Musings on the byways of popular culture
This picture was taken in April 1964 during rehearsals for the Ready, Steady, Go Mad Mod Ball at the Empire Pool Wembley (later the Wembley Arena, now the SSE Wembley Arena).
Apart from the Beatles, who that week held the top five records in the US, just about everyone of note from the Merseybeat boom is here.
Of the 40 faces here how many can you identify? Some are obvious but others are perhaps not so easy.
I’ll post a key diagram and a list of names shortly.
http://i.imgur.com/G9Ofc6M.jpg
With the news that Sir Clement Freud has been exposed as a paedophile, can we now expect him to be airbrushed out of popular history, as happened with Rolf Harris and Jimmy Savile?
So, will Macca change the cover of Band On The Run (Freud is pictured above Linda) and if so who should replace him?
Perhaps some of our more Photoshop literate members can have a go at this?
http://i.imgur.com/fgAxfWn.jpg http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/14/sir-clement-freud-exposed-as-a-paedophile-as-police-urged-to-pro/
Following his “Muddy Wolf At Red Rocks” event and the “Three Kings Tour” where he covered Albert, Freddie and BB, Joe Bonamassa has announced plans for a British Blues Boom special this year.
He talks about it in depth here and also demonstrates how to play like Eric, Jeff and Jimmy, plus there’s a little Paul Kossoff and Peter Green in there too.
Those of a nervous disposition may like to skip the first eight mins which is all amp talk. After that it’s guitar heaven all the way.
What does it sound like?:
If. like me, you file your music in strict alphabetical order, I’m guessing the section marked “Q” is very sparsely populated indeed. Only five “Q” names grace my shelves and you can probably guess what they are. That’s right, it’s Quatermass, Queen, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Quiver and Quintessence (those Quarry Men bootlegs are filed under “Beatles”, need you ask). Of those five, the one that gets the most needle time by far is undoubtedly the magnificent and timeless Quintessence.
For those of us who were buying records in the 60s and early 70s our first introduction to the band was almost certainly via the 1969 Island sampler LP Nice Enough To Eat. Here, nestling among new and exciting offerings from Fairport, Tull, Free, Mott and Crimson was the Quintessence track Gungamai (sic). But in their haste to get Nice Enough To Eat into the stores, Island made a few basic errors with the sleeve notes (see comments for more details).
Such confusion aside Gungamai (sic) with its overtly Indian overtones was an attention-grabbing departure from the other prog/folk/blues fodder on Nice Enough To Eat and it was the start of a love affair with » Continue Reading.
Boxing legend Muhammad Ali is dead aged 74. He was without doubt the greatest sportsman of the last 50 years and one of the most recognised people on Earth.
It will be interesting to see if the anti-boxing movement tries to make much of his Parkinson’s disease.
http://i.imgur.com/wv0fgl7.jpg
OK, the kids have had their fun with Poppy’s bumper “people talking over a drum machine” thread – aka the Hippity Hoppity thread – now it’s time for the grown-ups to show ’em how it’s done with a prog rock version. In other words, I’m shamelessly stealing Poppy’s idea.
That’s right, it’s another one of those YouTube clips list. But I’m hoping people will add a little explanation to their choices.
Here’s my favourite prog track. It’s Roundabout,the opening cut from Fragile the 1971 fourth Yes album. Eight minutes of great playing from a band at the absolute top of their game.
Fragile was the first Yes album with Rick Wakeman on keyboards and it features the classic line-up of Wakeman, Jon Anderson, Steve Howe, Chris Squire and Bill Bruford.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Tdu4uKSZ3M
It’s official. The lunatics are on the grass and the counter culture is dead.
Pink Floyd, the band whose music was once synonymous with the underground movement, social revolution and mind-expanding drugs, will appear on a set of UK postage stamps later this year (6 LP sleeves and 4 live images).
The stamps look great, but I can’t help feeling a little sad about the whole concept somehow.
The Division Bell sleeve has already appeared on a postage stamp in 2010 of course.
http://i.imgur.com/xdr0ggl.jpg http://www.mojo4music.com/24101/pink-floyd-stamps/
On the old blog I wrote a long piece about seeing Bob Dylan live in Sheffield in 1966. After the Afterword site went down the Dylan piece was subsequently picked up by a couple of blog sites and attracted interest from far and wide.
Then I was approached by the BBC to take part in a Radio 4 documentary about the day in question May 16, 1966. It seems that both Blonde and Blonde and Pet Sounds were released on that date.
The documentary goes to air next week.
So Pet Sounds and Blonde On Blonde are half a century old next week. Which one has aged better?
http://i.imgur.com/Za0pxEN.jpg http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b079pqct
“Lonnie had opened the door and a whole generation rushed though”: Jim Carter (that’s Downton Abbey’s butler “Carson” to you and me).
