The Joy of Six 1576

Anna Sabine, Liberal Democrat MP for Frome and East Somerset, has discovered what happens when a politician loses her voice: "There’s a thing about: do I seem weak now? Like, does this make me seem weaker? Which is another reason to be really clear: I will do national media, and I will carry on campaigning."

"The council’s constitution, which sets out how it is run, says it must have a cabinet and a leader at the top and this is required by UK law. The local authority is also required to have an elected member overseeing children’s services. The absence of this and the length of time the council has had no one in charge is what has led officers to make the highly unusual declaration the council is breaking the law." Edward Barnes reports from Oldham, where the elected councillors have failed to agree who should run the borough council after May's elections.

Alazne Mountjoy says women suffer because of the systemic misogyny in medical research and practice: "Women undergoing surgery are significantly more likely to experience complications, and even die, when the surgeon is a man as opposed to a woman. This is in conjunction with the fact that surgeons are overwhelmingly male, with fewer than a fifth of surgeons being female."

Anna Verhamme and John Britton, in a report for the Higher Education Policy Institute, say universities are their professional and support staff and then paying consultants more to provide these services.

"From Browne’s first instalment, featuring the character Sam Weller, sales for Pickwick rose and kept rising. Browne would go on to become Dickens’s principal illustrator, and Pickwick – helped enormously by his comic illustrations – became a literary sensation that revolutionised Victorian book publishing." Michael John Goodman looks at the relationship between Charles Dickens and his illustrator Hablot Knight Browne ('Phiz') and reminds us how strange it is that we now publish Victorian novels without their illustrations.

"Chris Isaak has carved out a singular career doing one thing so hauntingly well, it’s become his signature. He’s built a cathedral from heartbreak and despair, lit by the flickering neon of 3 a.m. regrets, and its served him well for over four decades." James Kenney on Chris Isaak and the art of staying sad.

Connie Converse: Roving Woman

From an article on the BBC website by Thomas Hobbs:

Centring on an edgy, city-dwelling female protagonist unapologetically owning her sexuality, the brilliant song Roving Woman sounds like the work of a millennial musician. Evoking the smoky, airborne notes of a late-night Brooklyn bar, it contains lilting guitar harmonies that float in and out of focus like cascading cigarette smoke, while its melancholy vocal is reminiscent of popular contemporary folk musicians like Weyes Blood, Jessica Pratt and Angel Olsen. "Someone always takes me home!" the lead singer swoons.

Yet the truly remarkable thing about this track is it was actually recorded more than 70 years ago. Roving Woman isn't the work of some lo-fi singer-songwriter in their early 20s, but is in fact the forward-thinking creation of Connie Converse. She was a bedroom musician who wrote the bulk of her songs in early 1950s New York, years before Bob Dylan came on the scene and sparked a new singer-songwriter movement.

But she pulled back from her musical dreams at the turn of the 1960s and then, in 1974, aged 50, disappeared completely – never to be heard from again. It was only this century that this mysterious artist's work was rediscovered and has found a devoted audience, stunned by just how pioneering she was.

And:

Another one of Converse's fans is Martin Carr, the English folk musician and lead singer of the band The Boo Radleys, who has written several songs paying tribute to her. "Connie had a dramatist's eye – the ability to conjure a fully inhabited world from a single detail," he explains. "The fact that she named a song after a J.M. Synge play, or was capable of lyrics such as 'Spring seemed to linger in a little bunch of flowers he pressed into my hand', tells you she was reaching well beyond the American folk tradition."

Carr is also particularly impressed by Converse's guitar playing and believes it's extraordinary no matter what generation you come from. "Her guitar playing is phenomenal. I can't play her songs, they're too hard for me!" Carr enthuses. "Her playing reminds me of the way Paul Simon plays; orchestral arrangements for six strings. She was a true individual, an artist of no time."

