Tag Archives: Kraftwerk
1975 COUNTDOWN | #20 — #11
#20 BETTY DAVIS — NASTY GAL Paradoxically, Nasty Gal is Betty Davis’s fiercest and most polished record. Produced by Davis herself, it fuses hard funk with glam-inflected edge: serrated guitar riffs, tight horn stabs over a rhythm section that struts and swaggers. Davis’s vocals are raw, confrontational and defiantly sexual, pushing beyond the already bold […]
1974 COUNTDOWN | #5 — #1
It has certainly been a long, strange trip yet here we are near the end of the 74 FROM ’74 album countdown. With a dozen-and-a-half days of 2024 still remaining. What efficiency! Before launching into the final five albums, it is timely to recall that this is neither a ‘Best of’ list, nor a ‘Greatest […]
BACK AT THE CREASE
So much sport. So much music. Time to multi-task. Although not as dramatic as the Ashes tests, Wishbone Ash’s 1974 album There’s The Rub is a corker. Perhaps their last truly complete LP and my second favourite. Perfect for watching Australia clean up England in the first two tests. (Don’t mention the third.) The eccentric British troubadour-poet […]
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 […]
BACK TO FRONT
Here’s an album cover post a while in the planning. Though perhaps that should read: a while in the acquiring. Years ago, when I first got a copy of Kraftwerk’s Radio-aktivität I was struck by the cover art: a geiger counter showing the operation panel on the front of the LP and the rear of […]
EUROPE ENDLESS
It’s just another elderly musician gone. Happens so regularly that writing rock obituaries would be a full-time job. So why does the death of Kraftwerk co-founder Florian Schneider fill me with sadness? Actually, not sadness… loss. A electronic hole in the musicverse leaving one man standing. Hütter and Schneider, Schneider and Hütter. Now just Ralf. […]
POWER PLANT BACK ON LINE
Are you onboard with Kraftwerk? The Deutsche electronic music pioneers are far better known now than when they created their definitive romantic/ascetic albums in the seventies. In fact a halo of electronic divinity now surrounds a band whose membership grew then shrunk and at one point even toured a set of robotic dummies instead of […]
TEN FROM 77 – 3 / ELECTRONIC – 2
Continuing (and concluding) a rather indulgent journey through albums released in 1977 broadly falling into the ‘electronic’ category. Having covered 10 – 6, here are the Top 5. 5 Jürgen Karg — Elektronische Mythen Herr Karg played bass with jazz experimentalist Wolfgang Dauner on a (semi-) legendary 1969 recording. Eight years later he released his […]
TOP TEN EXCUSES FOR BUYING RECORDS
The review I read was really positive 1 The price was a lot less than Discogs 2 It’s my birthday 3 I’ve never seen it ‘in the wild’ before 4 The cover art is nice 5 It fills a gap in the collection 6 It will be my birthday in 10 days / weeks / […]
CASSETTES COLLATED
A few years back I came across a seemingly serious new event: International Cassette Day. Apparently some misguided souls were entirely genuine in wanting to reenergize this obsolete and never-very-good-in-the-first-place medium on the back of the (then) nascent vinyl revival. Well, LPs are certainly going strong, but thankfully cassettes remain consigned to the back of the audio wardrobe in […]
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