Record Store Day is nearly here. At theartsdesk on Vinyl we have a selection of goodies which are appearing exclusively in record shops. See anything you fancy?THEARTSDESK ON VINYL’S VINYL OF RECORD STORE DAY APRIL 2023Suicide A Way of Life Rareties (BMG)With Suicide’s underrated 1988 album A Way of Life heading for reissue, this Record Store Day release amps the anticipation with a four-track 12” of associated odds’n’ends. It opens with a live version of, supposedly, Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA”, but it is, in fact, frontman Alan Vega vamping around songs including Fats Domino’s “ Read more ...

Together or separately, British psychedelia and 1967’s related music have been ceaselessly looked at. There cannot be an awful lot more to say. Nonetheless, the law of diminishing returns is there for ignoring so herewith the follow-up to the 2016 box set Let’s Go Down & Blow Our Minds.Too Much Sun Will Burn - The British Psychedelic Sounds Of 1967 Volume 2 is – in keeping with its predecessor – a 79-track, four-hour clamshell set. Despite the crowded market, it's a great listen. Should an introduction to the territory be needed, the diligent Too Much Sun Will Burn does a mighty fine job. Read more ...

There’s something charmingly unassuming and humble about The Zombies. Nowadays their 1968 second album Odyssey and Oracle regularly figures in all time greatest albums lists, but it was a flop at the time and its reputation grew through a gradually snowballing cult status, and the band split soon after its release. Most of their existence, in fact, has been in this century, with Rod Argent and Colin Blundstone reviving the name in 2004 and staunchly putting in the legwork on the revival rock circuit ever since. If you ever see them talk, even now at knocking on 80, they are just seemingly Read more ...

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 ...

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 ...

Buildings can hold memories, the three dimensions of space supplemented by the fourth of time. Ten years ago, I started every working week with a meeting in a room that, for decades, had been used to conduct autopsies – I felt a little chill occasionally, as we dissected figures rather than bodies, ghosts lingering, as they do. Of course, Brutalism would shun such foolishly romantic notions, one of its key practitioners, Le Corbusier, famously remarking, “Architecture or revolution”. And with the white heat of technology still burning bright, he provided the template for the Park Hill Read more ...

“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 ...

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 ...

The Beatles loomed over everything else. It wasn’t inevitable, but the arrival of the revealing Revolver box set and Peter Jackson’s compelling Get Back film confirmed that there is more to say about what’s known, and also that there are new things to say about popular music’s most inspirational phenomenon of the 20th century.Just as it was when The Beatles were operational, the Revolver box and Get Back gave other things out there standards to aspire to. This pair of archive releases became a wholly unexpected yardstick for 2022. Obviously though, brows at labels aren’t furrowing about Read more ...

Each new Beatles album offered a chance for other acts to record their own versions of songs which didn’t make it onto singles. What was on the long-player could pick up attention if it was covered. Revolver was no exception. Cliff Bennett & The Rebel Rousers’s version of “Got to Get You Into my Life” was in the charts the August 1966 week Revolver was issued.Revolver’s “Here There and Everywhere” was recorded by The Fourmost. “For no One” was covered by Paul McCartney sound-alike Marc Reid, “Yellow Submarine” by The She Trinity. None were hits, and The She Trinity were gazumped by The Read more ...

Any reminder of the greatness of Love is welcome, and Expressions Tell Everything does this in fine style. A box set, it contains eight picture-sleeve seven-inch singles, a book and a couple of postcards. It’s very stylish.The period dwelt on is 1966 to 1969, over which the original band changed line-ups, fell apart and was then resurrected with new players behind main-man Arthur Lee for the Four Sail album. On record, Love began in 1966 as a hybrid of folk-rock and The Rolling Stones, and went on to incorporate Bossa Nova and jazz for the late-1966 second album Da Capo. The magnificent Read more ...

Slovak director Eduard Grečner wrote the first draft of a screenplay for Dragon’s Return (Drak sa vracia) in 1956 but didn’t have the confidence to direct it, this adaptation of a novella by the Slovak author Dobroslav Chrobák that he finally realised 12 years later.An elderly but spritely Grečner appears in one of this disc’s bonus features and there’s a fascinating 2015 interview with him transcribed in Second Run’s booklet, Grečner recalling his efforts to convey the author’s rich prose in cinematic form. Dragon’s Return is indeed visually spectacular, the rocky landscapes and Read more ...