Who the fudge is Benjamin Judge?

This week I wanted albums by bands or artists beginning with P or, for triple points, Q. Have you ever seen Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory? Of course you

Perhaps out of politeness, most people refer to carrion crows as crows. It seems a little discourteous, I guess, to bring up the whole ‘messing around on corpses’ thing in

TLast week was the first time the top of the leaderboard didn’t change hands. In fact, the top five was unchanged. Is that it then? Are there no more surprises?

Few people know that House Martins are named after that time in Doc Martin when Dr Martin Ellingham (played, of course, by the brilliant Martin Clunes) temporarily moved out of

This week’s double points countries were Bulgaria, Cape Verde, Iran, Burundi, Guatemala, Ecuador, Kiribati and Poland. Let’s be honest; you can’t rank music. You can make broad distinctions, sure. I’m

Quite common, your chaffinch. It shouldn’t present you with a whole lot of trouble. Chaffinch (Fringilla coelebs) You know what a chaffinch look like? Yeah? Well, chaffinches look like that.

Each spring there is a little flurry of ‘first swift of the year’ mentions on twitter as these magnificent birds make their way up the country. I’m telling you, arty

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

Not everyone has a window that looks over a river or an ornamental duck pond or a pristine Buckinghamshire boating lake, so why am I pretending that you can see

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

Second only to ‘what? the feathered variety?’ in the small catalogue of tired jokes about birds and bird watching, the great tit provides huge potential for hilarious top bantz between

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

The Cocteau Twins are one of those bands that people get really serious about. It isn’t enough to just like them, you have to have a favourite album and reasons

I’m not sure I need to justify this one. I know you like it. Everyone likes it. Even your mum likes it. It’s just good songs, innit.

You know pigeons. Dirty grey gluttons with gammy feet and missing toes, lumbering toward cigarette butts and Wotsits with equal relish. Dead-eyed park bench botherers. Statue-liming vectors of pestilence. Sentient

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