At last. The Velvet Hearts debut album, Into the World, has just been released. It’s currently available exclusively from CDBaby. It is the best of times, and the worst of times, to be trying to build a career as a musician. The online revolution is both generous in its audience and stingy in its fiscal [...]

When, by chance, we saw The Velvet Hearts at The Edge a couple of months ago, we were left with the overriding impression that this was a band who had taken a step beyond the norm and were producing something really rather special. We saw them a second time at the sunny Portsmouth Bandstand, and [...]

This is one of those “maybe it exists but I can’t find it” ideas. Something that I’d find very useful would be media player plugin that could use the ID tag from mp3′s (etc) to nip off to the WWW and find the relevant guitar tab so playing along is thus a very easy process. [...]

After my viva last Tuesday we ended up at the edge of the wedge and what was already a very good day got even better thanks to some very talented musicians and a comfy stool at the bar.

We recently spent a couple of nights in Dublin without hearing the beat of a single Bodhrán or even a hint of live music coming from any bar. So last Friday night we were spoiled, with no fewer than two concurrent Bodhráns (and a guest washboard player), mandolin, guitar, accordion and bass thrown into the [...]

Back in the last century after Netscape merged with AOL, a 3-year deal was struck between AOL and Sun Microsystems such that the Professional Services groups from Sun and Netscape would work together on projects that benefited both companies. The Netscape server software became (to all intents and purposes) jointly owned and developed, and Sun [...]

Kurt Cobain was a musician who (by his own admission) could only just manage to play the guitar and sing at the same time, who was emotionally unequipped to deal with fame and stardom, and who therefore paid the ultimate price by killing himself, alone, using a shotgun.