Music

An archive of blog entries about music and music production.

Top of the Pops put out to pasture

20 June 2006 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

You almost certainly didn’t hear it here first, but Top of the Pops has been cancelled. It’s always sad to see old regulars go, but it had had a good life and it needed a rest.

It can always come back later as a retro thing. Wouldn’t you just love to see DLT or Peter Powell introing hit acts from the 70s and 80s making a comeback again?

Hell, while we’re about it, bring back the Golden Oldie Picture Show. I’m sure there’s a few songs out now that could have better videos done on the cheap for them by the Beeb.

UPDATE: DLT has just signed up with radio station Magic.

Music

A test of musical arithmetic

19 June 2006 Rob Buckley Post a comment

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts“Rob, do you like David Byrne?”

Yes, I do.

“Rob, do you like Brian Eno?”

Yes, I do.

“Do you think, therefore, that you will like David Byrne and Brian Eno?”

I’m not sure I’d ever considered the combination of those two musicians. Do their skills complement each other or are they mutually incompatible?

Fortunately, there’s an easy way to find out if you’d like them or not – you can stream their entire album, “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts”, over the Internet from this here web site, provided you have QuickTime. I wasn’t unduly impressed, but it might grow on me.

Now I’ve taken the test. Will you?

Music from the Orange “Open” advert

13 June 2006 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Since a large number of people are coming to this blog trying to find out the music to the new Orange “Open” advert (the one with the fish in a bowl – you can view it by clicking the play button), I thought I’d put them out of their misery: it’s Music for a Nurse by Oceansize from the album “Everyone Into Position”. You can buy the track from iTunes or the album from Amazon.

Touching Evil title sequence and theme

30 May 2006 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

As a little treat and to give you a flavour of the show – and because I’m in one of my obsessive moods – I’m setting up a one-show, one-page rival to Brilliant But Cancelled. Here’s the opening few minutes of the pilot episode of Touching Evil. It may not instantly grab you, but as a way to establish the entire mood of a show plus the scenario behind it, it’s a remarkably economical use of three and a half minutes. But bear with it.

I’ve added the title sequence and title theme as a second video, since they are possibly one of the best combinations in TV history, even if the theme seems to have been re-used for a perfume ad. If some of the music sounds familiar, you’re probably a Nine Inch Nails fan.

Enjoy!

Continue reading “Touching Evil title sequence and theme”

Buckley’s Crime Show Hypothesis needs a new name

4 May 2006 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

On Saturday, I suggested that the producers of US crime shows don’t watch any of the other shows. I’ve now decided to expand the hypothesis to include other genres, thus necessity a name change for the hypothesis, which will now be called “Buckley’s ‘All producers live in Islington’ hypothesis” (so-called because only people in Islington say things like “Of course, we don’t actually watch television. In fact, we don’t even own a television set. Ha, ha, ha!”).

I’m prompted to do this hypothesis-expansion because of Monday’s episode of Prison Break. During the last five minutes of the show, there was an extended montage overlaid with an instrumental version of Massive Attack’s Teardrop. “So what?” you ask yourselves. Well, the thing is Prison Break airs on the Fox network in the US, as does House MD, everyone’s favourite tale of grumpy doctors. And as I’ve droned on about ad nauseum, the theme tune to House in the US isn’t the same as it is in the UK (the UK’s theme is apparently called “Buddha Grass Soul(kpm 548)” and was composed for the show especially, because of licensing issues). The US theme to House is in fact Massive Attack’s Teardrop. Two Fox shows in more or less the same time slot, both using the same piece of music.

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have mentioned this to avoid being too anal about it. But Variety picked up on it, too. When quizzed though, Fox replied, “The music supervisor for Prison Break didn’t know it was the theme song for House.” But as Variety’s Josef Adalian points out, surely one of the producers of Prison Break will have watched House at some point.

Except if my hypothesis is right, of course… Still, I feel I need more evidence before I can bump my hypothesis up to the status of theory. And ‘Law’ is going to be a long time coming, I suspect.