Reissue CDs
Kieron Tyler
The most commercially and consistently successful band on DinDisc was Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. Martha and the Muffins also made a mark. Label mates The Monochrome Set were cool, distinctive but not so chart friendly. The Revillos were less reserved, as was New Wave of British Heavy Metal outfit Dedringer. The patronage of Heaven 17 brought dance troupe Hot Gossip to the label.DinDisc was an offshoot of Virgin Records with arty leanings. Extant from autumn 1979 to early 1981 it was in keeping with the Charisma subsidiary Pre, which operated over a similar period. Both paved the way Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The New York Dolls, The Ramones, Suicide, Television, Blondie, The Dictators, The Heartbreakers, The Shirts, Richard Hell and the Voidoids. From 1974 onwards, New York buzzed with bands. There were also Tuff Darts, The Fast, Pure Hell, Von Lmo and others who didn’t quite grab the brass ring. Out of towners like The Dead Boys, Pere Ubu, Devo and The Real Kids jostled for attention too.Despite the crowded market, The Senders were central to this mix. Formed in 1976 by ex-pat Frenchman Philippe Marcade, who had arrived in New York in 1974, they issued one single in 1978, a seven-track 12-inch EP Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Ka Huma” by Ivo Nilakreshna sounds as if a jazz band was taking on rock ’n’ roll. There’s a swing and sway, busy rhythm guitar and a lead female voice singing a yearning melody. An instrument which seems to vibes is in there. But there’s more than the familiar elements. Most of the influences are unrecognisable.Zaenal Combo’s “Tandung Tjina” is an rocking instrumental with a comparable otherness. There’s a kinship with California surf band The Pyramids’s “Penetration” but, again, the primary building blocks are out of reach. Both tracks appear to have sprung from an unfamiliar well.And so it Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The 1997 release of Time Out of Mind was the resurrection of an artist who appeared to have wandered off the reservation some years before, lost in transit on his Never Ending Tour, trailed by an army of "Bobcats" who followed him for show after grinding show. “How can you stand it?” he once asked of a woman who told him she’d seen dozens of NET gigs.While set lists shifted like tidal sands from night to night, the performances ranged from the ragged and wildly unfamiliar to the singular and revelatory. After attending one of 1991’s woeful run of shows at Hammersmith Odeon during a bitter Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
At some point in 1979 a duo called The Door and the Window are playing a London Musician’s Collective show in a large brick building along the road from Cecil Sharp House in Camden. One of them has a synthesiser, probably a WASP. The other has tape recorders and a guitar. The inscrutable noise made features clanks, grinding and drones.On a Saturday night in either 1979 or 1980 a band called Exhibit “A” are playing Covent Garden youth club The Central London Youth Project. It’s in a basement along Shelton Street, so is usually called “The Basement.” They’re young, and deal in a jagged yet Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A first encounter with Rustic Hinge and the Provincial Swimmers is unforgettable. Their summer 1970 recordings are so far out they at first seem unlistenable. Persistence pays though and the ear tunes in. It becomes clear this band swallowed the Captain Beefheart playbook and regurgitated it after applying a severe dose of the cut-up technique.Despite sending a letter which generated the interest of Beefheart fan John Peel, who wanted to add them to the roster of his Dandelion Records label, Rustic Hinge and Co were close-to unnoticed. There was a January 1971 mention in the underground Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A strange new single went on sale in Britain’s record shops in April 1962. Credited to Ray Cathode, “Time Beat” combined a metronomic rhythm with peculiar, otherworldly sounds. It was not a standard pop record. The flipside, “Waltz In Orbit”, was also about its tempo and was just as weird. Not many copies were sold.The Ray Cathode single was issued seven months before The Tornados’s equally unearthly “Telstar” and was, in time, recognised as a ground-breaking combination of studio-created sounds and pop music. The Ray Cathode handle masked a collaboration between the BBC Radiophonic Workshop’ Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In December 1977, the music weekly Sounds included an article about the County Durham punk band Penetration. By Jon Savage, it was headlined The Future Is Female. The same four words would be used by the band for their promotional badges.Penetration were fronted by Pauline Murray. In the article, an unidentified male band member is quoted as saying “we’ve never considered Pauline as anything different from just another member of the group – why should she be any different? It's person to person that's important..."Pauline Murray said “I just feel as though I'm a boy. (laughter). Nooooo. You' Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Beatles loomed over everything else. It wasn’t inevitable, but the arrival of the revealing Revolver box set and Peter Jackson’s compelling Get Back film confirmed that there is more to say about what’s known, and also that there are new things to say about popular music’s most inspirational phenomenon of the 20th century.Just as it was when The Beatles were operational, the Revolver box and Get Back gave other things out there standards to aspire to. This pair of archive releases became a wholly unexpected yardstick for 2022. Obviously though, brows at labels aren’t furrowing about Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Each new Beatles album offered a chance for other acts to record their own versions of songs which didn’t make it onto singles. What was on the long-player could pick up attention if it was covered. Revolver was no exception. Cliff Bennett & The Rebel Rousers’s version of “Got to Get You Into my Life” was in the charts the August 1966 week Revolver was issued.Revolver’s “Here There and Everywhere” was recorded by The Fourmost. “For no One” was covered by Paul McCartney sound-alike Marc Reid, “Yellow Submarine” by The She Trinity. None were hits, and The She Trinity were gazumped by The Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
"Descarga Royal" by Los Royal’s de Pucallpa opens proceedings. After flurries of wobbly wah-wah guitar, a driving percussion bed interweaves with a rolling guitar figure. Then, about two minutes in, the guitarist steps on the fuzz pedal. Groovy. Psychedelic too. The band’s name is taken from the tropical east-Perú city of Pucallpa, located on the Amazon tributary river Ucayali.Further in, "Humo En La Selva" by Los Invasores De Progreso is as groovy and also features fuzz guitar along with vocal chants. Progreso is located in inland south-western Perú along the Apurímac, another Amazon Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
When Trevor Beales’s band Havana Lake released their only album in 1977, it was on a label which also issued records by The Ryman Country Band, The Saddleworth Male Voice Choir, The Slaithwaite Brass Band, The Thurlstone Bell Orchestra and a version of Sixties beat band The Merseybeats. Look was the offshoot of West Yorkshire studio September Sound Studios – anyone booked there could have a record pressed as part of the deal.Havana Lake’s CSNY-ish, Lindisfarne-leaning album Concrete Valley had more sympathetic Look Records bedfellows in the country/folk-slanted duo Harmony & Slyde, and Read more ...