Musings on the byways of popular culture
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Some folks here might enjoy my mixcloud of songs from the “Beatle” years of 1963 to 1969. I’ve chosen 4 lesser known songs from each year and intercut it with ads and clips, drawing from as many genres as I have in my collection – with a just few hits thrown in. Tony Blackburn’s “60s Gold” it is definitely not. Any suggestions of lesser known gems would be greatly appreciated.
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Occasionally I do a mix on a piece of music technology. Seems that “fuzz”, started in Nashville with a broken amplifier, and it was Country artists that first adopted it, which led to the first pedal, Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz-Tone. My mix moves from Nashville to London with The Rolling Stones and Beatles, and later Hendrix with the Fuzzface. Along the way we also hear fuzzy sounds from Diana Dors, Burt Bacharach, Nancy Sinatra, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Andy Williams, Aphrodite’s Child with Vangelis and Demis Roussos.
A delightful Radio 4 documentary that manages, without fuss or pretension or the male posturing that writing about music became, to show us a world (in the middle 60s) that we probably now underestimate or have forgotten about – a time before musicians became precious about their art and before people writing about it felt the need to become personalities themselves. And yet these supposedly fluffy interviews were read by millions and contained perhaps surprisingly truthful insights, based on significant access. It was very largely a time before ‘the PR person’. The title is slightly misleading: replace ‘rock’ with ‘pop’, which actually adds another layer to it – a time when what became rock was genuinely mainstream and ‘popular’ at the same time, a time before the myriad sub-genres to come. Well done to all who made the programme.
