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From the Cream Judge to Maple Lattes: what happens when we turn the album cover over?

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moseleymoles on A brief note about the liner note

If the mp3 sounded the death knell for the Liner Note, the era of streaming has well and truly nailed the coffin down and shovelled the earth over. The idea that there might be some writing alongside the track(s) seems a positively antediluvian notion. So, before its gravestone mosses over, let’s offer a brief thought for the humble Liner Note.

The first records had no truck with writing either. Instead the record sleeve was valuable billboard real estate that could be used to shift other catalogue items, the record player to play your new disc on, or other stuff entirely. This notion lived on into the early eighties in the ‘Nice Price’ range, when the inner sleeve showed you how you could add most of the Alan Parsons Project back catalogue to your collection at a speical low price.

The liner note started as an extension of advertising copy – written by the admen at the label to persuade you to take it home as you stood there staring at the back of the album in the record shop. Here’s the note for the first Bob Dylan album:

Columbia records is » Continue Reading.

The Myway Code

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H.P. Saucecraft on Driving For Your Life In Rural Thailand

The Thais are not the worst drivers in the world, although they seem keen to give that impression.

They’re not even the worst in South East Asia; the feeling that Vietnamese road users are out to kill you is not without foundation, and the Cambodian understanding of the rules of the road is even sketchier than the Thai – going offroad through a jungle carpeted with landmines can sometimes seem the safer option in a country where road users on the wrong side of the road have precedence. Lao PDR only has one road, but abundance of good luck and an almost supernatural attentiveness is required to get from one end to the other. Or even across.

Thai drivers have a 360 degree blind spot. They will cheerfully drift across lanes, pull out, reverse, overtake and slew to a halt with zero awareness of other road users. Mirrors (in cars or on bikes) are used exclusively as personal grooming aids, allowing minute inspection of complexion flaws while parked in front of the Seven or speeding across an intersection. Why on earth would you want to look where you’ve been? » Continue Reading.

Groom Service, please

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Raymond on The science of male grooming is far from being ‘settled’.

During a recent visit to a Turkish barber, I made a startling discovery which I hope may lead to me being recognised as having made a significant contribution to the science of grooming. Like most folk, I believed that the science had been more or less settled since the mid-seventies, when Jorge Silva’s ground-breaking ‘The hermeneutics of grooming’ was published. Silva’s research established that there were six recognisable stages on the ‘male haircut’ continuum:

Passive → Larval → Peacock → Business → Utilitarian → Topiary

The ‘passive’ phase encompasses the childhood years, when the male has no awareness of his hair and all responsibilities for grooming fall upon his mother. The second (or ‘larval’) phase begins when the young male becomes self-conscious and is, as Silva puts it, ‘quite fussy’ about his appearance. Stage three (the peacock phase) has been the subject of most academic attention. Gilligan and Porter’s influential paper on ‘The Hair Delusion’ (Oxford Tonsorial Review, 1991) observed that, during the peacock phase, a young man “may spend as much as one third of his income on hair products and spend as much as one » Continue Reading.

The Blue Oyster Cult Thread…On Your Feet Or On Your Knees

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moseleymoles on Blue Oyster Cult

One of the joys of the old place (both of them now) was the threads in which a slightly less celebrated act was given a thorough airing in a thread dedicated to them. In that spirit here’s my take on an act that if they ever had their due, have now slipped well off the radar. So welcome to the Blue Oyster Cult thread and if you’ve never heard anything by the Cult beyond Don’t Fear The Reaper don’t be afraid..

BOC started in the late sixties as an American answer to the emerging heavy metal/hard rock acts from the UK, particularly Black Sabbath. Their first three albums: BOC, Tyranny and Mutation, and Secret Treaties, mine a fairly conventional rock sound – enlivened by Donald ‘Buck’ Dharma’s guitar and lyrics that mined mysticism, World War Two and arcane mythology amongst others.

After building up their reputation as a hot live act, their phase as top-notch album-sellers started with the live album On Your Feet or On Your Knees, and two subsequent studio albums, Agents of Fortune and Spectres. These albums saw their sound coming into focus and the airing of a slew of their best-know » Continue Reading.

The Whiplash ‘ question’.

