replacing Hardly Baked whose feed is broken for reasons unknown. Original Hardly Baked + archive are here http://hardlybaked.blogspot.com/ 
 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^"Really awful is more interesting to listen to than pretty good" - Eno
Luke Owen from Death Is Not The End has launched into a run of releases reissuing electronic music put out by CRI - Composers Recordings, Inc., originally co-founded by Otto Luening in 1954 and active right up until 2003. This is an obsession close to my heart, having picked up a lot of CRItronica as vinyl over the years, chased down others through the Cal Arts record library, and found still more…
"Latrine lunacy"! In the same 1980 issue of Sounds , wholly gratuitous shot of depantsed but thankfully still underpanted Judge Dredd Ugh! double ugh! In yet another issue Phil Mogg of UFO - one of Sounds frequent pin-ups - lays down the law: Unclear if this is an ahead-of-its-time(-for-UK) pro-boxers sentiment or simply a belief in going commando style under your spandex metalgod leggings or…
And a little glimpse from Ms Grogan But the Melody Maker unexpectedly beats all comers with this horror:
Yes that is Tears For Fears in their early mod revival incarnation: Graduate Looking a bit like Mick Talbot's first band, the one with that song that goes "a man ain't a man with a ticket in his hand... YOU NEED WHEELS" Good Lord, there is documentation I don't mind the opportunism / bandwagon-jumping thing in rock'n'pop at all - in fact I rather enjoy it Musicians are fans, just like the rest of…
Feels like any week now it ought to be kicking off in terms of Punk Fiftieth Anniversary coverage. Magazine retrospectives, TV programs, exhibitions, books, documentaries... But what will they pick as the commemorative fulcrum? The first, or the second, performance of the Sex Pistols at Lesser Free Trade Hall, Manchester? (The first is coming up very soon anniversary wise, just three days off,…
The Sounds penchant for displaying for male nudity or near-nudity is really quite peculiar here's another shot of Angus Young in skimpy briefs Reference in the text to running around in his wife's skimpy knickers Bon Scott also seen shirtless And another shot of Angus deshabille Gratuitous reshowing of this amazing clip found by Phil Knight This time it's Bon Scott who's showing off his gams…
Absolutely fascinating current affairs programme from 1972 looking at advice columnists - Dr Stephen Black talks to Marjorie Proops of the Daily Mirror , Evelyn Home of Woman , Claire Rayner of Petticoat and Jane Firbank of Forum , who between them "deal with more than 100,000 letters a year". Most of these columnists have multiple assistants helping them and an office full of reference books and…
Is it mean to say an artist peaked - exhausted their artistic existence - with their very first single? Undoubtedly it would be mean.. but it may not be unfair, or inaccurate. That guitar sounds like lens flares and eyelash diffraction So dazzling, it makes you want to close your eye-ear It's like a perfect Anglophiliac concoction of "See For Miles" Who and first-album Jimi Hendrix Experience (I…
Jump to 18.55 for the amazing "Farewell to A Hill" by Alice Shields - " a piece made in mourning for the death of a loved one ", whose components include " electronically manipulated harpsichords, the sounds of small bells, and the cries of mallards ." This YouTube upload above is the quadraphonic version of the album (in fact this may be the only version of the album as originally on vinyl).…
Three versions of the song made famous by Billie Holiday - all three covers released within three years of each other Lydia Lunch was first Then Billy Mackenzie (p ersonally I always found it a rather lumpy obtrusion in Sulk) Then Marc Almond Actually there was a fourth cover within that timespan: Elvis Costello recorded a version in 1981 (but twas only released much later as part of a Trust…
Sounds again, of course - what was it with their compulsion to show hard rockers with their kit off? True, they went equally for salacious innuendos and cheesecake pictures of New Wave babes like Gaye Advert and Debby Harry Perhaps it's just equal-opportunity earthiness Readers responded in similar ways too - there was a whole running thing of letters drooling over Peter Perrett Perhaps more…
fascinating BBC Archive dig up of a program made in 1963 looking back just a few weeks to the early wintry months of 1963 and the Great Freeze . The UK was brought repeatedly to a standstill, rivers froze over, even the sea froze up a bit in certain coastal places, people got trapped in remote villages and having to huddle in the school hall for shared warmth, helicopter rescues of people whose…
