Can you hear Talvin sing sang Half Man Half Biscuit in 2003, about Anglo-Indian dance and world musician. Well, I hadn't, so I bought this album for a quid in a charity shop, about a decade ago. I've finally got round to listening to it.

This is a medieval / classical / folk album on the American jazz label Windham Hill, which the charity shop I worked in accepted as a donation, along with many similar (possibly from someone who reviewed such things). They didn't sell, and after one periodic cull were about to be thrown out, when I offered them a home for a token donation. Of those I've listened to, there isn't yet one I've liked or hated. Until now. Can you guess which way this is going to go? Surprise, surp

Someone bought this for me, knowing that I enjoy an occasional Led Zeppelin album, and had enjoyed a gift of a Plant and Page album. In all honesty, a collaboration with Alison Krauss didn't fill my heart with anticipation and glee, and I'm not sure I've listened to it until now. Plant has one of the great English rock/blues voices, while for me, Krauss seems to have the generic country and western sound, making her singing indistinguishable from lots of other very competent

I've finished catching up with recent purchases and feel I can listen to what I want for a bit, so I pulled this Fall compilation from the shelves and stuck it in the CD player. I seem to remember picking this up in a sale in Canterbury's short lived Fopp outlet many moons ago, but not to listening to it much. So, what do we have here? It's a compilation of tracks from 1990s albums The Infotainment Scam, Middle Class Revolt , live album The Twenty Seven Points and Cerebral C

This is my second purchase from Off The Record , a truly fantastic shop in centre:mk which raises funds for Willen Hospice in Milton Keynes, and continues my gradual accumulation of albums by Sheffield crooner, Richard Hawley. The first impression of this album is that it has a much bigger, fuller sound than earlier albums, and for me, that's a big plus. It's much more of a rock album than some of the more country and western tinged earlier releases. The gauntlet is laid dow

Number one in Britain and successful in the States, So round the table me and label bosses contemplate, You've got to get a second home and hang with Chrissie Hynde, And get yourself some Ray-Bans, 'cos boy you know it's time, For your Eno, Eno collaboration... So wrote Half Man Half Biscui t , but this is where it all started, Brian Eno's 1973 collaboration with King Crimson's Robert Fripp. In a visit to Milton Keynes last week, there's a fantastic hospice shop in Centre:MK

I've no idea, where or when I bought this, and even less of an idea why. Most of the rap stuff I'd heard, I'd found thoroughly unlistenable, with a few exceptions. Grandmaster Flash's The Message resonated as social commentary, but the glorification of crime, drugs and the casual misogyny of most of the genre rendered it unlistenable to me. So, I'm a little conflicted by this album, since most of the music is wonderfully laidback and smooth, while some of the lyrical content

This 2006 solo album by Blur guitarist Coxon (he's the nerdy speccy one, not the drumming Labour councillor or the cheesemonging David Cameron lackey), was picked up in a charity shop out of curiosity. I actually thought I had two Coxon albums, but one seems to be missing. There's a series there - Albums I Was Sure I Had But Can't Find. I've reviewed at lest three of them! This was one I approached half-heartedly, but this is the point of this blog, to give a listen beyond th

As featured in the smash film The Blues Brothers apparently, there's no information about when the tracks on this low budget, out of copyright, not a penny to Calloway or his family, compilation. Picked up for a quid in a charity show, no doubt, I'm not sure it's seen the inside of a CD player until now. So, taking it for what it is, a low budget, poorly recorded mono compilation of 1930s and 1940s big band music, it's actually far more engaging than I'd expected. Highlights

I picked this up on EBay many moons ago, but was well aware of the original source of these pieces. It's a compilation of the Go+ 12" single which was given away with the first 15,000 of XTC's Go 2 album, and Take Away/ The Lure Of Salvage, released between Drums And Wires and Black Sea, under the name "Mr Partridge". Virgin refused to release it under the XTC name, as it would have counted as one of the albums in their restrictive contract. The first five tracks are all d

