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I was Fourteen when I first wrote those words in my Schoolbook

Posted by Malcolm Toogood on November 14, 2022
Posted in: Gigs, Latest Blog.

I was fourteen when I first wrote those words

We all have albums in our collection that are ages-old, but we still play regularly.  Sometimes we may wonder whatever happened to that artist from all those years back; we may even regret never getting to see them live when they were ‘in their pomp’.  One such artist, for me, was Toyah.

She appeared towards the end of the short 1970s punk revolution when, ironically, it was her live album Toyah! Toyah! Toyah! that forced its way onto my record deck during 1980.  Regular readers will know that I specifically exclude live albums from my annual selection process, so it never featured in my roundup.  But when she released her next studio album, Anthem, six months later it was an instant purchase.  It made my top three in 1981, and has been a regular play over the intervening forty years.  But I never got to a gig – until this weekend.
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The One that Got Away 2021

Posted by Malcolm Toogood on October 16, 2022
Posted in: Albums of the Year.

one that got away

The One That Got Away has become a regular feature of my annual blog reviewing my year of music acquisitions. Last year I produced a complete blog for them, there were so many, mainly because of the disfunction to life caused by the 2020 pandemic.  Now, for the second year running, there have been enough ‘late purchases’ to fill a separate blog.

Late-discovery of an album does not just involve the previous year – some escape notice for decades!  And I guess, with 2021 still somewhat disrupted by Covid, especially the continued lack of much live music, it was only natural to search more content on streaming services and the like, opening up avenues of exploration that the busyness of ‘normal life’ would not normally allow.  Hence some of the albums up for mention here are from the last century.
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Back to Live Gigs – at last!

Posted by Malcolm Toogood on April 23, 2022
Posted in: Gigs.

After more than two and a half years, we finally got to a live gig again to see When Rivers Meet at Bath Komedia.  Turned out it was also their first gig since the lockdowns.

This is the first time we had taken-in a gig at this local venue, but by no means the first time we had been in the building.  It used to be the Beau Nash Cinema way back in the day, and I well remember the Saturday morning matinees back in the fifties when we paid sixpence to see a Western in which the wagons were circled to fight off those pesky injuns, or the White Hats defeated the Black Hats in a shoot-out in the local corral.
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A New Brits A-Gender ?

Posted by Malcolm Toogood on February 9, 2022
Posted in: Breaking News ..... not.

Brits

It was good to see the Brits back in full flow last night, especially the sets and effects which have to make this, at least visually, the best Awards Show in the world.  Stand-out for me last night was Liam Gallagher – not only a great performance of a debut track, but how on earth did they do that with those lasers!?

Of course, the headlines today are all about Adele ‘scooping the pool’ and the new non-gendered categories.  But it’s amazing how, in making their woke points, the mainstream media virtually ignore what the awards are actually for – the music.  It is also somewhat ironic that in highlighting the fact that the award categories did not reflect gender in any way, shape or form, the likes of the Grauniad still had to stress, very pointedly, that more categories were won by female artists than male. Continue Reading

Album of the Year 2021

Posted by Malcolm Toogood on December 22, 2021
Posted in: Albums of the Year.

album of the year 2021

Welcome to my Album of the Year 2021 blog. I guess we all had hoped for a better time after the prevails of 2020 but, despite a few short months of relative freedom, its successor has turned into another strange year with a real sting in the tail. Not, however I am pleased to report, in the quality and quantity of great music it has produced.

I guess you find, when you have written about music for as long as I have, that you hear ever more echoes from the past – whether they are influences on new artists or samples from old hits. This year, I found myself both concentrating on a vast array of new music, as well as on my Classic Albums section, which has featured a number of albums that celebrated their 50th anniversary this year, the majority of which still sound as fresh today as they did all that time ago.
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