I initially misheard the lines as "I'm a hot retard!" "Marquis de Sade!" UPDATE: They are in fact "I'm a hot retard!" "Marquis de Sade!" Like an iD fashion spread turned to music Only in the UK could such flimsy nonsense prosper and become Successful Pop But Haysi Fantayzee had two fun hit singles - this one and "John Wayne Is Big Leggy" (is that a penile innuendo?) And there's something about the…
The improbable existence of this book of scholarly essays on Deep Purple fer fuck's sake made me re-contemplate this band's deep uncompellingness.... how they run a distant third to Led Zep and Sabbath.... And then to wonder what other examples of this clustering and ranking could be found across music history... The obvious one is Beatles and Stones with The Who trailing some distance in…
theory praxis
Fascinated by this particular performance of a song that was among the select group of pre-punk songs to cut through to me, a child then not paying that much attention to the hit parade beyond a weekly watch of Top of the Pops . "Wide Eyed and Legless" is a harrowing confession of inadequacy and failure - " this world is full of my shame " - from a man beaten by the bottle (" the rhythm of the…
Proficiency of the musicians - and the prowess / power of the singing - suggests an Old Wave into New Wave makeover. And indeed... Before Angletrax, the singer Wendy Herman was in Sadista Sister s, an all-female confrontational cabaret troupe who made a fairly feeble record in 1976 for Transatlantic Records Their Brechtian agit-prop approach went over well in Germany and Holland though In the UK…
One of those groups who are let down a little by their front man's appearance - not that he isn't "charismatic", he certainly commands the stage.... but his owlish babyface and mullety hair-style, combined with the bared chest in the performance above.... well he's punching above his weight here in the studly rockgod contest Top tune - but like quite a few things from that 1976-77 moment, it feels…
1978! Never heard of this - session? guest appearance? interview? Doesn't seem like the sort of thing Capital Radio used to go in for. I think the estimate of the number of people who'll be listening in is rather inflated... that would be literally every single person in Greater London, at that time. I mean, yes, "eight million people can listen" to The Pop Group, but are eight million people…
Does any phrase bring to mind the atmosphere, the aroma, of the British 1970s better than "sex maniac"? Not a rhetorical question - I genuinely am curious if there's a more evocative word or phrase. I mean, there's "secondary picket". The ad above is from 1976. The Sex Maniac's Diary launched in 1972, which surely proves its echt-Seventiesness. ("Kinky" would be the much cooler 1960s precursor I…
" We gave her most of our lives.... never a thought for ourselves... " " We only wanted to be loved " (always taken it to be meant as a clinging motherly or grandmotherly voice, a mixture of sponge and limpet... although others bits of the lyric suggests it's more about the mutual braindeath of matrimony: Rotten's last stand of cynicism before hitching up with Nora, for life) " Nigel's whole…
The mystery of subcultural persistence, aka non-synchronisation: the fact that rock epistemes overlap and Eras do not end punctually but bleed across the supposed periodizations that journalism (first draft of...) and history (second draft of...) work with Example: this NME 1977 review of a benefit in Brighton for Release - the hippy era organisation that defended people charged with drugs…
A student's suggestion for a DIY micro-scene of the 21st Century - Rominimal (Romanian minimal techno) When I heard it, I thought this is a bit son-of-Villalobos and apparently he is the foundation stone of this sound. Which is a bit of a for-discerning-types-only scene, I'm told - sophisticated. They drink wine on the dancefloor! I'd never heard of this sound but the scene has had a smidgeon of…
The return of Student Selection - a series that never really got started (just one post I think - actually two) but was intended to showcase cool music that my students have turned me onto. Quite a few classes are based around a prompt - send me a clip of your favorite tune in such-and-such a genre, or sometimes a specific artist (Bowie or Joni). For a recent class on New Wave / Postpunk, a…
Long loved this album title and record cover (the shot was taken by John McVie) , but never listened to the music until now. The image has a powerful English-nostalgia effect, memories of walking to school through fog or mist But the Bare Trees cover photo could easily have been taken in California The fog in the Bay Area is something else. I once approached San Francisco in a taxi from the…