Category ACROSS THE DECADES
CATASTROPHY AVERTED
Back in the old school days of the 90s you learned about music on paper. I, for example, was an avid reader of MOJO: The Music Magazine, a UK monthly full of solidly researched features and well written reviews. I guess it is the mark of a loyal and trusting reader to purchase albums based […]
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 […]
PELL KNELL
Listen to this song by musician, songwriter, sometime ‘Never mind the Buzzcocks’ presenter and writer of the music for the Roald Dahl musical Matilda, Tim Minchin. It’s called ‘Come Home (Cardinal Pell)’, and was written, recorded and released in three days as a response to the news that the 74-year-old Catholic clergyman will not attend […]
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 […]
DECADE DIVING #1
Several ‘Album Anniversary’ posts have appeared here at Vinyl Connection. We have cruised to Köln with Keith (Jarrett), raved about Relayer and hung out with the Minstrel In The Gallery forty years on. Sometimes it’s just too hard to resist the lure of the decade-driven ‘It was twenty (thirty, forty) years ago, today…’. Yet I’ve […]
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 […]
HILLAGE RIFFAGE
In some ways, packing for a year in a different hemisphere is easier than preparing a suitcase for two weeks at the beach. I pondered this conundrum back in 1996 as I prepared for an extended relationship cultural exchange in Germany. Often the answer to the question “How many? How much?” was answered with the […]
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 […]
A KIND OF 2015 LIST
Biggest crush What does it mean when you go, in a mere few months, from never having heard of an artist to buying four albums new? Probably that you have too much time on your hands and money in your pocket. Nevertheless, I became very taken with the lively retro-electronica of Zombi. They combine elements […]
YULETIDE MEMORY
The year I undertook a part-time theatre/drama/acting course at the National Theatre Drama School was, without doubt, one of the best for quite a while*. Yet at the end of the year I was uncertain about the future. Was it worth trying to further develop my acting skills? Could I sandpaper them into something that […]
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 […]
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