The Joy of Six 1574

Liz David-Barrett argues that, by making rule-breaking a selling point, Reform UK is signalling it's open for influence trading: "It is no coincidence that some of Reform’s biggest donations have come from individuals in cryptocurrency, keen to ward off the threat of regulation."

"Our findings lay bare the reality of an industry that operates without regulation. Some companies are run by people with no previous experience in care work: directors are security bosses, or come from the music business or the military. One company in our dataset is owned by an overseas private equity firm." Tom Wall reveals the vast scale of England’s £255m illegal care industry.

"Eight in ten of the UK public think mobile phone thefts have increased since 2010 and around six in ten believe both vehicle-related thefts and burglary have increased. In fact, all are down by 50 per cent or more over that time period." Bobby Duffy says that, though crime is falling, the public doesn't feel safer.

Nik Popli takes us inside the attempt to remake the Democratic Party in the US.

"Everyone who knows Muir’s work knows that he grew up as the son of a peasant farmer in the Orkneys, in one of the last communities in Europe practically untouched by Renaissance and Enlightenment culture—and that his poetry and prose are greatly affected, one might even say determined, by the struggle Muir underwent when circumstances landed him in the middle of several modern industrial and political nightmares." Andrew Frisardi mourns the eclipse of Edwin Muir's poetry.

Mari Wilson on how she made Just What I Always Wanted.

Bryan Ferry: A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall

Bob Dylan glammed up sounds good. This is on Ferry's 1973 debut album These Foolish Things, and it reached no. 10 in the singles chart the same year.

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Who are the goons in balaclavas who turned up in Dover and Portsmouth? Hope Not Hate explains: "In 2016, he [Danny Tommo] pleaded guilty to attempted kidnapping and was sentenced to two years in prison after taking part in an armed attempt to abduct a man during a drugs-related dispute."

Rosemary Runswick argues that the Liberal Democrats should fight the Holborn and St Pancras by-election hard and answers her critics in the comments.

Cathy Young pays tribute to Gloria Steinem: "The vision Steinem shared in 1971 of a humanist and egalitarian future may have been simplistic in its idealism. But in 2026, it’s a far more humane vision, and better for it, than what her right-wing detractors have to offer."

"During the 1868 election his opponent suggested that McLagan was 'not a Scotchman' and a racist cartoon was circulated in the constituency depicting McLagan as a slavedriver with a blackened face, flogging a topless man in a kilt. The cartoon played on the status of McLagan’s father as an enslaver, local perceptions of McLagan's racial identity and statements McLagan made during the 1868 election in support of flogging in the military." Martin Spychal has researched the career of Peter McLagan, whom he calls "Scotland’s first Black MP".

"She was multifaceted in a way that few are: she was a popular, well-respected, beloved iconoclast, a true original, and she also radiated the self-referential camp of a celebrity impersonator. She operated both as a person and as an idea: Dolly seemed to consciously 'do' Dolly. A songwriter, musician, actress, philanthropist, advocate, mogul and more, she was always pivoting between different aspects of herself, and twirling those impressive embellished skirts and dresses all the while." Niela Orr celebrates the life and music of Dolly Parton.

The Secret Cricket Coach asks where the hell Rob Key is: "For years he was paid to tell us what was right and wrong with English cricket. Now he is responsible for much of it, but recently we haven’t heard much from him. England have had a difficult period, questions are being asked about behaviour, standards and leadership, and it is Joe Root who seems to be answering them. I find that quite strange."

Adrianne Lenker: Real House

Matt Mitchell wrote on Paste in 2024:

As soon as I finished listening to Real House, the opening track from Adrianne Lenker's new album Bright Future, for the first time, I paused the music and immediately called my mother—not to say “I love you” but to hear her voice and remember the gift of connection we hold together even in distance. 

