Category Archives: Music

He got game, and the Spanish hills

A song for Friday.

You see, it doesn’t matter what a song is about or what they put in a video. A song ties itself up in your head with memories because of when you first hear it, or a particular concert, or a certain trip when it was on heavy rotation. And boy, for three weeks in the summer of 2001 did we hear this song a lot. I travelled to Spain will fellow members of the Grey Sky Appreciation Society Tom and Jasmine Salmon, and our navigator supreme Nev. We had rented a car in Barcelona and were going to aim it north, for the Pyrenees, west, for the Basque coast and the Picos de Europa, and then south, across the dusty plain to Madrid. We had brought piles of CDs , confident that with the new millennium all rental vehicles would be supplied with something to play them on. Unfortunately there was some kind of misunderstanding at the rental agency, and they had to dig a battered and bruised old jalopy out from a garage down a side-alley. It was nice and spacious but only had a tape player.

And we only had one tape. Continue reading →

The Things Around Me – Malachy Tallack

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Wounded Man by Malachy Tallack with Steven Laurenson, from the album from the thorn (buy here)

I discovered the music of Malachy Tallack through another project, The Things Around Me. Last year Malachy moved to a house in the village of Vidlin, on the north east coast of the Shetland mainland. After six months, and still feeling like a stranger, he began to write a series of essays in an attempt to come to some understanding with his surroundings, and these essays are wonderfully evocative of the animals, birds and plants all around him. They are also beautifully illustrated by Will Miles, and artist and ornithologist who lives and works in Fair Isle. Continue reading →