Monday, January the 31th, 2005

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Poppy Nisbet's Music Tips

Mrs Gubbins is frantically busy with her new magazine about velcro, dubbin and crayons* (see 26th January), so we asked Poppy Nisbet to come up with a recommended website for you to visit when you have exhausted the heady, exotic pleasures of Hooting Yard. Here's Poppy:

Hello readers. There's nothing I like better than to clamp my iPod to my head and listen to exciting music. Being a woman of rectitude, I never download anything illegally, so my recommendation today comes with a stern injunction to purchase the delightful compact disc from which the sample tracks are taken. I just know you're going to adore it. My own reaction on hearing these songs was a combination of glee and awe.

I speak of that unique musician Bob Drake, whose new record, The Shunned Country, is packed with no less than fifty-two songs. Go and download eight of them, sit back, and listen carefully. You too, I have no doubt, will be as thrilled as I was. While you're listening, if you can bear to stay away from Hooting Yard for a while, it will be worth your while to roam around Bob's site, which contains many, many delights.

*NOTE : Mrs Gubbins has just sent—by pneumatic packet—a note to say that she has expanded the purview of her new publication. In addition to velcro, dubbin and crayons, her Daily Digest will also cover string, grease, bellows, plasma gas, methods of divination, parcels, The Love Boat, different types of paste, hints on horticulture, the life-cycle of bumblebees, Spring-heeled Jack, grizzly bears, cotton, Cotton Mather, shampoo recipes, tungsten railings, poop deck etiquette, the Lindbergh Kidnapping Hoax, towels, blizzards, cocoa, genuflection, hatred, floppy things, irked Klondike gold prospectors, the legend of Anaxagrotax, ink, bales, crumpled things, the Burgomeisters of Calais, dots on a transparent plane, geese, why Jif is now called Cif, mordant pelicans, drums in the night, the contents of the stomach of an ostrich, the recording of Disraeli Gears by Cream, turquoise jewellery, goldfinches, starlings, the collected writings of Elkan Allan, taverns in Didcot, maps of Sumatra, tonsured friars, food poisoning, wooden kettles, Toc H lamps, pulverized lumps of basalt, wimples and snoods, Daktari, voodoo, jam, kale, strabismus, Molotov cocktails and the true meaning of the pendant worn by Christopher Plummer on his wedding day.