Advantages: Elvis Presley singing some wonderful music Disadvantages: The tracks have been released and re-released many times over the years
People often recall Elvis Presley as the early rock 'n' roller in the mid-1950s, or the less rocking star of some (sometimes) decidedly dodgy movies from the 1960s, or as the Las Vegas singer of the 1970s. One style of music which straddles all of these time periods though is gospel.
Elvis was always a great lover of gospel music, and often spent hours singing this type of music with his backing singers in his own private time.
Elvis' record company, BMG, have spent the last 29 years (since his death) repackaging his recorded material, and still release many CDs each year, collecting together already released material and unreleased material from the archives (this unreleased music is often distributed through their specialist Elvis label FTD - short for 'Follow That Dream' which was the title of one of Elvis' movies from the 1960s ...
Advantages: The broadness of the music kept my interest throughout, they enjoyed being there! Disadvantages: None for me.
As much as people like to mock my part of London, it does have some good points, and one of the diamonds in the rough is The Fairfield Halls.
An eclectic mix of ?artistes? have passed through the corridors of this Concert Hall since it opened in 1962, ranging from Robert Cray to Mott the Hoople. A quick check of their website tells me that both The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Curtis Stigers are also due to perform here in the near future. Okay, so it?s not exactly the O2 arena, or even the Brixton Academy, but it?s not bad.
It was here that I came to see The Soweto GospelChoir recently. My friend had been more keen than I to attend, but I was interested enough to agree to go. I didn?t appreciate, until we saw the concert, that the Choir had such diverse musical scope. They mixed traditional African gospel and hymns ...
Advantages: Opens up a whole world of music listening Disadvantages: Suggestions can be both predictable and wildly off-target. Some data errors
or takes on uneasy Big Brotherish overtones remains to be seen.
In the meantime I shall continue to enjoy the dozens of new acts I've discovered via Audioscrobbler. After all, where else would I ever have learned that there's a Chicago indie band arrestingly named the Scotland Yard GospelChoir?
UPDATE: typically, within a few weeks of me writing this, Audioscrobbler disappeared. It has now been subsumed within the above-mentioned Last.fm. This is merely 'powered by audioscrobbler', although most of the features mentioned above do remain, and in a far more attractive format too.
(In the unlikely event that you want like to see what I've been listening to lately, go to http://www.audioscrobbler.com/user/Bullhassocks). Oh, go on, laugh. ...
