Category GENRE SPECIFIC
1971 LIVE [PART ONE]
By the close of the 1960s the technology and knowhow for recording live music had improved substantially. Sure, the results were patchy on many occasions, but overall live albums had become much more listenable. Here (and in the forthcoming Part Two) we trawl through Vinyl Connection’s 1971 “Live” holding, counting ‘up’ to my favourites. 13 […]
SPRING 1971, GERMANY
Achim Reichel was part of The Rattles, a German pop/beat band who had a 1969 hit with “The Witch”. It’s an edgy late psychedelic single that’s worth checking out (if you like that kind of thing). After going solo, Reichel immersed himself in exploring the magic of guitar effects, releasing a number of albums through […]
MILES AWAY
It’s the biggest single slab of music by a single artist in the entire Vinyl Connection collection. More titles than anyone needs, I suspect, and certainly more than I care to admit to. Why do I always come back to Miles? Perhaps the answer is simple. Miles Davis was an innovator, talent spotter, restless musical […]
WITHIN HEARING
A selection of what has been spinning at Vinyl Connection headquarters recently “Audio Diary 2014-2018” is a 5-CD set of live King Crimson, and a ripper! Full of brilliantly realised versions of KC music both vintage and newer, it is at times glorious and at others pummelling. Just the way we like it. Released in […]
FEBRUARY 1971 — PART TWO
Continuing our trawl through Vinyl Connections holding from February 1971, and beginning with an absolute classic. [Part One here] Pretty much everyone agrees that Carole King’s second LP is a flawless album that boosted singer-songwriter artists towards the top of the first division. And not just in the US and Canada where the LP was […]
FEBRUARY 1971 — PART ONE
We’re running late, by about two months, so let’s get into it. * FEBRUARY 1971 ALBUM RELEASES Simply the most infectious collection of straight-ahead electric boogie that you’ll ever hear. John Lee was a savvy veteran by the early 1970s, he’d witnessed the surge in interest following the British blues boom of the early 1960s […]
JANUARY 1971 — THREE LATE ARRIVALS
It is tempting to believe that the internet knows everything about everything. When it came to finding release dates for Vinyl Connections bushel of 1971 albums, it became clear that the www is not as all-knowing as you think. Sure, I discovered a number of errors in the VC spreadsheet, mostly albums where I had […]
JUTE THE OBSCURE
Rare records with eye-watering price tags do not always live up to their reputation nor their scarcity-inflated value. Although Vinyl Connection does not own a vinyl copy of the one and only Kahvas Jute album Wide Open, the excellent Aztec Music re-issue is playing as I write. Thus it can be loudly proclaimed: this is […]
SPLIT DECISION
Veteran British blues-rockers Groundhogs deserve respect. They were there, in one form or another, from the early days of the UK blues explosion, taking their name from a John Lee Hooker song (‘Ground Hog Blues’) and backing the legend on his mid-60s visit to old Londinium. After a debut album in 1968 showed them in […]
HAVE SPACESUIT—WILL TRAVEL
Ordering a book from the dreaded ‘Big River’ company, I was lured by the ‘on your list’ bait and, of course, bit. The item was a CD I’d removed from an order months ago, something that had caught my attention but not fully hooked me in. On a whim, I added it to the cart; […]
EUROPE ENDLESS
Teaching English at the Volkshochschule Wiesbaden was one of the highlights of my time in Germany. The Head of the Language Department seemed delighted to have someone who actually had a teaching qualification. Though this was correct in principal (I did indeed have a Bachelor of Education) I’d never actually taught in schools nor practiced […]
DO ANDROIDS DREAM?
Is Vangelis the Greek Jean-Michel Jarre? Is Jean-Michel the French Klaus Schulze? Is all European synthesiser music the same? If you answered ‘No’ to all three questions, go to the top of the class. Vangelis O. Papathanassiou was born in the town of Agria some 120 km north of Athens as the seagull flies, or […]
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