Music & Musicians Archives - The Oxford Astrologer

Category: Music & Musicians

Pop stars, great composers, intense compositions, music is the playground of the planets.

Cycling through the air, straight-backed and determined, Miss Gulch transforms into a witch on a broomstick at the start of The Wizard of Oz. It’s terrifying and fabulous. Margaret Hamilton, who played the Wicked Witch of the West in the 1939 classic, owned the part fully, becoming a [...]

Astrology Talk Investigate: The Glastonbury Festival

The Glastonbury Festival, the pop music extravaganza held in bucolic south-west England every June is now part of the established summer season, along with the Proms, Glyndebourne and Henley Regatta. It started off as Pilton Festival on Michael Eavis’ farm just outside Glastonbury, [...]

Mars in Gemini — in His Own Words

Mars, the planet of pepper and passion, is in the sign of Gemini for a very long time (20 August 2022 – 23 March 2023). The warrior is unbuckling her sword, laying down her shield and lying down by the campfire to trade stories for a long stretch too. In short the red planet is [...]

Kate Bush’s Surge

Kate Bush, visionary song-writer and performer, is being rediscovered by a whole new generation, thanks to the inclusion of her song Running Up That Hill in the TV series Stranger Things. For a person born with a Uranus-Sun conjunction in Leo, of course, nothing is strange, and anything can be [...]

Adele’s Saturn

One thing’s certain about the singer Adele: she likes Saturn. At her one-night only special in Los Angeles the other day, she sported ginormous, dangly Saturn earrings, flashed a tattoo of the ringed planet on her right forearm, and was otherwise clad in black head to foot — [...]

Singer and dancer Britney Spears is 39 years old, and, until recently, and has has a busy work schedule as super pop diva. But she is enslaved by a so-called legal conservatorship that was set up when she was having a nervous breakdown 13 years ago. Spears had the kind of melt-down that [...]

Harry Styles: Beloved by Venus

She lives in daydreams with me She’s the first one that I see And I don’t know why I don’t know who she is … ” — She Talented, graceful Aquarian Harry Styles is much more than a pop star, indeed he appears to be channelling something bigger than himself [...]

Oh The Magnficence: Scott Walker

I sometimes feel I need to shake myself like a wet dog after listening to Scott Walker, and, maybe, watch the droplets turn into glorious rainbows, transform into hummingbirds. Two lines into a Scott Walker song and you are immersed, taken into another, magical dimension. His perfect diction, [...]

RIP Nancy Wilson

Intelligent, emotional and true — Nancy Wilson called herself a “song stylist”. She managed to mix irony and compassion in her interpretations seemingly effortlessly. She died today at the ripe age of 81. Listen to her caught-you-red-handed song, Guess Who I Saw Today, for an [...]

In the Key of Sagittarius: Benjamin Clementine

Although he was born on December 7, 1988, Benjamin Clementine sounds like he’s lived for a thousand years. Wow. Here is his chart. Sadly no birth time. But I think you can hear that Sagittarian freedom and wildness in the way he unleashes his voice. And the generation with Neptune in [...]

In the Key of Virgo: Leonard Cohen

The great Leonard Cohen: born on this day, September 21, 1936. Ascendant and Sun are both at 27° Virgo — a great heart — and they make a perfect square to the MC in Gemini (a career as a wordsmith). The two planets of art, Venus and Neptune, are also exactly conjunct too — at [...]

In the Key of Virgo: Beyoncé

It’s easy to see that Beyoncé must have a powerhouse of planets in the sign of partnership — Libra — after all she is one half (arguably the more glamorous half) of the most powerful marriage in showbiz. She was born on this day, September 4, in 1981 Indeed, Beyoncé has Venus [...]

RIP Aretha Franklin

Aretha Franklin brought everyone who listened to her glorious voice closer to heaven while she was here on earth. She seemed to her audience like a living vessel for the divine. Her voice seemed to effortlessly catalyse emotions. Just a quick look at her chart is instructive. • There is her [...]

Venus in Gemini: The Twinkle

Those of you who follow this series already know that we’re looking at beautiful or extraordinary people to try and get an idea of how Venus, the goddess of beauty, works in each sign. Light, breezy, youthful, friendly, clever, funny — those are Gemini adjectives. Maybe the most famous Venus [...]

The Summer Wind

A little easy listening for summer. This melancholy song with its beautiful lyrics has been covered many times. I didn’t know it was initially a German tune — Der Sommerwind — which Johnny Mercer heard and translated into English. I’ve been listening to many versions on YouTube. Here are my [...]

Venus in Aries: Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew

In the early spring of 1970, jazz fans were only talking about one album — a rich, textured blast of sound played with freestyle mastery and driven by an enormous rhythm section. Miles Davis, the prince of cool, had plugged in and gone electric. Not only was Davis’ use of electrical [...]

In the Key of Pisces: Adam Levine

Last year, we featured a series of musicians born during the month of Pisces — one for each day, but there were just too many to fit in. Here is Adam Levine, another for our sweet-sounding Pisces male voice choir, that includes James Taylor, Chris Martin, Nat King Cole, George Harrison, Tom [...]

In the Key of Pisces: Tom Chaplin

Tom Chaplin, of the British band Keane, sings with all the tortured melancholy you’d expect from a fish-boy with Sun squaring Neptune, the planet of music. That Neptune is in Sagittarius, the sign of excess, so it also comes as no surprise that Chaplin has had his share of drug problems. One [...]

In the Key of Pisces…week one

Last year, The Oxford Astrologer published a post on a musician every day during the month of the fishes — that most musical of signs. In case you missed it — or would like to do it all over again. Here is the list and links for the first week… Many, many musicians were born […]

In the Key of Pisces: Nancy Wilson

So versatile, so clear, so direct: there’s no one like Nancy Wilson. I love her easy listening albums from the late 1960s/early 1970s (which included some of the best interpretations of Latin American music in English). They sparkle. Her voice is so pure and powerful, but it’s her ability to [...]

1 2 3 4 Next »