Spotify Preview and Island Boys purchase links...

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Café Musica - Island Boys EP out on 16-Aug-2019

will be available on all popular download and streaming services...

click here for the Apple iTunes pre-order offer of £2.49 for all 4 songs

with love...

The Rubber Wellies - Pirate Song #TunesDay

Went to see The Rubber Wellies recently at the rather wonderful Folk at the Froize, a monthly or so event in darkest Suffolk which combines live music and delicious food, what could be better?!

I first caught the Wellies at the Greenbelt Festival, at which they will be appearing this year too, and I was hooked. Their song lyrics' apparent charm often camouflage hard hitting social justice messages and therefore their appeal is on multiple levels. The musicianship and relaxed stagecraft is impeccable and ideal for the intimate venue the Froize provides.

I strongly recommend you catch them before they become a distant spec on a massive stage!

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Sorrow in my heart - Garden of Gethsemane

Love Letters to God - Nahko Bear...

Once seen, never forgotten... Nahko and Medicine for the People were the outstanding musical moment from last year's Greenbelt Festival, an annual pilgrimage. In fact the performance was one of the best gigs I've ever been too. And to be one of the many standing to challenge corporate oil, respect.

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Hallelujah, new use for abandoned power plant!

Rufus Wainwright joins a 1500 voice choir in a disused power station in Toronto give a moving rendition of Leonard Cohen's anthem 'Hallelujah'. Of course, Rufus knows the song well, one of the soundtrack highlights in Shrek... and the phrase "The Secret Chord" forms the title of Jonathan Evens and my book.

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Martyn Joseph nails it...!

Captivating video for one of the songs on Martyn's latest collection 'Sanctuary' released today...

Love it!

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For the love of pets and beer... 500 miles

Using the inspired version by Sleeping At Last of The Proclaimers anthem 'I'm Gonna Be (500 miles)' to make a charming, albeit sentimental, narrative style advert entitled 'Lost Dog' for Budweiser...

The full cover version of the song is here... already claimed by X-Factor (in 2014) and The Voice (2015) as their original ideas despite Sleeping At Last's 2012/13 recording.

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Coldplay - tearing me apart...

And I don't care... if you think I'm uncool, bah, I simply love this, so there...!

This touches me on so many levels, those who know me well may figure it out, a big clue is one of the tags below... and it is about time I posted again!

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Wide, wide as the ocean...

Come on come on and shake down those shabby bones.
We're tired and torn, creaking and cracked I know.
When did we last make some time?

Spinning with stars, dreams disregarded.
Days are all full, stuffed and congested.
When did we last make the time,
To be scared of the dark,
Where the gods and monsters hide?

Dust ourselves down.

Show me the way to make me a child again.
We'll be amazed by all we can't name and then,
We can at last stop to breathe,
And be scared of the dark,
Where our mind's got space to dream.

Click to download for FREE!

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Springsteen explains Pete Seeger so well...

From Bruce's brilliant introductory speech at Pete Seeger's 90th birthday party:

As Pete and I travelled to Washington for President Obama's Inaugural Celebration, he told me the entire story of "We Shall Overcome". How it moved from a labor movement song and with Pete's inspiration had been adapted by the civil rights movement. That day as we sang "This Land Is Your Land" I looked at Pete, the first black president of the United States was seated to his right, and I thought of the incredible journey that Pete had taken. My own growing up in the sixties in towns scarred by race rioting made that moment nearly unbelievable and Pete had thirty extra years of struggle and real activism on his belt. He was so happy that day, it was like, Pete, you outlasted the bastards, man!...It was so nice. At rehearsals the day before, it was freezing, like fifteen degrees and Pete was there; he had his flannel shirt on. I said, man, you better wear something besides that flannel shirt! He says, yeah, I got my longjohns on under this thing.

And I asked him how he wanted to approach "This Land Is Your Land". It would be near the end of the show and all he said was, "Well, I know I want to sing all the verses, I want to sing all the ones that Woody wrote, especially the two that get left out, about private property and the relief office." I thought, of course, that's what Pete's done his whole life. He sings all the verses all the time, especially the ones that we'd like to leave out of our history as a people. At some point Pete Seeger decided he'd be a walking, singing reminder of all of America's history. He'd be a living archive of America's music and conscience, a testament of the power of song and culture to nudge history along, to push American events towards more humane and justified ends. He would have the audacity and the courage to sing in the voice of the people, and despite Pete's somewhat benign, grandfatherly appearance, he is a creature of a stubborn, defiant, and nasty optimism. Inside him he carries a steely toughness that belies that grandfatherly facade and it won't let him take a step back from the things he believes in. At 90, he remains a stealth dagger through the heart of our country's illusions about itself. Pete Seeger still sings all the verses all the time, and he reminds us of our immense failures as well as shining a light toward our better angels and the horizon where the country we've imagined and hold dear we hope awaits us.

