Category Particular platters

BODY SPIRIT SYNTH MAGICK

Is that a trickling water feature or a leaky lavatory cistern? If you were at The Festival of Mind Body and Spirit at the London Olympia between the 21st and 29th of April 1979, the question would probably not have bothered you. Blissed out on asparagus acid and tripping on tofu, a sample bag of […]

TIME — IN QUAALUDES AND RED WINE

When you are in pain, time has the capacity for slowing to a torturous crawl. Such was the lot of your correspondent this week, as one of the Vinyl Connection bicuspids decided it was sick and tired of meekly sitting between ripping canine and grinding molar and transformed, Jekyll and Hyde-like, into a small white […]

BEARDED RAINBOWS

Eric Clapton and girlfriend Charlotte Martin were at London musician’s club The Speakeasy in Spring 1967. It was the same club where, not long previously, Eric had his first taste of LSD in circumstances that were probably not your average first trip, even in that much mythologized year. The way Eric tells it, ‘the Beatles came in […]

NOT PANTS

Here is the groove test. Spin “Green Onions” by Booker T. & The M.G’s and if your booty doesn’t shake, your hips don’t swivel, your head doesn’t nod or your fingers snap, man, you dead to the rhythm. “Green Onions” was the lead track and hit single from the 1962 album of the same name, […]

ENGLISH EVERGREENS

2016 — Top Five New Releases Although Vinyl Connection managed a respectable bag of new release during 2016, less than half of them actually made it to these pages during the calendar year. We were onto the new one by post-rock instrumentalists Tortoise back in February and rushed towards the release by local artist All India […]

2016 REPORT FROM THE FIELD — PART 1

Top Five Secondhand Record Purchases It is revealing that there was more than enough material in the acquisitions book to produce a Top 50 list of secondhand records entering the Vinyl Connection domain during the past twelve months. We are talking fifty highlights, by-the-by, not gap-fillers, pass-markers and also-rans. So much good music and such […]

TOGETHER ALONE

On a Crowded House high after the televised concert last weekend, I was going to write about Together Alone. I thought to tell you of how, buying the album on release in 1993, its darker hues spoke strongly to my melancholic side, deep and rich like a chocolate cake made with 70% Lindt and a […]

DARK SIDE OF THE VALLEY

When you think about the world-straddling colossus they became in the latter half of the 70s, it is easy to forget that Pink Floyd started life as just one spray of colour in the kaleidoscope of Swinging London. Like many bands of the 60s, Pink Floyd embraced side projects and commissions. After all, it was […]

JACK JOHNSON — SAY IT LOUD

Racism, discrimination, a rock manifesto, sex, sport, violence and audio editing. Buy a ticket, this album has it all. Oh, and it’s a soundtrack too. Coming off the recording sessions that produced In A Silent Way (released July, 1969) and Bitches Brew (April, 1970), it was clear that Miles Davis was determined to move his music-making […]

SPACEMILLS OF YOUR MIND

It is late. The television is the only light in the room. You slouch, alone, on the couch. The movie you’ve been determinedly watching through to the endless final credits has been disappointing. What were people raving about? Unfulfilled, you surf a few channels, hoping for…what? Something to prod you out of this torpor; a […]

WINNER TAKES IT ALL

Tomorrow I’m playing a third match in the Watsonia Tennis Club Championships. Lots of members enter multiple events; Open Singles and Doubles, A Grade Men’s, Parent and Child Doubles, Mixed. Given my level of fitness, I decided to enter just one event, especially as the boy was decidedly cool on the idea of playing competition tennis […]

SPACE TRUCKIN’

Well into the second decade of the 21st Century, it is wonderfully anachronistic that bands are still twisting the kaleidoscope of psychedelia. One such is Toronto’s Comet Control. Based around the songwriting partnership of guitarists Chad Ross and Andrew Moszynski (whose relationship pre-existed musically in the psych-metal band Quest For Fire), Comet Control released their […]