Category GENRE SPECIFIC
YULETIDE MEMORY
The year I undertook a part-time theatre/drama/acting course at the National Theatre Drama School was, without doubt, one of the best for quite a while*. Yet at the end of the year I was uncertain about the future. Was it worth trying to further develop my acting skills? Could I sandpaper them into something that […]
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 […]
LISTENER’S DIGEST #2: YOUNG, FOCUS, SEA AND CAKE, TPOTUSA, SCHOENBERG
Having been doing the single parent thing for well over a day now, our appreciation of Ms Connection’s contribution to the good life at chez Vinyl Connection is shooting up the charts with a bullet. Amongst the chores, errands, boy-wrangling and general infrastructure maintenance there has, nevertheless, been space for spinning a few discs. Here are […]
FIELD TESTING THE THEORY
It is a funny thing, the vinyl hunter-gathering lifestyle. Although I have a number of tasty records in transit from exotic locations world-wide (all right, you got me; from the US and UK), the prospect of a record fair last Sunday was too good to miss. A leave pass negotiated, off I trotted, returning home a […]
EARTH AND MOON
Sometimes reading blogs can be expensive: you read, you like, you must have… the purchase is a direct result of reading a particular post. Other times, I’ve noted indirect references to an artist rated highly by the writer and somehow added a pencil note to the old cerebral cortex. An example is the band Earth, alluded […]
MINIMAL RAINBOW
From an imagined podcast… It is generally agreed that ‘minimal music’ appeared in the mid-60s, arising out of the US avant-garde scene in which John Cage was a principal figure. Most writers and commentators, Sitsky for example, list La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass as the key composers. A study of […]
’77 JAZZ FUNK STRIP
Jazz has nearly as many sub-genres as metal, and that is really saying something. Having stumbled across the jazz-funk of The Crusaders in the early 80s, I began exploring this laid-back but groovy territory, finding it an enjoyable late-night adjunct to the frantic fusion I’d been fuel-injecting for nearly a decade. So I accumulated albums […]
LISTENER’S DIGEST #1: BJH, JT, MUTTON BIRDS, BLOSS & SCHULZE
While we love celebrating album cover art here at Vinyl Connection, it’s worth remembering that those sleeves contain records (or, ahem, CDs). So for this first edition of (yet another) occasional feature called “Listener’s Digest” I have chosen four albums that appeared in Album Cover posts over recent months. Variety being the ear-spice of musical life, […]
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 […]
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