The song, easily Lenker's rawest and intimate yet, rebels against mystery, refusing to be enshrouded by opaqueness. It’s a plainspoken, minimal and articulated collection of reflective vignettes – an archival of 22 years of Lenker's life as she remembers them. She conjures images of braiding willow branches into a crown, trying to build a portal to another world, dreams of flying, a mother and daughter's shared laughter in a hospital, a family coming together to say goodbye to their aging dog. 

Lenker's only muse on Real House is the past, and there are no cryptic metaphors. It's, as she calls it, "an autobiographical, condensed montage of the most pivotal moments in my childhood up until the moment of my dog’s death."

Lenker is also the lead vocalist, guitarist and principal songwriter of the band Big Thief.

If you're in the mood for songs about children's dogs dying, I chose Shannon by Henry Grose on a Sunday long ago.

The Rolling Stones: Paint It Black

This topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic and is one of those Sixties singles where the sitar, played here by Brian Jones, sounds at home.

Etran de L'Aïr: Imouha

Gershom Shahid once explained The Review:

Tishoumaren (known as Desert blues outside of Africa) is a genre that consists of traditional hymns from nomadic Berber tribes infused with Western blues and rock music. 

The genre’s roots are primarily found in the Maghreb (North Africa) and Sub-Saharan regions of Africa, mainly in the countries of Mali, Niger, Libya, Western Sahara, Algeria and Burkina Faso. Although this genre has been around since the mid-20th century, it has recently garnered some international attention.

The band Etran de L'Aïr ("stars of the Aïr") was formed in 1995 by brothers and cousins raised in Abalane in Agadez, Niger, and started off playing for local weddings. They have since found international success playing their brand of desert blues.

Sung in the Tamashek language, Imouha is a track from the band's third album 100% Sahara Guitar, which was released in 2024.

The Joy of Six 1568

Tom Perry links to a review of the duty to report child sexual abuse brought in by the Crime and Policing Act 2026. It finds that because of the way the law is framed, this new duty will have little effect.

Anand Kumar is part of the team writing the next edition of psychiatry's bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. This edition will, for the first time, attempt to draw on findings from neurobiology – a reminder of how little we currently know about the biology of mental health and neurodevelopment.

"In Idaho, parents who say their faith prohibits lifesaving medical care for their children can’t be charged with child neglect or manslaughter. Supporters of this protection over the years have included lawmakers who voiced support for 'traditional' Idaho values." But, as Audrey Dutton shows, between the 1880s through the early 1970s it was illegal for parents in in the state to choose prayer over medical care when a child’s life was at stake."

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite reviews four books on the General Strike of 1926: "The miners said that if some pits really were uneconomic, they should shut. The owners wanted to make all pits profitable again by squeezing the workers. The president of the owners' association freely acknowledged that in mines producing for export, wages would fall to levels that he did not shrink from describing as miserable'."

"Eaton was keen on a different director and format for each film. It meant each had its own reference points. I thought about Chinatown a lot with 1974. The design and costumes were all smoky and brown, like the 70s. The cast went for the material big time. David Morrissey really did his research and Sean Harris is nothing if not method. It’s a very masculine story but we wanted strong female characters too – we had Maxine Peake and Rebecca Hall. I kept the most horrendous violence off-screen. Violence you imagine is much worse than anything you’ll see. Your mind does the work." Michael Hogan talks to people involved in the making of the trilogy of television plays Red Riding.

"Sounds fascinated Joe from an early age. He would build circuit boards and take radios and record players to pieces, even creating his own recording equipment (there’s a tale that he put speakers up trees so that the local cherry pickers could listen to the radio whilst they worked, which is brilliant if true). Signing up for his National Service, he became a Radar Technician which also helped nurture another of his fascinations – outer space." Samantha Veal discovers the mercurial Joe Meek.

Argent: Hold Your Head Up

I loved this when it came out when I was 11, but it now makes me remember seeing The Zombies at Market Harborough Leisure Centre in 2011.

After he had played his keyboard solo on this, Rod Argent was shaking hands with people in the front row of the audience. I do like small venues.

