A year or two back when Katy and I were on holiday in Northumberland, we went several times to the theatre in Alnwick. The first night was a live streamed Shakespeare, but sadly the weather was so bad that the signal was lost so we never found out how it ended! However we reurned the […]
Spem In Alium
Spem in alium (Latin for “Hope in any other”) is a 40-part motet by Thomas Tallis, composed in c. 1570 for eight choirs of five voices each. It is considered by some critics to be the greatest piece of English early music. H. B. Collins described it in 1929 as Tallis’s “crowning achievement”. The work’s […]
Candy Dulfer
Candy Dulfer was born in September, 1969 in Amsterdam. She began playing the drums at the age of five. As a six-year-old, she started to play the soprano saxophone. At age seven, she switched to alto saxophone and later began playing in a local concert band Jeugd Doet Leven (“Youth Brings Life”) in Zuiderwoude. Dulfer […]
Beth Rowley
Beth Rowley was born in Peru to British parents who moved back to Bristol when Rowley was two years old. She was influenced by her family’s love for many different musical styles, and Latin American music. She attended St Mary Redcliffe and Temple School in Bristol. Incidently, a school at which David spent a year. […]
Amazing Blondel
John Gladwin (guitar and vocals) and Terrance (Terry) Wincott (guitar and vocals) formed a band called The Dimples along with Stuart Smith (drums) and Johnny Jackson (bass guitar). Signed to the Decca label they recorded a single, the “A” side “Love of a Lifetime” and the “B” side written by John Gladwin titled “My Heart […]
Cindi Lauper
Lauper was born in Brooklyn to a Catholic family. Her father, Fred, was of German and Swiss descent. Her mother, Catrine, is of Italian descent. Lauper’s siblings are younger brother Fred and older sister, Ellen. Lauper’s parents divorced when she was five. Her mother remarried and divorced again. Lauper grew up in the Ozone Park […]
Irving Berlin
Irving Berlin was an American composer and lyricist, widely considered one of the greatest songwriters in American history. His music forms a great part of the Great American Songbook. Born in Russia, Berlin arrived in the United States at the age of five. He published his first song, “Marie from Sunny Italy”, in 1907, receiving […]
Róisín Murphy
Róisín Marie Murphy is an Irish singer-songwriter and record producer. She first became known in the 1990s as one-half of the UK-Irish trip hop duo Moloko with her partner Mark Brydon. Murphy met Brydon in 1994 at a party, using the chat-up line “Do you like my tight sweater? See how it fits my body.” […]
The Staple Singers
It’s Sunday, time for a little gentle gospel music from those 1970’s doyens of of the genre – The Staple Singers. They were an American singing group. Roebuck ‘Pops’ Staples, the patriarch of the family, formed the group with his children Cleotha, Pervis, and Mavis. Yvonne replaced her brother when he was drafted into the […]
Robert Miles
Roberto Concina, known professionally as Robert Miles, was a Swiss-born Italian record producer, composer, musician and DJ. Miles became proficient at playing the piano during his youth in Friuli, Italy, in the small town of Fagagna, where his family moved when he was young, and had been in the music scene since 1984. He worked […]