Pop thinking – Page 3 – For the fainthearted . . .

Iconic endurance

It’s odd hearing a cover of a Janis Joplin song being used for a Dior advertisement, not that many of many of the potential customers would probably know who Janis Joplin was, unless she was trending, or had millions of online followers.

It’s hard to imagine that future generations will be able to conceive of life without the Internet. Will they ever know what it is like not to have information on anything and everything in the entire world at their fingertips?

Yet while bringing people together, it also fragments …

Do you want something beautiful?

Wandering through a street this evening, I thought about beauty and thought about the video. Extraordinarily, sixteen years after it was posted, the video is still online: three words on Google, Newcastle, Stockholm, nightclub, and it was at the top of the page.

The video purports to be a comparison of in Newcastle-on-Tyne in England and Stockholm in Sweden. The Swedish club was filled with suave, naturally blonde sophisticates; the Newcastle club was rather different (you can find the video here).

Of course, it is nonsense. What the video …

Lest there be yet another programme on Woodstock

The anniversary of the 1969 Woodstock festival approaches. Hardly a year passes without there being a programme on some channel telling the story of the festival. If the true story had been told at the time, perhaps it would not still be remembered

Woodstock had always held a mythical place in the imagination of those of us who seemed to have been born a decade too late. It seemed a culmination of 1960s music and protest.

Joni Mitchell, who was not there, wrote a song about the festival that seemed …

Familiar ballads

When did popular music become popular?

There were folk songs that people knew that were passed down from generation to generation, and there were the music hall songs from the Nineteenth Century known and sung in urban and industrial communities up and down the country. But popular music, that which cuts across geography and class and even age, seems to have come with the advent of the radio and the record player.

Donovan was played on the radio. I have never bought a Donovan record, never been at a Donovan …

Giving away a record

The red Dansette is safely installed. All I need now is a rack for my many dozens of 7″ singles.

Some of the singles could be placed in a bag and taken to a charity shop. I would have no intention of ever playing them.

Records like Terry Jacks’ Seasons in the Sun might go. It wasn’t just miserable, there were plenty of miserable songs, it was morbid.

In my memories of 1974, it had seemed like a reworking of Tom Jones’ awful Green, green grass of home. Tom …

The time of music

Receiving a pair of complimentary tickets for Ed Sheeran’s concert at Croke Park on Sunday evening, I passed them on to someone who would enjoy the occasion.

Ed Sheeran seems a very nice person. Unlike many performers now he is a musician who writes and plays his own music. His concerts delight those who attend them. However, for me, the music has no attraction and the thought of being in a crowd of 80,000 did not appeal to me.

I have often thought I was born too late for music …