Category Particular platters
HIGH-HEELED BOYS
Continuing a survey of the remarkable career of Steve Winwood PART III Setting up a colourful tent at the English folk-rock fayre, John Barleycorn Must Die, with its linocut sheath of grain picture and earthy brown sleeve, was a heady brew of rock, folk and jazz influences that sounds remarkably fresh to this day. Opening […]
ORGANS OF HEARING
Decade Diving (Round 3) 1966 A left-hand piano figure rocks up and down before a bluesy right hand enters, along with drums and bass. It’s cool, it’s groovy, it’s ‘My sweet potato’, the opening cut on And Now!, Booker T & The MG’s third album. But hang on a minute, shouldn’t we be hearing organ? […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
LUCKY MAN
From the woozy fanfare opening ‘The Barbarian’ to the final swooping moog solo panning between the speakers at the end of ‘Lucky Man’, via the stroked grand piano strings of ‘Take a Pebble’ and the dystopian drama of ‘Knife Edge’, I know the first Emerson Lake and Palmer album very well indeed. But it wasn’t […]
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