Bob Dylan
the croaking, staggering, wonderful memento mori that he is…I wish he had done a duet with Justin Beiber. That would have been awesome. Question is, what song should they have done?

@gee man - "strikingly teenage and naive"??
1) Starting a love song with a negative - "I may not always love you" and then threatening suicide if she leaves him

My doctor once told me that "anyone above a certain level of intelligence suffers from a certain amount of depression." (that was part of the usual British doctors response to depression issues - "suck it up"). My point is that, if you want to make music that attempts to be something with intellectual (i.e …

I totally agree. I grew up near Oxford and was 15/16 when it came out. Saw them live a few times and I remember there was something unusual under their sound, some bits of oddness that made them more interesting than most of the other Oxford bands at the time. Plus Johnny's guitar work is already pushing their sound…

Yes. Saw her live with Howe Gelb I think. Got her album straight after.

just because i'm here and bored at work
Flute - check out Eric Dolphy for some insane, and awesome, flute playing.

One of the very few good things about tv in the UK is we get BBC4 which rocks. Although they had this documentary last year about authors in the 20thc, created using excerpts from talk shows and documentaries they had been on in the past, and it made me shed a little tear…Documentary makers are so afraid of just…

Greatest male songwriter who performs his own songs = Paul Simon (I'm sorry but he is a much more consistently great lyricist than Dylan. His songs may not be as cool and trendy but they are better constructed)
Greatest female songwriter who performs her own songs = Joni Mitchell

Third for the Dark is Rising sequence. We used to spend our holidays as a family in a small cottage in the mountains of North Wales, right slap bang in the middle of the area some of the books are set. I remember climibing up Bird Rock (Craig yr Aderyn) many times as a kid and really really hoping it would open like…

yeah, I find that fuzzy borderland really interesting. Some of the way people use sampling to completely and radically recontextualise sounds, or use turntables as instruments etc fits right in with what has been happening in the classical music world for quite a while and does deserve to be engaged with at a similar…

Maybe (I know you are not saying you think that, so sorry for the ramble), but I think the mistake was to think that hip-hop had to borrow jazz tropes in order to be seen as 'legitimate' or more intellectually complex. I think it has been those artists who have taken the core of what hip-hop is, and explored, deepened…

@betterforsome - Watership down traumatised me too. I watched it again recently and it has some really really dark stuff in it, and is all the better for it. I think it is all for the same reason the original fairy stories were so dark - kids need, and are able to respond to, that darkness much more than adults give…

To be fair, it may have been my fault for overdoing it. Like when I was 12 and drank a huge amount of Bacardi on an overnight boat trip. Now I can't even see a bottle without gavomiting….

Funny you should say that. I am in China at the moment and just spent my lunch break looking at some awesome versions of it and wondering if I should start collecting them…

I went through a big Kundera love-fest between the ages of about 19-23 and read pretty much everything he wrote. And then for some reason I suddenly found it all really trite, inconsistent and repetative. It definitely fits well with the whole 'deep and tortured poet' phase, but not so much when you grow out of…

I am the same. I know it is selfish and self-absorbed to respond like that, but I just get angry.

LTI is brilliant. Have you read his diaries? They are incredible. The fact that you were taught that illustrates some of the reasons why the US university system is better in many ways than the one here in the UK. I went to a fuddy-duddy old University and had to have big rows with professors to get linguistics and…

The thesis was on the language of brutalisation under Nazism and its legacy, with some comparisons to what was going on in the USSR… It was pretty scary to see how such simple linguistic tricks can be used again and again to manipulate human beings. I was writing it at the time of the Rwandan genocide and to hear the…

whoops. missed the 'h' of Shoah. Just to clarify I meant that and not the Southeastern Hockey Officials Association. Because that would be a very weird thesis.

My favourites of the A+ books (I have read most of them now) are the Ozick, the Weiss, the Broch, the Morgner and the Holub. I have a huge Eastern European bias to my reading too (primarily because I did a Masters on it/the Shoa/communism etc so got a little uber-geeky) so, as you also seem to love that stuff, I think…