Dogwood Tales
Sunday, September 13, 2026
Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake by Small Faces
The first side opens with the title track, featuring a Hammond organ and string session, moving on to a varied selection of styles including hard rock, soul and a proper blinky-blimey-cockernee singalong that anticipated the Britpop of Blur et al by a good thirty years. Side two is even stranger, with a surreal concept story narrated by comedian Professor Stanley Unwin, famed for inventing his own mangled version of English.
I can imagine a sixties hippie, having rolled up a giant Camberwell carrot on the back of their record tin being transported by this tale of Happiness Stan, a giant fly and a quest for the missing half of the moon.
Genuinely enchanting and Engly Twenty Fido-tastic!
Saturday, September 12, 2026
Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water by Limp Bizkit
The end result is simply tiresome, with mother-effin this and sniggering references to rude bits of anatomy-that. Even Apple Music thought that the name of this album was beyond the pale and asterisked it out. After listening to a couple of tracks, I looked up Fred Durst’s Wikipedia bio and it confirmed that he is, indeed, a massive arsehole who supports Vladimir Putin. Yikes.
I prefer my biscuits crunchy.
Friday, September 11, 2026
Hejira by Joni Mitchell
She tells you about every stop on the journey, old lovers who let her down, and the ones that got away, and meeting an old blues musician on Beale Street in Memphis, and the sad details of his life. She’s looking for something that she can’t quite explain, and it’s like that famous aviator Amelia who went missing and nobody knew what had happened to her.
Somewhere in the background you can hear a band, noodling some jazz and setting her words to music that evokes wandering and wondering on an endless exodus - a Hejira if you will.
That’s what listening to this album is like. Your road trip mileage may vary.