Also in the band that night was Rod Argent's cousin, the late Jim Rodford. He is also playing on this original recording.

Gene Chandler: Duke of Earl

This topped the US singles chart in 1962. Gene Chandler, who sang it, later took to calling himself the Duke of Earl.

I don't know when this suitably aristocratic live performance dates from, but Chandler (who is still with us) was later better known as a producer than a singer.

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"In 2008, I met the Ukrainian diplomat and journalist who would go on to bribe Nathan Gill: Oleh Voloshyn. At the time he was working as press attache at the Ukrainian embassy in Moscow, where I was based as the bureau chief for the Guardian. Voloshyn made no secret of his pro-Kremlin views. He was clever, chatty and spoke impeccable English. He later went back to Kyiv to work for the Putin-backed administration of Ukraine’s president, Viktor Yanukovych." In his new book, Luke Harding joins the dots of a continent-wide Kremlin influence network that was disrupted by the jailing of a former leader of Reform UK Wales.

Josh Gabbatiss, Molly Lempriere and Simon Evans find ten flaws in the new Conservative report on "cheap power": "The report relies on a series of questionable assumptions to claim that gas and nuclear will be cheaper than renewables – including the idea that gas prices will be low and stable."

Caroline Scott meets a few of the thousands of young people who leave the care system each year with no home and little support.

"Trees are planted because they cool streets. Wetlands are protected because they can hold floodwater. Parks are funded because they improve our health. All of those benefits are important. But they can also leave nature looking like a service provider for people. If a tree no longer provides enough shade, or a wetland becomes more valuable as development land, what happens to the argument for protecting it?" Saman Sobhani believes our cities should be designed for wildlife as well as people

Weilong Zhang reports the results of an inadvertent scientific experiment conducted in Britain between 1951 and 1956: "We found that people who experienced longer periods of sugar rationing during their first 1,000 days had a lower incidence of five types of cancer: breast, prostate, liver, rectal and lung cancer."

"Dancing Queen is the absolute summit of the purest pop. It’s almost a tasting menu of the greatest components. Its descending glissando is one of the most exciting moments in music history – you know exactly what it is and instantly beam on hearing it." Ian Wade revisits the brilliance of ABBA.

The Creation: That's How Strong My Love Is

The Creation sound good today and all sorts of prominent musicians cite them as an inspiration, but they failed to make it big in the Sixties.

It's a shit business.

Steeleye Span with Peter Sellers: New York Girls

What was Peter Sellers doing playing the ukulele on a track on Steeleye Span's 1975 album Commoners Crown? 

Maddy Prior explains:

While sitting over lunch we were discussing what we need to sparkle up the track New York Girls. Ukulele would be good someone said. Anyone got one? Anybody know someone who can play one? Peter Sellers plays it says Bob. Pause. Eyes meet, why not? We could ask. He could only say no. 

So we spent another interesting afternoon with a rather diffident Peter Sellers. I don’t think he’d ever been asked to play on a session before and was apprehensive about the whole affair until he realised we were delighted to have him there. He loosened up as time went by and finally finished by adding, unprompted, some Goon voices. We were ecstatic.

Bluebottle writes: I like this game!

X-Ray Spex: Germfree Adolescents

This is wonderfully bleak. So bleak it reminds me of Vanbrugh College snack bar on the original campus at York.

The Coasters: Yakety Yak

Isn't this brilliant? It has everything, from a situation every Fifties American teenager would have been familiar with to an irresistible catch: "Don't talk back." 

Yakety Yak was written and produced by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who were responsible for many great songs, and performed by the Black doo-wop group The Coasters.

According to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame:

The union of a black vocal group with two Jewish songwriters was one of the most propitious in rock history. Leiber and Stoller’s witty, street-smart 'playlets' were sung with sly, clowning humor by the Coasters and accompanied by the hot, honking 'yakety sax' of King Curtis. 

