Category: Music Reviews

Sade – Diamond Life – Nearly 35 Years On

It’s quite dangerous to visit your local cocktail emporium late at night, find yourself chatting to a music enthusiast, and then start hankering for an album that you couldn’t have given a toss about back in the day. The danger is exacerbated by the fact that most of us carry a veritable shopping mall in our pockets in the form of a smart device loaded with eBay.

Stevie Wonder – “Songs In The Key Of Life” At (Nearly) 40!

The 3 stunners from Stevie Wonder were Talking Book, Innervisions and the culmination, Songs In The Key Of Life. Recording began in 1974 and ended up being about a year late. It was released at the end of September 1976. It was a phenomenal success, and yielded many hits and cover versions, as well as countless samples on other artists’ songs.  Now that “Songs In The Key Of Life”  is coming up to 40 years old this year, it deserves a revisit.

Remembering Prince

In this round up I’ve barely scraped the surface of Prince’s prolific output, but rather than playing the Hits compilations released by Warners when the boss felt he needed to buy another mansion with a swimming pool, look out for these albums, which show a true genius (a flawed true genius maybe) at work. Heaven must be dancing now.

Take A Chance On Me and Honey Honey – A compare, contrast of two ABBA Songs

It seems that ABBA are a band that, despite not having recorded together since 1982, simply refuse to go away. This is evident from the multi-million selling compilation, “Gold”, through CD and vinyl box-set reissues of the original albums, right up to the phenomenal success of the stage musical and film, “Mamma Mia”. This is due in no small part to the combination of the girls’ voices, but often overlooked is the song writing talent of Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson. In this article, I review, compare and contrast two songs, Honey Honey and Take A Chance On Me, and attempt to analyse the song writing devices that lift these songs out of the ordinary, and turn them into works of art.