Joy Press

MacColl was a renaissance man of folk music, not as well known as Seeger or Guthrie, but in many ways just as important. Born in Scotland in 1915, MacColl knew and recorded thousands of traditional British and Celtic songs, a generous sampling of which is here offered. His voice can be a bit of a shock–wild and rustic and thick with dialect–but matched with original and traditional material like "Dirty Old Town" (made infamous by the Pogues), "Driver's Song," "Looking for a Job," and "Joy of Living," MacColl's art has vigor and immediacy.

Mercury Rising is a 1998 thriller directed by Harold Becker and starring Bruce Willis, Alex Baldwin and Mike Hughes. The government creates an unbreakable super code, they think. As a totally irresponsible and implausible decision some idiot in the government publishes the code in a magazine as a test. They never though the code could be broken, but a 9 year old boy with autism somehow breaks the code. Some people in the government then sees the boy as a threat to national security and wants to eliminate him. FBI Agent Art Jeffries, played by Bruce Willis, takes on the task of protecting the boy. This was quite a decent movie I thought, even though I felt the whole premise was very unrealistic. The government people are so incredibly stupid and even a boy with autism can’t break an unbreakable code. Besides that, there’s some fun to be had and this was while Bruce Willis still had a name worth checking out. The score is composed by John Barry.

The Early Days contributes to a musical niche with a compilation that serves as a testament to songs that should remain as they soundtracked numerous brilliant nights out.

Five years after the release of their last studio album, legendary UK musical institution, Soft Machine, return with a brand new CD/LP, Other Doors. Boasting new material and two numbers drawn from their extensive historical repertoire, Other Doors finds the band on their usual fiery form.