‘The Toytown Sound’ has only briefly been referenced before – the five-disc ‘A Trip to Towntown’ (released 2007) which was curated by members of the Marmalade Skies website. Sadly, it was somewhat lost in the tidal wave of psychedelic compilations released in the late 90s and 2000s but it was so skilfully done that it […]
This ongoing Lux and Ivy project, which hasn’t as yet descended into tarnishing their names, has started to find its feet with recent releases, with less in the way of flitting around trying to cram in as many artists as possible but to concentrate on key artists – or in this case, key artists and […]
Some 27 years since its original release, Screaming Trees’ most successful album is given the reissue treatment courtesy of Cherry Red, the handful of B-sides on the additional disc being only part of the reason to dig deep beneath the potatoes and feast heartily on the fleshy songs which feel as refreshingly vital today as […]
And what of Denmark in the 1960s? Before the arrival of this new three-disc set, my thoughts on the matter were somewhat flimsy it must be said – clean; organised; polite; earthy colours; chalets; fishermen; the odd tour-guide. Y’know, ill-informed guesses, the usual. What has never really sprung to mind is its underground music scene, […]
Unless you’re really pretty hot on your music knowledge, you’ll only know Peter Straker by referencing a video he’s been in (most likely, Freddie Mercury’s cover of The Great Pretender) or by saying, “he’s the bloke that was in the original Hair show”. It’s unlikely…to an extraordinary degree, that a cartoon light bulb would appear […]
It seems fitting that music was one of the few constants in LaVey’s life. As a child, playing the piano or organ was something that, although his parents supported, they had no need to encourage. Way before the birth of rock n roll, the music he played would most likely have been classical music and […]
It’s 1998 and after countless albums, The Residents go back to the beginning…right to the beginning. Subtitled ‘Curious Stories from the Bible’, ‘Wormwood’ is not, as you may expect, a vitriolic series of broadsides against Christianity nor even religion in general but rather a celebration of some of the overlooked eye-popping moments which forever live […]
In the wake of the death of his wife, Sharon Tate, Roman Polanski’s next film project was always going to have emerged from a metaphorically dark place. As it happens, the British weather ensured his film of Macbeth also came from a literally dark place, with appalling meteorological conditions combining with production costs (Hugh Hefner […]
Putting you on the spot, there’s every chance you can’t name a song by Tommy James & The Shondells. You know them and will emit an elongated “ohhhh” when prodded but you’ll think nothing more of it and go back to forgetting their name again almost instantly. I realise this is a tremendous opening salvo […]
Until the mid-sixties, jazz was the domain of Herculean drug gobblers – tar-encrusted-lung machines who had mastered circular breathing and rat-a-tat-tat drum patterns who might occasionally jolt awake sleepy bar patrons in swanky clubs in New York and New Orleans, or the bowler-hatted trad plodders playing ‘Three Blind Mice’ in unusual time-signatures to mutton-chopped wife […]
