Category c) Eighties [1980 – 1989]
STILL BLOOMING GOOD
One of the holy grails of rock music is the making of an album that defies time. The Stone Roses achieved this with their 1989 self-titled debut, a shimmering melodic masterpiece with a dark heart. From the Jackson Pollock inspired cover with its paint-trail puzzle to the ecstatic, epic final track “I am the resurrection”, […]
BARKING AND BEAUTIFUL
For a brief article to do justice to Kate Bush’s 1985 magnum opus Hounds Of Love it would need to be written in colour. It would have washes of luminous chalk, splashes of oil pastel, shafts of vivid acrylics and tendrils of lava lamp pink. Shapes would pulsate with passion, creep along midnight forest trails […]
CINEMATIC GOLD
In 1982 I was deeply immersed in the Student Union of the tertiary institution where I’d just finished a degree. It was an exciting, intense time full of meetings, negotiations, and nights spent strategising how to improve the lot of the student population. We were young and relatively clueless, but deeply committed. Often by late […]
GET UP, STAND UP
Having celebrated the Bob Marley boxed set just recently, I thought it would be a nice follow-up to share this piece, written for Discrepancy Records. * Singing along to “Is this love” or “I shot the Sheriff”, it’s easy to forget the music of Bob Marley and the Wailers is, at the core, a revolutionary […]
PROGRESSIVE FOURPLAY A—D
I generally don’t last long in Facebook groups. Someone will say something offensive and/or ignorant I’ll hurriedly hit “Leave Group”. Sometimes, which is far worse, I’ll respond/react only to then see the thing collapse into a foetid swamp as my stomach sinks at roughly the same rate. And that’s just the music groups. Nevertheless, one […]
CRATED UP
Few things get the old Vinyl Connection pulse racing as effectively as the gift of records. I was recently gobsmacked by the offer to plunder three crates of dusty vinyl that, my benefactor said, had been sitting in the garage for a couple of decades and that he would never play again. A quick flick […]
ALBUM COVERS | 10 MORE ARTIST PORTRAITS
More album cover art with an emphasis on art. Here are ten record covers with portraits of the artist. Some are from the Vinyl Connection collection, a couple were sourced from the internet. Several were suggested in the comments section of the initial post and are gratefully included. Let’s continue the pattern of starting with […]
THE PRINCE’S DIARIES
Day 1 Having suggested featuring a Prince album at the Discrepancy Records blog, I realised as I unwrapped the album that my knowledge of the small purple one’s music was rather limited. In fact the only Prince items in the VC collection are a double CD of his hits and the one where he’s being […]
FOCUS ON JAN AKKERMAN
In the post 1971 COUNTDOWN: #29 — #26, an instalment in the seemingly endless Vinyl Connection series, Focus’s second album, Moving Waves, was featured. Scott, veteran blogger at HMO, expressed his appreciation of the album, mentioned my other favourite Focus LP, and revealed his acquisition of a boxed set of solo albums from the band’s guitarist, […]
COVER ART | ON THE CHAIR
As we inch towards Summer, what could be better than Australian Crawl and a classic Leunig cartoon… While others seek warmth inside a green house. Leo Kottke is one of the masters of finger-picking guitar. “Greenhouse” came out in 1972 and while not quite as jaw-dropping as his classic “6 and 12 String Guitar” LP, […]
LEVITATING
A recent late-night on-line buying bonanza netted this re-issue of Hawkwind’s 1980 album Levitation. Part of the attraction—apart from it being Hawkwind, of course—was the inclusion of not one, but two bonus records: a concert recorded at that world-famous venue, the Lewisham Odeon, on the 18th of December 1980. The studio album has retained some […]
POPTOPIA!
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 […]
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