“A lot of us got out of the factory thanks to Lonnie”: Ringo Starr
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Before the Beatles, there were really only two men in Britain who could truly be called giants in the field of popular music. They were Hank Marvin and Lonnie Donegan. You may think that’s a rather glib statement, ignoring as it does all the great musicians and producers who were toiling away in the pop, jazz and folk worlds. But in terms of longevity and the influence they had on what was to follow, I do believe that before 1962 no two names were more important in British pop music than Hank and Lonnie.
Now read on….
http://i.imgur.com/6NGKHUS.jpg
The Everly Brothers documentary shown this week on BBC 4 was simply amazing.
Chock-full of famous faces it tracked Don and Phil’s amazing career from childhood radio stars until 1963 when a legal dispute with their publisher and the arrival of the Beatles conspired to, if not kill, then seriously stall what had been an extraordinary 7 year hit career.
Before the big purge of 2006, I had every issue of Q magazine to date, every single one of them. From the first issue in October 1986, running right through past the birth of Mojo in 1993 and on into the new millennium, I had them all neatly shelved in meticulous and correct order of release. Even after all the bands worth reading about had migrated to sister magazine Mojo and Q had become home to the Spice Girls, Robbie Williams, Oasis and other horrors I still kept on buying it, mainly for the Q Charts and the quality writing of Tom Hibbert.
Then one day, after realising I would probably never read that Rory Gallagher or John Martyn interview again (let alone be able to find it, even if the mood took me) I ditched the lot, freeing up acres of shelf space and feeling enormously liberated in the process
But today I found around 20 early copies of Q which had somehow escaped the expulsion. The earliest of these is issue #7 from January 1987 and what a keyhole into the (recent) past it is. This morning I read it almost from cover to cover, just so you » Continue Reading.
The Stairway to Heaven brouhaha has flared up again with new claims made that the opening chords are lifted from Spirit’s 1967 song Taurus .
This controversy has been kicking around for years of course and Led Zep are well-known for appropriating music from other sources. But it will be interesting to see if they are finally bang to rights on this one or if, 47 years after the event, they manage to walk away with an out-of-court settlement.
My money’s on the latter.
No, it’s not the new cast for Last Of The Summer Wine but the current and final line-up of one of my favourite bands, Family.
The Leicester prog merchants will play their final concerts at the O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire on December 17 and 18, with support from Edgar Broughton (with or with his Band, I’m not sure).
Any fans of Family on the blog?
Now read on —->
http://i.imgur.com/IJppaYy.jpg
Someone sent me this picture they took at the Hendrix museum at the house at 23 Brook Street, London W1 where Jimi lived in 1968-69.
In the recreation of his bedroom we see Jimi’s record collection and look, he had the first Zappa LP Freak Out, the Byrds’ Fifth Dimension, Wes Montgomery’s A Day In The Life, the first Canned Heat album and last, but by no means least….
*Drum Roll*
THE BEANO ALBUM
http://i.imgur.com/uHHrfP5.jpg
Say hello to Freddie & Dreamers. This what a chart topping* pop band looked like in 1964. The teenagers went wild for these guys during the beat boom, but just look at them! What a shower.
It’s a very long way from One Direction.
*Freddie & the Dreamers enjoyed six top 20 hits between 1963 – 1965
http://i.imgur.com/EYE2NDN.jpg
How about a picture of Tiny Tim meeting Princess Margaret in 1969 while David Bowie looks on?
Tim is flanked by Dusty Springfield and Lou Christie.
The Tiptoe Through The Tulips hitmaker routinely carried his ukes in a plastic carrier bag and on this occasion he went for a patriotic theme.
I assume it was some kind of charity gala Royal Variety-type event.
I found this on Danny Baker’s Twitter feed yesterday.
http://i.imgur.com/lQhOGWC.png
C-G-D-A-E
Those are the chords to Hey Joe. Along with House Of The Rising Sun it’s one of those simple songs that nearly every budding guitarist learns how to play very early in the uphill struggle to rock stardom.
Perhaps the most famous version of Hey Joe is by Jimi Hendrix. It was Jimi’s very first single, recorded as a slow, lazy ballad in late 1966 not long after he arrived in London. But the song has a long and illustrious history going back much further than Hendrix.
It’s thought that Hey Joe was written in 1962 by Billy Roberts, an obscure California-based folk singer, but even that is shrouded in uncertainty.
The Leaves, The Standells, The Surfaris, Love, The Music Machine, and The Byrds all recorded versions before Jimi and the song became an LA garage band standard, in much the same way as Louie, Louie had before it.
The song became so ubiquitous around LA, usually in fast-paced, speeded-up form that perhaps inevitably, Frank Zappa lampooned it as Flower Punk a track from the Mothers’ 1967 album We’re Only In It For The Money. It’s thought that Frank based Flower Punk on The Leaves version » Continue Reading.
