With all the records in the world to talk about or simply listen to, I seem to have found myself listening to Jonathan Wilson’s second LP rather a lot. It sounds, as does the first album, like Crosby, Stills and Nash with a general seventies Laurel Canyon feel, but it also has something Dennis Wilson […]
Living in London in 1979 was like living in San Francisco in 1967, Seattle in 1990 or perhaps Paris in the fifties. Music oozed out of the very paving stones. The air was charged with vital sounds, green mohicans, studs, earrings and bands – The Furs, The Only Ones, The Pretenders, Elvis Costello, The Boomtown […]
The debut album released in 1972 some three years after they formed, came out in the shape of a piggy bank and began with a sci-fiesque keyboard that jumps without warning into lute and flute from a castle banquet. It then materialises in the sixties and is back on Mars, all before you get time to […]
This was the first album by Van Der Graaf Generator released in 1969. It’s the debut of a band that would become one of the most progressive (in the truest sense) of all the bands from this genre. Although this record doesn’t have the classic line up that included sax player David Jackson and bass […]
Contemporay classical composers, and that means modern era, are often dense, difficult and a challenge. Sir John Tavener who died yesterday was a God-fearing, or more a man inspired by God to create music of profound beauty. A literal vessel for divine inspiration or “divine dictation” as he playfully put it. The Whale was a piece […]
When the announcement came that The Mars Volta were breaking up I cried, well actually no, that’s a terrible exaggeration…but I was sad to hear that a band that I had followed from the start and had seen live 3 times were stopping. I regret never being able to get all their albums on vinyl […]