This Day in Music…December 14

So X Factor Final.

Thought you might like to suffer as well. :biggrin:

First Round:

Eoghan Quigg – I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday

JLS – Last Christmas

Alexandra Burke Silent Night

Second Round:

Eoghan Quigg & Boyzone – A Picture Of You

JLS & Westlife – Flying without wings

Alexandra & Beyonce – Listen

Third Round:

Eoghan – We’re All In This Together

JLS – I’m Already There

Alexandra – You Are So Beautiful

Part one ends with an awful rendition by the rejects.

Part two an hour later, Beyonce performs and the lowest vote getter gets booted.

So the winner’s song is performed by the two remaining acts.

JLS – Hallelujah

Alexandra Burke – Hallelujah

Winner announced

The winner performs again

And that’s it for another year.

Richard Thompson: 1000 years of popular music
Most lists of ‘greatest songs’ barely go back before Elvis. The legendary guitarist’s live show makes amends

As the title perhaps hints, the concept for this unique show dates to the last days of the last millennium, when Thompson, the folk-rock singer-songwriter and guitar legend, was asked — along with many other luminaries — to name “the best 10 songs of the millennium” by Playboy magazine.

Knowing most respondents would take “of the millennium” to mean “try to think of something before Elvis if you can”, Thompson determined to give them what they had asked for and set about uncovering great songs that really did stretch back 1,000 years. “I thought, I’ll start in AD1000 with a jumpy little number by St Godric,” Thompson remembers, citing the hermit whose compositions are the oldest English-language songs for which the original musical settings survive.

Unimpressed by Thompson’s scholarship, or perhaps merely unable to get an up-to-date photo of Godric to illustrate the article, Playboy declined to print his list. The seed of an idea had been sown, however, and when the Getty Museum in Los Angeles asked Thompson to perform a show, he unearthed his list.

Leonard Cohen – Hallelujah

Jeff Buckley – Hallelujah

She’s red hot, but her soul is strictly sanitised
Despite powerful pipes, Duffy fails to catch fire like the vintage singers she apes

She dedicates possibly her oldest song, ‘Enough Love’, to manager-cum-mentor Jeanette Lee, who heard it as a demo and decided to take the unformed singer under her wing. Yearning for enough love ‘to go round the world’, it sounds like a Sixties soul cover version. In fact, it was written by Catatonia’s Owen Powell and Richard Parfitt from Welsh pop also-rans the 60 Ft Dolls – just one aspect of the uncommon sequence of power-broking that made Duffy a star.

Powell and Parfitt passed the demo on to Lee, the most unlikely of pop Svengalis. Enmeshed in west London’s punk circles, she was an administrative member of Public Image Ltd, John Lydon’s post-Pistols band. After raising a family, she joined forces with Geoff Travis at label-cum-management company-cum record shop Rough Trade. She introduced Duffy to former Suede guitarist Bernard Butler, who crafted the rich retro soundbed of Rockferry.

Duffy, then, is an international phenomenon built by former punks and indie kids. It’s a shame they didn’t make her slightly better. While there is no faulting songs like ‘Warwick Avenue’ – a treat from Duffy’s a capella introduction until the final shimmer – too often her performances lack light and shade. Her voice stuns at full-pelt but rarely catches or swoops. Her customary finale, the giddy, yearning ‘Distant Dreamer’, leaves you feeling that she should have more songs like this. But Duffy’s bonus-disc tunes are full of polite cliches, like ‘Fool For You’ and ‘Please Stay’.

You desperately want Duffy to break a sweat, to really electrify like the vintage acts she admires. Froideur has an important part to play in Sixties-period sexpottery, but abandon – crucial to soul, pop and R&B – is largely absent from Duffy’s affective palette. Adele’s got it, Beth Ditto’s got it, Amy Winehouse has got it, perhaps to a fault. Instead, Duffy’s is a kind of M&S version of soul – pleasant, well-made but ultimately overly sanitised.

The X Factor voting details

X FACTOR 5 – VOTING DETAILS

TOTAL VOTES CAST OVER ENTIRE SERIES : 16,469,064

Show 1…………..

Eric Burdon loses battle to be the only Animal

Their legendary song House Of The Rising Sun helped make The Animals famous in the Sixties, until the band broke up amid much acrimony.
Now, more than 40 years later, two original members of the band have resumed battle – in a bitter fight over who can still use the famous name.
Former lead singer Eric Burdon has been locked in a legal dispute with drummer John Steel over who has the right to make it their trademark.
Burdon, 67, argued he was a living personification of the band, adding that he still performed in the UK and around the world under the names The Animals and Eric Burdon And The Animals.

‘I was the political Beatle,’ says McCartney

Sir Paul McCartney has shaken one of the cornerstones of Beatles mythology by claiming it was he, not John Lennon, who politicised the band after meeting the philosopher and pacifist Bertrand Russell in the mid-1960s.

In an interview with the journal “Prospect”, Sir Paul says Russell informed him of America’s escalating role in the Vietnam war, prompting the Beatle to return to Abbey Road studios and tell “the guys, particularly John, about this meeting and saying what a bad war this was”.

It had previously been accepted that Lennon was the group’s political conscience.

Sir Paul’s account differs from those of contemporaries and Beatles historians. Tariq Ali, a leader of the anti-war movement in Britain, told the “Sunday Times”: “This is news to me. We never heard of Paul’s views at the time. It was John Lennon who was concerned about the war. He never mentioned McCartney and I never thought of asking him to join us.” Alan Clayton, the biographer of all four Beatles, said: “I think Sir Paul is rewriting history now that Lennon is gone.”

A curiously French complaint

When I was a student, living in Avignon in the south of France, I remember waking up one morning shortly before Christmas, feeling shivery and as if someone had spent the night sandpapering my throat.

After a couple of days of wheezing and coughing, I took myself to the doctor and explained that I was feeling a bit ropey.

One hour later I had been diagnosed with a severe lung infection, mild asthma and had in my hand a prescription for six different types of medicine, an appointment at the local hospital’s radiology department and an emergency referral to a specialist in pulmonary disease.

The next day I flew home to the UK for the Christmas holidays where my worried parents persuaded me to visit their local GP for a second opinion.

After five minutes in his consulting room, I emerged empty-handed but with a new diagnosis. I had… a cold…..

Former ‘American Idol’ Bucky Covington performs free concert at Intersection, preps for new album

And starting Monday, he’s going into the studio to record his second album, which will also be on Lyric Street Records with the same producer, Mark Miller.

“I said, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ So definitely got Mark on it again,” Covington said.

He performed a couple of songs off the upcoming album Saturday night, including the ridiculously catchy “Evil Knievel,” with its no-holds-barred opening and hit-worthy lyrics.

“So far, it’s been through the roof,” he said of the reaction to the new songs. “That’s why I picked these two.”

We’ve already been flogged America’s Hallowe’en, so now comes a desperate plea: Don’t let them steal our Christmas!

As I write this, it’s 79 degrees outside, the hummingbirds are humming and there isn’t a Christmas tree, strand of tinsel or fairy light in view.

My British friends have been calling – mostly after a few cups of seasonal cheer – to bemoan a very different sort of December: the cold, damp, dark days; the conveyor belt of pointless parties; the headache-inducing round of school choir and Nativity plays.
And I’m as jealous as Hell.