Category: Projects

Emilliana Torrini - Today has been OK I seemed to spend most of 2005 trying to sell a house in South West Herts, and commuting by car from there down to Gatwick Airport on a daily basis at a time when most of that stretch of the M25 was being worked on. Given the tumultuous … Continue reading 2005

Scissor Sisters - Comfortably Numb In late September 2004 my life seemed, for a while, to enter something of a soap opera. In the space of about five days I handed in my notice at the BBC after nearly eight years there, saw my first marriage break up, and lost my grandfather (in the dying … Continue reading 2004

Seth Lakeman - Kitty Jay 2003 was a rubbish year for music. From memory I think I spent most of it listening to stuff from the late sixties and early seventies, and often from Brazil. The bridge point between the dying embers of the dance music era, and the emerging new indie scene, there was … Continue reading 2003

Belle & Sebastian - If you find yourself caught in love The second example of a song discovered in a moment of random shuffle, I first came to hear this track a few years later in 2005, a year a spent an awfully large amount of time stuck in a car on the M25. I … Continue reading 2002

Mr Scruff - Get a move on Mr Scruff, AKA Andy Carthy, is the last person who has truly entered my roll call of Musical Heroes (which is a funny bunch including Miles Davis, Leonard Bernstein, Robert Smith, Matt Johnson, David Sylvian, Gilles Peterson and Joyce, amongst others). DJ, cartoonist, producer, recording artist, pie maker … Continue reading 2001

Moloko - The Time is Now And then the year 2000 arrived, the world didn't stop, the computers carried on working, and a new millennium and decade were begun, yet again, a year early. I really like the Moloko track. The only thing is that for ages I thought it was sung by Texas. So … Continue reading 2000

The Chemical Brothers - Let forever be 1999 was a weird year. I blame it on the fact that Prince had been singing about it from about 1984, but there were some strange, cult-like things going on, not least the millennium bug and peculiar suicide sects believing that the end of the world was nigh. … Continue reading 1999

The Beastie Boys - Intergalatic The Beastie Boys leaped into the public consciousness in the mid 1980s in a whirlwind of teenage high jinks, the theft of hundreds of VW car badges and the general disapproval of the Daily Mail. I seem to remember that there were even calls to ban the band from entering … Continue reading 1998

Coldcut - Atomic Moog 2000 The story of Coldcut (abridged): two massive pop hits ('People Hold On' and 'The Only Way is Up') in the late eighties followed by setting up the Ninja Tune label and being some of the most innovative DJs (and latterly VJs) on the scene. The label and offshoots have produced … Continue reading 1997

DJ Shadow - Changeling I was talking with a school friend of 24 years ago on Facebook a couple of days ago about how much of my life was intrinsically linked to the BBC. I owe my very existence to the Corporation, as it was there that my parents met in the 1960s. In the … Continue reading 1996