Every Record Tells A Story
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Things You Don’t See Anymore #4: The Flexi Disc
Many hundreds of years ago (well, in the 1960’s and ’70s) and in the days before the Internet, if you can imagine such a thing, record companies tried many ways to get music heard. They tried bribing DJs. This was frowned upon. They tried fixing the charts by bulk buying or giving away records to…
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Queens of the Stone Age – …Like Clockwork Review
June 2003. As I was carried above the heads and outstretched hands of an ecstatic Brixton Academy audience, (hoping no-one would a) grab me in a delicate place b) drop me or c) pick my pocket) crowd-surfing for the first (and last) time in a defiant protest against being thirty three years old, I realised…
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A Look At The Haunting And Sensitive Poetry of… Whitesnake
Whitesnake. Fronted by David Coverdale, and best known for their eighties videos featuring Coverdale’s then-girlfriend, the actress Tawny Kitaen who fetchingly writhed on Coverdale’s car whilst risking catching her death of cold by not wearing very much. All shaggy flowing perms and pouting lips – and that was just the band. And yet… before all…
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Rock Stars in Comics: Coldplay, McCartney, Elvis and Kiss
Despite the obvious merits of the comic books I enjoyed many years ago such as Sin City, Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns and so on (I lost touch with things in the mid-nineties) comic books have unfortunate baggage that accompanies them. If you ever look up the word “Geek” in the dictionary, there tends to…
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The Flaming Lips Play “The Most Important Show Ever” – Live at Camden Roundhouse
The most important show ever? Well – actually that’s just a “sacred obligation” between Flaming Lips front man Wayne Coyne and last night’s audience at The Camden Roundhouse, where the Lips played last night. Let me explain… It had been a tough couple of days for The Flaming Lips. First, they postponed Monday’s Roundhouse…
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The Flaming Lips Cancel Show In Possible Blow To My Dancing Onstage Dream
The Flaming Lips show at The Camden Roundhouse was cancelled last night due to an unspecified “illness”. However, according to the Roundhouse’s website, tonight’s show may still go ahead: “The second show on Tuesday 21 May is unaffected at present. However, should illness persist, the promoter may need to reschedule the second show too. More…
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Sneaking Off To Record Stores In Disneyland – A Users Guide
Vinyl records enthusiast? Going on holiday to Orlando, Florida? Want to find a record store? Read on… As an aside to the previous post about Yesterday and Today, I secured my copy of this Beatles record during a holiday in Florida at one of a couple of decent used record stores that I found. I…
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The Beatles: Butcher LP Covers and How A 1966 Album Actually Lost Money
It was very confusing being an American Beatles fan in the sixties. Apparently. I have the disadvantage from a perspective point of view of a) being British and b) having been born in 1970… In the years up to 1966, Capitol in the USA had a rather cavalier attitude to albums. Rather than promoting them…
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Look Out For… John Grant
Song of the day, not that I have a feature called “song of the day”, is by this fellow called John Grant who released an album called Pale Green Ghosts in March of this year. The song is called GMF. It’s a belter. Pale Green Ghosts is a break up album, and it’s almost as…
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A Few Words on Jeff Hannemann and Slayer
I was sorry to learn of the passing of Jeff Hannemann, Slayer guitarist, who died on 2 May 2013. Hannemann, alongside fellow Slayer members – guitarist Kerry King, monster drummer Dave Lombardo and bass player / singer Tom Araya produced a game-changing record “Reign In Blood” which, thanks to its crystal clear production (by Rick…
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A Visit To Chess Records…And When Muddy Waters Met The Rolling Stones
2120 South Michigan Avenue was immortalised in song by the Rolling Stones in their 5×5 EP (recently re-released on Record Store Day) and was the headquarters and recording studio of Chess Records. It is worth listing just a few of the songs recorded at this studio, because that list is like a lesson in American…
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Look Out For…Tom Hickox
I wanted to mention Tom Hickox today. Since I mentioned Tom’s song “The Pretty Pride of Russia” last year, he has secured an opening slot with Richard Hawley, including the latter’s forthcoming Somerset House concert. “The Pretty Pride of Russia” was one of my favourite songs that I heard last year and now Tom has…
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The Best Concept Album of the Eighties? Step Forward Operation Mindcrime
Concept albums divide opinion. There are those who dislike them as bloated, worthy and self-indulgent. These people see concept albums as being about as welcome as Justin Bieber in The Anne Frank Museum, and avoid them like they would gout. And there are those who love them because they are er, bloated, worthy and self-indulgent.…
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Look Out For…Sweet Billy Pilgrim: Download Their Album For Free. Yes. Free.
Regular readers will know that my favourite album of last year was Sweet Billy Pilgrim‘s “Crown and Treaty”. I wasn’t the only one. Mojo Magazine slotted it neatly into their Top 50 albums, calling it an instant five star classic, and it made many other end-of-year lists. Simply put, it is a towering work of…
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Look Out For…Temples: Live Review
“The best new band in Britain” declared Noel Gallagher about Temples on the recent Russell Brand show on XFM. Gallagher has form with such proclamations, having praised eight of the last three most successful new artists in the UK, including Jake Bugg. But if Noel Gallagher is sometimes profligate with praise, on this occasion…
Every record tells a story 