We’ve all been in the position where we’ve been taken in by a beautiful spot in the country, and want to have a weekend or a week break there – only to find it is hours away in the car. When this happens, you have to be ready to pick up the best albums in your house, load them onto your ipod and enjoy the journey.

But, what are the best albums to listen to? Are there certain picks that are better suited for travelling through the country? For example, The XX are more of a band to listen to in and around the city. Here we will have a look at a few to help you on your way when your en-route to one of the many Sykes Cottages around the United Kingdom.

Read the rest of this entry »

Misheard lyrics, sometimes known as mondegreens are near homophones which confuse but can be amusing at the same time. The term ‘mondegreen’ was coined in an article by Sylvia Wright in an article published by Harpers in 1954 and comes from the fourth line of Percy’s Reliques that her mother used to recite to her. The stanza should say

“They hae slain the Earl O’ Moray, and Laid him on the green.”

Dropping Phat Beats Old School

However, Wright thought both the earl and a Lady Mondegreen had both been murdered.

The best thing about mondegreens is that they are so often better than the original lyric or line. When I was a child I thought Michael Jackson went to the post office to buy himself a fizzy drink.

“Get down to the post office, don’t drop ‘til you get a pop!” whereas, rather incredibly, the real lyric is “keep on with the force don’t stop, don’t stop ‘til you get enough.”

Because we learn language not only by listening but contextualising and (usually) looking at the mouth of our interlocutor pop songs and poetry lend themselves very well to misunderstanding. Pop songs have little or no context and poetry tends to use language strangely in order to make use of rhyme, metre and rhythm.

There are of course anti-mondegreens, Steve Miller, in his song The Joker invented ‘pompatus’ because he couldn’t think of anything else that would fit, creating the line “Some people call me Maurice, ‘cos I speak of the pompatus of love.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Ok I promise that this is going to be the last “Top List” post that I do for updates from last year, but as a lot of you who read Blazing Minds also know me for my love of music, I thought I would do a musical based “Top List” post using my personally scrobbles via Last.fm so this is my Top Artists, Albums And Track Scrobbles list.

Ever since I got my iPod Classic a couple of years ago, my music collection has been growing and though it’s not as big as some peoples music lists, so far I have around 6,320 tracks on my iPod, it is great for me and I get  to add some amazinging unsigned artists to it quite frequently and have even had the honour of working with a few on my Remergence project.

So as you can expect I do have a tendency to play a lot of music on my iPod and when it is plugged in to iTunes it syncs up with last.fm and records what I have been listening to, though sometimes last.fm has a bit of a fit and doesn’t “scrobble” the tracks, but besides from that it’s all automatically done for me
Read the rest of this entry »

Ok everyone! This could possibly be the final update to this post, so lets get on with it

Now I’ve always been a fan of the TV show Monkey Dust that used to be on BBC Three some years ago with it’s quirky characters and amazing music, this is the show that introduced me to the wonderful musical talents of Goldfrapp and Boards of Canada!

So since having a trusty iPod I’ve been collecting the tracks that have been on the several series that the show ran over and when I originally typed this post I had 22 tracks, now at my most recent count I have 56 tracks that were used over the three series on Monkey Dust, yes that many!

Read the rest of this entry »

Those days of going to the cinema to just see a film and nothing else have really fallen by the wayside, these days we get operas, sports events, concerts and much more.

And today I found out that my local haunt, Rhyl Apollo Cinema, is having a special “for one night only” event and beamed direct from Broadway to the Sony 4K Digital cinema screens, now how cool is that!

Memphis  - Direct from Broadway for ONE NIGHT ONLY!

The foot-tapping, Tony Award-winning Musical – direct from Broadway for the very first time! In 1950s Memphis, a young white man named Huey (Chad Kimball) visits the underground Beale Street Club to soak up the sounds of rhythm ‘n’ blues.

Read the rest of this entry »

As the misheard song states, ‘Waking Up Is Hard To Do’, so we have put together the top 10 songs that are going to help you get out of bed. Some of these songs are loud, others are more fun, but all relate to getting your butt out of bed.

Also, you should recognize that if you need to just wake up without having a song related to mornings, take any track off of a death metal album, and set your volume to max. With this list, we’re going for a little bit more style than just sheer terror!

So in no particular order, here are the ten greatest wake-up songs:

Read the rest of this entry »

Image by NRK P3 via Flickr

Shocking news today as police confirm that singer Amy Winehouse was found dead in her Camden home in London at the young age of 27.

It appears that earlier today the police were called to the address in London at around 4PM upon arrival to the property, the police officers found the body of a 27-year-old female at the scene.

Amy Winehouse was born on 14 September 1983 and shot to fame with her critically successful album Frank in 2003 and nominated for the Mercury Prize for her follow-up album Back To Black in 2006.

Read the rest of this entry »