Sister Albums: An inconsistent premise of my top 10 records that share an element of kinship beyond a single artists natural, chronological output.
No.10 – Iggy Pop's The Idiot and Bowie's Low. The Exemplar!
No.9 – The Clash Sandanista and Ellen Folley's Spirit of St. Louis.
While its own thing, Spirit of St. Louis could be considered the 7th and 8th side of Sandinista as it was recorded on completion with the same writing, performing, producing and engineering team.
No.8 – The Human League's Dare! and Heaven 17's Penthouse and Pavement. The two rival albums from the core of the original Human League. Huge competition and both excellent but Penthouse and Pavement sounds fresher today, to my ears anyway.
No.7 – Roy Orbison - Mystery Girl and George Harrison - Cloud Nine. You can probably also throw in The Travelling Wilbury's and Rock On! by Del Shannon in there too. I've grown to quite like that huge gated snare sound.
No.6 – Faces – Nods as Good as a Wink and Rod Stewart – Every Picture Tells a Story. The most blurring of boundaries of any of their releases. The eclecticism of the Stewart solo probably is the most identifiable difference.
No.5 – Roxy Music – Stranded and Brian Ferry - These Foolish Things. Far more distinction between these and Faces/Rod solo, mostly due to the covers but feels like a great Roxy side project bang in the middle of their best period. BF available in every charity shop
No.4 – Spiritualized – Lazer Guided Melodies and Spectrum – Soul Kiss. Another set of uber-rival records from the core of another. Side 2 of the last Spacemen3 album is essentially this Spiritualized.Soul Kiss is a really great and an unfairly forgotten part of this story for me.
No.3 – Byrds – Younger Than Yesterday and Gene Clark. Yet another rival release but this time when the mothership band still existed, and each featuring much of the same musicians and released in the same month. Both fantastic but sadly, Gene's was a commercial failure.
No.2 – Bowie Heroes and Iggy's Lust For Life. Nothing more needs said.
No.1 – Velvet Underground WLWH and Nico Chelsea Girl. Difficult for two albums, recorded weeks apart and mostly featuring the same musicians and writers to sound so different but they do and they don't. Stephanie Says, recorded by VU shortly after could have sat on Chelsea Girl
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🧵Rock's most significant moment?-Beatles on Ed Sullivan? Elvis meeting Sam Phillips?Little Richard and Earl Palmer recording Tutti Frutti?Bobby Gillespie and Country Girl?No.But with what may seem like too much time on my hands I've managed to find official and scientific proof>
>It is the 1960 Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran tour of the UK, and more specifically the tragic crash which killed Cochran and brought that tour to an end. Or did it? Because the coincidences and strange connections splintering from it would shape the future of popular music>
>Most music fans will know the more obvious story surrounding Dave Dee (more on this later) and perhaps even the Marc Bolan connection but these only touch the surface. Unsurprisingly, of coarse The Beatles feature heavily so let's start there...>
Revolutionary Folk From Scotland.
The original sequel to Big Gold Dream was an attempt to dispel a myth: that rather than being beardy light entertainment,Scotland's folk-music was actually an important and radical part of the foundations of late 60s UK/US counter-culture music.>
The film never happened–due to potential contributors shuffling off to the great folk club in the sky. It is returning as a book however so here are some of the more interesting players who,along with the UK's other scenes would play a huge role in creating a musical underground>
1. Jimmie Macgregor and Robin Hall. Mostly known as the hosts of the White Heather Club, the epitome of everything uncool. But they also hosted The London Folk Song Cellar and gave hugely important early exposure to Anne Briggs, Martin Carthy+ Watersons.
Secret Bands:
While listening to The Great Unwashed this morning, who are really NZ's Indie-Pop heroes, The Clean I thought I'd put together a few of my favourite recorded band pseudonyms.
It does not include C/lash, Human League, Stranglers or Cure.
XTC / The Dukes of Stratosphere - Mole From the Ministry. The summer of 1967 pushed even further.
Kaleidoscope / Fairfield Parlour / I Luv Wight
Let the World Wash In.
Even another name change and recording the theme song of the festival could not help this most unfortunate band.
3rd Feb 1959 is often referred to as 'The Day The Music Died'. That's certainly when young Buddy Holly died but in many ways that phrase, when in related to his death, I think should really be the day music was born. On this anniversary, here's a celebration of Buddy Holly >
Buddy still casts a huge shadow over all popular music today.He was there at the absolute dawn of Rock and Roll–playing with Elvis and Bill Hailey in 55, and along with them helped form the DNA of all Rock that is played today.Music didn't die with him–he helped give birth to it>
Two days before his death, a 17 year old Bob Dylan saw him perform. In his Grammy speech for Time Out of Mind Dylan said 'I was three feet away from him... and he looked at me. I just had some sort of feeling that he was...with us all the time we were making this record"
#HollywoodGate Thread 3.5
I spoke to 4 crew members from this production yesterday.The separation of local crew / not local can be calculated in a few ways (attached) so have had various figures. At lowest 70/30 was claimed and at the very, very best it was 50/50, now likely less
What is confusing to me is why Screen Scotland, on record, when asked about the split said "predominately from Scotland, some are from the south, but most are based in Scotland".This statement does not appear to be based on verifiable data and I'd like to know why it was said?>
If a screen agency have being asked by the news to speak on a very specific subject then surely they would do their homework before hand in order to answer any questions accurately? It is not difficult to obtain very accurate figures, and that is not confidential information.
Eddie Cochran is rightly regarded as one of the absolute pioneers of Rock and Roll. His influence on music is immense, as is his influence on fashion – see attached photo for a blueprint of the 80s PopStar. Less widely celebrated are the equally huge talents of Sharon Sheeley
Sharon Sheeley, typical of attitudes facing female musicians in the male dominated Rock world then was most commonly referred to as 'Eddie Cochran's Girlfriend', or worse, simply 'girl'. Who she really was is one of the greatest and most successful songwriters of the 50s and 60s.
Sharon wasn't given some vanity songwriting credit given due to being a rock star's partner either, she'd already written a US number one single before she met Eddie. At 15 – one, five - she wrote Poor Little Fool for Ricky Nelson