It's rare to come across a piece of film that captures the moment when one song transforms a show, but Jesse Winchester's performance of 'Sham-a-Ling-Dong-Ding' on Elvis Costello's TV show Spectacle in 2010 does just that. When I found it...
When the daily news is a grim daily carnival of human inadequacy and ugliness, that's when we need music most. A rhythm, a tune, feeling - perhaps even a thought or two - put to a melody can remind us...
Everybody likes a drink. Everybody loves a drinker. There's nothing like booze to make life a little more colourful, fun and generally worth living. Right? Well, maybe not exactly. Most of us know that, like any other highs, alcohol has...
Has there ever been a song so widely covered, and so often ruined, as the astonishing 'Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?' Even though it is one of my very favourite songs, I have struggled to find a version that...
Would Nigel Farage enjoy this week's Friday Song? It would seem, on the face of it, unlikely. The great Italian songwriter Paolo Conte is sophisticated, arty, earthy and shamelessly foreign. He doesn't even speak English, for heaven's sake. He was...
A reliable indicator of songwriting talent is when a writer takes a hoary, overworked theme, one that has been mauled and murdered in countless second-rate songs, and makes it entirely new. Janis Ian, one of the great unsung heroes of...
If there were ever a song that illustrates the muddle we are in about race, tolerance and offensiveness, it's my Friday Song this week, 'That's Why They Call Me "Shine"'. The song has taken a peculiar journey over the past...
I was introduced to the extraordinary, unearthly music of Gillian Welch by the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro in 2002. He was on Desert Island Discs and his last choice of song was 'I'm Not Afraid To Die' from the 1998 album...
As every songwriter knows, one of the basic requirements of the job is to get the hell out of the leafy suburb of Clichéville, where everything is familiar and has been done before. The trick is to make it new....
I first heard 'The Ballad of the Sad Young Men' in the mid-1960s, sung by Davy Graham on his astonishing second album Folk, Blues and Beyond, and it has stayed with me ever since. I've always loved its opening lines,...