Category c) Eighties [1980 – 1989]
TWISTING THE KNIFE AWAY
“We never do anything with my friends, it’s always yours,” she said. It was true. In fact I had not realised until this moment that Penny had friends. She’d appeared at the educational institution where I worked without any visible attachments and in the months we’d been seeing each other, none had been forthcoming. If that […]
A MUCH NEEDED VOID
First up, apologies to those of you who have been awaiting this review for longer than you should have awaited it. The fault was mine entirely in that I was confused because I thought I had three different albums to listen to again but it seems that I sort of didn’t. More one-and-a-bit. Let me tell you […]
RUTHERFORD’S DAY
Writing a memoir seems to have become a compulsory autumn activity for ageing rock stars. And given the rate at which they are dropping off the twig, a good thing too I reckon. Commit those stories to print before deteriorating faculties and disintegrating memories make it impossible to recall the detail that brings such tomes to life. […]
IS YOUR DEODORANT STRONG ENOUGH?
Just recently, while introducing an album with significant input from Steve Winwood, (Stomu Yamashta’s GO), I wrote about Terry Hounsome’s Rock Record 7. To illustrate both the intricacies of the book and the impressive count of Winwood appearances, I cited an example of an album not worth pursuing. With self-assurance and confidence, it was noted that […]
ARCING UP
Here is the Steve Winwood story in his song lyrics. At the time of the first solo album in 1977, the tone is one of quiet desperation. Hold on to me when you’re falling When you’re falling down to the ground Hold on to me when you feel like When you feel like you can’t […]
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? […]
HERO’S JOURNEY
I remember trying to work out the difference between my music consumption and that of normal people. How come they weren’t bothered by having just a couple of dozen records and a box of cassettes? Why didn’t they avidly study the backs of the sleeves and where was their curiosity about how the music was […]
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 […]
TOWERS OF STRENGTH
Nowadays it is not that easy to connect with the sense of geopolitical tension that pervaded the early 80s. The threat of war —and here we are talking about nuclear conflict, not yer pussy tanks, napalm and barking M16 stuff— was seriously canvassed across the northern hemisphere. Sabres were rattled, bugles blown, hands were wrung […]
SPIRITS AND GREMLINS
Last summer holidays I made a two hundred and fifty kilometre round trip to visit a Sunday Market. A mate was holidaying nearby –or rather, we were staying near the newly acquired beach house of he and his partner– and I discovered that Geoff (unlike Vinyl Connection readers) had not been to the Kongwak Market. So off we […]
THANKS FOR DROPPING BY
For some blogs, fifty-five thousand page views is an average week. For Vinyl Connection it is the culmination of over two-and-a-half years of posts. That’s OK; a mass audience was neither the goal nor expectation. Still, it is a little milestone worth marking, so I dipped into the VC catalogue and pulled out spreadsheet entries […]
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. […]
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