Musings on the byways of popular culture
My pal Johnny C (no, not that one) has created a video montage for one of the pieces on my Titanium Flag remaster inspired by Fridtjof Nansen – the one featuring a stunning performance by Jan Akkerman replicating the sound of a man fighting a blizzard in the high latitudes with only an electric guitar and a Marshall stack for shelter. Here it is.
Here’s a question for the French-speaking AW massif – is John McLaughlin stating that he met George Martin during a Peter & Gordon session around 5 mins in here? In what I don’t doubt is a wide-ranging interview… in a language I can’t speak…
I’m thinking of doing a bit of crowdsourcing – after a suggestion by Twang – for one of the music biog books I’m working on. I’d always planned it to be a limited edition self-published affair, and I could stretch to just about doing it myself (finding the two or three weeks necessary to get the text finished is the problem at the moment, with other calls on my time) but the Kickstarter route seems attractive. Anyone got any advice or direct experience?
11/05/2017
The Markmeister will amaze and astound with his Beatles lore. His message is this:
I’m doing few public events in 2017 (I’m busy working on a book, you know) but will be at Walthamstow Central Library on Thursday May 11th, 6 to 8pm.
The idea is to dive into the history of the Beatles – and general music/social history – through artefacts brought along by the audience. I don’t know what people are bringing, so it’ll be fresh. I’ll spend a timed five minutes speaking about each piece to ensure everything stays snappy and I get through as many items as possible. It could be the first time our musical history has been done this way, and I fancy it’s going to be a cracking couple of hours, in which the talk can go anywhere.
Here’s the blurb: > Walthamstow Rock ‘n’ Roll Book Club invites YOU to bring along a Beatles or Beatles-related artefact which Mark Lewisohn will talk about for a timed five minutes, explaining the Beatles’ vast history through that specific prism. The item can be anything at all – a photo, a record, a document, a press cutting or magazine cover, a piece of memorabilia, » Continue Reading.
What does it sound like?:
‘What does it sound like…’ – that question is the reason it’s taken me a week to write this. I know, of course, from years of listening what the Quintessence Island recordings sound like, in terms of the musical content, but something about the opening bars of ‘Giants’ on this 2CD Esoteric gathering of the group’s three albums, non-album single and stray live track from the V/A ‘Bumpers’ compilation LP through decent speakers – and then headphones – made me think that I needed a spare hour or two before churning out a review. Why? Well, to A/B the audio with the audio on three still-available trio of Repertoire reissues of the individual albums ‘In Blissful Company’, ‘Quintessence’ and ‘Dive Deep’ (which add the non-LP tracks appropriately).
My instinct was correct, the mastering on the Esoteric 2CD (by one Paschal Byrne) somehow results in a slightly ‘tighter’, less expansive sound than on the Repertoire discs (mastered by ‘EROC at The Ranch’). I suspect Paschal has applied a little more de-noising or a little compression. Ultimately, if you don’t know Quintessence, I don’t think this a deal-breaker – the music still gets through. The differences » Continue Reading.
A brief heads-up – the sensational short-lived jazz-rock quintet led by Mike Westbook in the early weeks of 1972, with Isotope guitar wiz Gary Boyle, released an own-label live album ‘Live’ at the time. Now we have a fabulous new expanded remaster on Hux Records, mastered by Jon Hiseman and featuring two extra tracks. Trust me, it’s terrific…
The audio clip attached is from the pre-remastered vinyl.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGFS4TnudDM
He’s as bad as the politicians.
I’ve mentioned the Hardchargers around here before – a sensational blues trio from NI, with a national debut album due later this year. Here is their frontman and songwriter Lonesome Chris Todd doing his solo thing with 12-string guitar and slide. Enjoy!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_i1kDBGbyk
There have been at least three Ali MacKenzies in the pantheon of rock, and I come here to celebrate and introduce the most obscure of this trio…
First, there was Ali MacKenzie of London cult 60s freakbeat act The Birds, then there was lanky pianist Ali MacKenzie, stalwart of the hits-era Suzu Quatro band in the 70s. Coincidentally, the latter was – like the Ali MacKenzie I’m about to introduce – from Northern Ireland, and at a point in the early 2000s both of these Ali MacKenzies (‘MacKenzi’?) could be found in the infamously scuzzy, spit and sawdust pub-rockers the Flange Band, a version of which can still be found beneath the spilt beer and gutters of Bangor, County Down.
The Ali MacKenzie I come to praise is a world-class bass player I’ve known since the mid-90s, a man who has seemed strait-jacketed or at least implausibly confined within blues bands and cover bands when, in my view, he should be a member of the post-Entwistle Who or Jeff Beck’s band, or the like, bestriding the stadiums of the world like a colossus. Partly, living in NI is an impediment to any musician having wider opportunities, partly, Ali’s very humble, » Continue Reading.
