Born in Brixton, South London, David Robert Jones—known to the world as David Bowie—was a creative child who formed his first band in 1952 at the age of fifteen. After his unsuccessful self-titled debut LP in 1967, Bowie stepped back from pop music for a while and studied mime and drama with Lindsay Kemp. When […]
After The Final Cut (1983), Pink Floyd were no more. So decreed Roger Waters, key lyricist and driving creative force in the band. But guitarist David Gilmour had other ideas and in 1986 he began working with drummer Nick Mason in the floating studio he had created on the magnificent houseboat Astoria, moored along the […]
As mentioned previously, I’ve been transitioning from IG to Bluesky. A March “Vinyl Challenge” caught my eye. Using the grammatically clunky (but instructive) hashtag #31GreatWomenMusicians, the idea is to post one artist a day for the month. It has been such fun delving into the Vinyl Connection Collection that I thought I’d share a few, […]
Early in the twenty-first century it seemed that, finally, the jazz loving world was starting to pick up on guitarist Grant Green. Hallelujah! His rhythmic playing being neither complicated nor particularly flashy, Green stayed off the radar of casual jazz fans for far too long. Yet he was all over bebop and worked with many […]
Rock behemoths Pink Floyd cast a long shadow across popular music, from the 60s to the 80s and beyond. Perhaps that is why Floyd guitarist David Gilmour has produced just five studio albums in a six decade career; the band that bought him fame, fortune and friction has tended to dominate his creative life. Luck […]
A few days ago we escaped a summer scorcher by retreating to the coolth of an air-conditioned cinema. The film was James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, the newly released biopic of the early career of Bob Dylan. Featuring a riveting performance by Timothée Chalamet, the film tracks Dylan’s career from his arrival in New York […]
With the madness coursing through America’s veins, I’ve become increasingly unwilling to have any intersection between President Pumpkin’s oligarchs and my life. So, like a couple of other friends, I am transitioning from IG to Bluesky for posting records. Do I think the dead fish tech bosses will notice? Of course not. But tens of […]
Sonically daring and lyrically challenging, Radiohead’s follow-up to the hugely successful OK Computer was the result of much suffering. Thom Yorke endured a psycho-emotional crisis during the extensive world tour following OK Computer’s success while the whole band agonised about their ‘direction’. Yet somehow they managed to both renew their sound and create an album […]
One of the wonderful things about popular music is the way it has splintered into a thousand sparkling threads, like a fireworks display in slow motion. There are more genres, sub-sections, and styles than could be examined in a lifetime… and it all started less than seventy years ago. Yet despite the best efforts of […]
Growing up in a musical family, young Jimmy Smith learned piano and later, double bass. When he switched to organ in the mid-1950s after hearing Wild Bill Davis, Jimmy combined the two instrumental skills, utilising the bass pedals of his Hammond B3 to fill out the lower end of his sound. While this made the […]
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