An alphabet of bands and artists as a series for the next 26 days. These were selected by the Spotify algorithm.
U:K is a short-lived 'supergroup' of technically proficient musicians. They recorded several albums including a live one.
Japan had more visits by Jobson and crew than the country they were named after. The band had a classic line-up, although in recent concerts, only two were from the original.
This features the late, great John Wetton on bass and vocals. He also played with Asia - which he founded. Previous bands included Family, King Crimson, Roxy Music,
The guitarist was the late, great Allan Holdsworth, a pioneer of guitar synthesisers.
The drummer was originally Bill Bruford, who also played with Yes and Genesis as well as Earthworks. He retired a few years ago, but not for long. I've seen him play live a number of times with both of those bands.
On the clip below, the drums are played by multi-instrumentalist Marco Minnemann is an awesome drummer who is capable of incredible rhythmic patterns in complex time-signatures. I remember watching a clip of him auditioning for Dream Theater.
The big draw for me is Eddie Jobson. He is a multi-instrumentalist, classically trained and a phenomenon, and will appear elsewhere on the blog.
Here they are playing one of my favourites of theirs.
And this has just been added to YouTube because Eddie is going to be performing live for the first time in some years.
It's a live performance of 'Carrying no Cross'.
From Eddie Jobson's "Four Decades" solo concert in 2013, with special guests John Wetton and Marco Minnemann.
Other guests appearing at the concert included Sonja Kristina (Curved Air), Alex Machacek (U.K.), Aaron Lippert (UKZ) and Ric Fierabracci performing a broad range of music from Jobson's forty-year career.
An alphabet of bands and artists as a series through February. These were selected by the Spotify algorithm.
Tangerine Dream is a band whose line-up has changed repeatedly over the years, but which continues to this day, and will continue indefinitely because its about the music and the idea and not the particular people who make up the band at any one point. The Wikipedia page explores all the musicians who have contributed to the project. I first saw them over 40 years ago.
It was founded by Edgar Froese and other key musicians for some years were Christopher Franke and Johannes Schmoelling.
The current line up is made up of the multi-instrumentalists Thorsten Quaeschning, violins from Hoshiko Yamane and Paul Frick - the most recent addition.
Their White Eagle album from 1982 has a nicely geographical front cover. The deluxe version has some excellent bonus tracks as well. This is one of my favourites.
I was very pleased to catch them playing a 50th anniversary concert based around their album 'Phaedra' at the Barbican in 2024.
The 2nd half of the concert (after an hour long performance of the main album as a session) was full of hits and started with a storming 'No Happy Endings'. This is on the soundtrack to the video-game Grand Theft Auto V.
Here's a live performance of Madagasmala.
There is also this video featuring the last live performance by Edgar Froese in June 2014 and a cracker of a song 'The Silver Boots of Bartlett Green' featuring two of the current line-up.
Thorsten Quaeschning released an album with Steve Rothery of Marillion as a duo called Bioscope in 2025. It's very good also.
One of my favourite tracks played live is called The Silver Boots of Bartlett Green. This was often the final track played at gigs and this recording is particularly special as it was the final time that
In January 2026, they released a recording of a special 50th anniversary concert at the Barbican where they played their album Phaedra plus a selection of other tracks. It's in my collection. I was there at the event!
Discography
There isn't room to put the full discography of albums as they have released over 100 I believe...
Here's just a few ... from older albums to more recent ones...
AI generated so there will be some errors.
The penultimate line-up played a concert at the opening of a new concert venue, and the resulting gig is available free of charge here. It's wonderful...
A lot of music is written about particular places.
Airports, in the work of Marc Augé are "non places".
Non places are described as follows:
Non-place is a neologism coined by the French anthropologist Marc Augé to refer to anthropological spaces of transience where human beings remain anonymous, and that do not hold enough significance to be regarded as "places" in their anthropological definition.
Examples of non-places would be motorways, hotel rooms, airports and shopping malls. The term was introduced by Marc Augé in his work Non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity, although it bears a strong resemblance to earlier concepts introduced by Edward Relph in Place and Placelessness
In 1978, Brian Eno released "Ambient 1: Music for Airports", a quietly radical album that redefined the role of music in public and private space. The album was born out of frustration: after spending hours waiting at Cologne Bonn Airport, Eno found himself irritated by its sterile, uninspired atmosphere. Rather than simply complaining, he reimagined what sound in such a setting could be—composing an album "designed for airports" but meant to function in many contexts.
