I have just watched my teenage years unfold before me on screen after viewing the new Ron Howard film, The Beatles: Eight Days A Week – The Touring Years. I was barely 13 when the Beatles first scraped into the UK charts, on December 15 1962, with ‘Love Me Do’ at no. 26. Alongside the Beatles…

I’ve belatedly come across Eric Clapton’s Facebook tribute to B.B. King where Eric says, “This music (blues) is almost a thing of the past now. There are not many left who play it in the pure way B.B. King did”. This is just so sad. Just to rub salt into the wounds, let me explain…

Of all America’s creative gifts to the world, does any touch humanity more than the captivating music we call the blues? Rock & roll, rhythm & blues, rock, soul, funk, jazz, heavy metal, and pop music in general, are just some of the musical genres that have rolled out of the blues. For lovers of…

Back in San Francisco last week for the first time in 20 years, we found ourselves, as you invariably do in San Francisco, amongst the throng at Pier 39. After checking that the city’s famous sea lions still hang out at K-dock, I heard the most unexpected sound – full tilt piano boogie woogie emanating from…

How George Bernard Shaw wrote the world’s first anti-rock music review.  Let’s go all literary today and talk about the Nobel Prize-winning author and playwright, George Barnard Shaw. If you haven’t heard of him, George had enormous influence on Western culture, politics and theatre from the 1880s until his death, aged 94, in 1950. The…