See a Problem?

This merely compounded the felony and they received a roasting from the more snobbish elements of the rock press. Which is strange when you consider that the Moody Blues outlaw credentials were rock solid. None of the other members are exactly coy about their influences either.

Despite the critical disapproval, the best of the Moody Blues music between and possessed grace and beauty. Like the Beatles, they understood how pop songs worked as ensemble pieces. None of them were particularly virtuosic or showy as musicians and their music is refreshingly free of the noodling longeurs that characterised the output of their more self-indulgent contemporaries. And, as that Isle of Wight footage shows, unlike the majority of their peers, they could recreate their entire studio sound in live performance, sumptuous vocal harmonies, temperamental Mellotrons and all. Yes, some of their lyrics were trite.

While their lyrics were full of worried philosophising, their sound was as snug as an electric blanket. Their classical motifs are always reassuringly familiar. Everything is built on steady progressions. Nothing ever jars or wanders off into atonality.

Vinyl’s difficult comeback | John Harris

There is dissonance but no abrasion in their music. Those same critics now look increasingly time-warped in their appraisals of psychedelia. To younger ears, approaching this stuff for the first time, there is nothing remotely otherworldly about the vast majority of those west-coast bands who took shedloads of psychedelic drugs at the time. Dig beneath the paisley window dressing and the countercultural rhetoric and most of them sound like the folk bands they previously were and the country rock bands they were destined to become.

That cross-fertilisation of the mainstream and the medicated produced some great acid pop, even if most of those who made it never touched LSD. It led to sitars on Vince Hill records. Nor would they have stopped to consider that many of the critically approved psychedelic pop singles of the late 60s were made by long-serving Tin Pan Alley arrangers and session musicians.

Nirvana, for example, who made the wonderful Rainbow Chaser , had much of their carefully crafted material scored by production-line stalwarts such as Syd Dale and Johnny Scott.


  • Das große deutsche Märchenbuch (German Edition).
  • Sex, drugs and Jimi Hendrix: my life in festivals.
  • Bonhoeffer: A Screenplay!
  • Flugverbot (German Edition);
  • Armut in Deutschland: Eine kritische Bestandsaufnahme (German Edition).
  • The Moody Blues – psychedelia’s forgotten heroes;
  • Get A Copy?

The Bee Gees, another deeply unfashionable band with the rock cognoscenti, also made some wonderfully ersatz acid-pop in the late 60s. On another occasion, at a showbiz party, someone passed him a joint and he declined, saying: One day, I really must get round to suing the author for all my osteopath bills. Before that, The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis made me snort, shudder and chortle with embarrassed glee.

'I fell out of bed laughing': writers on their favourite funny book

I have never been able to tune in to Lord Emsworth , but the Jeeves-Wooster relationship has a tensely comic energy. A few years ago, I heard Terry Wogan read the famous Gussie Fink-Nottle prize-giving speech to a large audience at the Cheltenham festival. They say you could hear the laughter in Birmingham. Its graphic style and dark undertow seemed far more European than most anglophone books. It is Canadian, though, and for my money the funniest book ever written, and here is why: And if you know any children at all, you will be reading it a lot.

It is funny in whatever language you read it 22 and counting and to almost every child in the world. But there are times, and surely the present is one of them, when to do so is manifestly unnecessary. Chosen by Marina Lewycka. The worse the world gets, the more we need to laugh.

'I fell out of bed laughing': writers on their favourite funny book | Books | The Guardian

But my all-time favourite is What a Carve Up! The Radio 4 adaptation of the book was written by none other than David Nobbs. This is not a book to be read in public. It should be enjoyed in private, where you can laugh, scream and dribble at your pleasure, without fear of being arrested. It is funny and touching, and his accounts of trying to learn French will leave you spitting up the windows.

This is a book so funny it will make you feel alive. Chosen by Lissa Evans. In , Betty MacDonald, a divorcee living in Seattle, contracted tuberculosis. In , after the enormous success of her first book, The Egg and I — about living on a chicken farm — she wrote a second, entitled The Plague and I , about her experiences in a sanatorium. So, my panacea for 40 years has been a funny book about chronic illness.

Navigation menu

Fingers crossed it keeps working …. Chosen by Ian Martin.


  1. Abertura e Toccata - Trombone;
  2. Auf Mallorca liebt sichs besser (German Edition)?
  3. Leading Teams: Tools and Techniques for Successful Team Leadership from the Sports World.
  4. Austyns Awesome Zombie Dirt Bike Race?
  5. Human Factors in Traffic Safety, Second Edition;
  6. Get Into Business With Germany.
  7. Both were madly futuristic. At Swim-Two-Birds , his masterpiece, has characters conspiring against their author, erupting into the baffled real world as if in some weird Charlie Kaufman movie. The Third Policeman , with its proposition that people and their bicycles are exchanging molecules, one slowly becoming the other, now feels like something the mainstream media might be hiding from conspiracy theorists.

    The Brother, a monstrous chancer; Keats and Chapman, literary dandies with a weakness for puns; and the Plain People of Ireland, a sort of unreliable chorus.

    Similar authors to follow

    This book is a masterclass in how to defy a boring world with mischief. Chosen by Charlotte Mendelson. Novels rarely make me laugh.

    Strangers giggling give me the giggles. Yet almost all contemporary fiction leaves me straight-faced. There have been highlights: But nothing comes close to the salvation of my teenage years, the epitome of Englishness: Cricket, sentimental villagey poshness, chorus girls, spats: Order by newest oldest recommendations. Show 25 25 50 All.