Posts Tagged ‘bbcnews’
Hotel California | BBC News
23 August 2018A Smashed Hits about (the) Eagles’ Hotel California:
“Vaguery is the primary tool of songwriters,” Frey told a journalist during a 2003 pro-am golf tournament in California’s Pebbel Beach, where he was partnered with Huey Lewis. “It works, it means whatever the listener wants it to mean.”
Sources: History of the Eagles; Hit Story: It All Started Because Of Rattlesnakes; Rockin’ ‘Round The Round, SF Gate; Jennifer Parker’s McBusted: The Story of the World’s Biggest Super Band and this lovely data collection from Southern California Public Radio.
Trump, double-negatives and politics | BBC News
23 July 2018A quick piece for the BBC about double negatives:
It’s hard to understate how often we find ourselves using two negatives when we don’t mean to – in fact, this sentence begins with a common example
See also:
Stand By Me | BBC News
21 May 2018A piece for BBC News about the use of Stand By Me at the royal wedding:
That’s why Harry and Meghan’s choice of song meant more than if they’d gone with, say, Ed Sheeran’s Shape Of You. And the performance by the Kingdom Choir takes Stand By Me back further still, re-infusing it with the defiance as well as the devotion of gospel.
Election Lexicon | BBC News
12 May 2017By me for BBC News: Election Lexicon, the words which “caught the ear” in a week of campaigning.
27 May: [campaigning suspended]
Bob Dylan’s Forever Young | BBC News
17 December 2015A Smashed Hits piece for the BBC News Magazine about this year’s X Factor Winner’s Song, Bob Dylan’s Forever Young:
The Dylans decamped to rural New York state for some peace. They didn’t get it. The presence of Bob Dylan gave the tiny town of Woodstock such countercultural kudos that its name was given to an “aquarian exposition” – the famous 1969 festival in a neighbouring county which didn’t feature Dylan, but did bring half a million people into his back yard.
For some of them, “Dylan’s back yard” was no metaphor, and they never went away. The Dylans soon wearied of finding hippies in the trees around their home and Dylan became frightened that he might have to use his “clip-fed Winchester blasting rifle” to keep them from his family. Onwards, then, to an Arizona ranch.
Louie Louie by Richard Berry, and the Kingsmen | BBC News
30 April 2015A piece about the origins of Louie Louie and the FBI’s investigation for the BBC News Magazine.
The Kingsmen noticed that their audiences now included middle-aged men in suits and shades and were soon questioned by the Feds, apparently being told: “You know we can put you so far away that your family will never see you again.”
They insisted that Louie Louie was innocent, but as ardently as they’d sought reds under the bed, and over the course of two-and-a-half years, the G-Men contrived a series of eye-wateringly unpalatable images and practices from Ely’s mumbles.
Why Nick Drake’s is music of comfort, not of despair | BBC News
25 November 2014On the 40th anniversary of Nick Drake‘s death, a short piece for the BBC News Magazine:
His first album, the pastoral Five Leaves Left, correspondingly begins with the lines: ‘Time has told me you’re a rare, rare find / A troubled cure for a troubled mind’.
The second, Bryter Layter, is purposefully upbeat and the last, Pink Moon, ends: ‘So look, see the sights, the endless summer nights / And go play the game that you learned from the morning’. This is music of comfort, not of despair; rebirth, not death.
Here’s the documentary mentioned, A Skin Too Few:
And there’s a John Peel version of my favourite track, Cello Song, at the Guardian.