MUSIC THAT PARTS THE CLOUDS GENERALLY HAS A LITTLE BLOOD IN IT
“So, what kind of music do you like, then?” The question is often delivered with the accent firmly on the “do”, as though there’s no music left after insufficient enthusiasm has been shown for a [...]
MUSIC THAT PARTS THE CLOUDS AT CHRISTMAS
About 15 years ago, I was heartily and probably finally sick of reading more or less the same articles every December about “yuletide songs”, so many of which managed at some point to rhyme “yule” [...]
A CLOUD-PARTING LIVE MUSIC TRIP TO THE UK (AND A FEW ALBUMS) Pt 1
Like most things, getting to the live gigs you want to see in the UK when you live in South Africa is a matter of timing. Last year my only concert in a five-week European [...]
MUSIC THAT PARTS THE CLOUDS PT 5
This piece comes with a bit of a backstory. I recently spent several weeks holidaying in Europe and, while in northern Italy, I ran out of English-language reading material. A forthcoming train journey between Milan [...]
SOME OF THE MUSIC THAT PARTED THE CLOUDS IN 2021 Pt 4(b)
At the end of our previous instalment, I mentioned that Uncut magazine had devoted one of their recent cover-mounted CDs to what they called, with clear reference to ‘The Old, Weird America’, Greil Marcus’s marvellous [...]
SOME OF THE MUSIC THAT PARTED THE CLOUDS IN 2021 Pt 4(a)
In case anybody is missing the point of writing about music from last year so far into this one, it is, simply, that there is always so much good music around, in so many styles [...]
Richard Haslop: SOME OF THE MUSIC THAT PARTED THE CLOUDS IN 2021 – Pt 3
Some may have noticed the preponderance of female artists in the previous episode of the music that parted my clouds in 2021. I’ll leave it to others to decide whether this was just me or [...]
Richard Haslop: SOME OF THE MUSIC THAT PARTED THE CLOUDS IN 2021 – Pt 2
Richard Thompson tells a story that may be apocryphal about meeting the Queen when he collected his OBE in 2011. “And what it is that you do?” she is reported to have asked. “I’m a [...]
Richard Haslop: SOME OF THE MUSIC THAT PARTED THE CLOUDS IN 2021 – Pt 1
This piece could just as easily have been called, with appropriate credit to Daniel Defoe, ‘A Journal Of The Musical Plague Year’. The previous year had been too weird and confusing to really get a [...]