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Festive 50:
Continuing a Christmas tradition started by the late broadcaster John Peel in 1976, an assortment of our DJs count down through the best 50 tracks from 2010, as voted for by listeners to Dandelion Radio. Mark Cunliffe, Paul Ackroyd, Matt Gunn, Ste, Rocker, Mark Whitby, Pete Jackson, and Andy take it in turns to reveal the chart in reverse order, with Rachael Neiman announcing this year's winner!
To try to keep the suspense in the countdown, the track info is not shown until a few seconds before each song finishes. The show is repeated every day (at different times) until the end of January so if you join in somewhere in the middle, do come back and hear the rest.

Andrew Morrison:
Andy's 3-hour January show features his favourite tracks and acts from the last twelve months, with another chance to hear some of the very best session recordings from his shows in 2010 – including Ghost Society, Errors, Cygnus X-1, Spiral Into The Storm, The Horn The Hunt, Block 45, SWATHES and Red Cosmos. …

Festive 50:
Continuing a Christmas tradition started by the late broadcaster John Peel in 1976, an assortment of our DJs will be counting down through the best 50 tracks from 2010, as voted for by listeners to Dandelion Radio, with Rachael Neiman announcing this year's winner!
The show will broadcast daily (at different times) from Christmas Day until the end of January.

Festive Fifty Build Up Show:
Join a selection of Dandelion Radio DJs on Christmas Eve for this one-off, Festive Fifty Build-Up show. DJs will introduce some of their picks of 2010 that didn't make it into this year's listeners' poll, while warming up for the first play of 2010's results at midnight on Christmas morning.

Andrew Morrison:
Andy has a very special 3-hour show with three guests to round off the year: a spoken word session from The Orch; a second session for the show from Raw Milk (featuring two extraordinary cover versions); and an exclusive mix of material by High Frequency Bandwidth, the new project by Alex Patterson from The Orb and Dom Beken. …

Nick Cave's Jukebox again
Another CD set of songs which have inspired Nick Cave over the years is going on the market. This is the third this year and the fifth overall. The first two were Original Seeds way back in 1998 and the follow up Original Seeds, Volume 2 in 2004. I would rate the first Original Seeds very highly just because there was nothing like it before but now that is very different.

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Original Seeds - Track listing:
1. Tim Rose - Long Time Man
2. Gene Vincent & His Blue Caps - Cat Man
3. Leonard Cohen - Avalanche
4. Karen Dalton - Katie Cruel
5. The Sensational Alex Harvey Band - Hammer Song
6. Tom Jones - Weeping Annaleah
7. The Loved Ones - Sad Dark Eyes
8. Scott Walker - The Big Hurt
9. John Lee Hooker - Tupelo Blues
10. Lefty Frizzell - The Long Black Veil
11. Johnny Cash - The Folk Singer
12. Odetta - Another Man Done Gone
…

A bit of a work in progress - if I can think of more examples of traditional folk songs making it big when redone in the style of rock, then I'll add them as I think of them.

The House of the Rising Sun as done by The Animals in 1964
This American folk ballad has been covered numerous times, but the version by the Animals received the most commercial success. This version - which made number one in both the US and the UK - is considered to be the quite revolutionary as the "first folk rock" song. The Animals first heard the song as done by a singer named Johnny Handle and recorded it in one take. Despite rumors to the contrary, the Bob Dylan version was not inspired by the Animals version, as Dylan had recorded this song in 1961. The song had in fact been recorded dozens of times before Dylan and perhaps owes its preservation to Alan Lomax. Lomax, who was a curator for the Archive of American Folk Song for the Library of Congress…

Sat 29 Mar – Shirley Collins

Shirley Collins’s book America Over The Water recounts her time travelling through the southern states of the US with Alan Lomax in the late ‘50s making field recordings of local musicians. It’s a fascinating book but the show – basically an illustrated lecture, though way more exciting than that sounds – really brings it to life. The show is a celebration of Lomax and, crucially, of the great singers and musicians he encountered – admittedly not people I knew well previously but I’ll be seeking out Texas Gladden, Mississippi Fred McDowell and the rest in the coming weeks. The fact that I’m able to do so is thanks almost entirely to Lomax’s (and Shirley’s) diligence, capturing their music on a prototype portable tape recorder (one of only two in the world at the time). The old recordings sounded fantastic through the Purcell Room sound system, the photos of the South in the ‘50s were eerie and humbling and some of the more animated characters – the…

WOW! Moby is making real dance music again with his new track Disco Lies! He's not singing!(only whispering) Nor is he raiding Alan Lomaxes library for samples!

(well i guess New York, New York with Debbie Harry was the true beginning)

And its good! Not earth shattering, but a good solid tune. Welcome back Moby!
http://youtube.com/watch?v=MwyPI-zKqRs

I had a great time discovering and listening to music in 2007. An excellent crop of new records were released in the past twelve months, and with the guidance of so many new information sources -- music blogs, editorially-heavy web merchants like emusic and boomkat.com, and especially my valued friends on last.fm -- I was inundated with new material all year long.

Here's my list of the records that provided the greatest listening thrills in 2007:

1.Andrew Bird - Armchair Apocrypha

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After much anticipation, I was immediately impressed by this record when it arrived last March. Although the opening five-track sequence of its predecessor Andrew Bird & the Mysterious Production of Eggs was simply impossible to outshine, this record struck me as more consistently great from start to finish, with so many splendid sonic flourishes and fantastic songs. There are so many textural and melodic details in the music (filled by Bird's trademark fiddle…