Internet Radio and Richard Digance

Listening to Internet radio while I "work". It's a great thing is Internet radio, and I can't really understand why it isn't massively popular yet here in the UK. We've got AM and FM and DAB, but they don't open up your horizons like the Internet. Got some favourites. Radio IO Acoustic, great for that background gentle vibe and the odd eye-opening new-found classic. Soma FM, Indi Pop Rocks, fantastic for those livelier moments and for discovering new artists you're never likely to find in a UK Virgin of HMV. Whatever did happen to the independents?

It's not the same as flicking through racks of vinyl. happy hours spent scouring the cheap bins at Sundown Records in Walsall. Don't suppose it's still there. Discovered Richard Digance there, because he looked a bit "Rocky" on the sleeve of "Treading the Boards". I remember in my pitiful innoicence and ignorance proclaiming him "better than Dylan" and then at Uni everyone holding their hands over their ears and muttering about Puff the Magic Dragon. Course, that was before he becanme a comedy TV star (Digance, not Dylan) and he was a proper folk singer.

He had this song called "Pub Joke Song" which I embassingly did myself a couple of times on stage, sorry Richard, no royalties. I remember also at student parties mates getting me to "sing" others. I now know my voice is made for anything other than singing but still don't really know if back then these "mates" were taking the piss and setting me up, or if ....actually I do know, it's just taken me till this moment to accept it. Bastards!

Anyway, Red Lights of Antwerp is a beautiful song, so thanks Richard, whatever the others say, you opened my eyes, so stand to attention, eyes to the right and watch the blades of the midnight windmill turn!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Who voted for a hung parliament?

Is it just me? I'm being told by politicians, journalists, commentators that I/we have spoken and that I/we have decided we don't want a single party with a majority, we want a new kind of politics. What utter, utter rubbish. I and I'm sure most of you, voted for the party we want to govern. Just because we all have different ideas on who that should be doesn't mean we want a new kind of politics (as it happens I do, but how they read that from a single cross in a single box is beyond me!). We haven't suddenly developed a collective conscience and voted as an amorphous mass. That's all, just needed to get that off my chest!
Read more

The Hazards of Love

Image
The Hazards of Love A concept album, words to strike aural terror into most people, including yours truly in normal circumstances.  But when I heard The Rake's Song (a chilling, thrilling tale of multiple filicide) for the first time, I didn't know that the album which had spewed it forth was a concept deal. But what a concept, love, murder, kidnap all wrapped up in a 21st century folk-rock package to die for.  Not for the feint-hearted, but for anyone who likes a bit of meat (albeit dripping wwith blood) with their music!
Read more

Less - by Andrew Sean Greer

Image
Billed as a comic novel, I have to admit it took a while for me to adjust to and appreciate the gentle humour which runs through the book.  Worse it took me to about about halfway through before I started to feel any sympathy with the protagonist, Arthur Less.  Possibly it's my cultural distance from almost every character in the novel - or maybe it just isn't as witty as the critics have made out. Less is a mildly successful novelist on a cobbled together world tour devised purely to get him out of the country for the wedding of his former partner. Only while in Paris and cornered at a party by a Nemesis, who explains Less's lack of popularity to him as being down to Less being "a bad gay" did I really start to warm to him.  I suspect most if us feel that for much of our lives we've pretty bad at whatever it is we are supposed to be.  From that point I rooted for the poor guy, in his one suit (when his luggage hadn't gone astray). In the end it...
Read more