Monthly Archives: May 2012

My review of the biography of Nica Rothschild — the music-loving heiress who inspired many a jazz man — is in today’s Independent.

“It’s a measure of the quality of the wordplay that you can be out of touch with the pop charts and still have enormous fun…” My Times review of Adam Kay’s Smutty Songs show is here (paywall). Trying to find a YouTube … Continue reading →

Clive Crooks weighs his prospects. I really do hope he’s wrong: Obama’s big problem, I think, is that he is no longer the president he said he would be. Above all, he’s stopped trying to be that president. The astonishing … Continue reading →

It’s too much to expect the people who run big Wall Street firms to speak plain English, since so much of their livelihood depends on people believing that what they do cannot be translated into plain English. What John Mack’s … Continue reading →

Caetano’s classic song. The day they celebrated the end of slavery in Brazil.

Violence is now ingrained in dancehall music, as it is in gangsta rap, which borrowed much from Jamaican deejay styles of delivery, dubbing and “toasting”. (Dr Dre’s revered 1992 album, The Chronic, teems with Jamaican influences, even Jamaican voices.) … Jamaican … Continue reading →

My (paywall) reviews today: Kate Dimbleby sings Dory Previn, Bulgaria’s Kottarashky & The Rain Dogs cook up Balkan vamps with a splash of reggae.