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Junglejim on How far is too far?

Enjoyed the movie Whiplash, excellent screenplay, direction and performances, and am curious on the thoughts of the Massive on what I took to be its central question: how far or can or should one go in the pursuit of excellence and whether the price paid is worth it, particularly in the field of music.

Can a mentor justify pushing a pupil to absolute breaking point in attempting to achieve ‘perfection’? Few would question this motivational approach in sports training ( particularly in endurance events), but in music? especially the branch of music featured in the film, with its unique history? And does technical prowess offer any hope of worthwhile output?

I was also taken with the fact that it centres on a jazz drummer, aspiring to the technical heights of Buddy Rich. Rich has an interesting place on the pantheon on drumming, and jazz specifically. I know nobody who questions his preeminent ability and there’s no shortage of available footage that leaves one thoroughly impressed, but I also don’t know any one who likes jazz that actually listens to his music or would put any of his albums in their personal top 10s » Continue Reading.

Everything Is Less Than Zero…the lit brat pack revisited

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moseleymoles on A short introduction to some East Coast writers of the eighties

Picking up Donna Tartt’s latest novel The Goldfinch at a local charity shop got me thinking about how, while I’ve lived out my life through new wave, goth, acid house, britpop – literature isn’t quite like that. Movements take decades to crystallise rather than months. But there was a group of young American writers who resembled if not a group, then a loose scene – those described as ‘the Literary Brat Pack’ in the mid-eighties whose image and much of its writing drew heavily from the music and creative scene of New York. They were young, wore shades after dark, listened to music, went to clubs, took drugs and wrote about…mainly other people who were young, wore shades etc…

Tartt was famously at Bennington, an exclusive East Coast college with Bret Easton Ellis in the early eighties as was Jonathan Lethem. Ellis became famously associated on the New York party scene with Jay McInery. Add Tama Janowitz and you have five writers whose work all features heavily on my shelves.

As an impressionable teenager and avid reader these writers – many of whom wrote debut novels set » Continue Reading.

Cogito Ergo…. Summat?

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Sewer Robot on Untangling Reality and Fiction

*Contains spoilers for all titles in bold. And, perhaps, for the existence of Santa*.

“I am afraid sir, you have a rather weak grasp of reality”. So speaks Jonathan Pryce during the opening scene of Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen. The man he is addressing has disrupted a play recounting Munchausen’s fantastical exploits while claiming to be the real Baron himself. Thus a film set in “The Age Of Reason… somewhere in Europe… Wednesday” portraying a theatrical production of the tall tales of a fictional character whose audience includes people wounded from the very real siege bombing taking place outside the theatre is hijacked by the same legendary fictional character (who was, in fact, based on a real person). The Baron goes on to explain (in flashback, with the actors from the theatre playing their adopted roles) how the siege was all his doing – a story so far-fetched only young Sally Salt believes any of it. Somehow the magic of Gilliam movie logic buttresses the Baron’s shaky story, but how strong a grasp on reality do any of us have? Oprah Winfrey’s autobiography is called “What I Know For Sure” » Continue Reading.

The world needs Christian Grey

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todayoutof10 on Fifty Shades – Christian Grey is ready for us. But are we ready for him…?

As I booked my ticket to see Fifty Shades of Grey, I was very much looking forward to my date with Christian Grey. I had been left disappointed by our first encounter and was eager to find out if our second meeting would be an improvement. I had reason to believe this would be the case.

I was late to the Fifty Shades party, having bought the book and its two sequels long enough after they had become a sensation to expect a cracker of a read. Finding the idea interesting, I was eager to immerse myself in a story that I expected to be emotionally charged, erotic and pretty gripping. In my head, I was already conjuring the developing relationship between the troubled man and the sexually naive young woman and looked forward to how it would play out in word form. Unfortunately, the books disappointed. So much so, that I gave up part way through the second novel. For me, a good book will put flesh on the bones of the characters I am imagining, helping me develop the story » Continue Reading.

Eminent Hipster, horrible paragraph.

