I imagine this will sell out. Really annoyed that I cant go.
https://wordinyourear.fanbridge.com/campaigns/show.php?id=1434707&sid=214689641&fblike=1
Musings on the byways of popular culture
I imagine this will sell out. Really annoyed that I cant go.
https://wordinyourear.fanbridge.com/campaigns/show.php?id=1434707&sid=214689641&fblike=1
Having just seen a photo of the November issue of Mojo mag (Bowie headlining), I noted that not one single female artist is featured on the cover. Looking at the last few issues on their website it seems that this is not a new phenomenon; Kate Bush gets a cover story, but apart from that, looking at the last few months at least, female artists featured in any way on the front of the magazine can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Poor Laurie Anderson appears, but only in terms of “The Lou I knew”.
It’s a total sausage-fest*!
we had a new site tagline? The Prince sentiment is fine but it was last year.
The nine disc set is now up for pre-order with complete track listing. 2CD and 4LP to be available too.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Trouble-No-More-Bootleg-1979-1981/dp/B075P19BL5?tag=shtv.uk-21
Any thoughts?

What does it sound like?:
After splitting up following the release of their last album, 2013’s Afterglow, Black Country Communion are back! For the uninitiated, this Anglo American band comprises Glenn Hughes, Joe Bonamassa, Jason Bonham and Derek Sherinian, and is one of the best rock bands to emerge in the last decade.
It looked like they were gone for good, with fall outs between Hughes and Bonamassa over the latter’s supposed reluctance to commit fully to the band due to the demands of his own very successful recording and performing career. It seems they’ve now kissed and made up however, and produced this set, a really good hard rock album.
This is classic old school rock in similar vein to bands of yore like Deep Purple and their ilk, in turn bluesy then heavy, but with some great hooks. Personally, I prefer the longer pieces where the songs really have time to develop, such as Last Song For My Resting Place, The Cove, Wanderlust and the closing epic When The Morning Comes. Hughes is in great voice throughout, although he seems to have reined himself in a little compared to some of his solo work, and his vocals » Continue Reading.

Author:Michael Odell
Michael Odell is a rock journalist, now writing for The Times, who cut his teeth with the NME and Melody Maker, before becoming a contributing editor at Q magazine during its heyday, the period which is covered by this book.
Despite the rather ominous sub-title ‘A Music Writer’s Journey Into Madness’, this is no heavyweight dry memoir on the very serious issue of mental illness. It is a humorous book by and large, which takes a quirky and sardonic look at the author’s seemingly glamorous life style at the time, jetting off around the world to interview rock stars, while trying to maintain a ‘normal’ home life with his partner and young son, and how this ultimately led to pretty much a full on nervous breakdown. With the help of his therapist, the redoubtable Mrs Henckel, he looks back into his past, his family life as an immigrant in the UK, and his teenage friendships and hopes and aspirations, in an attempt to get to the bottom of his issues. Along the way, he meets Bowie, Bono, Macca, the Gallaghers and Pete Doherty. Ultimately though, he must face the big question – is it, as his partner suggests, » Continue Reading.
November’s Cherry Red box is the 7CD deluxe complete Fall single A-sides & all their B-sides. 3CD set featuring just the A-sides is also available. All remastered by Andy Pearce.
“Dear Cherry Red, please stop releasing these lovely boxes. Regards, Steve’s bank manager.”
https://www.cherryred.co.uk/product/the-fall-singles-1978-2016-deluxe-7cd-box/
An 8-CD box comprising the studio albums “Tutu”, “Amandla” & “Doo Bop”, the film soundtracks “Siesta” & “Dingo” and live albums “Live with Quincy Jones At Montreux”, “Miles Davis Live Around The World” & “At The Nice Festival”.
“The package is presented in a stiff black clamshell box with each of the 8x CDs in its own sleeve complete with original artwork. A high-quality 60-page booklet details the history, development and production of all the music, complete with genuinely engrossing & literate essays penned by people like Ashley Khan and Leonard Feather.
The music is all remastered to perfection and the sound (even the live-on-stage stuff) is excellent. At the offer price, it’s a steal.”
I expect it’s available from other retailers, if spending money with Amazon is not your preference.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B016E29ZIK/ref=pe_1229711_212818321_em_1p_3_ti
Debut album from Gizmodrome. Stewart Copeland, Mark King, Adrian Belew, Vittorio Cosma.
