Steve Litchfield

It's not just 1970s bands that I try to get my head around who did what and when - in this case Erin Bennett is very much a live and going concern, along with her band EBB. But there's history here to be documented in one of my 'famous' chronologies - existing mini-bios of Erin are brief and omit a full context. So I'll try and rectify that here. Who is Erin Bennett and who are EBB (née the Erin Bennett Band - gettit!)? She's a singer/songwriter, and, first Syren, then EBB, produce heartfelt pop through pop-rock and into full on progressive rock. All with genuine emotion, terrific lyrics, and thoughtful arrangement. And special mention to her backing band, especially the original drummer Jo Henley (RIP) and replacement (since 2014) Anna Fraser, with Erin's songs being given genuinely intelligent driving rhythms by two virtuosos on the kit. So to the chronology, right up to date, since EBB (as a band) are still relatively new to the scene and are expanding t...

[Yes, yes, a little self indulgent, but I was musing on such a list recently and thought 'Why not do it properly and do it in a blog post?'] I was chatting to my daughter and talking about the 'old days' when we used to make 'mix tapes' on cassette, painstakingly copying on tracks from other tapes or LPs to create curated compilations. She paused for a brief moment and then said 'you mean like a playlist?'(!) Ah. So yes, turns out the mix tape is redundant in 2023, but the idea of picking 10 (or 15, as has ended up here!) favourite tracks from a band, an artist, an era, or a genre, and then theoretically putting them into a playlist is a good idea still. Not least because it filters out a lot of the rubbish that every artist inserts. Because none are perfect and all are guilty of putting in 'filler' songs, let's face it. The better artists or bands have less filler, but it's still there, and therefore warrants a retrospective curation. In...