Now on top of it, he never wears it on his sleeve. He has become comfortable and casual in this immense role. He's funny and very eccentric. I'm gonna bring Tommy out, and the song Tommy Morello and I are about to sing I wrote in the mid-nineties and it started as a conversation I was having with myself. It was an attempt to regain my own moorings. Its last verse is the beautiful speech that Tom Joad whispers to his mother at the end of The Grapes of Wrath. "...Wherever there's a cop beatin' a guy Wherever a hungry newborn baby cries Where there's a fight 'gainst the blood and hatred in the air Look for me Mom I'll be there."

Well, Pete has always been there.

For me that speech is always aspirational. For Pete, it's simply been a way of life. The singer in my song is in search of the ghost of Tom Joad. The spirit who has the guts and toughness to carry forth, to fight for and live their ideals.

I'm happy to report that spirit, the very ghost of Tom Joad is with us in the flesh tonight. He'll be on this stage momentarily, he's gonna look an awful lot like your granddad who wears flannel shirts and funny hats. He's gonna look like your granddad if your granddad could kick your ass.

This is for Pete...

Watch Bruce's speech right here, big thanks to iamworkingonadream

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Full Choral Hide and Seek with Imogen Heap

Having already listed this song and Imogen Heap's original version of Hide and Seek as a 'stop you in your tracks' song how delighted was I to discover this full choral version?!

Featuring the University of Washington choir with Imogen, totally amazing and so Secret Chord!

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The Mandela Gospel...

And the people said...

Amen

Jeff Buckley - BBC Soul Music Archive - Take 3

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BBC Soul Music - Dido's Lament

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I'm delighted to report the BBC has increased the duration of the archived pieces from Radio 4's wonderful Soul Music and have included this edition along with many others, link above.

Here's a re-post of what I wrote about this broadcast back in 2010 which includes some of the content discussed with Jonathan Evens in our book 'The Secret Chord':

BBC Radio 4's edition of 'Soul Music' which featured Dido's Lament turned out to be really special! It always gives me enormous encouragement (and pleasant surprise!) to hear top notch classical maestros admitting truths that most of their colleagues would consider heresy.

The program moved from a fairly conventional start covering thoughts from the mezzo soprano Sarah Connolly and the view of the conductor of the band at the Cenotaph for Remembrance Day.

Jeremy Summerly, the big boss of the Royal Academy of Music and a renowned conductor, issued the first challenges to conventional thinking about the approach to singing the piece. He asked how would anyone know how 17th Century singers would sound and then introduced Alison Moyet's version, praising her approach, the clarity of her timbre and the fact that every word is intelligible. For someone of Jeremy's stature in the classical world to say this is really something, especially as he stated that Purcell's masterpiece is 'the great tune of the 17th Century'.

The closing section of the programme introduced Philip Sheppard, cellist and now composer. He spoke about how he was invited along to be part of the supporting orchestra for Elvis Costello's Meltdown Festival in 1995. One of the pieces was to be Dido's Lament which would be sung by charismatic rock singer Jeff Buckley. Although Philip had never heard of Jeff Buckley before once he heard him singing it had a most profound effect on him:

He seemed to screw every ounce of meaning out of the words and physically he looked like he was wracked with pain and anguish as he was singing it. But what was coming out was beyond ethereal his voice had this quality where it meant so much more than when I had ever heard it before.

But then when he sang it it seemed to be a Lament so much more and it really went beyond what I would consider to be classical music...and to date it's actually probably the greatest musical
experience of my life, in as much as it turned my world inside out.

As a result Philip had to admit:

I know NOTHING about music - at all!

Up to that point I was a musican who played through study rather than a musician who played through feel and now I have to say I seek out people to work with who do not necessarily read music who have their first sense is one of 'ear' rather than of 'technique'...

Philip then goes on to say how this became a pivotal moment in his career which helped him to become a composer, enabling him to move away from being 'a player who just repeated other people's music'.

