Johnny O'The Brine

Always moving, always busy, Alasdair Roberts returns on March 23rd, with a new LP 'What News'. The follow up to 2016's 'Pangs' was recorded with Amble Skuse & David McGuinness and is once again on the Drag City label. Among the record's eight songs are a couple I've seen Alasdair play more than once, in fact he's been performing his interpretation of 'The Fair Flower of Northumberland' on stage for over seven years.

Here's 'Johnny O'The Brine', the first taste of 'What News' and an audience recording of Alasdair and old mucker Will Oldham duetting on 'The Fair Flower of Northumberland' back in 2011.

Version City #43 - Tortoise & Bonnie 'Prince' Billy sing Elton John

Bonnie 'Prince' Billy and Tortoise have each made individual appearances on these pages in the past, though the 2006 LP, 'The Brave and the Bold', finds their talents combined. The 10 tracks on the album are all cover versions of artists who range from the familiar (Bruce Springsteen, Richard Thompson), to the obscure (Lungfish, Quix*o*tic), to the unexpected (Don Williams, Melanie Safka). Here's the highlight of the whole shebang for me though, a spooky reading of Elton John's 'Daniel'.

Version City #38 - Bonnie 'Prince' Billy sings Bob Dylan

It's an exciting week in the Dylan community, with the long-awaited release of Bob's new album, 'Shadows in the Night', a re-imagining of songs previously recorded by Frank Sinatra. So this seems an appropriate moment to share my own favourite re-imagining of a Bob Dylan song of recent years, Bonnie 'Prince' Billy's terrific reading of 'Brownsville Girl', performed at the finale of the Louisville Motherlodge Festival in 2012. It's an audience recording and there are a lot of people playing, so it distorts here and there, but thank goodness someone captured it. How great is this?

Old Pa over at Tune Doctor is king of the Bob Dylan cover version - he's got hundreds of 'em! 

Check 'em out here.

If You Want to Get Ahead....

I am a man of many ongoing projects, all of which involve transferring the contents of teetering boxes of stuff (be it audio or visual) onto a digital medium, and few of which I'll probably ever completely finish. Still, I'm having a great deal of fun along the way, particularly with my recent car-boot sale acquisition, a photo scanner, which is allowing me to fully explore the family negative and slide archive. Mind you, I've only just begun to scratch the surface and have already discovered many a dodgy snapshot of yours truly - the moustache period of the mid-1970's, what was I thinking? Then, of course, there was my early 1960's penchant for very small hats.