recently, and it brought back memories of the first time I became aware of his extraordinary talent. It was 1983, and I had recently become the Art Editor of The Listener, thanks to David Driver, who was my boss at Radio Times. He was leaving for The Times and handed over his part-time…

It’s time to start writing about music again. As I limber up, here’s a placeholder. ¶ I’d heard the song for the first time in years on one of the last episodes of the TV series, Mad Men. Brian Hyland’s 1962 puppy-love pop classic (#3 on both US and UK charts) has a naggingly dark/slightly hysterical melody that stuck in my head for days after watching the programme. One one hand it’s an…

Season’s Greetings & a Christmas Song | All the best to all Five Things readers So, this year’s Christmas song is “Silent Night”. Written in 1816 by Joseph Mohr, with music by his friend, Franz Xavez Gruber. My version is an unholy mix of “Nightshift” by The Commodores (I wish) and Robbie Robertson’s soundtrack to Killers of the Flower Moon (I also wish). Even as a child I baulked at the…

FUN WITH BOB | Bob Dylan. Bo Diddley. Brazilian Drumming. Amusing-to-make video. Another month, another Bob cover — I love this song, but I put this here feeling that I never quite got it right… I can’t spend any more time on it, so here it is for your amusement or otherwise. Five Things proper will return in September — best to you all.

Recorded for fun in the early days of Garageband, circa 2011 — the sentiment remains true to this day.

I’m re-publishing this following the passing of one of my favourite “Dylan” photographers. It was originally written for Pulp magazine in 2017. Bob Dylan: A Year and a Day. Photographs by Daniel Kramer Edited by Nina Wiener / Art Direction by Josh Baker / Design by Jess SappenfieldPublished by Taschen, hardcover in a clamshell box, edition of 1,965 (cute!) “In retrospect, it’s clear that Bob…

These are my thoughts after watching Ripley, and as we’re heading back to La Isla Mínima I thought I’d put an Instagram post from our trip last year on Five Things… {ONE} Steven Zaillian and Robert Elswit’s RIPLEY (Netflix) If you want to watch this series about an amoral chancer, you will pay for the pleasure. You will be put through the mill. You won’t cast off the deaths like in a two-hour…

Why today? So, on my dad’s birthday (he would have been one hundred and two today), a song about our Sunday trips to buy bread in Soho. I was brought up on Charing Cross Road, on the edge of Soho, where everything we needed was: food shops, liquor stores, barbers, music venues (for my dad), the wonderful magazine shop where I bought comics, and various school friends. There was a bakery, hidden…

Every April, I think about Richard Manuel, born on April 3, 1943, in Stratford, Ontario. I still remember where I was in March 1986, when I heard that he had taken his own life — the magazine art department of The Observer newspaper. I remember feeling unmoored for days, which seems too much of a reaction for someone I hadn’t met or known personally, but The Band had been such an important…

I was reminded of James & Bobby Purify’s wonderful track by a nice interview with Dan Penn in The Guardian this week by my friend Garth Cartwright. “I’m Your Puppet” was the only song cut at Muscle Shoals by James and Bobby (their record label sent them to Moman’s American Studio in Memphis for their follow-up), but I’ve always had a soft spot for the song, mainly for its rolling melody line,…

“Joe Hill ain’t dead,” he says to me,“Joe Hill ain’t never died…Where working men are out on strikeJoe Hill is at their side,Joe Hill is at their side.” Listening to Alexei Sayle’s Desert Island Discs a while back, it was interesting to me that he chose “Joe Hill” as one of his eight discs, recalling that it was performed at his mother’s funeral. I first heard “Joe Hill” on the Woodstock…

Season’s Greetings & a Christmas Song | All the best to all Five Things readers — I’m going to get back into posting more regularly in 2024, promise. In the meantime, a few days out from the 25th, here’s this year’s Christmas song. It’s that old chestnut, “Winter Wonderland”, which was written in 1934 by Felix Bernard and lyricist Richard Bernhard Smith. Smith, a native of Honesdale,…

{ONE} RONNIE HAWKINS, THE LAST WALTZ | “COME ON ROBBIE, LET’S TAKE A LITTLE WALK…”Robbie still has to count Ronnie in … but the sound of his newly-bronzed Stratocaster summons up the rowdy rockabilly that Ronnie Hawkins traded in. “I didn’t know whether it would be a bad idea, but I decided to have the Stratocaster bronzed. It was a bit tricky, you know, finding somebody to do that. One of the…

Some thoughts on A.I., Sinead O’Connor, Marvin Gaye, Vini Reilly, Serge Gainsbourg and The Parsons/White B-Bender.

THE INTRONow we’re all getting fully signed up to the future — it’s Philip K. Dick’s world after all, we just live in it — this week, Five Things touches on A.I., a spooked and possessed Marvin Gaye song, a world of music newly discovered, a video that is so French it should be required viewing at Customs and an extraordinary guitar modification. The saddest news was the passing of Sinead…

Trying to use words, and every attemptIs a wholly new start, and a different kind of failureBecause one has only learnt to get the better of wordsFor the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in whichOne is no longer disposed to say it. And so each ventureIs a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulateWith shabby equipment always deteriorating— T. S. Eliot, East Coker {ONE} BILLIE’S HOUSE:…