At the time, ambient music was more a concept than a genre, mostly existing in contrast to the formulaic "muzak" of elevators and lobbies.
Eno’s approach was intentionally different. He didn’t want to stimulate or distract. Instead, he wanted to create space: for thought, for calm, for uncertainty.
As he put it in the liner notes, ambient music:
“must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.”
Each of the four tracks on 'Music for Airports' unfolds slowly, with a ghostly serenity:
“1/1,” the opening piece, features tape-looped piano patterns that feel both deliberate and weightless.
“2/1” stands out for its non-vibrato vocal loops, which Eno called “uncannily lifeless”—intimating not peace, but the eerie absence of human presence.
“2/2,” created using an ARP 2600 synthesiser and layered with multiple echoes, is lush, slow-moving, and quietly immersive.
What makes "Music for Airports" so enduring is its conceptual clarity. Eno wasn’t just crafting background sound—he was rejecting the idea that music must entertain or dominate.
Over four decades later, "Music for Airports" still feels timeless. It’s not only a foundational work in ambient music, but a philosophical statement about how we listen—and why sometimes, the most profound sounds are the ones that ask the least of us.
It is part of a series of ambient albums.
The full album can be heard below:
Brian Eno is an interesting musician and polymath who has dipped into a huge number of projects over the decades, and collaborated with a wide array of musicians with different musical styles.
He played for some years with the band 'Roxy Music'. He is a producer and musician, as well as involving himself with a whole range of art projects.
This excellent London Review of Books review by Ian Penman of two biographies contains a large amount of detail about his life, and his projects, some of which have been criticised. It is well worth reading!
Eno also provided "enossification" to The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway - adding to the sonic palette of the album - which has been blogged elsewhere.
Here, he explains how the idea of ambient music came about.
Eno's influence can be heard on other music which has already, or will be, featured on the blog, including David Bowie's 'Berlin Trilogy'.
We will return to this album later on the blog, as Carl Lee has also written about this set of albums and what they mean to him in another of his excellent blog posts.
What are your favourite ambient music pieces and artists?
I bought a hardback version of the book when that came out as a gift for my wife who is a huge Pet Shop Boys fan. She has seen them many times over the years, going back to the 1980s and including at the Royal Opera House. I've also seen them play several times including at Glastonbury.
It's a copy signed by the author: Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys.
An alphabet of bands and artists as a series for the next 26 days. These were selected by the Spotify algorithm.
Sigur Rós are one of my favourite bands, and I have seen them play live as often as I can, even before 2012 when they first became particularly prominent by composing music used in a David Attenborough series - even if you don't think you know it, you will have heard it. I went to see them play last year and the person next to me said "I only know one song" - and I knew which one they meant.
Here's the song that introduced them to many:
The most recent concert was with an orchestra down at the Royal Albert Hall.
Here's one of my favourite tracks, as recorded at Abbey Road Studios: Ára Bátur
The track hadn't been played live before.
And then in October - they played it...
There are plenty of videos recorded by those who were present at the concert - see if you can find your favourite.
Vonlenska (Hopelandic) is the non-literal language that forms the unintelligible lyrics sung by the band on some songs, in particular by Jónsi. It is also commonly known by the English translation of its name, Hopelandic. It takes its name from "Von", a song on Sigur Rós's debut album Von where it was first used. However, not all Sigur Rós songs are in Hopelandic; many are sung in Icelandic. Vonlenska has no fixed syntax and differs from constructed languages that can be used for communication. It focuses entirely on the sounds of language; it lacks grammar, meaning, and even distinct words. Instead, it consists of emotive non-lexical vocables and phonemes; in effect, Vonlenska uses the melodic and rhythmic elements of singing without the conceptual content of language. In this way, it is similar to the use of scat singing in vocal jazz.
The band's website describes it as "a form of gibberish vocals that fits to the music" it is similar in concept to the 'nonsense' language often used by Cocteau Twins singer Elizabeth Fraser in the 1980s and 1990s or by Icelandic singer Björk.
It is worth exploring all their discography.
In October 2025, I saw them performing with the London Contemporary Orchestra.
Monday last week saw the appearance on iPlayer (and BBC One) of the new offering from Mackenzie Crook. He had already cast his magic with 'Detectorists' and an updating of 'Worzel Gummidge' and this is his latest series: "Small Prophets".
