The legendary Australian progressive band Spectrum went into cryogenic storage in mid-1973. When you think of the departure of a band – especially a well-regarded one with a series of albums to its credit – you tend to think of record company neglect or audience indifference. That image doesn’t quite fit the last year in Spectrum’s […]
If ‘The Tourist’ is your favourite song on OK Computer, then you’re more than likely to fall in love with Cocteau Twins. That elegiac, yearning quality embedded in the best Thom Yorke vocals infuses Elizabeth Fraser. Perhaps you know her voice already. The Cocteau Twins song most people know is ‘Song to the Siren’, a […]
Confessional songwriters have never been a particular favourite round these parts. I have a tendency to snap, “Speak for yourself!” followed by the chastened acknowledgment, “Oh, you are.” Yet for a while I’ve been yearning for an artist to tackle the themes we citizens of a certain age are confronting. Not global warming or China’s emergence […]
When an artist wears their influences on their sleeve, your response is likely to depend on what side of the shirt you are looking at. If it is front on: fresh new patterns and design, then delight will erupt and you won’t give a rat’s arse about what went before. Contrariwise, in the view from behind […]
Sunday was a lovely day in Melbourne. A little early haze then some Spring sunshine. We played family football in the park – soccer and Aussie rules as befits a child of mixed parentage – then back home for lunch on the back veranda. For the first time since Winter, I opened the window and […]
there’s a song snatch in my fragmented brain… I’m on a train * the space is co-created, shared. what flows into it is often pain a unique snowflake drop, individually etched with wounds. with the pain, sadness. hello, how low? wrenching creeping weeping. the pain of the other infiltrates the listener. […]
Last Sunday, bright and early, I packed the car with six crates of records, a box of CDs, another of 45s and a sandwich and drove off to the Box Hill Record Fair. It’s something I’ve been doing fairly regularly for quite a while. About fifteen years in fact. This realization made the sunny morning […]
I Wanting to build upon his established mail order record business, Richard Branson went into retail. The first Virgin store opened above a shoe shop at “the cheaper end of Oxford Street”1 in 1971. By Christmas the following year, Branson and his team had “fourteen record shops: several in London and one in every big city”1 […]
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 […]
* Andreas Vollendender – Down to the Moon [1986] Eric Clapton – Pilgrim [1998] Rush – Fly by Night [1975] Ashra – New Age of Earth [1976] * “Blue Night” by Michael Learns To Rock [2000] * 50 word short stories triggered by the above sequence are welcome and can be posted in ‘Comments’ 🙂
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) […]
* amon düül II – phallus dei [1969] acoustic alchemy – positive thinking [1998] eno moebius roedelius – after the heat [1978] john abercrombie – timeless [1974] * feature image blue nile – hats [1989]
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