Category GENRE SPECIFIC
TIME OUT IN PLEASANTVILLE
A couple of evenings ago Ms Connection and I wanted to collapse onto the couch for a bit of screen time togetherness. As it was a week-night and we’ve found that anything too exciting disrupts fragile sleep patterns, it was agreed that something gentle and preferably funny was the order of the night. So I […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
JAZZ DAY
A Mundane Day In The Life … Saved by its Jazz Soundtrack Last night I drank too much red wine. It was the wine’s fault, not mine. Rich and deep, it warmed my veins and got inside my head. This morning its oak and tannins were hanging around my system in a fuzzy sand-papery way […]
ERIC & THE VAN DER GRAAF GENERATOR
I The High School I attended was pretty large for the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne. The area had been a ‘growth corridor’ for some years and its previous life as a market garden area must have lingered in air and soil as children were plentiful. There were five classes of 25 wide-eyed primary school graduates […]
ART CRIMES IN FRANKFURT
Fourteen years is a pretty long sabbatical in anybody’s language, yet that’s the elapsed time between Donald Fagen and Walter Becker winding up Steely Dan after 1980’s Gaucho and reforming the band to tour in 1994. A recording of that tour duly appeared as Alive in America which all self-respecting Dan Fans rushed out and […]
vinylconnection.com.au 