Category d) Nineties [1990 – 1999]
A NEW COLLABORATOR AND A NEW SOUND
In 2001 David Bowie released what is without doubt the oddest compilation of his career. Which is saying something, there having been over 40 collections of his music across five decades. This one was called All Saints, with the subtitle telling you exactly what you were getting: Collected Instrumentals 1977 – 1999. The story goes that […]
LISTENER’S DIGEST #2: YOUNG, FOCUS, SEA AND CAKE, TPOTUSA, SCHOENBERG
Having been doing the single parent thing for well over a day now, our appreciation of Ms Connection’s contribution to the good life at chez Vinyl Connection is shooting up the charts with a bullet. Amongst the chores, errands, boy-wrangling and general infrastructure maintenance there has, nevertheless, been space for spinning a few discs. Here are […]
FAVES AND WAVES
Some time in mid-1999, a music-mate and I decided to compile our one hundred ‘Best Albums Of All Time’ lists to celebrate the end of the millennium. To make things more interesting, a handful of other friends and acquaintances were invited to do the same. As you might imagine, there was considerable discussion (if not […]
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, […]
ALMANAC PLAYLIST – 21 JULY
Today I employed the Almanac Strategy © for my ‘work at home’ playlist. This is what it yielded for the 21st of July. The information in italics is sourced from various internet sites. There are links to youtube videos for most featured songs. 1947 Born on this day, Cat Stevens, singer, songwriter. 1967 UK No.2 single ‘Matthew And Son’, […]
XTC IN EXCELSIS
Back in the car-cassette days of the late twentieth century it was a mandatory part of any road-based holiday to prepare a compilation tape for the journey. These became known as the ‘In-flight Entertainment’ series and included a number of pleasant destinations in the state of Victoria. With the aim of spicing up the listening […]
MAGIC MUSHROOM
As part of a rationalisation of his music storage and delivery system, my friend BB gave me a box of CDs to take along to the next Record Fair. Comprising largely jazz from the more exploratory end of the spectrum and progressive music of the kind that defies genre labelling, BB had transferred the music […]
DON’T STOP ‘TIL YOU GET ENOUGH
So here is the Vinyl Connection New Year’s Resolution: To post a weekly diary of all – I mean all – new music arrivals at Base Camp Connection. The good, the bad (as in “that’s really, bad, man”) and the ugly. It’s been tried before and lasted two posts, there has been a holiday edition, even an […]
MORE THAN ABRAXAS
When you think of album art, some classic images spring to mind… – those four blokes on the London zebra crossing, – that angular tubular bell suspended over sky-sea-shore, – the underwater baby boy lured by an angler’s dollar bill. Though it is harder to capture in a few words, the cover of the second […]
TOUGH WEEK?
there’s a song snatch in my fragmented brain… I’m on a train * the space is co-created, shared. what flows into it is often pain a unique snowflake drop, individually etched with wounds. with the pain, sadness. hello, how low? wrenching creeping weeping. the pain of the other infiltrates the listener. […]
THE DAILY PLANET
Back in the 90s I enrolled in a writing course at the CAE. Confusion Anxiety and Entropy. No, sorry. That was me in the 80s. The course was with the Council of Adult Education and it was in the city one evening each week. I completed ‘Writing for the Stage’, and I finished ‘Writing Fiction’. […]
ART CRIMES IN FRANKFURT
Fourteen years is a pretty long sabbatical in anybody’s language, yet that’s the elapsed time between Donald Fagen and Walter Becker winding up Steely Dan after 1980’s Gaucho and reforming the band to tour in 1994. A recording of that tour duly appeared as Alive in America which all self-respecting Dan Fans rushed out and […]
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