1980s
Kieron Tyler
The opening track is Hoyt Axton’s “Evangelina.” After first appearing on the 1976 album Fearless it was re-recorded and issued as a flop UK single in July 1980. The new version had also been an OK-selling US single in 1980. The reason this deeply atmospheric, velvety, yearning country marvel had UK sales potential after it came out on minor-league British imprint Young Blood was due to radio play: radio play on the BBC’s Radio 2.“Evangelina” illustrates exactly what Wednesday Morning 6AM - Radio Hits From The Small Hours 1970-1983 is about: the musical continuum defined by a maverick aspect Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Stagefront are two silhouetted figures, heads at a strange angle. Like hanged men. Beside each is a robed demon sentinel with a burning torch. Overseeing all is a gigantic, trompe l’oeil devil, gnarly-fanged, eyes a glazed pink blaze. The demons touch their torches to the doomed mannikins who go up in flames. Kreator, amid the enkindled carnage, plough into the utter pummelling of “Endless Pain”, the title track of their 1985 debut album. The moshpit explodes again.The German thrash perennials, over 40 years into their career, are bigger than you might think. They’re filling 3000- Read more ...
Music Reissues Weekly: This Can’t Be Today - A Trip Through The US Psychedelic Underground 1977-1988
Kieron Tyler
This Can’t Be Today - A Trip Through The US Psychedelic Underground 1977-1988 is marketed as a “3CD set documenting the 1980s American ‘paisley underground’ scene” which includes “over 65 scene setting, taste making tunes inspired by all things 60s, thrift store and Rickenbacker” with “scene staples, underground nuggets, leftfield gems and everything else between.”Indeed, this is pretty much what this clamshell set, titled after a Rain Parade track (it’s on Disc Two), does. However, the words “leftfield gems and everything else between” imply that this umbrella shelters more than The Bangles Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
As a disillusioned ex-admirer – like so many – it’s with a degree of dread that I approach Morrissey’s 14th solo album (the first for six years) not least because of the positively Kafkaesque struggle to actually hear it. But an open mind is necessary.What if there were no axe to grind? What if the hopeless search for love had been answered? What if there were no conspiracy theories? Why, then, there would be no new album (and – let’s face it – we’re all thigh-high in conspiracy theories right now). So we must buckle up and hear what the once-great man has to opine. The hilarious album Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Squeeze have done well. They’ve worked their arses off for years and now have significant profile again, playing some of Europe’s bigger venues (such as the O2). Their latest release, then, is anticipated. It’s a fanciful rejig of a concept album the band’s central duo, Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook, created, pre-success, when they were teenagers in 1974. For both better and worse, it sounds that way.Trixies offers 13 snapshots of an imaginary nightclub, much flavoured by Difford’s youthful reading of Damon Runyon’s New York nightworld tales, mingled with the lowlife of their native south Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Some exhibitions make you feel inspired, others perplexed. Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting at the National Portrait Gallery left me feeling battered and bruised – as if I’d been hit by a wrecking ball.The show doesn’t start out that way. In the early 1940s, Freud spent several years perfecting his drawing technique. At first, he used a mapping pen, which produces clear, sharp lines perfect for detailed observation.In a luminous self-portrait from 1947 intended as a book illustration, he uses a variety of marks to create the impression of a three-dimensional head. A shock of wiry hair Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In November 1975, UK music weekly New Musical Express included an article by Charles Shaar Murray titled “Are You Alive To The Jive Of The Sound Of '75.” Recently in New York, he was revealing what he had discovered.The bands looked at – and he saw most saw live – in his prescient round-up were Blondie, The Heartbreakers – “the first N.Y. punk supergroup” – a “new-look” New York Dolls, The Ramones, The Shirts, Patti Smith, Talking Heads, Television and Tuff Darts.
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Central to what he covered in this remarkable role call was a venue: the Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Lyle Kessler’s 1983 three-hander has embedded itself in the American repertory, attracting a Tony nomination and star casting. Here it was graced with an award-winning turn onstage from Albert Finney, who later starred in a film version. But is it more than an actors’ play?The little Jermyn Street stage brings its simmering tensions straight to your seat, as brothers Treat (Chris Walley) and Philip (Fred Woodley Evans) clash at their Philadelphia row-house. Treat, a self-styled tough guy, is a petty thief who preys on hapless pedestrians, bringing home his booty – watches, cash, jewellery – Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The stylish gentlemen pictured above are Crimson Earth, a band active from 1970 to 1976. Regardless of their longevity, the Dorset-based outfit failed to attract national attention and didn’t release any records. There was an audition for EMI, local media support and a deal with a Bristol booking agency but cigars were not forthcoming.Even so, a 1972 tape of the band has been disinterred and one track from it – the explosive, irresistible “Heathen Woman” – was included earlier this year on the agenda-setting Yeah Man, It's Bloody Heavy!!, an extraordinary, wild-ride compilation of never- Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTHManduria Bite Me (Wild Honey)
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The debut from Milan punkers Manduria is a six-tracker haemorrhaging rock’n’roll cheek and sass. They riff and fuzz and bang about without a care in the world, shouting and revelling in reverb mess, howling like Screamin’ Jay Hawkins while cranking up the amps like The Cramps, the rhythm section indulging in a mono-stomp that penetrates the inner brain like Joe Pesci’s vice. There’s a track called “I Hate to Think” and you don’t need to. On “Buongiorno” they slow things down for a dip Read more ...
Joe Muggs
One of this year’s best music books, Songs in the Key of MP3 by Liam Inscoe-Jones, paints a picture of musicians of the “streaming era” having a different relationship to the past, compared to those of… well, the past. He shows how artists like Dev “Blood Orange” Hynes have adapted to mass availability of culture by indulging not in nostalgia for something vague, but using the endless micro detail at their fingertips for reconstructing, picking up unfinished business, creating “alternative presents” from which new lineages might branch off.So it is with a lot of this year’s best records. Read more ...
Gary Naylor
That young person sitting next to you on the bus, earbuds wedged in, an enigmatic, Mona Lisa-ish smile on their face - are they listening to a podcast? If so, is it one of many, many such concerning True Crime, a genre that has moved out of the WH Smith’s magazine shelf with the National Enquirer and the large print section of the library, and into a much more youthful market in the 2020s? Chances are that it is.I can’t be too precious about it, numbering Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon books amongst my favourites about showbiz and sneaking a peek, as a very guilty pleasure, at Wikipedia’s Read more ...