Mark Pentleton

As I’m at the Scottish Learning Festival today and tomorrow I was planning ahead a bit yesterday and recorded Autumn Leaves in advance of today. Looking out the window this morning I think September in the Rain may have made more sense… Autumn Leaves, or rather the French original Les Feuilles Mortes dates from 1945. [...]

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When I said that I was playing this song today my wife reminded me of the line in The Fabulous Baker Boys when Michelle Pfeiffer asks “does anybody really need to hear Feelings again in their lifetime?” However it was one of the songs which was regularly requested in the various restaurants and hotels I [...]

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It’s time for something a bit special on my 365songs project today: my friend and colleague Pierre Benoît Hériaud was over at the weekend and we decided to record a song we performed live a few years back at the Partners in Excellence Film Festival. It’s Francis Cabrel’s La Corrida, a very powerful song told [...]

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It wasn’t until I listened to the evening news on the radio in the car last night that I realised the significance of yesterday’s date. For many years my Italian grandmother would reminisce about the sad events which happened on 10th June 1940 when Churchill infamously gave the order, “Collar the lot!”, referring to Germans [...]

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This song was originally composed in 1953 as ¿Quién será? (Who will it be?) by the Mexican composer and bandleader Pablo Beltrán Ruiz. An English-language version was released in 1954 by Dean Martin and since then it’s been covered by hundreds of artists, perhaps most famously by Michael Bublé in 2003. I hope you enjoy [...]

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Written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David in 1967 originally for Dionne Warwick, this is one of those songs which has the musical equivalent of a few imperfect subjunctives! There is a bar of 10/4 in the verse, and the chorus is in 11/4 (2 bars of 4/4 and a bar of 3/4). It was [...]

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Today’s song is Fragile by Sting from the 1987 album …Nothing like the sun. It was also recorded in Spanish and Portuguese and was dedicated to Ben Linder, an American civil engineer who was killed by the Contras while he was working on a hydroelectric project in Nicaragua in 1987.
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