Category ACROSS THE DECADES
ART ON YOUR SLEEVE #3 – JETHRO TULL
An occasional series featuring LPs boasting ‘fine art’ on their covers, with commentary on the music and something about the art. #3 JETHRO TULL – Minstrel in the Gallery [1975] THE MUSIC After the patchy but commercially successful Warchild (#2 in the US), Jethro Tull’s eighth album was an energetic and consistently excellent return to form. Combining […]
FOUR MOMENTS IN POOLE
“I’ll be in meetings all day but you can take the car and go exploring.” My friend Jo was zooming down the M3 from London towards the coast, expertly nipping in and out of traffic and dodging belching lorries as I sat in the passenger seat feeling very much on the other side of the […]
TORN SKY
I’ve just woken from a fitful doze, 34,000 feet above the Caspian Sea. Not that it is visible as we hurtle through an orange-pink upper altitude cloud carpet at 578 mph, but it’s down there somewhere below the crumpled sheets of puffy stuff. That is what the animated map tells me, anyway. What a clever little […]
HOT SABBATH
It was well after leaving High School that I acquired my first stereo. Sure, the family home had several devices capable of emitting music: a Bakelite mantle radio in the kitchen, my Father’s Elcon reel-to-reel tape recorder, the sideboard sized stereogram in the lounge, all polished wood and frowning classical records. But all of these […]
FLOYDITTIES
What do you do when you have the entire catalogue of an artist, the ‘Best of’ albums, most titles on at least two formats, plus a goodly selection of bootlegs? If you answered, ‘See your therapist’, you get points plus that special superior feeling that attends the suspicion a fellow music lover may just be […]
PINK EARS AND TANGERINE NIGHTMARES
THE MUSIC OF TANGERINE DREAM, PART TWO After Electronic Meditation, Klaus Schulze moved on from Tangerine Dream, leaving band leader Edgar Froese in need of a replacement. There was a young musician Froese had encountered in the Berlin scene as the drummer of Agitation Free (a brilliant, inventive band I hope we’ll get to at […]
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’, […]
NORWEGIAN STARFIRE
What a strangely captivating album is Starfire, the 9th from Norwegian band Jaga Jazzist. I stumbled across this recent release, took a punt on the album after auditioning a track on youtube (below) and… got excited. The grooves are inescapable though far from standard issue. Often the melodic lines seem to be layered on top […]
10 ALBUMS TO SAY YES TO
Following the recent departure of Yes co-founder and bass supremo Chris Squire, it seems fitting to revisit the music of a band central to 70s ‘Prog’ who continued to make music through every subsequent decade. Who would have thought that the song-writing partnership that began when Jon Anderson and Chris Squire hit it off in […]
SUNDANCES
One Saturday afternoon in October 1976 I rode my bicycle round to Rod Amberton’s place to watch a total eclipse. It seemed like a friendly thing to do, given that this sort of solar phenomenon only occurred every few decades and Melbourne was, apparently, a prime location from which to view it. Assuming the clouds […]
PINK DISCO
It is amazing what you’ll buy when the need for vinyl outweighs good sense. I’m not sure what mood I was in a few weeks back when the best I could bring home was an album of disco versions of Pink Floyd songs, but it may have been certifiable. Ignoring a raft of warning signs […]
KOMPUTER WORLDS
“Beam myself into the future” Needing to choose a CD for an album-length child-accompanied drive across the Melbourne suburbs, I pulled out Kraftwerk’s Computer World. There wasn’t much risk as the boy really likes Man-Machine. When he saw what I’d pulled out, he gave it the thumbs up and even an endorsing, ‘Good choice Daddy’, so […]
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