Surrounded by very English rolling hills. It’s never been a great centre for the live music circuit, although I do remember Kings Of Leon and The Stranglers playing there amongst others I remember the fans were not the nicest there to away teams and there was quite a high percentage of men with moustaches, which is an immediate red flag. It has a famous roundabout, not for the faint-hearted, and I’ve travelled there a few times to watch the local Robins Speedway team. Such a great place that even Gilbert O’Sullivan once chose to live there. Yes better than The Beatles (whom I love, incidentally).įrom Swindon, a mid-size industrial town and railway hub in the heart of England’s countryside, approximately halfway between London and Bristol. Starting in the early to mid seventies as Star Park and then The Helium Kidz, before embarking on a near 25 year recording career, the breadth, diversity and inventory and not least, originality of their songs is simply unbeatable. I want to express why personally I feel they’re the best. Maybe it’s bad form, almost amateur to write of your own experiences in life in unison with a piece on your favourite band, but, in part that’s exactly what I’m going to do. Of course it’s a little different to be writing an article on a band who haven’t anything to release or I’ve just seen live.īut when listening to a band’s music has made the worst crisis since World War 2 that much more comfortable and reassuring for this writer. So who in my opinion (Let’s say that again in capital letters IN MY OPINION) were the best, There’s only one conclusion – XTC. There were really BIG contenders in Elvis Costello with his various incantations, Squeeze perhaps? The Kinks and yes the aforementioned outfit from Liverpool. SO….I could go on naming contenders, but I won’t. Who would I have left out? I nearly wrote a list longer than this article) Or jump past Punk, Talk Talk, Joy Division, The Pogues, The Specials, blur, Happy Mondays, The Smiths. Even pop bands such as ELO and 10CC were marvellous. We could put the obvious case of the Beatles by going further back, or The Rolling Stones, Cream, The Who, progressing through the years to Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Elton John, Queen, Bowie, Pink Floyd etc. The Damned, The Undertones, The Jam, Gang of Four. The Stranglers and The Clash I grew up listening to and still love both to this day, not to mention the many other punk and new wave bands from that era. Now I could put a case forward for many thousands of artists. Who in my opinion – and let’s stress, music like all art is subjective – but who in MY opinion is the best British band or artist of all time and why?. Whilst in Norfolk I’d often thought about talked about this subject matter. When the outbreak came, with no suitable offers of anywhere to stay, I returned, rather forlornly to my Leicestershire flat I’d wound up in Norfolk, nursing a severely broken heart and to much extent a broken mind. This, like many of you, effectively stopped me in my tracks. One thing I never expected was the whole Covid 19 crisis. Claustrophobia and panic attacks are more regular than my friends know, yet as a paradox to that, I also struggle in crowds (which, perhaps luckily, were never an issue in my singing days). I’m also a bit of an enigma, a 50 plus man who, through breaks ups, lives alone and struggles with that. That just gets in the way of listening to more music.įor every episode of Love Island or Gogglebox, I could be discovering, The Ozark Mountain Daredevils, Laghonia or some garage band from Alabama who made one single on a Pebbles compilation. The one constant factor of this is that I listen to it. If a poll was launched into the public domain, for a favourite, the most creative, the best, then there would be multitudes of answers with The Beatles still coming out on top.įrom a personal point of view, Music has been my life, my one constant companion that has never let me down, whether I’ve performed it, photographed it, written about it, attended quizzes, sold it or played it on my radio shows. When you think of the history of British music, perhaps going back to the first early efforts by primitive man, through the compositions of Elgar, Britten, Holst and their contemporaries, Music Hall, Jazz, Blues, Rock’ n Roll, all the genres of the sixties, through the next decade of glam, prog, sheer rock indulgence, or pub rock, which all crashed into Punk, New Romantics, Ska revival, I could go on, that’s an awful lot of music.
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