Cinder Well is the musical project of Los Angeles–based songwriter, composer, and multi-instrumentalist Amelia Baker. Her starkly emotive vocals and surrealistic lyrics are framed by cinematic arrangements drawing from traditional and experimental music. There is weight and resonance to Cinder Well — heavy in ways that do not rely on volume or distortion, but on the depth of songwriting and the unhurried space it holds.
This follows the previous wonder of 'Detectorists', which benefitted from a wonderful theme song from Johnny Flynn.
Much more to come on that in a post to come next month.
This could well have been Rush in terms of sheer volume of plays, but they will feature a great deal separately.... so instead, here's a band I listened to a lot during the 1980s and 1990s. From Athens, Georgia.
Their most iconic album is 'Automatic for the People', released in 1992. This was in the charts for weeks and there were all sorts of singles from it, plus 'Out of Time' which featured 'Finding my Religion'.
A favourite album is a much earlier one called 'Document'.
This track is from that album.
I saw the band several times: once on the 'Green' tour, and once on the 'Monster' tour.
That meant a return to Huddersfield, where I studied for my geography degree at the Polytechnic there, as they were playing the football stadium. See the 2nd post for today for more on that gig and the ticket stub from the gig.
They released a number of tracks which could be said to have a geographical theme to them.
It's the end of the world as we know it...
"That's great it starts with an earthquake...."
Maps and Legends
This is from an early album called 'Fables of the Reconstruction'. Here's a live performance from 2003.
And also Daysleeper, with its video of corporate life...
An A-Z of bands through February suggested by Spotify when I type in each letter of the alphabet into the search...
So Spotify suggested Queen for 'Q'.
I've not really played a lot of Queen on Spotify, but it's one of the Q bands that will pop up when people search.
I certainly played a lot of it when I was younger, and I remember buying Queen 'Live Killers' album from Woolworths - a double LP, which I played a lot...
I also bought the single for 'Bicycle Race' from the album Jazz... which I think was partly because of the design of the cover... the 'B' side was Fat Bottomed Girls.
I also remember this song coming out when I was at Primary school.
Some years ago, when I still did a lot of climbing, I was able to climb the Cioch on the Isle of Skye.
This is a dramatic spot: half way up a cliff which is hundreds of metres high.
It features in the film 'Highlander', the soundtrack to which had several songs by Queen.
'The Brutalist' soundtrack won a lot of awards during 2025.
It accompanied Brady Corbet's multi-award winning film about an architect making his way in post-war USA against discrimination and brutal treatment, but who designs and helps bring to life a huge brutalist building which acts as a memorial to his past.
The soundtrack is by Daniel Blumberg - one of my son's favourite musicians. He also wrote the music for the more recent 'The Testament of Ann Lee'.
Teaching the lessons of the past through the music of the future.
An alphabet of bands and artists as a series for the next 26 days. These were selected by the Spotify algorithm.
This is also the 100th post on this new blog.
Again, not surprising that Public Service Broadcasting appeared in the algorithm as I've been listening to them for a long time and have seen them play live numerous times over the year, each time getting a little bigger and better with more ambitious productions.
The band started out small, and their early stages featured TVs with visuals on them. Their shows are always visually interesting.
He came up with the name, as he said in the interview linked to above...
"....that was me. Just me, as at first it was just me in the band; it really was just a solo entity and the first gigs that I played was just me in a pub without any visual accompaniment or anything. It really was a solo, semi-live, semi-electronic performance. The name just seemed to fit what it was that I was doing. The only bad thing about it was that it meant that we would end up with the same initials as the Pet Shop Boys and obviously they got there first and they are a lot better (laughter)."
Here's a picture of mine from a gig back in 2015....
Image: Alan Parkinson - shared on Flickr under CC license
The musicality is excellent and even my daughter was converted when she went to see them at Latitude in 2025.
The band uses music linked with vintage audio of speech, including early news reels, and audio from organisations such as NASA and early newsreels. Their first album featured classics like 'Spitfire' and 'Everest' which are still part of their live set today.
Here's 'Spitfire'...
You could argue that all of their albums are concept albums in that they are themed around a particular idea.
When the band tours, they now also add vocalist Eerato do the vocals.
For many years, any interaction with the audience was through pre-recorded voice samples.