I’ll leave you to make your own mind up over the quality of the album

Venue:
The Star and Garter, Manchester
Date: 17/09/2017
The Cravats are a legendary Punk band hailing from Redditch – although to my ears they fit more in the Post Punk bracket of bands like Wire, Pere Ubu, Blurt and Magazine. Sham 69 they were not – not least because they had a Sax player and a big dash of Beefheart, Bonzos, psychedelia, garage rock and Jazz influences but infused with the violent energy of Punk. I first picked up on them via Jon Savage’s ‘There is No Such Thing as Society’ Punk compilation, and I’m a sucker for that combination of squealing Sax and loud guitars so I wasn’t about to miss this – not only presenting their first new material in 30 years but also, amazingly, their first ever gig in Manchester. It’s also an unusual gig in that there are no advance tickets, and it’s an early start and due to end around 9pm (well it is Sunday). The Star And Garter is a Manchester institution, a lovely old pub (which used to open at odd hours to quench the thirst of workers at the nearby railway station and parcel depot) with an upstairs room, with the » Continue Reading.
I wish I thought of this phrase, but sadly, I am not that witty and clever.
I have just read Jonathan Meades review of Slow Burn City by Rowan Moore, and I feel the entire section deserves to be posted here. He’s talking about the “Garden Bridge” which, thankfully, has been jettisoned…
“Boris Johnson, a provenly mendacious mayor; Joanna Lumley, a gurning veteran dolly bird; Thomas Heatherwick, a cute salesman for himself with an abject record of design failures, astonishingly compared by the dotard shopkeeper Terence Conran to Leonardo da Vinci: these three ‘national treasures’ should take note of Moore’s startling description of the bridge as ‘digital jism’, a useful addition to the architectural lexicon. They are of course not alone in their antinomian arrogance. One longs for a National Treasure Island, to which the professionally characterful and the strenuously lovable might be transported, there to anecdote each other to tears and expire in a storm of names dropped from a great height.”
So, apart from Boris Johnston, Joanna Lumley and Thomas Heatherwick, who deserves to be dumped onto “National Treasure Island” and why?
This is a tricky one for me to answer myself; Stephen Fry is sometimes » Continue Reading.
I`ve not watched this yet but I certainly will. Here`s the show described as “one of the greatest sets in Farm Aid history”, the performer? Neil Young. No more to be said.
Link in comments.
I don’t want to cause the blog to combust in an orgy of dribbling expectation (that’s a lie, for openers), but I’ve just been informed that Afterword Royalty Andrew W.K will release his first new album in 8 years on 2 March 2018.
Full details here:
“I’m going for the sound of pure, unadulterated power; every emotion, every thought, every experience, every sensation, every fear, every joy, every clarity, every confusion, every up, every down… all extruded and concentrated into one thick syrup of super life-force feeling, and then psychically amplified by the celebratory spirit of glorious partying.”
https://pitchfork.com/news/andrew-wk-announces-first-new-album-in-8-years/
Here he is giving the greatest interview ever….
And here he is making young people happy once upon a time, in scenes later captured for posterity by Hieronymous Bosch….
Roll on March.
Everything about this video screams naff but in my warped view of the world it is one of the coolest things I’ve seen, whatever that means. Have I got this one wrong too?
I updated itunes at the end of last week, and perhaps co-incidentally playcount has stopped working completely. Nothing being recorded in the playcount column. Any thoughts on how to solve this? Yes have done a basic google and nothing recent that provides a how-to would appear to be on the apple help forums or similar.
by JustB 31 Comments
So, rather than being The Nicest Man In Ever, Dave Grohl turns out to be The Actual Worst. The Rock Dad. Can there be anything worse? His 8-year-old kid wants an Imagine Dragons record (not, as the headline claims, Lana del Rey). He comes out with AC/DC because PROPER MUSIC.
Other scenes from Chez Grohl: “Happy birthday, sweetheart. I know you wanted pizza for tea, but here’s some liver and onions. It’s better.”
“Here’s twenty quid, love. Get yourself a toy.” “Oooh, how about that?” “No, not that, get the Meccano. I loved Meccano when I was your age, plus it’s educational.”
Let’s have some more from the School of Be-My-Avatar Parenting!
I must say this pleases my dark heart. That this rag exists and “The Word” doesn’t is a travesty of what is true and good in the world. It was mostly a singularly boring read, and I’m not sure if it’s focus on Woodstock-friendly singer songwriters then dull American bands playing catch up with UK indie made it any better. it is about as interesting as the freesheet NME (is that still going?). Then there are the legendary album reviews…
http://rateyourmusic.com/list/schmidtt/rolling_stones_500_worst_reviews_of_all_time__work_in_progress_/
There was a piece in the Telegraph the other day about rock star insults, though only a few were real gems worth remembering.
