Caught by the Reaper – Etta James
20 January 2012 // Remembrance
Hard for me to pick a favourite song by Etta James, impossible in fact. Over at The Guardian site Richard Williams (a man forever reliable when it comes to soul) has managed to get it down to ‘her ten finest performances’ (listing a couple that I have never heard but certainly will have before tonight [...]
Caught by the Reaper – Peter Reading
3 December 2011 // Remembrance
by Tim Dee. The poet Peter Reading died on 17th November. I knew him for nearly twenty years and I loved him. He was a great poet and a great birdman, and consequently among the greatest bird poets though he was better known for other things. I wrote about him in The Guardian, here. My [...]
Caught by the Reaper – Shelagh Delaney
21 November 2011 // Remembrance
Dave Haslam pays tribute to the writer Shelagh Delaney, who passed away on Monday. At 5.30pm on Monday 21st November Channel 4 News tweeted “Morrissey inspiration Shelagh Delaney, author of A Taste of Honey, has died”, and it’s true that as well as more than a handful of Morrissey’s lyrics coming straight out of Shelagh [...]
Caught by the Reaper – Jackie Leven
15 November 2011 // Remembrance
Mick Houghton remembers musician, songwriter, Jackie Leven, who died yesterday: I was working in the press department at Warner Bros when I first met Jackie, then fronting Doll By Doll. It was sometime in the spring of 1978 and I’d been assigned to them or them to me. Representing Doll by Doll at the meeting [...]
Caught by the Reaper – Henry Cecil Roy Donne
1 November 2011 // Remembrance
Will Burns pays tribute to his Grandpa, who passed away last week. Henry Donne, or Roy as he preferred, was not a famous naturalist or fisherman. He was not a prize winning sports writer, or big game hunter. What he was however, was the single biggest influence on three generations of one family’s pronounced and [...]
Caught by the Reaper – Bert Jansch
Mick Houghton pays tribute to a friend: Bert Jansch died in the early hours of the morning. I must have said those words a hundred times yesterday. From the moment around 8.30AM when, twice in rapid succession, my office phone rang, followed by the confounded mobile, I knew Bert had died. He’d been battling uncomplainingly [...]
Caught by the Reaper – Sylvia Robinson
30 September 2011 // Remembrance
Co-founder of All Platinum and Sugarhill Records and one half of Mickey & Sylvia. This portrait of Sylvia Robinson was written by Kevin Pearce in 2006 and originally published in the Fifty Thousand Reasons collection on the Tangents blog. ———————————————————————————————————————- Nik Cohn’s written the best pop books ever. I Am The Greatest, Says Johnny Angelo, [...]
Caught by the Reaper: Tom Hibbert
2 September 2011 // Remembrance
Remembered by Bob Stanley When I moved to London in 1986 I thought I’d get in touch with my favourite music writer, Tom Hibbert. He was responsible for a book I loved called Rare Records: Wax Trash and Vinyl Treasures, and had edited another called The Perfect Collection. His writing was offhand, intensely knowledgable, iconoclastic, [...]
Caught by the Reaper – Jerry Leiber
Jerry Leiber (l), Mike Stoller (r) Jerry Leiber, 1933 – 2011 Bob Stanley pays tribute: The Abbey Road medley is often cited as the perfect career closer: “And in the end, the love you make is equal to the love you take” sums up the warmth, generosity and unbroken circle of the Beatles’ story. Mind [...]
Caught by the Reaper: Nickolas Ashford, 1942 – 2011
A tribute by Chris Roberts. Long, long ago, before the words “darling” and “baby” became passé and infra dig, they were swoon-inducingly effective, within and without pop music. They were giddying, disarmingly romantic, and rarely more so than in the works of Nickolas Ashford, who died this week, and his wife Valerie Simpson. Among the [...]