The most recent concert I atteneded was at the Barbican in November 2025.
Here's their excellent poster. They often have a screen-printed poster for sale at their gigs, similar to other bands such as 'The Decemberists'.
Their albums are varied and exciting as well as the EPs that they have released on some eclectic topics, including a Dutch speed skating race called the 'Eleven Cities Tour'.
As this YouTube clip says:
In April 2013 we were approached by the organisers of the Explore the North festival in Leeuwarden, Netherlands. They asked if we would use some footage of the Elfstedentocht (Eleven Cities Tour), the world's biggest ice skating race, and write some songs around it. So we did.
More on that in another post as well...
Every Valley explores the decline of the coal mining industry in South Wales. I will return to that separately in a later blog post as it is definitely connected to a place and a community that has been changed by circumstances.
The Race for Space chronicled the space race, with tracks about Sputnik, Korolev and the moon landings with 'Go', as well as the first Apollo missions. What I particularly liked about this was the detail that a different drum kit was used for the Russian songs than the American songs... again more on that in a later post.
And here's a live performance of 'The Other Side' - a classic song played live....
Bright Magic is their Berlin album with more synthesisers and again J. Willgoose moved to Berlin while they were recording the album.
The Last Flight tells the story of Amelia Earhart and her attempt to circumnagivate the globe which came to a tragic end. This album has its own entry on the blog, as the design involves several maps of the proposed route. Her flight came to an end
After a series of concerts to support 'The Last Flight', the band is now preparing to record their next album. I can't wait to find out what the theme is....
Discography
They will play their largest gig at Alexandra Palace in 2026, and I have a ticket...
There may also be connection to tell you about later in the year as well... more on that to come.
It's beautifully put together, and provides a different dimension to the country.
The creator has interviewed people for the project.
Here's one exchange:
Kaśka Paluch: What does Iceland sound like to you? If you had to choose just one sound that defines it?
Yrsa Sigurðardóttir: Wind. Definitely wind. I live by the ocean, and wind is the constant background noise. And the sound of waves too, though that depends a lot on the wind. But those two things—wind and the ocean—define the soundscape here for me.
Kaśka Paluch is a musicologist, music journalist, sound artist, and educator, and the creator of Noise From Iceland—the first-ever sound map of Iceland. Originally from Zakopane, Poland, she studied musicology at Jagiellonian University and has published in Onet.pl, Tygodnik Powszechny, Noisey, LAIF, and Presto.
Click the blue circles to hear the recorded sounds e.g. Solheimajökull.
The sound was recorded at the glacier's face. The lake was just defrosting, and the crushed pieces of ice bumping against each other made a sound like wind chimes.
After creating a first sound map of Iceland in history - www.noisefromiceland.com - the Noise From Iceland project has been released on an album basis. These are field recordings from the island with trance and techno music composed to them. In total, almost an hour of noise - volcano, lava, waterfalls, Icelandic animals and rivers - selected to engage the listener's ear as much as possible. - The sound does not have to be clear, but it has to be interesting - says the author, Kaśka Paluch - my guru of field recordings, Geir Jenssen once told me and this thought was my motto while working on this album.
Noise From Iceland has been created since January 2020. It is an attempt to answer the question: what does Iceland sound like? Proving that apart from beautiful pictures, this majestic land of fire and ice has a lot to offer also to other senses.
The motive for starting work on the sound map of Iceland was a meeting with a blind tourist who was on my trip when I was working as a guide - explains Kaśka Paluch - It was she who told me how much there is to know in Iceland, even when you cannot see it.
Another guest post from Carl Lee. Some care needed over the contents of the lyrics and imagery here.
Chinese rap music
You aren’t really starting to get a handle on the rapidity of change in 21st century China until you’ve spent an afternoon watching Chinese rap videos on YouTube.
Let me confess, for a British 63 year old music fan, albeit one who is a Sinophile and hip-hop fan going back to the 1980s, Chinese rap, grime, trap, drill, Memphis beat, whatever label you want to hang on it, is more of a social phenomenon than a musical one.
Musically most Chinese rap is generic and draws primarily upon US influences.
It skews from ‘pop’ lite to sparse ‘trap’ with its minimalist beats set out by synthesized drums. To some extent that is not the point. The point is more what the rappers are articulating and that is very much Chinese although the usual rap tropes of guns, girls, cars and cash also figure widely.
