The last time Nick Saloman and I spoke he had just sent off the digital files for the next Bevis Frond album to his record company, Fire Records. We spoke about his hopes for the two-dozenth Frond opus. As always, the songwriter was phlegmatic about the record’s future. “I write songs,” he says. “I record […]
FROM 33 ⅓ SUBMISSION CHAPTER ONE — “Introduction” You are now the owner of the latest His Master’s Voice radio gramophone and you have at your command all the pleasures to be found on His Master’s Voice records. To show you how lovely modern records sound on a modern radio gramophone, here are extracts from […]
Back in May of this year I was immersed in a project that occupied my waking hours (plus a few more besides) and left little room for other activities. The best I could manage at Vinyl Connection was a pictorial post that hinted at the topic. It was called, with coy indirectness, “What’s Going On […]
The 2019 documentary Hitsville: The Making of Motown has the slug-line “The soul of a city, the rhythm of a nation”. Very catchy and with some truth, no doubt, though an equally valid subtitle might have been “The house that Berry built”. Berry Gordy cheerfully admits—several times, in fact—that his reason for getting into music […]
60 ALICE COOPER — Killer The band really pulled their act together in 1971, releasing Love It To Death in March and Killer in November. Although the former had the bigger single, the enduring love letter to teenage angst “I’m Eighteen”, the latter edges it out for me. Amongst the schlock horror—check out the inner […]
Pink Floyd’s Relics, which came out in May 1971, was the perfect example of a record company stop-gap release. The band toured extensively in that era (the time of Atom Heart Mother) and when they did eventually make it into the studio, there were worries their rate of creating new music was far from brisk. […]
65 LEAF HOUND — Growers Of Mushroom Inside half a minute you know exactly where you stand with Leaf Hound’s only LP, Growers Of Mushroom. “Freelance Fiend” opens with a guitar squall, powerful vocals and a blues-rock fusillade that would have made Hendrix grin. If the sound evokes Atomic Rooster, that’s not surprising as Peter […]
Sifting through over two hundred albums released in 1971 has been enjoyable, at times surprising, and occasionally daunting. It would have been impossible without the Vinyl Connection database. An early approach involved allocating each entry into a band: 10, 20s, 30s, etc. then sorting each cohort into order. That helped me map out a rough […]
After some time becalmed in lockdown waters, word has come from the poop deck of the good ship Vinyl Connection that it is well and truly time venture once more into the ocean that is “1971”. Although voyages on this varied and exciting sea have been a tad irregular, a few nautical miles have accumulated. […]
All record collectors have their ‘grails’, those rare and desirable albums that rarely pop up or, when they do, require a second mortgage to obtain. Some people keep a list of those items they long to call ‘my precious’, others simply hope for a chance encounter in the wild at a reasonable (or not totally […]