Here’s a nice snapshot of a week in December at New York’s Blue Note for Chick Corea’s 75th birthday, with John McLaughlin. Gail Moran, from MO Mk2, can also be glimpsed. John teases the audiences about ‘wrong notes’. I refuse to believe him!
Duke Special and the Ulaid, as AW regulars will know from a previous post (a memoir on a live recording session with invited audience in the middle of nowhere), are currently mixing their ‘Belfast Suite’ album and Peter (AKA Duke) asked me out of curiosity did I know if there were any previous examples of artists releasing effectively ‘new albums’ in the form of a concert recording.
Interesting question – and I’m hoping there’ll be a few answers from The Massive. off the cuff, I could vaguely recall a Joe Jackson 2LP set from the mid 80s that was, I think three-quarters new material, but recorded in concert. From memory (I haven’t checked yet), I think ‘Slade Alive’ in 1970 was largely material not otherwise recorded by the group.
And then one gets to live albums that feature a handful of ‘stage repertoire’ numbers alongside familiar material, such as The Who’s ‘Live At Leeds’.
The Pentangle’s ‘Sweet Child’ (1968) double LP is worth mentioning in that the live disc entirely comprised material not otherwise recorded by the band bar one number – although some of the items were tunes that individual band members had previously recorded in other bands or » Continue Reading.
Here’s a chap, Arthur, on drums, who’s doing a short recital of Mahavishnu Orchestra music in fullment of a degree. Unfortunately there are two errors in the text at the start of his video, but let’s hope the examiners don’t notice…
As I was waiting to be served in a Cafe Nero coffee shop earlier the woman in front of me took a photo of the store’s selection of packaged wafers (vanilla, chocolate, hazelnut). I was on the verge of saying to her, ‘That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen’. But it was none of my business. So I’m saying it here instead. Can anyone beat that?
Anyone waiting for the 999 live album on Record Store Day?
One of the great footnote/what-if bands in late 60s Britain, spanning 1967-69, with one album on Elektra, a few singles, two future members of Fairport/Fotheringay and two female singers, Kerrilee Male (on most of the records) and then the great Dorris Henderson (on one single), the latter having recorded two albums with John Renbourn in the previous few years. For four months towards the end former Brian Auger Trinity/future Isotope guitarist Gary Boyle was a member, hitherto unrepresented on record with them.
Here are five of the eight tracks from the bands last two BBC radio sessions, both with Dorris on vocals and the latter with Gary Boyle on fabulous guitar and (who knew?) Jethro-esque flute. Enjoy!
https://soundcloud.com/colinh-1/tg-24769-eclection-2-songs
I’m sad to say that Barry Riddington passed away on March 7. Barry (with Malcolm Holmes and a third partner) was the driving force behind HTD Records in the 90s, which morphed into Talking Elephant Records – a happy home for many old-school British folk and rock musicians making new music, along with licensed in reissues of music in that vein.
Barry and Malcolm were like the Blues Brothers of the Home Counties: well-mannered grammar school boys in leather jackets and cowboy hats, happy to sign up morris dancers and people who used to be in Caravan, or Fairport, or that sort of thing. They were on a mission from God – to save 70s rock.
Barry was as self-deprecating as the day is long, and he and Malcolm had sort of bumbled into the music game and made mistakes along the way, but Barry was no fool – more than once he picked himself and his label off the floor and turned it around. More importantly, he was a wonderful human being – he was a generous man and a great friend to anyone who knew him, and the world is a poorer place without him. He’d been » Continue Reading.
Broadcast in mid 1969 on Top Gear. Any ideas?
https://soundcloud.com/colinh-1/tg-mid-69-unidentied-prog-jazz-medievalism
Author:‘Shane Kirk’
As of January 2006, Skirky had been playing guitar in bands, some of which had played original music, none of which ‘made it’. As he explains in the Introduction to this warm, witty, unpretentious and entertaining diary of a year-in-the-life of the bar covers band they had become, ‘we couldn’t just knock it all on the head and retire gracefully. Retire from what, for a start?’
As well as being written by a fellow clearly comfortable in his own skin, Skirky (who has, like Dr Watson did with Conan Doyle, employed someone to be his literary agent/name-on-the-cover, in this case one Shane Kirk) has produced a valuable anthropological document. It even helps that we never find out the name of the band (unless I wasn’t paying attention on that page) and only know the members by cunning soubriquets: The Drummer, The Other Guitarist, The Singer, et al. This is thus an ‘Everyband’ memoir – a snapshot of the life and trials of a bunch of music fans who have wound up exchanging the dream of Peel sessions and the right to say ‘Hello, Wembley!’ with feet on monitors for an evening at the Dog & Duck, a few » Continue Reading.