To get a flavour of what is hot in Chinese rap and how in China’s more socially conservative and government mediated society rappers offer an outlet for transgression and complaint a few rappers who have risen to the fore in 2025 are worth considering.
Perhaps most transgressive is Chengdu’s Four4444, a young female rapper who recently said “What if Hello Kitty carried a Glock?” Her shtick is cosplay pinks and bows offset by venomous sexual put-downs of men.
The polar opposite of this is GuiXiang, a 60 year old cleaner from Suzhou who raps about the price of vegetables and how unclean her local fish market is.
Both are TikTok and Douyin sensations in China and both work with a minimalist beat palate.
The most successful, particularly in terms of exposure outside of China is Lanlao who trades by the name SKAI ISYOURGOD and is currently the most streamed Mandarin speaking artist (although he often raps in a rural Cantonese accent) on Spotify with nearly five million monthly listeners.
What Lanlao has done that sets him apart is that he hasn’t copied US artists and the themes that they rap about.
His focus is on modern Chinese society, its obsession with wealth creation (set out in the track ‘Blueprint supreme’), the inequalities it creates, and how that plays out not in the shiny first tier cities of China such as Shenzhen or Shanghai but in small town China and the aspirations, often thwarted, of that ‘left behind’ population.
Blueprint Supreme - English version.
Twenty-eight year old Zhang Fangzhao aka ‘God of Henan Rap’ has a more melodic and melancholic take that has resonated with many in China. Coming from the coal-mining town of Jiaozuo, Henan is from a town which is very much a part of China’s ‘rust-belt’.
Zhang’s song ‘Factory’ begins with the words.
“The smoke from the factories covers the stars”
and he goes on to refer to those who choose to stay in the polluted backbone of China’s industrialisation as ‘nails’. His take on a side of modern China is a world away from the media narratives found inside and outside of China. This is not the world of gleaming towers, consumer affluence and neon lights.
The mournful video that accompanied its release is a good counterpoint to the tunes twinkling pianos and muted trumpet.
If I was still teaching A level geography or undergraduates I might use this video to challenge their potentially preconceived notions of what makes up today’s China. It is a big place, with 1.4 billion people living in a continental scale nation with a multitude of languages and dialects, and Chinese rap is helping to shine a light on parts of this evolving society from the vegetable markets of Suzhou to the bleak industrialisation of Henan via the small-time ‘gangsta’ bosses of Guangdong.
Of course as Joe Strummer once sang ‘they think its funny turning rebellion into money’, and rap in China has gone mainstream with iQIYI a subscription based streaming service producing seven series of a series called ‘The Rap of China’ show where aspiring rappers attempt to impress a panel of judges.
Unsurprisingly, this being the world of rap, many rappers have produced diss tracks about the show focusing on its sanitised public appeal where any references to sex, drugs, police or anything that appears to challenge Chinese nationalism or the central importance of the state are removed.
You can be absolutely certain that Four4444 will not get an invitation to appear on 'The Rap of China'.
Carl Lee is retired but was a lecturer at The University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University, taught A level Geography for 20 years at Sheffield College, is the author of five books about geography and has a PhD in economic geography. He has been nuts about music since buying his first single in 1973: 10cc’s 'Rubber Bullets' if you were wondering.
A month-long A-Z of geography based on my Spotify algorithm...
Well. The maestro... it had to be for this letter of the alphabet.
Image: David Bailey
If I had to choose three artists whose music I would only have access to for the rest of my life, Mike Oldfield would be on the list and I'd definitely have some of his first three albums in my Top 10... not that I'm going to compile something like that right now - perhaps by the end of the year.
I've been listening to his music regularly for over 50 years...
Here's a short documentary on how it all started, with Tubular Bells.
A huge amount of video and other material is available around this particular album and how it was recorded and its influence.
I was very envious of Simon Groom who got to see the whole recording process and participate. The resulting piece of music was used for years after. Here's the full version of the session.
I've got all of Mike's albums in some format or other.
I was also fortunate to see Mike play live four times - which many people will also be jealous of perhaps - particularly those who discovered his music later.
Mike's last ever live performance was the biggest of his career and dates back to 2012.
I hadn't expected him to be performing as he hadn't performed live for some years since the Premiere of Tubular Bells III (which I attended - more on that in a future blog post). I hadn't intended to watch the majority of the event as I was down in Devon at the time, and was actually heading to see Leeds United playing a friendly against Torquay.
