Category: Off the Beaten Tracks

THERE are many groups named after foodstuffs – Cream, Hot Chocolate, Orange Juice, Bread and the Cranberries to name but five – yet I can think of only one inspired … Continue readingLemonheads you win

THE adjective ‘precocious’ could have been invented for Jackson Browne. At an age when most of us were still worrying about acne and failing to revise for exams, he was … Continue readingA Jackson Browne study: Part One

THIS week’s choice will never feature, I’ll wager, in anyone’s top ten of rock and roll heroes. They wouldn’t even be in my own top hundred. But the three albums … Continue readingIn touch with the Feelies

IT IS often the case that a personal life in crisis can result in some of a musician’s finest work; Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks and Joni Mitchell’s Blue … Continue readingDavid Bowie: Low and behold

THIS week, a long-overdue salute to that most enduring of songwriters, Randy Newman. For more than half a century he has been making us smile and sob, sometimes simultaneously, with … Continue readingRandy Newman, master craftsman

IF HE had listened to his music teacher’s advice, we wouldn’t be listening to Bill Dalton now. At 16 his school report read: ‘William is musically incompetent.’ Discouraged, he went … Continue readingBill the conqueror

MY choice this week has frequently been described as one of the greatest albums of all time, and the best by a female artist (how long before records by males … Continue readingBlue: The confessions of Joni Mitchell

THERE were many embarrassing moments in my journalistic career, and some still have the capacity to make me cringe. One such came on a Sunday in 1976, at the July … Continue readingWill the real John Martyn please stand up?

WITH gloom all around, politically and weatherwise, and spring seeming a long way off, here’s a ray of aural sunshine to brighten up your day. The Innocence Mission represent love, … Continue readingThe age of Innocence (Mission)

DURING the 1960s, there were few cosier corners in the world of television than BBC Light Entertainment. Middle-of-the-road singers such as Val Doonican, Petula Clark, Nana Mouskouri, Bobbie Gentry and … Continue readingJimi wrecks the Lulu show