Tonight is the first night of The Proms 2026. Copland, Gershwin and Ravel launch this season. 

Tomorrow night it's the turn of composers Emerson, Anderson, Banks, Hayward, Hammill, Oldfield, Zappa and Wright: in a Special Prog Rock Prom titled 'A Fanfare for the Common Man'. See the full programme here. 

Many of the featured compositions have been Friday Star Tracks, so it's a popular selection performed by an orchestra and a band comprising of Carl Palmer and Peter Hammill along with Guy Garvey, Jane Weaver and Gruff Rhys. I'm sure you'll know most of the songs included. 

To following the evening's title I've picked today Emerson, Lake & Palmer's version of 'Fanfare for the Common Man'. This is a shorten edit from the 9 minute original, which was the *Aaron Copland composition at the start and end with a 6 minute middle section added by Keith Emerson. Filmed at the Olympic Stadium in Montreal. 

NB: This Prog Prom is scheduled for TV broadcast next Friday, 24th July on BBC4 and will be available on the iplayer from then.

One song in the programme I was not familiar with was 'Refugees' by Van der Graaf Generator, so I gave this poignant piece a listen and recommend you do too: (link here) - interesting video also. 

*The 1942 original 3 minute classical piece is basically all 'Fanfare'. Here's a video with some fantastic images - fyi (click on)  

  

World Cup 2026, with an introduction last Wednesday, (scroll down) takes another musical break today.

Aside from the cameras constantly picking out people in the crowd you don't recognise it's been the 'Hydration' breaks that have caused as many talking points as VAR decisions.   

Commercial / Coaching / Music / booing breaks call them what you will they have become a pause of annoyance. And apparently the best way to stop the crowd booing is to get them to start singing, with American stadium DJs quick to get the music playing. 

So you have probably heard ‘Don’t Stop Believing’ by Journey and other singalong tunes by John Denver and The Killers and no doubt this track by Bon Jovi.

Though not in anyway about football, I can see why it was chosen, with lyrics like: 

"hold on to what we've got"
"We'll give it a shot"

And "we're halfway there" - all rallying cries of encouragement to take back on to the field of play.
All together - 'Livin' On A Prayer'

 

WORLD CUP 2026

As the Football World Cup progresses to the Quarter-Final stage, time for a breather and some musical reflection. 'Life is a Highway' is the song used for the excellent ITV introduction titles. The lyrics 'All night long', have in some cases been quite literally that ! (from a watching perspective)...

The song is from the movie ‘Cars’ and is played by the American Country Music band Rascal Flatts. The original composition, from 1991 is by Canadian Tom Cochrane. Here's the full track FYI - click link

  

A I (as in Artificial Intelligence):

Plenty of discussion this week about this. A recent newspaper article spoke about various Apps that allow you to easily create your own songs, along with this quote "As an artist I'm a bit frightened - these songs sound really good".  

A friend had made such a song for their husband's birthday, With personalised lyrics and a catchy tune which was extremely good. Then my wife using Suno: a generative artificial intelligence music creation platform, made a song for me: 'My Favourite Partner in Crime'😃*

Then a few days ago I read about the streaming platform: Tidal, that had updated its policies with regard to AI and that music generated by the technology will no longer be monetised on the platform !

And this brings me to music I heard on a YouTube channel under the banner 'Crossroads Records'. There's literally dozens of videos all very similar in structure. It even has a menu guide by listing featured instrumentation:- Reverb-Heavy Electric Slide Guitar - "Train-Whistle" Harmonica (Call and Response) - Deep Hammond B3 Organ & Minor-Key Piano - Slow-Drag Brush Drum Rhythm. 

See what you make of today's track ‘The Last Train from Memphis’ with guitar playing [like Gary Moore] and soulful singing, however no mention at all of artists names playing these instruments. So I'm pretty sure it's AI. 

Is it therefore about enjoying the sound of the music or the ethics of it's origin ? How do you feel ?

* A Link to this song is available upon request. Just ask. 

NB: SUNO Inc. has been sued by the Recording Industry Association of America for copyright infringement, and thousands of musicians have signed a letter demanding that the company cease using copyrighted music in their training data. Suno does not disclose the dataset used to train its artificial intelligence.