Every Record Tells A Story
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2019’s Albums and Songs of the Year
While mixtapes generally went out of fashion with Blind Date, the launch of Channel 4 and, well, the cassette, (does this mean mixtapes will come back into fashion soon? A lot of the albums below were released on cassette), the idea of circulating either CDs or playlists of your favourite tunes of the year is…
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New Evidence Reveals The Place Where John First Met Paul Is Not Where You Think It Is…
It’s a great story. The Woolton Village church fete, on 6th July 1957 is where John’s band The Quarry Men are playing on the back of a truck. Ivan Vaughan introduces his schoolfriend Paul McCartney to his friend and band mate John Lennon. Paul borrows John’s guitar, turns it around and tunes it, then rolls…
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Jon Savage Dreams of The Seventies in New Compilation
Ah, the swinging sixties. If you can remember them, you weren’t there. If you can’t remember them, you may not have been born yet, and thus weren’t there either. So no-one was there. And yet, there they are, the swinging Sixties, where everyone who now has a final salary pension scheme had more fun than…
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New Music, New Battles
One of the juiciest new sounds of 2019 comes from quite an unexpected source… Drummer John Stanier used to be in a nineties metal band called Helmet. Remarkably, the name was a blessing, given one alternative band name given serious consideration was “Tuna Lorenzo”. Helmet were dubbed a “thinking man’s metal band”, which, at a…
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Take The Test in Modern Record Collecting Etiquette: How To Conduct Yourself In A Record Shop.
Modern life may not be, as Blur would have us believe, rubbish, but it can be confusing. A hundred years ago, if you wanted to blend in to the general throb of your friends at Downton Abbey, you would just need to learn which knife and fork to use, dish out a few withering put…
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How Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson Channelled the Spirit Of Dio In The Classic “Number of the Beast”
Paul Dickinson was expelled from Oundle boarding school for the amusing yet nauseating reason that he relieved himself into a meal he had prepared for his teachers. The Evil That Men Do may or may not live on and on, but at the very least it will get them kicked out of private school. It…
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What Have Music Festivals (Like The Village Green) Ever Done For Us?
With a thousand music and performing arts festivals reportedly taking place in the U.K. every year you would be forgiven if the annual bash at Chalkwell Park, within touching distance of Southend-on-Sea, had passed you by. But this omission would be a shame, because Chalkwell’s Village Green, celebrating its tenth year, is a hub of…
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Fun Lovin’ Criminals, Busted At Essex Village Green Festival
The Festival season. While Spanish music fans fret about how to stay hydrated in Barcelona and Portuguese music fans research online reviews of sun hat stores in Lisbon, British music fans research which pop up tents are least likely to be washed away in a flood, and bookmark the NHS online page for trenchfoot remedies…
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Fantastic Beats And Where To Find Them: A Guide To London’s Independent Record Shops
London may have its downsides: traffic jams, crowds, the £10 gin and tonic, but it also has sixty-odd places to buy records. Sixty-odd reasons to put up with the stresses and strains of life in the capital. Even with a backdrop of retail woes (British Retail Consortium figures show consumer spending fell more sharply last…
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Hard Rock’s “Yesterday”: The Story of Goldilox by Kings X
“Goldilox is the song that people just missed out on… one of the greatest songs that I had ever heard”
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Ian Broudie Addresses Fifteen Years of Hurt with Solo Album Re-release
Pete Paphides never stopped dreaming of owning Ian Broudie’s 2004 solo album on vinyl. His new label, Needle Mythology is re-releasing the “Tales Told” album to address fifteen years of hurt…
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How To Attract Thousands Of Instagram Followers For Your Vinyl Blog: The Ultimate Guide
Whether we prefer to use Social Media as a way to keep in touch with old friends, to post videos of the funny things our pets do when confronted with green vegetables, or simply for 3am rants about the FBI and the fake news media while sitting on the toilet, we are all becoming increasingly…
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#VinylSanta Trends at #5 on Twitter. Here Are Ten of the Best #VinylSanta Finds
We all have our Christmas traditions, whether it’s belting out a heavenly chorus of “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” at Midnight Mass or collapsing face-down in shortbread and lager while nurturing simmering resentments about the family on Boxing Day. Not all traditions are happy ones, of course. Those readers who work in offices may recognise…
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The Every Record Tells A Story Albums Of 2018
In April 2018 we learned that revenues for streaming services surpassed income from CDs and vinyl (and, for that matter, cassettes) for the first time. So it feels rather quaint to have “Albums of the Year”, yet, like filling our houses with sparkly tat at Christmas, or steadfastly maintaining to our children that a fat…
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Beatles Reunite As Ringo Starr Joins Paul McCartney Onstage In London
Beatles fans received an early Christmas present last night as the two surviving Beatles, Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney, played together onstage for the first time since Ringo’s 2015 inauguration into the Rock n Roll Hall Of Fame, for the first time since 2002’s Concert For George in the U.K., and for only the tenth…
Every record tells a story 