mostly david ephgrave

I have this performance of The Beach Boys song Lady Lynda on regular rotation when I listen to music on getting ready in the mornings and seldom skip it. It's made all the better for the fact it was recorded at Knebworth Park - approximately six miles down the road from where I live (cue all those assassins trying to track me down to a less than ten-mile radius) - in 1980, less than a year before I was born, so if my family had lived in the house I grew up in by then, they could have potentially heard it from our window. I wish I could have been there myself, though if the gig was anything like Oasis' show there in 1996, it would have taken us a surprisingly long time to get home afterwards, despite the convenient location. When I went to see Brian Wilson perform Pet Sounds in Edinburgh last summer, he happened to have Al Jardine (who sung and co-wrote this) in the band, which was an added treat, and while he didn't sing my favourite of his Beach Boys songs at the gig, ...

Over the past week or two, I’ve been on a bit of a Sheryl Crow kick, largely thanks to rediscovering her cover of one of my most-liked Bob Dylan songs. She has one of my favourite female voices, yet despite this, I only own one CD and that’s just a single (her '97 release ‘Hard to Make a Stand’); on that basis, you can only imagine how much of her back catalogue I’d own if I hated her (it would fall into minus-figures). Dylan, conversely, takes up more of my collection than anyone else, save The Beatles and Paul McCartney’s solo work. He’s one of those artists who, when you get him, you really get him - and once I’d tuned into his style as a student, I'd time and again be blown away by his lyrics; he’ll have more jaw-dropping imagery in one track than other people fit in a whole career. These days, I mostly listen to music in the morning when getting ready, and more often than not, this will consist of a suggested YouTube playlist when I’m in the bath, r...

Where would I be without YouTube’s lyrical assistance? If the video-sharing behemoth didn't exist, I would never have worked out how many yeahs there are before my favourite Sam Cooke song ‘Bring it On Home to Me’ fades out - and I need this information to survive. I’m too apathetic to count them myself. That said, you should never trust the internet when it comes to music. It always lies. The most frustrating byproduct of being an actor / musician is having to score out instrumental parts by ear. Listening to song after song in two-second bursts while you pick out a figure that’s buried in the mix is one of the most tedious and brain-exhausting jobs on the planet. It makes you despise music. Every so often, against your better judgement, you’ll look to online tab or sheet music for a shortcut. It’s never accurate. Lyric sites aren’t any better. They’re the World Wide Web’s equivalent to a game of Chinese Whispers; maintained by people with tiny earholes and a...