Such as when Peter Grant turned up at a Dylan gig and introduced himself: “Hi Bob, I’m Peter Grant, I manage Led Zeppelin”. To which His Bobness replied drily: “I don’t come to you with my problems, do I?”.
The other good one in the Telegraph was from Slash about his nemesis: “I once asked Axl why he had left off the “e” in his name and he started crying because he thought he’d spelt it right”.
Lester Bangs wrote clever insults, such as his description of Barry White “nineteen hundred pounds of pure lumbering animal, makes Leslie West look like Steven Tyler”.
Any others spring to mind?

Author:David Lagercrantz
Given the success of the first ‘sequel’ to the late Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, The Girl In The Spider’s Web, published in 2015, it was inevitable that a further novel would follow – and here it is.
Taking into account Larsson’s original three book series, this is now the fifth in the sequence, but note that these are new stories commissioned by Larsson’s brother and father, who control his literary estate, and are not connected to the unfinished novel and storylines supposedly on a computer now in the possession of his partner.
Despite that, the preceding novel was a huge worldwide success, and has now been commissioned as a film, and I believe this novel will follow the same route. The story, told partly in flashback, has several interconnected strands, dealing with events from the heroine Lisbeth Salander’s traumatic childhood, but coming back up to date with her incarceration in a violent Swedish prison. This is linked to the death of a noted child psychologist, leading to an investigation of the story by the editor of Millennium magazine Mikael Blomkvist. I won’t give away more of the plot, but suffice to say that although it is quite convoluted » Continue Reading.
I was brought up and went to school in a remote town in the West Highlands of Scotland. How remote? Well, we like to boast that we are the “nearest town to nowhere, furthest town town from everywhere,” and the nearest point of civilisation is Oban, which is eight days travel by sledge away. Anyway, what it means is that the wee boy shaking in the seat next to you in day one primary one is the same big boy that is telling you how he got “double tops” from Big Mary behind the bike shed last night 11 years later as you all await to see whether your exam grades are good enough to get yourself out of here and up to university in the BIg City. Any Big City. However lifelong friendships are forged through shared childhood and teenage experiences, and y’know, you get to love those guys and gals…… Lets go back to the summer of 1970 and we are all entering our sixth year… and rumour has starting to spread that one of our gang is missing… we’ll call her Louise. Louise at 16 has only done and got herself pregnant by a guy she met » Continue Reading.
Anne Nightingale reminiscing setting up for her Lou Reed interview in 1989…on 6 Music as i tpye badly.
Picked up Dave Stewart’s autobiography (Sweet Dreams Are Made of This) at the library and it makes for fascinating if annoying reading. I never realised he had worked with so many people. The book is just chapter after chapter of name dropping. Even during the Eurythmics he’s working with Stevie Wonder (harmonica on There Must Be An Angel) and Stevie Nicks, simultaneously (or so it seems). And among others there are Clem Burke, Terry Hall (Vegas), Dylan, Harrison, Jagger, Elton, Bowie, Bryan Ferry, Tom Petty, Bono …
He seems like a nice guy but unfortunately the book gives little real insight into what inspires him or how he works.
For much of it he comes across a bit like Gary Bloke from Celeb cartoon. A typical bit might read:
“I was playing tennis with Tony Blair and Paul Allen from Microsoft at my second new property in Cannes when the maid told me there was a strange woman in our living room. Remembering the words of Deepak Chopra (or was it Nelson Mandela?): “A stranger is just a friend you have not yet met” I went inside to find Katy Perry lying on the floor tapping out a » Continue Reading.
I’ve only just come across this, a fan’s Lynne-style polishing off of the 3rd song Yoko passed on to Macca and co which was (apparently) vetoed by George from Anthology III following the UK press reaction to Free As A Bird and Real Love. Thought I’d share it, in case others haven’t seen.
https://youtu.be/tPE795oaw6Y
Just seen a Currys PCWorld advert in which the presenter talks about “haitch-dee” [three mentions, so it’s no slip of the tongue]. I can’t believe nobody picked that up before they committed it to VT or whatever the F they use these days.
It’s “aitch”, you ignorant pricks.
Honestly, I can’t live on this planet any longer.