Jeff Buckley died in a tragic accident just two years later in 1997, sunsequently his version of Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah' reached number one in the US Billboard charts and is considered by many to be the definitive version.

Now Philip thinks of Jeff nearly every day and is ever grateful for the effect of the encounter, even though he only met him for around half an hour...

Listening to this has changed me forever, too, thank you so much...

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Turning audiences into congregations...

This video of Coldplay performing their hymn-like anthem 'Fix You' is discussed on the excellent Rock and Theology blog, curated by Dr. Tom Beaudoin. Am honoured to have been invited to write a guest post for them which includes references to that post. Additionally this gave me an opportunity to respond to both Jen Logan's post 'Music and People' on the Greenbelt Festival blog and my chum Tim Nevell's personal views on her thoughts.

Of course, I felt compelled to draw out some of the themes that Jonathan Evens and I develop in our book The Secret Chord ;-)

Read the full post here: A Matter of Time and Space

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Music holds, heals and invigorates, gives Dignity

A cracking little project for the metropolis of Leeds recorded and produced in Hope & Social's studio The Crypt... Checkout the full song from the gifted Jasmine Kennedy, available for just one of your British pounds (or more!), a sensitive cover of Deacon Blue's 'Dignity' here:

• More about the Love Music Leeds project
• Blog post entitled: Tales from the Crypt
• My earlier post about H&S: Rolling Sideways with Hope and Social

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The Boss and the miracle of music...

A film put together as part of the MusiCares 2013 Person of the Year award made to Bruce Springsteen. To check out the whole of The Boss' acceptance speech is a splendid idea!

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Is Somebody Singing...?

A fascinating collaboration between the International Space Station Commander Chris Hadfield, the band Barenaked Ladies and the Canadian junior choir the Wexford Gleeks. Band lead singer Ed Robertson is a self confessed space geek, a common theme amongst many musicians ;-)

I watched the video a couple of days ago, thanks to my blogosphere chum Mike Todd (checkout his original post here) and found I kept returning to watch again. I find there is something deeply moving despite the simplicity of the piece. To me it exhibits the characteristics of a Secret Chord moment, where many elements combine to make it thus...

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Folk music tradition matters...

This last week I decided to watch the BBC red button transmission of the annual Radio 2 Folk Awards. I have learnt that there are more sub divisions in this genre of music than realised at first, with various factions trying to claim their particular style is more authentically orthodox than the rest. My sense is that this is a problem that tends to arise where there is a clearly defined sub-culture, which folk music surely is.

One of the issues that manifests itself is the 'big fish, small pond' syndrome. Some of the music was simply not that great! A bit like poor versions of mainstream equivalents, even prog. rock (to my prejudiced ear) got a look in. There were notable exceptions from the delightful Karine Polwart and the sublime rendition above from Lifetime (he prefers 'lunchtime') Award recipient, fiddler Aly Bain.

This piece is played with such amazing sensitivity and surpassed anything else that I heard during the evening. Of course, it may have been different actually being there, but from the audience reaction I reckon this was most likely a Secret Chord moment! Unashamed plug warning: read more in Jonathan Evens and my wee book, The Secret Chord!

There are those that have managed to 'crossover' (that dreadful description) to the mainstream, in the last few years Seth Lakeman and Bellowhead to name but two, both of whom have amazing talent and virtuosity. This year an 'outsider' was invited to cross back, as a guest, into the fold, from the big outside world, namely Billy Bragg, who also received a special award.

It was all a bit like going to church, those who knew what was going on were fine, to us on the fringe some aspects were a total mystery (church), lots of meaningless drivel (bad sermons), some inspiring speeches, (good sermons), plenty of average music (typical), a rousing hymn at the end (predictable) and the transcendent rendition from Aly Bain and Phil Cunningham (a rare and precious sacred moment which reminds us what it's all about).

There seems to be plenty of energy devoted to maintaining traditions (back to church again!), but those that choose a higher calling prefer rather to build on the traditions and land up producing something very special, long may that continue...

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Good tidings from Hope and Social...

Hope and Social's Seasonal and mellifluous contribution to the Leeds based charity for the homeless 'Simon On The Streets'. This is part of a Christmas compilation of 14 other festive songs which can be purchased for a 'pay what you like' contribution from justgiving.com/anthologieschristmas2012.

Happy Christmas everyone!

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