Tag: ZZ Top
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Glastonbury News: Day One
It was a strange mood that pervaded across Glastonbury yesterday as the overnight referendum news sank in like a heavy boot into the mud. Even rumours of a secret Radiohead performance (still only rumours) weren’t enough to lift spirits. Sir Michael Eavis popped over to cut a ribbon on the Other Stage to open the…
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Rock and EDM: ZZ Top and David Guetta Collaborate On New Tracks
The news this week that ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons teamed up with David Guetta in Ibiza to record an album is surprising to many. At first sight, it looks like there’s a too-strong batch of Ecstacy going around the island. After all, why would an ageing 70’s throwback with a silly beard be allowed to…
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First Time I Got The Blues…
It wasn’t easy to expand one’s musical horizons in the eighties. Napster and Spotify really made life easier for us in the 21st century. Back then we didn’t have anyone to hold our hands and tell us “these are the good songs, these are the less good ones”. There was no one to advise that if…
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Rock’s Great “Lost” Albums of the Eighties: #2 – Rocky Hill
When you think of rock n roll brothers, you generally picture squabbling siblings, such as Ray and Dave Davies, Noel and Liam Gallagher, Rich and Chris Robinson or Dave and Ed Milliband. Perhaps only Eddie and Alex Van Halen have really made things work apparently smoothly, and that’s possibly because one of them is a…
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An Analysis of The Lyrics to ZZ Top’s Ten Foot Pole
“I bet you can’t work out these lyrics” said a friend in 1986, holding a copy of ZZ Top‘s El Loco album with an evil glint in his eye. I guessed it couldn’t be too tricky. Child’s play. The sort of thing that I could probably sort out whilst a) assembling some flat pack furniture…
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44 Years And Counting: ZZ Top Live At Hammersmith Apollo
For some people ZZ Top are seen as something fun that happened in the eighties, like the Sinclair ZX81, perms, Rubik’s Cubes and the threat of nuclear annihilation. Those synth-guitar albums “Eliminator“, “Afterburner” and “Recycler” (the latter actually released in 1990) produced some of MTV’s most memorable videos featuring legions of girls, three guys, two…
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The Top Ten Records of 2012
The Ten Best records of 2012? Growing up in the eighties, you didn’t hear much about end of year best-of lists, but now, like reality TV shows featuring people I have never heard of, they appear to be everywhere. It almost seems rude not to nail my colours to the mast and tell you what…
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My (less) embarrassing first record: ZZ Top – Eliminator
ZZ Top’s Eliminator album, with singles such as Sharp Dressed Man and Legs was a welcome relief from the rest of the charts. The singles charts in the early eighties were wonderfully diverse, but they rocked about as hard as a James Blunt-themed episode of Glee. There were more balls in the East German Women’s…
Every record tells a story 