What does it sound like?:
The first ever solo album from the ZZ Top frontman contains just about everything you could hope for and almost lives up to its hubristic title. But instead of duplicating his main band’s well-established sound and style, Perfectamundo sets Billy’s guitar, vocal and songwriting talents against a funky Afro-Cuban backdrop.
Billy is backed by the BFG’s, an ensemble twice the size of his regular band and it allows him to stretch out in a bed of funky Latin percussion, piano and Hammond organ. Billy’s massive guitar sound is featured here in spades of course, but for once he’s not carrying the whole show and can sometimes lay back and luxuriate in the lighter Cubanised backing.
Of the 11 tracks, three are instantly familiar covers and very fine they are too. Slim Harpo’s Got Love If You Want It, Roy Head’s Treat Her Right and Big Joe Williams’ evergreen Baby Pleae Don’t Go all receive the Latin treatment, while losing none of the gutbucket bluesy feel we expect from Gibbons.
The original material is groove based and is perhaps a little less distinctive for that. But Pickin’ Up Chicks On Dowling Street and the slow-burning » Continue Reading.
I was listening to the magnificent Goodbye Cream LP today (on vinyl, natch) and as Eric, Jack and Ginger brought the mammoth 9 minute white hot solo of I’m So Glad to a screaming, shuddering halt, steam coming off the brake pads and rivets straining on the engine room boiler, a few people actually began to applaud during the few moments of ensuing silence. Yes APPLAUD. What were they thinking? Didn’t these lightweight fans know that this was just a temporary halt in proceedings before the band launched back into the main theme of the song and the closing vocal verse?
All of which brings me to concert etiquette. Have you ever noticed that there are several levels of gig-going fans? There are those who applaud the instrumental introduction to a song, presumably to show how clever they are. Then there are others who wait until the opening vocal line before the penny drops, at that point it’s safe for THEM to applaud. Still others wait until the very END of the song to clap, which is just as it should be,
Alternatively, some people like to applaud specific passages of a song. For example, Dylan’s It’s Alright Ma, » Continue Reading.
Not quite as significant as The Byrds’ Turn, Turn, Turn half century perhaps, but Frank’s 18th LP was released on this day in 1974.
It was his biggest seller in America, peaking at #10 and is one of the most accessible Zappa albums in his vast catalogue.
Along with Frank’s previous album Overnite Sensation it was also one of two FZ albums released in Quadraphonic, the new-fangled four channel system which fizzled out shortly after.
Continued in comments
http://i.imgur.com/5HUHLVz.jpg
My good friend Mr @h-p-saucecraft is clearly so obsessed and/or enamoured with the Kevin Rowland My Beauty sleeve, he needs very little encouragement to post the famous retina-searing image here on the blog at every opportunity.
So that got me thinking, who else has taken their kit off on an LP sleeve when they clearly shouldn’t have? We’re not talking about attractive ladies and ripped gentlemen in peak physical condition here, but nerds, weeds and Walter the Softy types who should keep their vests on at all costs.
So here’s a bit of a teaser to start. Whose nipple is this? It belongs to very famous person indeed, but not someone from whom you expect to see this kind of thing.
You won’t cheat, will you?
*or the admiration of your blogmates, whichever is the larger.
http://i.imgur.com/zFUyjaO.jpg
The Third Ear Band were making wonderful music like this in the late 60s/early 70s.
What’s more they were signed to a major label – Harvest, EMI’s prog enclave – and they opened for the Rolling Stones at Hyde Park in 1969.
We live in a different world now and such a thing will never happen again.
Isn’t that right @owlsley ?
I found this on David Hepworth’s Twitter feed. It’s a fascinating look at the underground scene around Notting Hill in 1971. Some of it is more than a little self-conscious and cringe-worthy now, but it’s still very interesting, especially to those of us who lived there at the time.
All the usual suspects are here: Richard Neville (looking super cool and talking very earnestly), Caroline Coon (beautiful and frighteningly articulate as always) and, of special interest to @colin-h , there’s footage and interviews with Quintessence.
There’s lots of stuff about Oz, It and the underground press in general and it’s a wonderful snapshot of a more innocent (some would say painfully naïve) time when life was so much simpler.
At 9:33 check out the poster for Danish progsters Burnin Red Ivanhoe on the office wall
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-61zkjz8G98
The so-called fifth Beatle has died according to a Twitter message by Ringo.
If true, it’s the sad loss of a great, great man.
http://i.imgur.com/lhnihfO.jpg
One of my favourite punsome album titles of all time is FAR CANAL by late 60s band Jody Grind. It seemed terribly risqué at the time (1970) and we loved the cheeky progsters for managing to slip it past the censors.
Any similar examples?
http://i.imgur.com/lFZgg66.jpg
