The Plashing Vole

 I didn't get very far with my trawl through the 7" collection: months later and we're still on A. I'd claim pressure of wo...

It's the middle of the marking period (a phoney war: so many have extensions that there will be No Summer For Vole) and I'm immersed...

While I was queuing to vote the other day my eye fell on the private school across the road. It's a pretty standard bit of Victorian fau...

 Hi Don, hi Dom.  I mean, of course, Trump and Cummings , the other two washed-up figures clinging desperately to blogging as a means of ho...

Nearly three weeks since I posted anything on here - partly thanks to having a bit of a holiday (i.e. officially booking time sitting at hom...

The singles collection odyssey continues, and we're still in the As. Today is The Associates, and their 1982 single '18 Carat Love ...

One of the best things about teaching from home, and I know that I'll be in a slight minority on this one, is the ability to do a spot o...

I am, as anyone familiar with me in IRL knows, an aficionado of lost or retro causes. I passionately believer, for instance, that it was a m...

Back to obscurities for today's singles: Armstrong (Julian Pitt, from Wales) with some perfectly serviceable pop-rock - I've only t...

No, not really: you've been rick-rolled.  It feels wrong to chattily post about old songs the day after yet another woman, Sarah Everard...

 You may think you can see some records here, but all I see is a gaping void in my collection of Ash 7" singles. What remains are thei...

Now here's a band I miss. Not the most aspirational of names, but the single word echoes the early-90s trend (Blur, Suede, Pulp, Oasis, ...

 (Actually, nothing in the Bible refers specifically to apples, as I keep writing on my students' Milton essays). But the remorseless pr...

 After yesterday's trash, here's a band from the same period who I really think have stood the test of time despite never approachin...

 Thanks to the wonders of alphabetisation, yesterday's classic 'House of the Rising Sun' sits next to a bit of post-britpop fluf...

 A very familiar song today, but one that still packs a huge amount into a few minutes - the haunting 'House of the Rising Sun' by T...

 At some point in the late nineties I got transfixed by Northern Soul, that magical northern British subculture with its own aesthetic and m...

 Compared with everything else I was buying at the time, American Music Club 's 'Can You Help Me?' counts as a crowd-pleasing hi...

 I unashamedly adore this next record. After Britpop died of shame I got into post-rock quite heavily: Mogwai , Slint , Velvet Underground,...

 …it's Alternative TV !  They were a big name on the post-punk circuit in the late 70s/early 80s because the frontman was Mark Perry (ed...