A quick pop into the local charity shop last week saw an addition to the Neil Young shelf (now at 21 albums - as said before, more due to his longevity, prolific output, and the frequency his CDs are given to charity shops, than any devotion to the great Canadian). This one is a real, no nonsense rock album. No histrionics, no profound masterworks, just rocker after rocker, with Young's love of a good jam with Crazy Horse (Frank Sampedro, Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina) indulg

I was very surprised when, a few months ago, actually sitting down and checking what CDs I actually own, that I didn't have a copy of this. Fortunately, this week the second hand CD guy at Harborough Market had a copy, and I had a couple of quid, so we swapped. Now my Steely Dan studio album collection is complete. Pretzel Logic is the band's third album, and possibly the album in which the jazz influences start to become more obvious than the earlier country feel of some of

You know you're old when not only are you looking at a 25th anniversary release of an album, but find that it was released in this format nearly 30 years ago. While I never owned this album, Deep Purple were one of my earliest musical tastes, before the discovery of prog, Canterbury and punk, possibly the first thing I took notice of beyond the top 40 pop charts. The title track, Fireball, was one of the first singles I ever bought, the last of the band's three top ten single

My other purchase from Reckless Records in Berwick St, Soho, last week was this 1972 album from Gil Scott-Heron. On the original vinyl release side one was songs, and side two poetry - this 2014 re-release as a Flying Dutchman Jazz classic doesn't make this differentiation, although preserves the original running order, as well as eleven bous tracks, pretty much repeating the album with alternate versions. First song is the lively and interesting Free Will, with a hypnotic ba

I picked this up from Soho's Reckless Records on a trip to London to meet old friends, last week. Coincidentally I've just started reading David Stubbs history of Krautrock, Future Days. The whole German experimental scene of the 1970s passed me by, with me not even following up my purchase of Camembert Electrique by buying The Faust Tapes , even though both were Virgin's "an album for the price of a single". This is an album I've heard many times, so was delighted to find it

It's always interesting to hear a collaboration between two artists that you've enjoyed in completely different contexts. Peter Blegvad is an Anglo-American songwriter whom I first encountered with Slapp Happy, in their way-out collaboration with Henry Cow, Desperate Straights, one of my favourite albums when at school. Andy Partridge was, of course, one of the driving forces behind XTC, and their main songwriter, and I've written much of my love for XTC during university yea

The final Manics' purchase from last month's Cornwall holiday is this 2021 release. I ran out of vaguely interesting things to say about the Manic Street Preachers long ago, so let's crack on. It's what you'd expect - a series of upbeat, politically charged songs, if anything brighter and more accessible than earlier releases. Not-a-hit single Orwellian is the most interesting of the early songs here, and The Secret He Had Missed with guest vocalist Julia Cumming is catchy,

Last one of the Newquay haul is this 1982 album. Mostly repetitive themes with spoken words over the top, it's a puzzle why New York City based conceptual artist Laurie Anderson decided to copy what Mark E Smith and The Fall were doing back in England, but it did provide her with a massive hit single in UK (and a minor hit in parts of Europe). I've come into this knowing only the hit single, so let's have a quick scoot through the works (I don't think conceptual artists have

On my bike ride round the reservoir this morning, I listened to a podcast with XTC's Andy Partridge, in which this album featured heavily, having recently been given the Steven Wilson treatment, in Atmos and 5.1 mixes (typed as if I know what that means) and re-released. I was given this as a Christmas present on vinyl on release by my brother (who I suspect also wanted to hear it himself) so it's a very familiar listen. Beginning with the clanky chords of Colin Moulding's Wa

I picked this up in HMV sale, not realising it was a compilation. I tend to avoid compilations on the basis that I generally plan on picking up all the original albums at some point, although some compilations quickly disabuse me of that idea. This is annotated with an introduction to the more accessible side of Steven Wilson", which seems a reasonable suggestion. This contains 14 tracks, all relatively short (4-6 minutes is short for prog) from the five albums released betwe