Reissue CDs
Kieron Tyler
As one decade gives way to the next, the beginning or end of the ten-year cycle rarely yields anything cut and dried. With pop music, a host of decade-related platitudes have no respect for the decade-to-decade switch. Depending on points of view, the Sixties didn’t begin until 1962, 1963 or 1964. With the Seventies, the kick-off could have been 1971 or 1972. Or maybe 1976 or 1977.Even so, it’s clear when some groundswells originated. Most of the early Seventies’ successful glam rockers were active in the preceding decade. Bolan, Bowie, Slade, Sweet and Alvin Stardust had all done their Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Earlier this year, the Peter Laughner box set was more than an archive release. Its diligence and scale forced a wholesale reinterpretation of the evolution of America’s punk-era underground scene. What it collected – aurally and in its book – demonstrated Laughner was more of a pivotal figure than he had so far seemed, and that his actions and vision resonate more than four decades on from his death.Moving through a different musical landscape, the CD compilation The Daisy Age cohesively soundtracked for the first time how hip-hop opened itself up to seemingly unrelated music (and non-music Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In June 1978, the still-extant independent label Cherry Red issued its first record. The seven-inch featured three slices of terse, Buzzcocks-ish art-punk by The Tights. The band were from Great Malvern, Worcestershire – as was the label. They only made one more 45 but Cherry Red – named after a Groundhogs song; the label was founded by local concert promoters – was built to last. Later, Great Malvern spawned Stephen Duffy’s Lilac Time and Blessed Ethel. Jenny Lind and Edward Elgar were local, but this seemed to be it as far as it went for entries on the rock ’n’ roll map.Surprisingly, Cherry Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Hugh Hefner established Playboy Records in 1972 as an arm of his male-targeted business empire. Amongst the singles issued in its first year were seven-inchers by jazzer Bobby Scott, proto-yacht rockers The Hudson Brothers, singer-songwriter Tim Rose, Björn & Benny (with Svenska Flicka), who were ABBA before they had a name, and Michael Jarrett, who’d written “I'm Leavin'” for Elvis Presley. In 1974, Playboy Playmate Barbi Benton came on board.Other notables included country staple Mickey Gilley, soul star Major Lance, soft rockers Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds and, late in the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“I was just released from the hospital…the doctor told me that the medicine can’t do me no good. They told me what I have is beyond medical science…he told me that what I have is more serious than cancer. He told me what I have is a very, very bad case of the blues. I found out the best remedy for the blues is to be with the one you love.”This astonishing spoken declaration comes during the first half of Jerry Washington’s “Right Here is Where You Belong”, a 1972 single which its performer, producer and writer self-released on his own Top Pop label. Washington’s day job was as a New York Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In the liner notes to the new reissue of 2001’s All is Dream, Mercury Rev’s Jonathan Donahue says it is “a weird astral album musically, and yes the symbolism lyrically runs many layers down and deep – different coloured layers of rock, soil and ash on an archaeology dig.”More straightforwardly, Mercury Rev’s other mainstay Grasshopper explains “All is Dream was a continuation of ideas we hatched during recording [previous album] Deserter’s Songs – and [its predecessor] See You on the Other Side – but we were bolstered by the excitement that Deserter’s Songs generated.”All is Dream was Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
If the prices fetched by original pressings are a guide, Mighty Baby are notable. Their eponymous first album, issued by the fittingly named Head label in November 1969, sells for at least £150 and has changed hands for over £500. A Blue Horizon edition of A Jug of Love, their second and last album (October 1971), tops out at £600.Mighty Baby and A Jug of Love are rare, totemic British underground albums. The first is a glistening fusion of psychedelia and John Coltrane-inspired textures with overt nods to American west coast rock. Traffic were on a similar path. For the second album, Mighty Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In a first for this column, what’s cropping up is a cassette reissue. The Clash’s third album is so familiar, going into what it is or was in any depth is redundant but it’s worth considering what’s going on here.London Calling was originally issued on 14 December 1979 and is celebrating its 40th anniversary. Naturally, it’s hitting the shops again. The definitive reissue came out for the 25th anniversary in 2004, when the album was teamed with rehearsal recordings taped on cassette at Vanilla Studios, a DVD of The Last Testament: The Making of London Calling documentary, promo videos, film Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“It's Gonna Take a Miracle” just missed out on a mainstream US Top 40 placing after The Royalettes issued it as a single in June 1965. But the song had staying power. In 1971 Laura Nyro covered it, choosing it as the title track for the album she made with LaBelle. Deniece Williams’s version hit big in 1982.The song’s co-writer was Teddy Randazzo. He had arranged and produced The Royalettes’s interpretation, the first time it was issued. Their reading is as he conceived the song: the template for what followed. The other vocal group most associated with Randazzo is Little Anthony and the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Three years after its release, Gene Clark explained where he was heading while creating 1974's No Other. “I was strongly influenced at that time by two other artists. Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions and [The Rolling Stones’s] Goat’s Head Soup. When I was writing No Other I concentrated on those albums a lot, and was very inspired by the direction of them...which is ironic, because Innervisions is a very climbing, spiritual thing, while Goat’s Head Soup has connotations of the lower forces as well. But somehow the joining of the two gave me a place to go with No Other, and I wanted it to go in a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Rough Trade’s first album was Stiff Little Fingers’s Inflammable Material. The label followed up its February 1979 release with Swell Maps’s A Trip to Marineville, The Raincoats’s eponymous debut, Cabaret Voltaire’s Mix-Up and Essential Logic’s Beat Rhythm News Waddle Ya Play? Inflammable Material was avowedly punk but though they could not have emerged without the punk upheaval, the others inhabited their own musical continua. There was a further difference: Inflammable Material charted – on the proper charts – while SLF's idiosyncratic labelmates could never have done so.Rough Trade’s Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Arthur or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire hasn’t had the stratospheric levels of praise as the preceding Kinks album, 1968’s The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society. Yet in the band’s narrative, it’s probably more important as it went hand-in-hand with their return to America after an enforced absence and became integral to their subsequent achievements there. Furthermore, as its title attests, Arthur also had wider themes than Village Green: it was avowedly ambitious.In his November 1969 Rolling Stone review, Greil Marcus brought contemporary context. “Less ambitious Read more ...