Music for stowaways

Rollo's blog about music and stuff

[musicforstowaways]

Princess Paragon - Stupid Girl

Here’s another one to file under “I had no idea I needed that in my life”: someone called Princess Paragon takes on Garbage‘s Stupid Girl. Released just a few months after the original, it does sound a little bit as though it was recorded in one day, but it’s still great, and if you disagree, you’re wrong. It peaked at number 184 on the Hit Music Singles Chart in the UK – and was definitely…

View On WordPress

[musicforstowaways]

One-T + Cool-T - The Magic Key

I was re-reading a recent post on this blog the other day to check for inevitable typos, when I was redirected to this archive post, in which I was singing (well, OK, speaking) the praises of a song called The Magic Key by One-T and Cool-T, and particularly its video. I’d written those words about 22 years ago, and since that’s probably before you were born and certainly well outside the frame of…

View On WordPress

[musicforstowaways]

And by the way

Dear blog, I know I’ve neglected you in recent years. We’ve been together for a little over 12 years now, but changes in my life around the time that the pandemic hit meant that I’ve not had a lot of time for you. What little spare time I have has been taken up with other projects, like doing the dishes, and watering the plants. Of course I miss you, and I still have plenty to say for myself. I…

View On WordPress

[musicforstowaways]

Some Euro Cover Versions of Oasis Songs, circa May 1996

May 1996. Oasis were pretty much at their peak, and had already spun off an interview 7″ and the brief career of Mike Flowers Pops. Less well known is their impact on the world of dance music. I had long been aware of Supernova‘s somewhat monstrous version of Some Might Say, a number 55 hit in the UK in May 1996. I use the word “monstrous” deliberately – it’s definitely fun, if you want to…

View On WordPress

[musicforstowaways]

Preview - Pet Shop Boys

Here’s a belated preview for Pet Shop Boys, who are back with a new album Nevertheless in a couple of months, heralded by Loneliness, a nice but fairly dull lead single which reminds me a bit of 2012’s Winner (although that had some good b-sides and remixes, which doesn’t seem to be true this time). The one positive this time around is the video, which is a kind of post-industrial reworking of…

View On WordPress

[musicforstowaways]

Oops

Sorry for the unplanned absence here – I had all sorts of nice posts lined up for the Christmas period which either never quite got posted or never quite got written. There’s always next year, I suppose. These next couple of months will probably be unpleasantly busy, so don’t set your expectations too high for the time being – I’ll post more when I can. Amusingly, if you search for this song,…

View On WordPress

[musicforstowaways]

Preview - Karl Bartos

Karl Bartos has had an interesting career since leaving Kraftwerk at some point in the 1980s. His post-departure album Esperanto is great, but for many of his later works he seems to have hung on a bit too hard to his past life, sounding almost like a parody of his former self. So for Bartos to have developed a new soundtrack for Robert Wiene‘s Weimar expressionist 1920 film Das Cabinet des Dr.…

View On WordPress

[musicforstowaways]

Flowered Up

You may have already been familiar with the sad story of Flowered Up – I was not. I had heard of them vaguely thanks to some of their labelmates, but I hadn’t read much about them, and I certainly hadn’t heard anything they had recorded. That’s a shame, because as you’ll see, they’re an interesting band. One of the more precocious of the “baggy” scene that grew out of Manchester in the late…

View On WordPress

[musicforstowaways]

Preview - Sleaford Mods

Perhaps this isn’t so much of a preview, given how fast the world moves these days – this came out on Tuesday, so it’s literally last week’s news now. It was a nice surprise to wake up on Tuesday to the news that Sleaford Mods have done a cover version of West End girls, and as you would expect, it’s delivered brilliantly, with a full East Midlands drawl. The backing is surprisingly faithful to…

View On WordPress

[musicforstowaways]

Fragments of The Universal Sun

I mentioned that one of my major projects over the last few years has been working on what I hesitantly call my own music. I’ve written about it once or twice in the past, although I try not to let it intrude too often here, as I’m sure this blog’s readers have better things to do than listen to it. Some of it is, I’m afraid, unavoidably awful. But making it makes me happy, and it’s pretty much…

View On WordPress

[musicforstowaways]

Preview - Delia Derbyshire & Barry Bermange

It is, of course, incredibly exciting news that a new Delia Derbyshire release is coming. Derbyshire is, of course, the musical genius who brought so many of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop‘s musical works to life through a combination of hard work and experimentation. Apart from the obvious composition that we all know about (the first couple of iterations of the Doctor Who theme), some of her…

View On WordPress

[musicforstowaways]

Rewind

Before we really reboot things in earnest, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on where this blog has succeeded in the past. That’s a past which runs back to 2011, over 2,372 posts (some of which even had numbers) and more than 100,000 page views. This blog cited on several Wikipedia articles as an official source and it used to have a respectable Twitter following too, until I decided to cancel…

View On WordPress

[musicforstowaways]

Hello

Well, that was a long break, wasn’t it? While this blog was never really officially cancelled, it does seem to have been on hiatus for quite a long time. So it’s high time we brought it back! Hello! What have I been up to since we last spoke? Well, mainly caught up with the real world, which has been very entertaining indeed, as I imagine everyone knows. I’ve had a lot less spare time in…

View On WordPress

[musicforstowaways]

Decadence

Well, it’s been very quiet around here, recently, hasn’t it? My big secret is that I used to write most of the posts during my commute, and… well, thanks to the pandemic, I haven’t had one for a little over two years now, so it’s been harder and harder to keep up. I’m sure there will be a reboot one day, but for now, I’m sorry – we’ll stay in this holding pattern for a while longer. I even…

View On WordPress

[musicforstowaways]

Fletch

I just read the news and felt I had to break my silence on this blog for this – but I hope you’re not reading it here for the first time. Depeche Mode‘s Andrew Fletcher, or “Fletch” as everyone seems to have known him, died today, much too young. Here’s some coverage thanks to The Guardian and the BBC. Obviously, this is a sad loss for all fans of electronic music. As was often the case, he…

View On WordPress

[musicforstowaways]

2022

Well, I’ve been away for a while. Obviously not really, but I haven’t been posting here, mainly because I’ve been busy with home life and other personal projects. I had intended that I would start posting again when my commute started once this whole pandemic thing died down a bit, but I still haven’t commuted for nearly two years, and while I’ve still got plenty to say for myself, I’ve run out…

View On WordPress

[musicforstowaways]

Pause

If you’re reading this, it means this blog is paused for some reason. Perhaps I fell under a bus on the way to the circus. Maybe I’m tied up rescuing evil old ladies from lovely little kittens. Or I could have just forgotten to write any more posts. Whatever the reasons, Music for stowaways will be back with you as soon as possible. In the meantime, please enjoy the archives!

View On WordPress