Country Life UK March 10, 2021

A studio album by Roger Chapman is always an event. Since '66, when the British singer-songwriter emerged as the voice of his generation with the seminal Family band, through every twist of his four-decade solo career, Chappo's output has defied music industry protocol, challenged genre, and held up a mirror to the times. "I've never stopped writing," he reflects, "and with Life In The Pond, I felt the need to hear what I'd put down in music."

There are few artists in country music more highly praised, or influential, as Lefty Frizzell. With a vocal styling often imitated but never matched, he found one of his greater advocates in Merle Haggard though musicians such as Keith Whitley, Johnny Rodriguez and Randy Travis were amongst others who also acknowledged his influence on their work.
The son of an oil field worker, William Orville Frizzell was born in Corsicana, Texas on 31st March 1928 but raised in Dorado, Arkansas when his family moved there shortly after his birth.

As the world plummeted into the COVID-19 pandemic, the four members of Black Stone Cherry were nestled deep in the woods of Kentucky, scrambling to complete their 7th album. There, they could feel the disease closing in as they watched the news daily, and it became apparent the album they were finishing featured lyrics that were eerily prescient. The resulting 13-track record is broadly emotive, and anthemic. It was finished just before the global lockdown was imposed, and it's aptly titled, The Human Condition.

BLK JKS are a seminal force in the South African underground. After an extended hiatus the Johannesburg foursome, championed by The Mars Volta and TV On The Radio (amongst many others), return with a groundbreaking new album.

John Wilson’s fourth volume devoted to music by Eric Coates opens with Music Everywhere, a rousing march that was commissioned by Britain’s first independent TV and radio service, Rediffusion, for use as its signature tune. The concert waltz Footlights is a life-affirming evocation of the glamour of the inter-war West End, created just weeks before the start of the Second World War. In wartime, as it turned out, the demand for refreshing, morale-boosting music would be higher than ever. Coates's ‘Souvenir’ I Sing to You was premièred on 14 March 1940 – the week in which wartime meat rationing was introduced in the UK. Composed for his young son Austin, The Three Bears Phantasy transports the Goldilocks fairytale firmly into the 1920s. From Meadow to Mayfair reflects Coates’s own journey from rural Nottinghamshire to life in London. Under the Stars, composed in 1928, marks the first inclusion by Coates of an alto saxophone in his orchestration. The Four Centuries Suite is one of Coates’s most substantial compositions – not only in length, but also in the size of the orchestra. Its four movements evoke the musical styles of the sevent eenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Dedicated to his wife, Phyllis, the work is also a celebration of the couple’s lifelong love of dancing.

John Wilson’s fourth volume devoted to music by Eric Coates opens with Music Everywhere, a rousing march that was commissioned by Britain’s first independent TV and radio service, Rediffusion, for use as its signature tune. The concert waltz Footlights is a life-affirming evocation of the glamour of the inter-war West End, created just weeks before the start of the Second World War. In wartime, as it turned out, the demand for refreshing, morale-boosting music would be higher than ever. Coates's ‘Souvenir’ I Sing to You was premièred on 14 March 1940 – the week in which wartime meat rationing was introduced in the UK. Composed for his young son Austin, The Three Bears Phantasy transports the Goldilocks fairytale firmly into the 1920s. From Meadow to Mayfair reflects Coates’s own journey from rural Nottinghamshire to life in London. Under the Stars, composed in 1928, marks the first inclusion by Coates of an alto saxophone in his orchestration. The Four Centuries Suite is one of Coates’s most substantial compositions – not only in length, but also in the size of the orchestra. Its four movements evoke the musical styles of the sevent eenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Dedicated to his wife, Phyllis, the work is also a celebration of the couple’s lifelong love of dancing.

Formed in the culturally distinct Tyneside area of England’s North-East in 1968, Lindisfarne blended the mercurial songwriting talent of singer/guitarist Alan Hull with ‘sweet and sour’ harmonies, proud references to their homeland and a boozy, uplifting acoustic-rock swagger that won over the masses in Britain in the early 70s