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Minnie the Moocher Moondog Pluto Freddie Mercury Sun Ra Kevin Spacey

Moose the Mooche Colin Stagg Ruby My Deer

Goody Two Shoes Winston Sweet King Pleasure

Inspector Morse Chief Inspector Teal Blakey Melinda Messenger Emily Post Alpha Male

Chu Berry Bobby Shew Inspector Jack Slipper of the Yard

A lot of jazz parlance suggests "content". Consider "jazz messengers", "tellin' it like it is", "hear me talkin' to ya" and "preachin'".

Walter Page Frank Butler Junior Cook

Freddie Green John Ireland Erin Brokovich

The Mad Hatter Alice Coltrane The White Rabbit

Thanks for the tip! Just watched this and they were at the top of their form. (The amateurish TV camerawork didn't matter.)

D K Dyson Sooty and Sweep Dusty Springfield

Half Man Half Biscuit Cracker The Munchkins

I just can't see any virtue in pops and scratches!

In literature style and content are inextricably linked and I guess it's the same in music, except we're rarely explicit about content in music. The exceptions are pieces which are purposely descriptive - a jazz example would be Tadd Dameron's Fountainbleau, where the music depicts the swans bobbing on the lake, etc. People who are close to a type of music are usually unaware of its "content" - a lot of pop music is about teenage angst to my ears, but its fans wouldn't be aware of that. To turn again to jazz, a guy once told me he liked jazz and named Johnny Dankworth and Cleo Laine, but when he heard me playing a Cannonball and Coltrane disc (Cannonball Adderley Quintet in Chicago), he said "I don't like this neurotic stuff". This was a "content" I hadn't been aware of; if I'd never heard music like that before, I might have heard that in it.

I saw the film on its release, so my memories of it are pretty vague now, but as I read I keep visualising the narrator as a Michael Caine character, so it's one of those books on which the subsequent film version has left an indelible mark. I feel much the same about Le Carré's George Smiley novels and the subsequent BBC TV versions with Alec Guinness, both of which I've recently read/watched.

Arthur Dent Gnasher Simon Pegg

I had a copy of it on its release. Amazing how something once seen as "alternative" and quite beyond the pale for polite culture has now become 100% establishment and thereby totally defused.

Good idea! This year I've read The Adventures of SH, The Memoirs of SH, The Return of SH and A Study in Scarlet and I have just borrowed The Casebook of SH from my local library.

Henry Boozier Boosey and Hawkes Wallace Beery

David Lean Skinnay Ennis John of Gaunt

Just finished re-reading a 1972 novel by Margaret Atwood, Surfacing. Interesting to note its environmental concerns echoed in her latest book, The Year of the Flood. Now back to spy fiction again. Now re-reading Len Deighton's The Ipcress File.

"Bob Brookmeyer and Some of His Friends" on Night Lights from WFIU

Al Percy Jimmy Heathcliff Clifford Jordan Katie Price

Burt Weedon Billy Root Little Rootie Tootie

Cecil Sharp Edmund Kean Emily Blunt