Month: April 2012
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The Rolling Stones In Rice Krispies Advert Shame! (and other breakfast stories)
Rock stars and Breakfast cereals are not the most obvious bedfellows… So what do The Rolling Stones and The Charlatans have in common (aside from having a greater appetite for banned substances than the Bulgarian weightlifting and Tour De France teams combined)? As I re-read The True Adventures of The Rolling Stones recently, there was…
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Tim Burgess of The Charlatans Telling Stories: “I Wanted My Book To Be Like Pulp Fiction…”
Charlatans lead singer Tim Burgess launched his autobiography Telling Stories this week at a special event at St James’ Church in Piccadilly. Reading extracts from his book, Burgess revealed snippets of life on the road with a rock band, which as most of us have long suspected appears to involve long and convoluted attempts to smuggle banned substances…
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The True Adventures of The Rolling Stones…and The Best Music Books of All Time
The 26th April 2012 sees the re-release of one of the greatest Rock Books of all time – The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones by Stanley Booth. The book mixes a history of the band with a first hand account of being The Stones’ live-in writer at the height of their notoriety. Extraordinarily, it…
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Record Store Day: Noel Gallagher Actually Does Something Surprising….
So Record Store Day came and went, and hipsters and anoraks alike (guess which one I am) can try to get some sleep after camping outside their record store overnight and then playing their records all day (Unless they are too scared to play their records in case they “lose value”)… I was told someone…
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Every Record Wins Kreativ Blogger Award!
Just three months in and already the awards are flying through the door. Well, not exactly flying, and that’s my own, inaccurate, use of the plural. But hey – a shiny Kreativ Blogger award statue now sits proudly on my desk. Metaphorically speaking. I don’t actually have a desk. Or a statue. To such giddy…
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AC/DC’s Best Album – Live from the Atlantic Recording Studios
AC/DC’s Live from The Atlantic Recording Studios is a lost classic – and in my view is their best album. Very soon after I bought AC/DC’s Fly on the Wall, The Friday Rock Show broadcast an entire live show of AC/DC from December 1977 live from the Atlantic Recording Studios. I was there hovering over…
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AC/DC’s Worst Album?: Not what you think it is….
There are some records I own that I think are great, despite all evidence to the contrary. The album might have had a critical mauling akin to Spinal Tap‘s “Shark Sandwich“, it might not be fit to hold a candle to the band’s previous efforts, and it might, to all intents and purposes, have been…
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In the beginning…before Later with Jools Holland…there was The Tube…
There was a time before Later…with Jools Holland. This was a time of The Tube… In 1986 it was still challenging to hear heavy metal on mainstream media. It would have been easier for Ghengis Khan to pass a CRB police check to help out at his local school than for the UK public to…
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Keith Moon “lined up for the Olympics”
There’s a great story reported by RollingStone.com that says the London Olympic Committee has approached Keith Moon’s agent to see if the drummer would like to take part in the summer’s festivities? It is of course refreshing that the Olympic Committee is not being ageist, and is prepared to overlook Moon’s past bad behaviour at…
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First Gig – Dio and Denzil the Dragon at The Hammersmith Odeon: May 1986
I’m sure we all have memories of our first time…the butterflies in your stomach, the nervous feeling as you wondered what it would be like, would it go well, would it be fun? Would you be “safe”… First gigs are A Big Thing in your life after all. My first gig was to see Dio…
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Shades Records – The Greatest Record Store There Ever Was: A Tribute for Record Store Day
As record store day approaches, I would like to pay tribute to just one record store that is sadly no longer with us. The Greatest Record Store There Ever Was… In the years before Napster, Songkick, Spotify and other Internet stuff spoon-fed the heavy metal-loving youth of Britain, there were just two ways to find…
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Record Store Day 2012 – Support Your Local Record Store!
It’s Record Store Day again! Coming just a few days after Rolling Stone magazine forecast the demise of the CD in as little as three years, Record Store Day is something worth celebrating. Designed to give exclusive product to independent record stores it gives me a decent excuse to go record shopping and support my…
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And Iron Maiden’s Best Live album is…..
Which is Iron Maiden’s best live album? (After all – with the release of En Vivo – they have released no less than ten…!) Back in December 1985 Kerrang! had given me two new ways to discover new music: their end of year critics poll (best album: Bryan Adams’ Reckless) and a 20 track K!…
Every record tells a story 