What was No.1 on the day you were born?

Here is something to pass away a few minutes of your time, find out what was number one in the UK and US on your birthday.

I'm sure you are itching to know what mine was so...

On January 24th of 1979 the number ones were:

UK
Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick - Ian Dury & The Blockheads

US
Too Much Heaven - The Bee Gees

I think I will stick with the UK one there.

Find out yours here...

More Magical Numbers?

The Magic Numbers look to serve up some more magic...

The Magic Numbers | Those the Brokes

The Magic Numbers return with their follow-up to the critically acclaimed self titled debut. Whilst there are signs the band has become a tighter more polished outfit the breezy surfy Beach Boys meets Mamas and Papas sound is still there. For fans of the first album this will be a good thing for what follows is in essence more of the same.

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Are Q 'avin a laugh?

The recent Q awards revealed a list of awards that all appeared to be much for the same thing, artists who did well in the past... The Q award of awards is a particularly good example. There is a mix of genres there admittedly but its all pop at the end of the day. Apparently there were some awards for current artists but these seem to have been mislaid in no less than 13 of these "achievement" awards...

THE Q INSPIRATION AWARD
A-Ha

THE Q OUTSTANDING CONTRIBUTION TO MUSIC AWARD
Smokey Robinson

THE Q GROUNDBREAKER AWARD
Primal Scream

THE Q ICON AWARD
Jeff Lynne

THE Q IDOL AWARD
Take That

THE Q OUTSTANDING PERFORMANCE AWARD
Faithless

THE Q CLASSIC SONGWRITER AWARD
Noel Gallagher

THE Q LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
Peter Garbriel

THE Q MERIT AWARD
Manic Street Preachers

THE Q INNOVATION IN SOUND AWARD
The Edge

THE Q CLASSIC SONG AWARD
Culture Club for Karma Chameleon

THE Q LEGEND AWARD
The Who

THE Q AWARD OF AWARDS
U2

Seems whoever turned up won an award, well done. Glad to see that this wasn't just an industry back patting exercise.

Q Awards Website

Digital Rights Management (DRM) and its place in the music chain

You cannot understand or fully appreciate 'digital rights management' without considering at least two musical recording formats before the digital music format MP3.

With a series of frank admissions its relatively simple to rack up a slew of copyright infringement offences. Your twelve years old and your Sony Ghetto blaster has a twin tape deck..It came factory shipped with the ability to copy from one deck to another. Yet each Our Price (remember them) bought cassette came with a 'copying is a crime' disclaimer. That in tandem with my penchant for spending my evenings sitting & listening for the song I liked to be played on the radio so I could record it on blank cassette. Only to have the nauseating Dj jabber over the end of track..

Move on from that and CD to cassette copying was the next method of collating free music.With some strategically placed cello tape borrowing albums from friends or ahem the town library, it was high times..

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The love lives on in Arthurs memory

Arthur Lee, singer and songwriter of influential 1960s band Love, has died aged 61. He passed away in Memphis following a battle with acute myeloid leukaemia.

Love were one of the most accomplished west-coast bands of the 1960s, with their 1967 album Forever Changes influencing successive generations of musicians. It regularly appears in ‘all-time album’ polls, with US magazine Rolling Stone listing it as number 40 in its top 500. Their music encompassed blues, jazz, hard rock and Byrds-style folk-rock, embellished with strings and mariachi brass on tracks like Alone Again Or. Together with Lee’s striking lyrical imagery and social comment, this made Love one of the most critically acclaimed – but undersold – acts of the era. Sadly, much of Lee’s work thereafter failed to match Love’s first three albums. After various line-up changes and reunions, Love finally ended in the mid-70s.

In 1996, Lee was arrested for shooting a gun into the air during an argument with a neighbour and convicted on an illegal possession of a firearm charge. On release from prison in 2001, Lee assembled a new line-up of Love and toured Europe and North America, often playing Forever Changes in its entirety.

In early 2006, Lee was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia. He underwent a bone marrow transplant using stem cells from an umbilical chord. A series of benefit concerts took place in Britain and the United States to raise funds for Lee’s medical expenses, including one organised by ex-Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant.

Lee and Love’s music still lives on, and has influenced bands as diverse as the Doors, the Damned, the Stranglers, Echo and the Bunnymen, the Teardrop Explodes, Belle and Sebastian, the Verve, the White Stripes and the Coral.