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Raymond on Pathologising the intellectual opposition

I’ve just finished reading ‘Eminent Hipsters’, Donald Fagen’s erudite and witty homage to his favourite musicians of the 1950s and ’60s. I’m not going to review the book, but something in it really caught my eye and I’m compelled to pass comment. Some of my friends (particularly those who have, over the years, been bored rigid by my missionary zeal), are aware of my admiration and love for Donald’s work, both as a solo artist and as part of Steely Dan. I was too young to appreciate ‘The Dan’ when they were in their prime; my love affair with their music only started after a friend made me a compilation tape back in 1989. He knew that I was a big fan of the Scottish pop outfit Danny Wilson and, as he handed me the tape, said: “If you like Danny Wilson, just wait until you hear this”. It was the start of a love affair which endures to this day. Indeed, so great is my fan-boy love for this band that when, after a twenty year hiatus, they released their comeback album ‘Two against nature’, I took the day off work just to » Continue Reading.

Britpop: An Accidental Convergence Of Nostalgia

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madfox on Britpop

AN ACCIDENTAL CONVERGENCE OF NOSTALGIA

How Suede, Blur, Oasis and Pulp came to define the UK’s youth-driven commercial music scene in the 1990s

“Britpop” is a term commonly used to group together up to a dozen musical acts which emerged in the UK in the early years of the 1990s and which would reach their creative and commercial peaks later that decade.

It’s tempting to regard these bands – chief among them Suede, Blur, Oasis and Pulp – as being part of some coherent movement. But this was not really the case: on closer inspection, there are significant differences in the musical and lyrical styles of each band, and in the social backgrounds, political interests and cultural fashions attached to them. Indeed, the key players could be seen to represent several of British popular music’s favourite genres from the past – 1960s beat, 1970s glam and pub rock, 1980s art-school pop – while a number of the also-rans dipped their toes in surf, folk rock and punk.

Britpop is a collection of divergent bands who just happened to become active or achieve recognition around the same time – when the extreme poles of grunge and rave » Continue Reading.

Quintessence: A History

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Colin H on Quintessence

I see a yawning chasm marked ‘Features’ that needs to be populated. Here’s a piece I wrote on Quintessence which appeared last year in ‘Record Collector’…

Quintessence

Some bands struggle for years for attention, but not Quintessence. Within weeks of forming, in April 1969, they were a word of mouth sensation. Chris Blackwell and Muff Winwood of Island Records dropped into a rehearsal with a chequebook and an artistic-freedom guarantee. Sorted. Quintessence were huge on the European live scene for three years and, in retrospect, were the last great hurrah of ‘the sixties’. By mid 1972, after four albums and two singles, the original six members had split in two – recording one more album each, as Quintessence and Kala respectively, before all involved slipped into obscurity as swiftly as they had appeared.

Quintessence, like Hawkwind, Marc Bolan and the Third Ear Band, were a product of London’s Ladbroke Grove scene, but few were locals.

Ron ‘Raja Ram’ Rothfield, an Australian conservatoire and jazz trained flautist, had met American bassist Richard ‘Shambhu Babaji’ Vaughan in Greece, both moving to London in 1968. Phil ‘Shiva’ Jones, also Australian, had recorded downunder as Phil Jones & » Continue Reading.

Baker Street

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Tim_Admin2 on Gerry Rafferty

Rafferty left St. Mirin’s Academy in 1963. He worked in a butcher’s shop, as a civil service clerk, and in a shoe shop, although as he noted in a later interview: “But there was never anything else for me but music. I never intended making a career out of any of the jobs I did.”[7] On weekends he and a schoolfriend, future Stealers Wheel collaborator Joe Egan, played in a local group named The Mavericks, mainly covering chart songs by groups such as The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.[8] In the mid 1960s Rafferty earned money, for a time, busking on the London Underground. In 1966, Rafferty and Egan were members of the band The Fifth Column. The group released the single “Benjamin Day”/”There’s Nobody Here” (Columbia 8068), but it was not a commercial success. The Humblebums/Stealers Wheel

In 1969 Rafferty became the third member of an existing folk-pop ensemble The Humblebums composed of future comedian Billy Connolly and Tam Harvey. Harvey left shortly afterwards, and Rafferty and Connolly continued as a duo, recording two albums for Transatlantic Records. A 1970 gig at the Royal Festival Hall, supporting Fotheringay with Nick Drake, earned a positive review » Continue Reading.