The Coasters parlayed their R&B; roots into rock and roll hits by delivering Leiber and Stoller’s serio-comic tunes in an uptempo doo-wop style. Beneath the humour the songs often made incisive points about American culture for those willing to dig a little deeper.

Leiber has described the Coasters’ style as "a white kid’s view of a black person’s conception of white society." In fact, their success showed how thin was the line between rhythm & blues and rock and roll in the Fifties. 

"Our songs…were R&B; hits that white kids were attracted to," Leiber said in a 1992 interview. "And if people bought it, it became rock and roll."

A blue plaque for Traffic's Jim Capaldi in Marlow

Jim Capaldi, singer, Traffic's drummer and Steve Winwood's longtime writing partner, is now remembered by a heritage plaque on his former home in Marlow.

It was unveiled on Sunday 2 August, which would have been Capaldi's 82nd birthday.

Among the people who gathered to see the plaque unveiled were Capaldi's wife Aninha and their daughters Tabitha and Tallulah, and figures from the world of music including Steve and Muff Winwood and Bob Harris.

The plaque, which  was installed by The Marlow Society, commemorates the home where Jim lived from 1971 until his death in 2005.

Photo from the Jim Capaldi Facebook page.

Buzzcocks: Promises

Steve Diggle, Buzzcocks' guitarist, described the birth of this song in an interview he gave to Malcolm Wyatt:

"Promises was my song, but I left the verses at home! There’s a demo where we’re having a bit of fun and I’m making the verse up as I go along. As I was doing that, Pete was by the mixing desk, so it was just me, John (Maher, drums) and Steve (Garvey, bass). 

“We were working out which songs we had, and Pete [Shelley] said, 'I think I've got some verses for that melody.'

"The difference was that it was going to be a socio-political song about promises made by the Government. I said, 'You’ve turned it into a f***ing love song!'

"Having said that, it worked out well all round. That’s the thing with lots of the songwriting, particularly later on. We complement each other."

Promises, one of a great run of Buzzcocks singles, reached no. 20 in January 1979.

Cliff Richard and the Drifters: Move It

John Lennon once said: "I think the first English record that was anywhere near anything was Move It by Cliff Richard, and before that there'd been nothing."

It takes an American podcast to take Cliff and the Shadows (as they soon became) seriously: We Say Yeah!

Steve Winwood and Viv Stanshall: Boy in Darkness

"I suppose I sort of went underground a little," Steve Winwood once told Classic Rock, looking back on the mid Seventies:

One of his 'underground' activities involved a musical liaison with the eccentric Bonzo Dog man Viv Stanshall. The pair had already co-written Dream Gerrard for Traffic's swansong album and collaborated on Stanshall's solo record Men Opening Umbrellas Ahead. They then concocted a soundtrack for a film version of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, hoping for financial backing. It never arrived.

They did, however, manage to funnel some of its ideas into Sir Henry At Rawlinson End, Stanshall's surreal satire of upper-English mores that was eventually made into a film starring Trevor Howard in the title role.

"Viv was hilarious," Winwood says, laughing. "He always sort of needed a straight man to do the musical things that he was wanting to do. And for a while I became that. We'd go into pubs and people's houses and start off some kind of act. I'd play some music, he'd play a bit on his euphonium, then try to do conjuring tricks."

A track said to be from their Gormenghast project, Boy in Darkness, was included on Dog Howl in Tune, an album put together from the confused archive Viv Stanshall left at his death by his son Rupert.

And then the other day I found this track. It too is called Boy in Darkness and it has much the same time as the Viv Stanshall one, though different words. But here Winwood, who presumably wrote that tune, is playing keyboards and Stanshall the euphonium. The band, the YouTube blurb speculates, may be filled out by Traffic members Rebop Kwaku Baah and Rosko Gee on percussion and bass guitar respectively.

This video was posted there by Berkin Altınok, whose account is filled with Winwood rarities and covers of his songs.