Between 2022 and 2024, Róisín McCarney released several excellent singles. Whether covering other artists in her own image (turning the Spice Girls’ classic ‘Wannabe’ into a swaggering, rock-pop statement that ends up sounding more like something from Sheryl Crow crossed with Shania Twain), or sharing her own voice on newly written songs, the Scottish singer set herself in place as one to watch. Her contribution to DJ Aaron Kennedy’s single ‘All Night’ proved that her voice was also well equipped to handle dance oriented material, and by the time she appeared as a contender on the BBC’s Saturday night TV show ‘The Voice’ – applying her talents to Blondie’s classic ‘Call Me’ – it seemed as if there wasn’t anything that she couldn’t sing with aplomb.
Author Archives: Real Gone
SAM ROBBINS – So Much I Still Don’t See
From the moment the intro of ‘Piles of Sand’ by Sam Robbins shares a perfect finger picked, acoustic melody, there’s a sense of the artist drawing his audience into something special. As the guitar melody grows with Sam adding a few broader strokes, the opening number from his 2025 album ‘So Much I Still Don’t See’ takes on an amazing folk-pop stance, but it’s with the arrival of a hushed vocal, those very positive first impressions are very much confirmed. The narrative track is perfect for Sam’s voice as he quietly cries through a lyric that reflects on the old adage about how small problems become larger if taken out of context, and how time passes, “empires fall”, but a little self-belief can keep us trucking. Throughout these perfectly formed four minutes, the performer takes the greatest influences from 90s acoustic sounds and even further back, with hints of Bruce Cockburn, James Taylor, and even a pinch of Gordon Lightfoot, blending them into something that’s very much his own. There’s a real purity to this performance. The music is superb, but every vocal note here has an even bigger emotive pull that’s almost impossible to resist.
PEARL HANDLED REVOLVER – Tales You Lose
In 2016, British rock band Pearl Handled Revolver released ‘If The Devil Casts His Net’, an excellent album of dark rock tunes taking in influence from The Doors, with a swathe of riffs from Queens of The Stone Age and a pinch of early Deep Purple. They’d released material prior to this, but this record is where their brand of retro rock really came into its own. Over the course of the years that followed, the band played a huge number of gigs – even appearing on the bill for the A New Day Festival in 2023 as support for Caravan, Ozric Tentacles and System 7 (the electronica duo featuring the legendary Steve Hillage and Miquette Giraudy) – and released a couple more albums.
THE REAL GONE SINGLES BAR #100
Welcome back to the Real Gone Singles Bar, the place where we explore some of the individual tracks that have dropped into our inbox over the past few weeks. This time out, there’s another single from a now familiar electronica act, a quirky piece of hard edged dance-pop, a great track from a much-loved rock band, a smart cover tune, and more besides. There’s even something that doesn’t quite work, but has been included as a point of interest. As always, we hope you find something new to enjoy…
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VARIOUS ARTISTS – Get Ready For The Countdown: Mod, Brit Soul, R&B & Freakbeat Nuggets
When Cherry Red Records launched their Strawberry Records subsidiary in 2020, they knew they’d need something impressive to kick start what would technically be a successor to the excellent RPM label. Their inaugural release ‘Halcyon Days’ tapped into an accessible selection of mod and soul cuts, very much in the spirit of RPM’s ‘Looking Back’ series. Needless to say, fans of the style – and of that series of RPM box sets – were thrilled with the result. A second box of mod and soul cuts from Strawberry – 2021’s ‘I Love To See You Strut’ – was pretty much as solid, and at other times, the label’s well curated products – box sets celebrating “the music of Black Britain”, 60s and 70s club soul classics, and even dipping their toes into the world of psychedelic folk (normally the remit of sister label, Grapefruit) – have also been considered very welcome fare.