Posts from the category Music

  • Delving for treasured albums amongst piles and piles of vinyl and CDs.

  • Beauty in the Melancholy

    I used to avoid Radiohead back in the 1990s, because my youthful inexperience made me think their songs were miserable. I’m so glad that I’ve grown up to hear the beauty in the melancholy.

  • Pissing the night away

    Remembering Luke the alcoholic.

  • Wall of sound

    Wall of sound

    I remember seeing Oasis early in their career when they played a Sunday afternoon slot on the subsidiary NME stage at Glastonbury Festival in 1994. The indelible memory is the sheer wall of sound coming from the stage, even then, before they released Definitely Maybe. Two years later, they played two legendary sets at Knebworth.…

  • There is a light that never goes out

    Marr’s rendition shows what a joyful song this is, despite the superficial conclusion which many (or most) people draw from the chorus. It’s not about death, but the incredibly deep love felt by the protagonist. I think this didn’t come across in Morrissey’s renditions, because his style emphasised misery instead of joy.

  • Ranz des vaches/lyôba

    Jo reminded me earlier of the Ranz des Vaches (or Lyôba), a classical Swiss alpine song which has stirred the hearts of many Swiss for years. It’s said that the song made those Swiss living abroad so homesick, that singing and playing it was banned amongst Swiss mercenaries in the eighteenth century, so as not…

  • 7 videos in 7 days

    7 videos in 7 days

    For those who may have missed out: one of those meme things went around on Facebook and I posted a favourite video per day over 7 days. …and, last but definitely not least: Christopher Walken and Fatboy Slim in an empty, glitzy, Kubrick-esque hotel. What else could you ever dream for in a music video?

  • Kodachrome

    Kodachrome

    When I think backOn all the crap I learned in high schoolIt’s a wonderI can think at allAnd though my lack of educationHasn’t hurt me noneI can read the writing on the wall KodachromeThey give us those nice bright colorsThey give us the greens of summersMakes you think all the world’s a sunny dayI got…

  • Country Feedback

    An absolute, all-time favourite. Filmed for Later… with Jools Holland in 1998.

  • The latest in a alphabetic series on aspects of my life: this time, the letter F is inspired by this weekend’s Glastonbury Festival.

  • I’ve made an early start on a big “spring clean” of my large CD and DVD collection, so I have an increasing number of CDs and some DVDs (dual channel German/English) to get rid of at Fr. 2 each. You can see the first few in this list at ShopSavvy: drop me a message if…

  • Pale Blue Eyes

    Pale Blue Eyes

    An excerpt from photographer Laura Levine’s unreleased underground Super-8 film, Just Like A Movie, featuring Michael Stipe.

  • Dreaming of flight

    Dreaming of flight

    …and where better to realise a childhood dream than in the Swiss Bernese Oberland? U.K. band Rudimental chose to film a large amount of the video for their recent release “Free” (featuring Emili Sandé) in the Alps of the Jungfrau Region and not only is the song lovely, but the accompanying video sequences are sublime.

  • A Perfect Day

    A Perfect Day

    I like it when there is a lot of contrast between subjects in an image or film, or conflicting imagery vs. mood. Such as in the case of this recent advert for the Playstation games console, in which “participants” in “games” sing about how much they’re enjoying the experience.

  • Nineties flashback

    An early autumn rainy Sunday drove me down to the cellar today, for a long-awaited clear-out. Amongst the piles of stuff now split between a much tidier cellar and a car half-filled with rubbish to be taken to the recycling centre, a big box full of old music cassettes came to the fore, which I’ve…

  • Long Time

    Long Time

    Some people with whom I was at school were friends for many years thereafter, and some drifted into the distance as time moved on. Thanks to the rise of services like Facebook, some have popped up again many years later and I’m glad to be in touch with some of them again: albeit, sadly, on…

  • ITEOTWAWKIAIFF

    ITEOTWAWKIAIFF

    A song for the end of the world.

  • C’était un Rendezvous

    One of my favourite pieces of non-fiction film: an eight and a half minute sequence filmed by Claude Lelouch on the streets of Paris in 1976.

  • Emmental fire festival

    The Fire Festival in Signau, a small area in the Emmental valley, is a Swiss folk and artistic festival; a smaller equivalent of Burning Man in the U.S. My friend and independent filmmaker Yannick de Zordo – who plays bass guitar for Choo Choo and who produced the great video for their song “We Go”…

  • We Go

    We Go

    Friends Choo Choo release their next music video, conceived and filmed by their bass player Yan.

  • A detailed look back on a little over twenty years as an R.E.M. fan, with details of what each of the albums means to me and what part music has played in my life so far.