Sunshine In The Music - Jimmy Cliff

Advantages: Fast paced and topical joke telling at its best
Disadvantages: DVD Extras could have been better

...Jimmy Carr is obviously a man who loves his work - on a recent chat show he explained that on completing a mammoth one hundred and sixty date tour he simply starts all over again. He spends more than half his life travelling the length and breadth of the British Isles delivering his unique deadpan rapid fire style of joke telling and observations on life, love and the worlds many problems. And for me it's not hard to see why he enjoys touring so much, he seems so much at home in front of a live audience, he knows how to play to them, how to deliver his jokes with impeccable timing, always articulate and well observed. Many people will be familiar with Jimmy Carr as the host of the successful Channel four quiz show 'eight out of ten cats', but if you were expecting more of the same you may well be disappointed. This DVD represents... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average very helpful

Advantages: Easy but not shallow reading, deeply chucklesome
Disadvantages: At the price, none

...A book that is tremendously annoying in the sense that as a music fan you wish you'd written it first. Giles Smith's comfortable, easy writing style takes you through his life with popular music; listening to it, buying it, obsessing over it, and finally attempting to play it in public for money. Along the way he goes through such pivotal moments as buying your first single (and lying about what it was years later), realising that Dark Side Of The Moon is rubbish, discovering that a music fan can't lose his virginity with the record player on, being compelled to buy everything Nik Kershaw records, failing to heed John Peel's warnings that it'll all end in tears, the revelation that Andy Partridge is a total genius, being big in Germany for about five minutes, having your bandmate break down and run off to become a gardener... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful

Advantages: Plenty of interesting stories
Disadvantages: Contains language some may find offensive

...is his own words and this is often heart-warming, especially for someone who knows the accent and the rambling way in which Geordies often talk. He does write the way he speaks quite a lot. Annoyingly, his accent has changed over the years but by and large this is written in a very natural style. The book is amusing in places. Jimmy mentions how one night on a music tour, he accidentally ate a whole packet of laxatives, thinking they were fruit pastilles. Of course, the inevitable happened, right on stage... There are some sad stories as well as funny ones. Jimmy's bad lad ways when he was younger were possibly part of the grieving process he went through when his sister Shelagh died. There is also an account of Timothy Spall's leukemia. One thing which bugged me about this book was that while Jimmy tries to make... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful