Category ACROSS THE DECADES
TUBULAR RIDGE
I Wanting to build upon his established mail order record business, Richard Branson went into retail. The first Virgin store opened above a shoe shop at “the cheaper end of Oxford Street”1 in 1971. By Christmas the following year, Branson and his team had “fourteen record shops: several in London and one in every big city”1 […]
STITCHING TOGETHER JAZZ, ROCK AND FUNK
When Miles Davis went electric at the end of the 60s he may not have actually ‘invented’ jazz-rock (or fusion, if you prefer) but he certainly plugged some serious voltage into it. What’s more, the musicians who played on the seminal Miles albums In a Silent Way (1969), Bitches Brew (1970), and Jack Johnson (1971) […]
TURNED OUT NICELY
I remember buying my copy of Jethro Tull’s Stand Up at a Record Fair many years ago. The stall belonged to a guy I knew vaguely from the public radio station I presented on, 3 PBS FM. He was part of the Heavy Metal crew. Their show preceded Late Night Shopping on a Friday evening and […]
VINYL HUNTER GATHERER GOES INTERSTATE
When finding themselves in a different city, any vinyl hunter-gatherer worth their turntable will attempt to visit as many music shops as possible in the available time. Art Galleries? Phooey. Historic Buildings? Only if they contain Record Shops. What we want are records. Lots of them. Vinyl Connection was in Adelaide last week, and had […]
JB YOU’VE DONE IT AGAIN!
One of the most successful Music, Sound and Electrical Goods retailers in Australia is JB Hi-Fi. There are over 160 stores in every state and territory of this wide brown land. But that is not how it began. Originally there was one JB Hi-Fi store just as there was one John Barbuto, the man who […]
BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE!
Posters, lyric sheets, merchandise order forms, glimpses of other mouth-watering titles from the same record company… lots of different bits of paper have been inserted into LPs over the years. They are not our concern today. Here, in ascending order of magnificent silliness, are Vinyl Connection’s six favourite ALBUMS WITH EXTRAS. 6. ROTOGRAVURE – […]
THE AMAZING PUDDING
David Gilmour reflected that Atom Heart Mother, Pink Floyd’s first album of the 70s, was “us blundering about in the dark” [1, p.92]. Keyboard player Rick Wright does not remember it fondly. “Looking back it wasn’t so good” [2, p.82]. For his part, Roger Waters would prefer the suite be “thrown into the dustbin and […]
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’. […]
AS WE WIND ON DOWN THE ROAD – ZEPPELIN AND FOLK
This article continues a feature on the bursting forth of folk influences on Led Zeppelin III. It uses as a springboard quotes from Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones and looks at albums that would have been important for the musicians as well as those released in the lead-up to the writing of material […]
BUSTLING TOWARD THE HEDGEROW: LED ZEPPELIN I – III
I – Setting out Led Zeppelin played their first gig on the 7th of September, 1968, in Denmark. The tour was a remaindered Yardbirds commitment but none-the-less a statement of intent for a new/old band with energy, commitment and stamina. They played regularly, often two sets per night, and set off on the first of […]
THE NEU! GROOVE [PART 2]
Last week Vinyl Connection introduced the self-titled debut album by the highly influential German band Neu!. The story continues… * For an unknown band releasing a first album, Neu! achieved significant success. It helped that highly respected and influential radio disc jockey John Peel was a big fan, resulting in solid sales in Great Britain […]
HELLO HALLOGALLO! [PART 1]
I cannot remember the date, but I recall the exact location where I took delivery of Julian Cope’s slim but influential paperback Krautrocksampler in Autumn 1996. There was a palpable thrill in opening the mail box near the front door at Langentalstraße 6 and finding a small parcel addressed to me. Not to Herr Schmidt […]
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