1970s
Album: X - Smoke & FictionThursday, 01 August 2024
X, although beloved of music journalists, are one of American punk’s most under-acknowledged. They took a tilt at fame in the mid-Eighties with the radio-friendly Ain’t Love Grand album and its lead single “Burning House of Love”, but it wasn’t to... Read more... |
Album: Blues Pills - BirthdayWednesday, 31 July 2024
Swedish-American four-piece Blues Pills are new to this writer but have been around since 2011. Their fourth album makes me wonder why.Of its 11 songs, judged purely on sheer pop-rock chops, nine have real legs. If a friend had put Birthday on and... Read more... |
Peter Kennard: Archive of Dissent, Whitechapel Gallery review - photomontages sizzling with rageTuesday, 30 July 2024
Peter Kennard: Archive of Dissent at the Whitechapel Gallery includes many of the artists’s most iconic political photomontages. Beginning in the 1970s, Kennard created images that by speaking truth to power, gave protest movements like CND (... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The ConversationTuesday, 30 July 2024
“I don’t care what they’re talking about,” says the best bugger in the business, Harry Caul (Gene Hackman). “I just want a nice fat tape.”In the minor-key masterpiece Francis Ford Coppola made in the brief interlude between The Godfather (... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: Tomorrow's Fashions - Library Electronica 1972-1987Sunday, 28 July 2024
The conundrum central to library music is that it was not meant to be listened to in any normal way. Yet, in time, this is what happened. What ended up on the albums pressed by companies like Bruton, Chappell, De Wolfe and others was heard by... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: Barry Ryan - The Albums 1969-1979Sunday, 21 July 2024
In April 1985, The Damned’s Dave Vanian was speaking with Janice Long on her BBC Radio 1 show. He said “Barry Ryan and Paul Ryan have been sadly forgotten. Everyone waxes lyrical about Scott Walker which is marvellous but this is absolutely superb.... Read more... |
Album: Deep Purple - =1Saturday, 20 July 2024
Ever since their 2013 album Now What?! hard rock veterans Deep Purple have been on a roll, both creatively and commercially. They’ve seemed a revitalised force. An album of covers aside, their output since has also sold/streamed multitudes. Not bad... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: Atlanta - Hotbed of 70s SoulSunday, 14 July 2024
Michael Thevis made his money from pornography. In the Seventies, his Atlanta warehouses were stuffed with most of America’s porn. Nationally, Thevis was the main distributor. Looking for something less edgy to fund with his profits, he turned to... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: Angelic Upstarts - Teenage WarningSunday, 07 July 2024
NME’s Paul Morley reviewed Angelic Upstarts’ debut album, the newly reissued Teenage Warning, in August 1979. He pointed out that they were “seen as the successors to Sham 69.”The assessment made sense. Their encore song was a version of Sham's... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: Cluster - ZuckerzeitSunday, 30 June 2024
In 1974, two albums by German kosmiche musicians working with electronics became the first from the seedbed of what’d been dubbed Krautrock to explicitly embrace – and merge – melody and rhythmic structure. One was Kraftwerk’s Autobahn. The other... Read more... |
Gavin Jantjes: To Be Free, Whitechapel Gallery review - a sweet and sour response to horrific circumstancesWednesday, 19 June 2024
Born in Cape Town in 1948, Gavin Jantjes grew up under apartheid. He openly criticised the regime in his work and, forced into exile, was granted political asylum in Germany in 1973.Nearly 10 years later he moved to England and his Whitechapel... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: Moving Away from the Pulsebeat - Post-Punk Britain 1977-1981Sunday, 09 June 2024
“Moving Away from the Pulsebeat” is the final track – barring the locked-groove return of the two-note guitar refrain from “Boredom” – of Buzzcocks’ March 1978 debut album, Another Music In A Different Kitchen. At five minutes 40 seconds it didn’t... Read more... |