This is a terrific seven minute summation of the Shamsters, from a punk TV Top 10 in, I’m guessing, the early 2000s. I’ve often wondered why there hasn’t been a definitive retrospective Sham docco, but perhaps this is all one really needs?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UI7c0k088gU
In between doing far too many other things I’m making my way through reels of recordings from BBC radio in 1968, identifying and digitising everything (mostly session recordings), which will be passed back to artists and eventually the British Library sound archive. In between Denny Laine’s Electric String Band and torrents of indecipherable songs from Tyrannosaurus Rex that all sound the same , the odd quirky vignette from presenter John Peel has been preserved. Here are three of them, beginning with John’s hitherto undocumented fascination (and rightly so) with JRR Tolkien. Alas, Tolkien never did a peel session, but he did release a record of readings, from whence this except derives…
The new issue of Record Collector announces the latest in the mag’s series of exclusive vinyl releases – this time a 2LP set from a Don Rendell quintet recorded at Klooks Kleek in apparently excellent sound in September 1963. Musicians aside from Don are Glenn Hughes (baritone), Kenny Baker (tr), Lennie Williams (bs), Chick Andrews (dr). The presence of Glenn Hughes is exciting – he died in 1966 is a house fire, was highly rated by the cognoscenti but left very little on record to attest to this (he plays the low notes on Georgie Fame & the Blue Flames ‘Get Away’…). During 1964 he briefly comprised a trio with John McLaughlin (gtr) and Rick Laird (bs) – the Rick Laird Trio in the handful of press ads for their gigs.
There are only 500 copies. Buy the mag to read about it or purchase via Record Collector on this line: 0208-7528193
Has anyone else in the UK ever come across such a slab of monstrous arrogance: an employer telling its employees not to express opinions in their spare time? What a bunch of crap.
Every time I’m in a queue at my local grocery store I see – seemingly week in, week out – ghastly looking women’s magazines in garish background colours with unflattering photos of Judy Finnegan on the cover. Very occasionally of Dawn French, but usually Judy. For non UK readers Judy Finnegan is a middle-aged former daytime TV show presenter. I suppose you could say she’s put on a bit of weight, but so what. She is no longer a public figure, as far as I’m aware. Somehow, vast numbers of these trashy looking women’s magazines seem to be more of less entirely based on serving up ever more unflattering paparazzi pics of Judy on the cover with sensational (and almost certainly non-story promoting) headlines such as ‘Fat!!!!’ ‘Wrinkles!!!’ ‘Judy goes shopping!!!!’ ‘Judy puts bins out!!!’
My question (specifically to AW women) is this: who buys this sh*t? Is there REALLY a commercially significant tranche of women who want to buy magazines promising photos of flabby has-beens minding their own business? Why?!?
Commenting on TV comedy is outside my normal comfort zone. Sometime in the last 20 years comedy became very earnest and arty and right-on and reviewed in newspapers – I suspect that whole ‘comedy is rock’n’roll’ thing at a football arena with David Baddiel in the mid 90s, or whenever it was, was the turning point: suddenly comedians gave names to their tours, like albums, and suddenly arenas became ‘the new working men’s clubs’, and smug gits were effing and blinding all over sneery TV panel shows. Any time I hear that stuff I think with sadness about a man from Liverpool who told a joke about German aeroplanes (Fokkers) on the Des O’Conner show in the 80s and who never worked again on TV. I often wonder if that guy watches these panel shows today and thinks, ‘I died for you all, you Fokkers’?
But I digress. I’ve watched the most recent three episodes of Tracey Ullman’s show called, well ‘Tracey Ullman’s Show’ on TV and it looks like its taken a great deal of time, effort and budget. And yet I’m not sure I smiled even once. Is it me?
The great man will be playing a farewell tour of the US in November/December – and playing a set of Mahavishnu Orchestra music for the first time since, well, the Mahavishnu Orchestra!
He played a few Mahavishnu numbers during the late 70s with his One Truth Band, and in his trio with Larry Coryell and Paco de Lucia circa 1980, but then there was nothing until the past three years or so, when he introduced ‘You Know, You Know’ into his current band’s set, and at a couple of recent New York residencies guesting with Chick Corea, where he revisited ‘Miles Beyond’ and, on one occasion, ‘Smile of the Beyond’. Presumably Miles smiled in the beyond.
John’s playing style and, in particular, his guitar sound have changed markedly since the MO era. Let’s hope the inner mounting flame is still there!
http://www.johnmclaughlin.com/2016/10/the-meeting-of-the-spirits-tour-nov-dec-2017/#comment-174760