As we came back from the match, we had the radio on, and they were playing the music from the opening ceremony and I was surprised to hear them say Mike Oldfield's name....
I knew that Bob Digby, GA President was at the Opening Ceremony. He had been following the development of the Olympic Park for many years as it took shape - as an example of urban redevelopment. There were various changes to the area - I visited myself with John Widdowson and a school group from Suffolk who kindly invited me along. Bob's never said how much he paid for his ticket...
There aren't many decent videos of the performance as they are copyrighted due to the Olympics' fairly stringent rules.
The audio is here however, and has been released in various formats since 2012:
Mike has made numerous varied albums in his career. I will be blogging separately about quite a few of them as they all had an impact on me in different ways.
He was also an innovator in the early days of computer games and video graphics - buying the most powerful graphics computers available and spending hours making videos for his own music. They look dated today, but then so do most things from back in the 1980s.
Check out 'The Wind Chimes' from 1987's album 'Islands'. Plenty of 3D objects floating about for no good reason... the music is great though, and was a rare side-long piece of music by then. This sounds great on a decent sound system for the bass. Like 'Discovery and the Lake' it was recorded in the French Alps.
If you want to know more about Mike's life and career, you need to visit the Dark Star website. I used to receive Dark Star magazine when it first started.
I'll also blog separately about the times I saw him live...
What is your favourite Mike Oldfield album?
Did you see him play live?
Let me know in the comments, and keep an eye out for more Oldfield related posts.
In 1974, Phaedra redefined the landscape of electronic music.
What began as an experimental session at Richard Branson’s Manor Studios in Oxfordshire became a seismic event in modern sound.
Using the Moog sequencer for the first time, Tangerine Dream - then comprised of Edgar Froese, Christopher Franke, and Peter Baumann - crafted Phaedra, an album that shimmered with innovation, mystery and a palpable sense of discovery. Half a century later, Tangerine Dream returned to London’s Barbican to honour that landmark work - reimagining it for a new era. ‘50 Years of Phaedra: At the Barbican’ captures this transcendent live performance, in which the current line-up - Thorsten Quaeschning, Hoshiko Yamane, and Paul Frick - revisit the spirit of Phaedra with the very tools that Froese and his collaborators helped pioneer.
An alphabet of bands and artists as a series for February. These were selected by the Spotify algorithm.
Not surprising that this came up via the Spotify algorithm as I'd been listening to a lot of his music before and since seeing the Wild God tour at the O2 arena. The album is now out on CD and in other formats.
Image: Nick Cave at the O2 - Alan Parkinson, shared on Flickr under CC license
His concerts are real experiences, like a church service. He prowls and draws in the audience with his lyrics, which often feature dark themes.
The musicians he accompanies himself with are also excellent. We saw a band which included Jonny Greenwood - the bassist from Radiohead - who sold out the O2 in November last year with hefty ticket prices as a result - and also some other top musicians.
He has usually collaborated with the musician Warren Ellis, who is Australian like him, and has composed a whole range of soundtracks, including a film about Jesse James. Warren Ellis' stage persona is wonderful.
My son also had the chance to meet him and say hello when he was down at the London Film Festival, as he had been involved in a film about Marianne Faithful. My son was coincidentally wearing his Nick Cave tour t-shirt from the O2 arena show. On the way there, we had also seen Mark Kermode on the tube, and as my son is a massive student of film, he had the chance to say hello to him too - more 2nd hand encounters of the first kind.
There are a few stand out tracks that I particularly like.
The encore at his recent UK concerts was a solo song at the piano: "Into my Arms".
A virtual exhibition has also opened up.
Selected discography - produced by AI
Any Nick Cave related stories welcome.... and what comes up in your 'N'?
I bought Marillion's first album: "Script for a Jester's Tear" on the day of release in March 1983 from a record shop in Huddersfield whose name escapes me, and saw the band play live quite a few times in those early years, including some gigs with Fish... facepaint, Grendel and all.
The playing was not as polished as it was on later albums, but the tone and atmosphere it portrayed went right to my sensibilities. I saw the band play live three or four times in the early years, with Fish in his make-up prowling the stage. I will post about 'Grendel' later in the blog. There were comments about the time about the derivation of their name, the use of face paint, progressive time signatures etc.
