Category a) Sixties and earlier [0 – 1969]
THEY SAID, THEY SAID
Continuing a track by track spin through The Beatles Revolver which began here. SIDE TWO 1. GOOD DAY SUNSHINE I’m in love and it’s a sunny day McCartney blithely chirps about how wonderful it is to be in love [Kozinn, p. 144] Superbly sung by McCartney and exquisitely produced by Martin and his team, ‘Good […]
STILL REVOLVING
It is the album that marked the Beatles transition from mop-tops to musicians, from pop princes to progressive boundary-pushers and it has been part of popular culture for half a century. Ringo may well have remarked that ‘tomorrow never knows’, but it actually does. It knows that Revolver was a great album then, now, and […]
SMILING PHASES
STEVE WINWOOD How do you approach the catalogue of an artist active over many decades in several different outfits who has a substantial solo output to boot? That’s the question I’ve been pondering, on and off, since a blogmate expressed interest in reading a little about the career of one of the great rock singers, […]
ORGANS OF HEARING
Decade Diving (Round 3) 1966 A left-hand piano figure rocks up and down before a bluesy right hand enters, along with drums and bass. It’s cool, it’s groovy, it’s ‘My sweet potato’, the opening cut on And Now!, Booker T & The MG’s third album. But hang on a minute, shouldn’t we be hearing organ? […]
DECADE DIVING #2
1976 When I stumbled across a copy of Jean-Michel Jarre’s breakthrough electronic album Oxygène in a Daylesford book and record shop some years back I was quite excited. Not because of the music itself —I already had the album on vinyl and CD— but because of the alternate cover, one I’d never seen before. Instead […]
BLUE VELVETS
One of the albums featured in 10 Terrific Album Covers – Part 2 was Live MCMXCIII by The Velvet Underground. At the time I was a trifle dismissive. Having the double CD did not deter me from snapping up this 4 LP live set on beautiful blue vinyl, apparently a ‘Black Friday’ release from 2014. Haven’t […]
10 TERRIFIC ALBUM COVERS* – PART 2
* ADDED TO THE VINYL CONNECTION COLLECTION DURING 2015** ** And whose music is terrific too! This is the second part of what was going to be a quicky but quickly became an epic. * Having the double CD did not deter me from snapping up this 4 LP live set on beautiful blue vinyl, apparently a […]
10 TERRIFIC ALBUM COVERS* – PART 1
* ADDED TO THE VINYL CONNECTION COLLECTION DURING 2015** ** And whose music is terrific too As album cover art is something of a passion here at Vinyl Connection, I thought I’d share some of the covers that have given pleasure on their arrival at Vinyl Connection headquarters, and include a word or two about the music. […]
10 ALMANAC ENTRIES FROM 1955
Chuck Berry records his first single, “Maybelline”, for Chess Records in Chicago [May 21]. Despite the vitality of his early songs and his significance as a writer/performer, surprisingly few of his singles crossed over from the R&B charts to the upper echelons of the pop hit parade. * “Rock Around the Clock” becomes the first […]
MULTI-COLOUR OF THE RAINBOLD
An opening electric guitar chord, solo-strummed, then the drums and bass kick in. It is a simple, powerful rhythm that is instantly inviting and enveloping. If it was a concert, you’d be on your feet already. You could sway to this intoxicating rhythm forever, but Steve Marriot’s voice enters, There’s wheat in the field […]
MINIMAL RAINBOW
From an imagined podcast… It is generally agreed that ‘minimal music’ appeared in the mid-60s, arising out of the US avant-garde scene in which John Cage was a principal figure. Most writers and commentators, Sitsky for example, list La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass as the key composers. A study of […]
LISTENER’S DIGEST #1: BJH, JT, MUTTON BIRDS, BLOSS & SCHULZE
While we love celebrating album cover art here at Vinyl Connection, it’s worth remembering that those sleeves contain records (or, ahem, CDs). So for this first edition of (yet another) occasional feature called “Listener’s Digest” I have chosen four albums that appeared in Album Cover posts over recent months. Variety being the ear-spice of musical life, […]
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