Posted by admin on 16 Apr 2008 | Tagged as: Eurovision, news, protest
I sometimes wonder if there’s a large book with complaints one can make about Eurovision entries that people pull out every year. French MP Jacques Myard is complaining that France’s Eurovision is partly in English. Post-modern dandy Sebastien Tellier’s “Divine” is in English (of sorts). Almost predictably, a number of politicians have taken it upon [...]
Posted by admin on 10 Apr 2008 | Tagged as: news
Britain’s Jarvis Cocker, formerly singer of Pulp, is to make an appearance at the Brighton festival on May 23. He is programmed to “explore the function of the lyric in popular song” (as it says on the website). Jarvis will start from the position that ’song lyrics don’t really matter’! From here he embarks on [...]
Posted by admin on 04 Apr 2008 | Tagged as: gadgets, news
Here’s something that I have basically been saying for a good while: the lyric sites are by and large spam. You’ve probably checked sites for lyrics and noticed that they often same very basic level of information, a few words. There is very rarely any information about who wrote the songs, nor who the publisher [...]
Posted by admin on 19 Mar 2008 | Tagged as: events, news
I can’t resist a plug for the TV series “Vermist/Missing”, taken from the film of the same name directed by Jan Verheyen. It will debut on Belgium’s VT4 channel every Tuesday from March 25 at 9.30pm. I wrote the track that plays out over the end, “Waiting”, with the series composer Steve Willaert. It’ll be [...]
Posted by admin on 07 Mar 2008 | Tagged as: meanings, news
I can’t say that I was disappointed to hear that the song “Danny Boy” has been banned from an Irish pub in new York for the month of March in the run-up to St. Patrick’s Day. Despite having a reputation as one of the quintessential Irish ballads, it’s another pure product of Tin Pan Alley. [...]
Posted by admin on 04 Feb 2008 | Tagged as: events, news
Visitors from Northern Ireland might want to check out the upcoming Belfast Nashville Songwriters Festival when US and Irish writers will be hooking up between February 20 ad 24. Nashville’s Don Schlitz will perform several of his 24 #1 hit songs including, “When You Say Nothing At All”, “The Gambler” and “Forever and Ever Amen”. [...]
Posted by admin on 02 Feb 2008 | Tagged as: meanings, news
I had to sympathise with Beck’s record label. While preparing the layout of a deluxe edition of his album “Odelay”, someone pasted in lyrics to the track “The New Pollution” that they found on a website. So the line “she’s alone in the new pollution” was actually printed as “she’s alone in the new delusion”. [...]
Posted by admin on 16 Jan 2008 | Tagged as: news, plagiarism
I mentioned some time back that Avril Lavigne’s “I Wanna be Your Girlfriend” was the subject of a lawsuit by eighties band The Rubinoos who felt it was too close to a song of theirs with almost the exact same chorus, “I Wanna be Your Boyfriend”. At the time, people were claiming she “ripped them [...]
Posted by admin on 21 Dec 2007 | Tagged as: news, politics, protest
I’ve always been a little uncomfortable with the campaign against dancehall, as it has echoes of the thought police in action. But I’ve always been very uncomfortable with some of the extremely violent anti-gay lyrics as well. Now the British resort Brighton has become the first UK town to officially ban licensed venues from playing [...]
Posted by admin on 19 Dec 2007 | Tagged as: anthems, meanings, news, politics
I always thought that national anthems were ancient texts passed down from generation to generation and sung with pride. As the recent news in the UK has shown, they can still be works in progress. And now Spain is at it, struggling to find lyrics that fit the national psyche. There is a simple reason [...]