I'm also a fan of the longer version of 'Assassing' and other songs from their 2nd album 'Fugazi'.
In 1985, they released 'Misplaced Childhood' - this tour was the last time I saw the band play live, so that's over 40 years ago!
They had several singles at the time, most notably 'Kayleigh', which is probably their most played song on the radio.
One of my favourite later albums of theirs was F.E.A.R. - from 2016.
On the title, Steve Hogarth said:
”This title is adopted not in anger or with any intention to shock. It is adopted and sung (in the song "New Kings”) tenderly, in sadness and resignation inspired by an England, and a world, which increasingly functions on an “Every man for himself” philosophy. I won’t bore you with examples, they’re all over the newspapers every day. There’s a sense of foreboding that permeates much of this record. I have a feeling that we’re approaching some kind of sea-change in the world – an irreversible political, financial, humanitarian and environmental storm. I hope that I’m wrong. I hope that my FEAR of what “seems” to be approaching is just that, and not FEAR of what “is” actually about to happen.”
Spoiler alert: it happened.
In 2022, they released an album which has references to climate change, COVID, Greta Thunberg, blood diamonds in Sierra Leone and a whole range of other issues of the modern day, with a reminder that as well as being kind to ourselves it might be better to be hard on ourselves...
Interestingly, I saw Tangerine Dream recently at the Roundhouse and the special guest guitarist for the final improvisation session of the concert was Steve Rothery: the Marillion guitarist. He was also in the audience for the final gig of Clannad - something I mentioned earlier this month, sitting in the row in front of me.
Here's the video for the opening track from that album: 'Be Hard on Yourself'.
I first heard Aimee Mann's voice on an album which was not hers. It was Rush's album 'Hold your Fire', released in 1987, and she sang on the track 'Time Stand Still' - one of the better tracks on the album. The video for the song is full of chonky 1980's graphics and is badly dated...
Rush had not used a guest vocalist before.
"We knew that the part she sings on was a feminine part.
We didn't want to use a keyboard or have Alex or myself sing it, so we started looking for a female singer. It's a very attractive opportunity for us to work with a female singer. We just looked until we found a voice, that was suitable. In listening to Aimee's last record, we loved the way she sang, so we just asked her."
Geddy Lee (1988)
She made a series of albums with the band 'Til Tuesday. They had one huge US hit with a track called 'Voices Carry'.
Their final album, called 'Everything's Different Now' was released in 1988. This was the first album I bought with Aimee as vocalist, and bassist/guitarist. Her bass work is awesome on the early 'Til Tuesday albums. Seek out some YouTube live performances from the time as well. She is fantastic.
She co-founded the new wave band 'Til Tuesday and wrote their top-ten single "Voices Carry" (1985). 'Til Tuesday performed live together in 2025 - more on that in a later post.
I read a review of the final 'Til Tuesday album in 'Q' magazine - more on that in a later post too - and bought the album on the strength of that.
Her first solo album 'Whatever' was released in 1993, and I've bought every album since - each one varied and musically interesting. This was an album I played a huge amount back in the day, including on a drive up to the Isle of Skye.
The 4th of July from her 'Whatever' album sets the tone for the rest of the album and also the nature of her lyrics.
I have been fortunate to see her play live on her few visits to the UK.
She has been nominated for a Grammy and Oscar too.
For the latter, she lost out to Phil Collins, despite having produced the amazing soundtrack to Paul Thomas Anderson's 'Magnolia' - his best film for many people, although 'One Battle After Another' has won over the critics.
Aimee's most recent album 'Queen's of the Summer Hotel' is a superb album, which is a series of short songs written for a stage adaptation of Susanna Kasen’s 1993 memoir of being confined to a psychiatric hospital, "Girl, Interrupted".
Here's an acoustic performance of 2 of the songs.
Check out some of Aimee's other music.
Discography - AI generated - misses out 'Whatever' and some of her singles as well. I have them all... and I need to source them on vinyl...
And to finish, here's that dated Rush video for 'Time Stand Still'
And a video on how she came to sing on the song.
Which 'M' does your algorithm throw up?
And what is your favourite Aimee album?
P.S:
Aimee announced that she is going to be performing her album 'Batchelor No.2' in full at an event later this year, I sent a message back about how we'd love to see that in the UK, and was excited to see this on my Instagram feed:
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