Who the fudge is Benjamin Judge?

This week, choices from Benin, Oman, Palau, Cameroon, Belize, Marshall Islands, Peru and Turkey were eligible for double points. Ah, M. M for Music, M for Magnificent, M for Marvellous.

So yeah, you might have heard, I do this album recommendation thing at the weekends. People recommend albums, I listen to them, and then (some may say arrogantly, and certainly

OK, so I sort of liked how it went last week. I liked the element of risk involved in choosing between an album you love from the US or the

Hello. I am trying out a new idea this week. Now that quite a lot of people are competing for this reasonably meaningless title (I should sort out some sort

This has been an odd week. For the first time since I started this there were a lot of records that didn’t excite me. I have spent some time this

I was tempted to go with Nightlife, what with New York City Boy being one of the greatest pop songs ever recorded and that, but in the end I decided

There was a time when Kenickie were my favourite band. I had the t-shirt and every part of every single they released. They were bright and funny and true. When

Gulls are notoriously difficult to identify correctly. The plumage of several species changes slowly over the first two or three years of their life. There are numerous closely related species,

Sometimes you can make a big brash argument about how an album changed the way we look at dance music or France or trombones or whatever. Most of the time

What is an album anyway? Is The Great Gatsby a novel or a novella? When does a short film become a film? How small is a miniature? How long is

Put some sunflower hearts in a feeder and sooner or later the goldfinches will turn up. It doesn’t matter where you are. They will find you. Goldfinch (Carduelis carduelis) You

I have a confession to make. I put this category in because I’m nosey. I was a bit late to the streaming party, signing up sometime in 2018, so three

I know that the categories of the last two weeks have been difficult for some of you, but if you want to be crowned The Best Music Recommender in the

Has any animal name in history taken less effort to think up than ‘blackbird’? It is such a lazy designation that it only actually describes half the species. Female blackbirds

I really didn’t think this through, did I? Spend a day listening to music best suited to a broken heart why don’t you? That won’t be a downer at all,

Because Kate Schellenbach was a founding member of the Beastie Boys, and Natural Ingredients was released on Grand Royal, every single interview, review or article with or about Luscious Jackson

The world, eh? It’s a funny old thing. Loads of people all over the place doing stuff. Sometimes they like things, sometimes they don’t. You can’t really predict what they

I decided to mix things up a bit this week, with themes based around the letter H rather than bands beginning with H. I like to keep you on your

I don’t know who is in charge of bird names, exactly. Whoever it is, they recently decided wood pigeon could lose the space. Not everyone is keen on the change.

How many heads did the shogun’s decapitator cut off? If you didn’t immediately answer that question by saying, “he cut off the heads of 131 lords”, in a weird, whispered

something something was always going to be hard to follow Angel Dust with something something something underrated something reputation has improved over the something something etc while less obviously experimental

So, as you may have noticed, I wasn’t well last week. I wasn’t particularly ill. I just had a stinking headache. But I didn’t think it was fair to anyone

Remember in the olden days, when magpies stole your jewellery and decided the sex of your unborn child and got super involved with all the witchcraft that was probably going

Everyone has got one of these. When you are sixteen or so, a band will arrive from nowhere and suddenly be everywhere. Then, record companies will find any band that

So many memories.

Swallows, martins, swifts. The pointy birds. Vladimir Nabokov described them as ‘scissoring’ the sky and it is a beautiful idea, the thought of the birds cutting cleanly through the sky

I don’t think I am being particularly controversial when I say that Lou Reed’s musical output over his fifty-year-ish career was varied in quality. The highs are pretty high, the

The second track on Lost Somewhere Between the Earth and My Home, The Small Song, features the single best vocal performance of the nineties. There. I said it. That power.

I’m the last person who would tell you to F the world but today it was, in one sense at least, unavoidable. Let’s just do it, yeah. Filter Happier –

F me, we’re only on the effing Fs! Fatima Mansions – Viva Dead Ponies (Ireland) Ireland proved incredibly popular this week, but there was only one choice that immediately sprang