Category: music

Chicken – Egg?

Tame Impala? “Never heard of them” you may say.  Well I was in the same boat for a long while.

What came first, the song or the video in terms of entering my own consciousness?

Hard to tell really. But I saw this initially on Vimeo and loved the video first and foremost. It is a surfing video that happens to use the track as its theme tune. The whole package did not encourage me to surf, but it did make me look up the band involved.

It is not quite the same as hearing yet another Groove Armada track on a car tv advert. You know the song already, so the advert is not really important. In fact it is verging upon the annoying after a while.

So which came first the video or the sound track?

Who cares in this case? Loving it all.

I know that people should be allowed to make money in a free market led society, but ………

Saw a band play at the Aylesbury Civic Centre a fair few years ago. Just starting out then – Jangling guitar riffs, shirts buttoned up to the neck, floppy fringes masking scowls and bum fluff tashes.

The band were hip enough for me to get enough respect after the gig from the bunch of year 10 lads. They were also there to enjoy the show. I bumped into quite them literally as they pushed and slammed around auditorium. I do not know who was more surprised to crash into who.

So the band are still hip now, seven years later, but beards have replaced those wispy moustaches and they get interviewed by the Guardian to publicize their new tour, rather than rely on word of mouth and posters.

Nothing grabbing you so far, well something is bothering me.

The Bristol show of this latest tour is at the Bristol University Student Union. A pretty large venue for Bristol, which has no big events arena, but will do soon. The whole tour went on sale simultaneously and the Bristol tour date, along with the other gigs went on sale today (21/8/15) at 9 am. Can I get on to any of the ticket agencies online at 9 o’clock? Nope. but I do get through to one site that allows me to book 0 tickets at £27.50. It is 9.16 am. Sold out.

Hard luck, I hear you say. Agreed, but when you see the same tickets being offered already at 9.30 am at three or four times their face value on online re-sale sites, it rubs salt in the wounds. It is all wrong.

Different gravy.

When people hanker after the good ol’ days I am with them on this one.

Reasons?

1. The clothes in 1959 were classic. Plaid, Brogues, tie pins, cigarette cases and pork pie hats all things of the past.

2 Black and White – has its merits and Film noir will live longer than 3D movies in the annuals of time.

3. One take live recordings – name any band who would even have the bottle, OR even be proficient enough to do a live broadcast of 9 minutes plus like that?

4. Jazz is and always will be cool and if done well is a different gravy.

I am not suggesting we bring it all back, but some things the World should still mourn are these two Stars of Jazz.

ps. Thanks Colston for reminding me

Funktastic

I have drafted a few posts about Rap artists and have decided to dust them down and get them out there.

Let me get this straight before I start I am a fan of all genres of music and I think that Rap music has its worth. I prescribe to the idea that all true and pure record collections should have no  Beatles albums in them at all and must contain Kind of Blue by Miles Davis. After that there is certainly space for hip-hop and rap music.

The first Rap artist I want to talk about is Snoop Dogg. He gets a bad press at times, which is to be expected when one considers some of the things he has done. He got a bit of a ticking off by Jay-Z this week, probably due to Mr Dogg sending a cake and some strippers to R&B singer Tyrese for his 36th Birthday.

 

The Guardian is a bit more complimentary about him, where they grudgingly admire his resourcefulness in making tv adverts for car insurance.

Rolling Stone described Snoop Dogg as “everyone’s favorite pimp”. I would not go that far, but he is a likeable rogue who is able to laugh at himself as well as those he is taking money from.

Loving his work with my other favourite joker Bootsy Collins.

 

The World needs people like Snoop Dogg and for that reason I salute him.

Music of the moment….

Not been listening to many new tunes of late, but am hoping that Elvis Costello’s new album with The Roots will grow on me. Meanwhile………

In most peoples’ minds Ukraine is a source of political unrest and a shed load of Natural gas. Vakula brings you something different to test those state of the art headphones that you got for Chrimbo.

I wish there was a record shop in town.

It is like the good old days. A musician plays his heart out at a gig  and after had your socks knocked off by the live performance you wait in anticipation for the next album to come out. Then when you find out this record is to made in collaboration with  another favourite combo then it is time to get really excited!

Time to buzz down to  Raynors/Rival/Revolver and get your hands on a copy of the LP.

Well Elvis Costello has teamed up with The Roots to make his latest album.

He did his best to shake up the dullards who were stood waiting in their chosen spots to see The Stones be wheeled out later. It was said that Freddie Flintoff used to bowl a lot of ‘effort’ balls in his Test career. Well Glastonbury 2013 was one of Elvis Costello’s ‘effort’ gigs.

So he has now gone onto work with Philadelphia’s finest. It just is a download away to see how they got on.

Record Box – the ultimate

John Peel died nearly 7 years ago. It seems such a long time that has passed very quickly. I have a box of vinyl records that I have referred to a few times on this blog, but the ultimate record box has to be the one that belonged to John Peel.

I found this documentary about this ultimate record collection on youtube and it comes in 4 parts. The first part is here and if you are a music fan I think you will enjoy the programme.

Bad Manners still going!

“GET WELL SOON BUSTER!”

[CLICK]

was a post written 2 years ago when Buster Bloodvessel was laid up in hospital in Italy. At the time it did not look good. It was even reported in the NME that the  front man from Bad Manners was in a bad way and obituary writers were being summoned in readiness.

However all is well with the big man, which puts a smile on my face. As in my recent trawl of various ticket agency web sites to see which forthcoming The Hives gig  was nearest to me I saw the list of bands due to play at the Reading festival next month. There they were, Bad Manners, and with a future Christmas count down tour lined up too. I might even go to the Fleece on December 15th and see them for myself! It has been a while.

Anyway Buster looks the picture of health to me – here he is playing Mighty Sounds festival in the Czech Republic in June. Good news I say.

bbv2

Box of vinyl………(6)

Got the old box of 45’s out for a flick through.

A bold purple cover stood out; I had rediscovered a GothRock classic. The Cult – She Sells Sanctuary. In fact it gets a brief mention in a previous blog, but I think that it deserves more than an honourable mention.

The-Cult-She-Sells-Sanctuary

The video was not that great, but I do remember it being on the video jukebox in the “Volley” on King Street. Video jukeboxes were all the rage back then after the dust had settled in the Betamax/VHS format war.

Goths were pseudo punks in the mid 80’s.   The sort of mainstream Gothic rock singles that were out then on the video screens were things like this Cult track, Killing Joke – A Love like Blood and Billy Idol’s – White Wedding.

I did like a lot of that style of music. Robert Smith of the Cure was a clever bloke in my opinion who wrote some unique songs. Siouxsie and the Banshees were another band that I thought were pretty sound. I never bought a Cult album though, but the single here was good to bop about to.

So this landed in my singles collection.

Coming back to King Street, pubs and music videos a couple of personal favourites of mine back then that were also on the jukebox were The Ramones – Teenage Lobotomy and Van Halen’s – Hot for Teacher. They stick in the mind. I somehow still remember staring through the smokey fug at the tv screens to watch those two videos, whilst I nursed a beer in the upstairs bar  The Ramones promo video was not as slickly produced as Michael Jackson’s Thriller,  but was a load more scarier from memory. I cannot find the actual video from then on-line today. Maybe it got banned by the Health and Safety people.

The Van Halen video just appealed for base reasons I suppose. Watching it now makes everything seem so dated. I will not post it as it is degrading to women, all warm blooded males can Google it.