Reissue CDs
Kieron Tyler
Sometime in early October 1963 John Lennon and Paul McCartney encountered The Rolling Stones and offered them one of their songs; one which became the London blues aficionado’s second single. “I Wanna be Your Man” was duly recorded on 7 October 1963 and released on 1 November. Thanks to The Beatles, the Stones charted for the first time. A Liverpool-London, north-south divide had been breached.A supposed stylistic separation was also breached – the Londoners were purported blues purists who stood apart from the pop scene. Of course, that changed as pop can absorb anything and ambitious bands Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The booklet coming with The Albums 1974-76 notes Johnny Rotten saw Heavy Metal Kids live and that the Sex Pistol “ripped off” their frontman Gary Holton. It's an assertion in keeping with a default option where the HMKs are referred to as a precursor band to punk – one helping to lay the table for it.This three-CD clamshell set offers a chance to dig into where the band fit in. Elsewhere in the booklet's text, The Damned's Brian James is quoted saying Holton and Co were “ahead of their time.” HMK’s keyboard player Danny Peyronel declares “we were one of the first bands to have the term Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Jon Savage's 1980-1982 - The Art Of Things To Come continues a series which began in 2015 with 1966 - The Year The Decade Exploded, a compilation springing off from Savage’s book of the same name. A follow-up looked at 1965, but after that the series has marched forward chronologically.This new 35-track double CD set – as before, the tracks are from singles rather than albums – follows seven compilations dedicated 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969-1971, 1972-1976 and, most recently, Jon Savage's 1977-1979 - Symbols Clashing. Together, they chronicle Savage’s take on popular music from the beat- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
After Del Shannon took his own life in February 1990 at age 55, some obituaries were careful to point out that he stood apart from other pop stars who were big in pre-Beatles America. “The most tragic thing would be for Del Shannon to be lumped with, as he sometimes was in the past, all the Bobbys and Frankies and the other teen idols,” said the L.A. Weekly.As he surfaced in 1961, Shannon would inevitably become lumped in with contemporary US male teen-pop singers. Fair enough to a limited degree as he had the moodiness of Roy Orbison and the edge of Dion, but he was his own thing.In their Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
For Dave Brubeck, his Quartet’s first concert in the Netherlands was memorable. Getting to Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw for the 26 February 1958 booking was difficult, possibly unfeasible. The band were travelling from Berlin, and arrived at the show a half-hour after they were meant to be on stage.The adventure is described by Brubeck in his note for 1958’s The Dave Brubeck Quartet in Europe album (a live set recorded in Copenhagen on 5 March: pictured below left). A blizzard had hit Berlin and all flights out were grounded. They got onto one for Düsseldorf, from where they’d have to take a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The most commercially and consistently successful band on DinDisc was Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. Martha and the Muffins also made a mark. Label mates The Monochrome Set were cool, distinctive but not so chart friendly. The Revillos were less reserved, as was New Wave of British Heavy Metal outfit Dedringer. The patronage of Heaven 17 brought dance troupe Hot Gossip to the label.DinDisc was an offshoot of Virgin Records with arty leanings. Extant from autumn 1979 to early 1981 it was in keeping with the Charisma subsidiary Pre, which operated over a similar period. Both paved the way Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The New York Dolls, The Ramones, Suicide, Television, Blondie, The Dictators, The Heartbreakers, The Shirts, Richard Hell and the Voidoids. From 1974 onwards, New York buzzed with bands. There were also Tuff Darts, The Fast, Pure Hell, Von Lmo and others who didn’t quite grab the brass ring. Out of towners like The Dead Boys, Pere Ubu, Devo and The Real Kids jostled for attention too.Despite the crowded market, The Senders were central to this mix. Formed in 1976 by ex-pat Frenchman Philippe Marcade, who had arrived in New York in 1974, they issued one single in 1978, a seven-track 12-inch EP Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Ka Huma” by Ivo Nilakreshna sounds as if a jazz band was taking on rock ’n’ roll. There’s a swing and sway, busy rhythm guitar and a lead female voice singing a yearning melody. An instrument which seems to vibes is in there. But there’s more than the familiar elements. Most of the influences are unrecognisable.Zaenal Combo’s “Tandung Tjina” is an rocking instrumental with a comparable otherness. There’s a kinship with California surf band The Pyramids’s “Penetration” but, again, the primary building blocks are out of reach. Both tracks appear to have sprung from an unfamiliar well.And so it Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The 1997 release of Time Out of Mind was the resurrection of an artist who appeared to have wandered off the reservation some years before, lost in transit on his Never Ending Tour, trailed by an army of "Bobcats" who followed him for show after grinding show. “How can you stand it?” he once asked of a woman who told him she’d seen dozens of NET gigs.While set lists shifted like tidal sands from night to night, the performances ranged from the ragged and wildly unfamiliar to the singular and revelatory. After attending one of 1991’s woeful run of shows at Hammersmith Odeon during a bitter Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
At some point in 1979 a duo called The Door and the Window are playing a London Musician’s Collective show in a large brick building along the road from Cecil Sharp House in Camden. One of them has a synthesiser, probably a WASP. The other has tape recorders and a guitar. The inscrutable noise made features clanks, grinding and drones.On a Saturday night in either 1979 or 1980 a band called Exhibit “A” are playing Covent Garden youth club The Central London Youth Project. It’s in a basement along Shelton Street, so is usually called “The Basement.” They’re young, and deal in a jagged yet Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A first encounter with Rustic Hinge and the Provincial Swimmers is unforgettable. Their summer 1970 recordings are so far out they at first seem unlistenable. Persistence pays though and the ear tunes in. It becomes clear this band swallowed the Captain Beefheart playbook and regurgitated it after applying a severe dose of the cut-up technique.Despite sending a letter which generated the interest of Beefheart fan John Peel, who wanted to add them to the roster of his Dandelion Records label, Rustic Hinge and Co were close-to unnoticed. There was a January 1971 mention in the underground Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A strange new single went on sale in Britain’s record shops in April 1962. Credited to Ray Cathode, “Time Beat” combined a metronomic rhythm with peculiar, otherworldly sounds. It was not a standard pop record. The flipside, “Waltz In Orbit”, was also about its tempo and was just as weird. Not many copies were sold.The Ray Cathode single was issued seven months before The Tornados’s equally unearthly “Telstar” and was, in time, recognised as a ground-breaking combination of studio-created sounds and pop music. The Ray Cathode handle masked a collaboration between the BBC Radiophonic Workshop’ Read more ...