Following on from the previous post about Junior Parker's Stand By Me, I happened to be listening to an old edition of Steve Propes...

 This is by way of a coda to an earlier post, here , about the origins of Ben E King's recording of Stand By Me. If you have read tha...

From October 23rd onwards, the highly recommended documentary series Street Corner Soul is to be repeated on BBC 6 Music - details of u...

Love Me Do by Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran Everything Between Us by David Ireland There aren't many drama reviews on this blog...

I watched Love Me Do: the Beatles '62 last night, a documentary commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Beatles' firs...

I mentioned the film Sven Klang's Combo some time earlier, in a post about doo wop biopics . Three scenes have recently surfaced on a...

Have just listened for the second time to Hard Boiled Eggs and Nuts, the Afternoon Drama about the early life of Stan Laurel. It wi...

I vaguely remember a discussion about My Friends by the Strangers and These Golden Rings by the Jive Five, two songs which share the s...

John Walsh is what we call in the trade a good writer. Quite apart from anything else, he knows how to pitch comedy, making it part of t...

I can't help it. I know it was only a couple of posts ago but I have to watch the video for Shirley and Company's Shame, Shame, S...

If you listen to Spencer Leigh's On the Beat programme via BBC iplayer, you may have been puzzled to find that the show appea...

The BBC are currently rerunning 35 year old episodes of Top of the Pops, its now sunken flagship pop show, in sequence. I initially thoug...

A few weeks ago I was, for the first time, inside the Panopticon, otherwise the Britannia Music Hall, in Glasgow: the place where a young...

A wonderful, painterly image of Cheapo Cheapo Records, late of  Soho, found online; another photograph provided the basis for the various...

Have just read in Record Collector magazine that the Dells, who haven't performed since the death of Johnny Carter just over thr...

I'm guessing that the above image, taken from a well-known auction site, shows more recent packaging for the joke glasses in the previo...

One thing I didn't do before posting the previous entry was to check whether that singularly odd phrase "Daring - don't fea...

In recent months my blog has attracted the attention of spammers - though as comments are screened before publication it's all a bit ...

This Bonzos track hasn't attracted much attention - perhaps not helped by coming immediately before I'm Bored on the Gorilla album....

Read about the death of Hal David on the BBC's news channel and was surprised it wasn't mentioned in the subsequent news progra...

The above says it all, really: having listened a few more times to the ten available tracks the Flamingos recorded for Decca in between C...

The final episode of Street Corner Soul was repeated last night on Radio 2 and will be available on BBC iplayer for one week - link here . ...

More thoughts about the Flamingos - in particular their time at Decca Records ( image from Marv Goldberg's highly recommended Flamingos...

While still Flamingos-minded after the previous posting , you can currently stream Matt the Cat's Juke in the Back episode about Chicag...

What? No, that's just a screengrab. Find a direct iplayer link for Street Corner Soul Episode 3 here , assuming you are reading t...

Do I need an excuse for another reposting of a piece about the Orchids' sublime You Have Two (I Have None) aka Happiness? Well, as it h...

  Good news if, like me, you love the acapella group 14 Karat Soul: the soundtrack for Sister Suzie Cinema is now available on streaming si...

  Joyce Carol Oates in an interview published in the Guardian today: Is there an art form you don't relate to? Situation co...

  The second episode of Street Corner Soul has now been broadcast and will be available on BBC iplayer for one week. If you haven't hea...

Waterloo Sunset was the highlight of the Olympics' Closing Ceremony for me. Not sure how much the surrounding acrobatics, nor the (li...

I have just read that there will be a final performance of Reasons to Be Cheerful at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on the South Bank on Septembe...

Country Girl is my favourite Jake Thackray track, from the above album. Or LP, as we used to cry them. I've written about it, and him...

I love this particular clip, this performance. You can't quite see that it's introduced by Julie Felix, so presumably it comes fro...

  In an effort to shame the BBC (no, I don't really think it'll work either) below are extracts from two reviews of the original br...

The Word - a magazine I ought to have read more often than I did - is shortly to be no more; its final edition is in UK shops just now. ...

No pontificating this time; just a youtube clip of a fave Van song, from Saint Dominic's Preview.

As Tommy Cooper would say, "That's nice." Have just checked the radio schedule for today and seen that instead of Part Two o...

Street Corner Soul , a four-part documentary series about the rise of doo wop, is currently being repeated on BBC Radio 2 on Sundays...

I read an article by Tom Sutcliffe in yesterday's Independent which deserves to be quoted at length here, as it ties in with a recen...

[read details about kickstarter campaign for new Peter Skellern CD here - 8th March 2024 is last day to pledge]   Still haven't finish...

Have just learnt that Eric Sykes has died. This is my 2005 review of his autobiography. The above image comes, I  presume, from Very Import...

I just saw Ben E King tonight, at the Jazz Cafe in Camden (the above image is a publicity photo from their website, as I wasn't one o...