Reissue CDs
Kieron Tyler
In early March 1980, the weekly music paper Sounds dedicated their front cover to “the new face of punk” with a photograph of Stinky Turner, the singer of The Cockney Rejects. What had, in 1977, been widely interpreted as a challenge to musical orthodoxy and as a new broom which was sweeping clean had, in turn, become a default style for new waves of bands. Punk, as The Exploited put it in 1981 for the title of their debut album, was not dead. And punk itself was now the inspiration, rather than the assorted influences which had fed into Buzzcocks, The Clash, The Damned and the Sex Pistols. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In terms of chart statistics, Julian Cope’s period with Island Records looks pretty good. He issued four albums with the label and all of them charted. Saint Julian (issued in March 1987) peaked at 11, My Nation Underground (October 1988) stalled at 42 but Peggy Suicide (March 1991) and Jehovakill (October 1992) climbed to 23 and 20 respectively. Not bad.Yet Jehovakill became his last album for Island and, in 1994, he signed with the Chrysalis Records subsidiary Echo for whom Autogeddon climbed to a 16 position. The chart statistics tell part of the story.With Island, the release schedule was Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Playing Vancouver’s Commodore Ballroom on 8 September 1974, the New York Dolls opened their first set of the evening with three cover versions. Muddy Waters’ “Hoochie Coochie Man” was followed by The Shangri-Las’ “(Give Him a) Great Big Kiss” and Otis Redding’s “Don’t Mess With Cupid”. They were acknowledging that blues, girl group records and soul were integral to who they were. A pretty comprehensive sweep considering they were a prime influence on the purportedly reductive punk rock. Once the building blocks were revealed to the audience, Vancouver witnessed them lurching into their own " Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Brian James’ opening cut is “The Twist”. Not the Sixties dance-craze song, but a melodic guitar-driven rocker simpatico with what Australian bands The Hoodoo Gurus, The New Christs and The Screaming Tribesman were dealing in during the late 1980s. Detroit’s slash-and-burn is in there, as is a pop sensibility. “Slow it Down”, Side Ones third cut, sounds like an alternate-universe hit single: one where edgy pop-rock ruled. Side Two opens with “Ain't That a Shame”, a mid-tempo, moody outing with the feel of the Johnny Thunders of “Subway Train” and “It’s Not Enough”.Back in the Britain of 1990 Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Fairytales is lovely. It opens with a subtle version of Jimmy Webb’s “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” which merges Radka Toneff’s emotive and intimate vocal with Steve Dobrogosz’s sparse piano lines. The ingredients are minimal, there is no embellishment yet the performance is powerful.Over the following nine songs, the mood endures. Versions of Elton John’s “Come Down in Time”, Kurt Weill’s “Lost in the Stars”, “My Funny Valentine” and “Nature Boy” sit naturally alongside musical interpretations of Emily Dickinson’s “I Read my Sentence” and the Fran Landesman poems “Before Love Went Out of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“When I was singing at my best, I was the essence of English song. And that was all I ever really wanted.” It’s said without pride and in a matter-of-fact manner. The speaker is Shirley Collins in the documentary The Ballad of Shirley Collins. Issued on DVD in a package with a CD collecting music which defines parts of her world, the film tracks a person balancing certainty about who she is and was with an enviable level-headedness.The Ballad of Shirley Collins is also issued as an album – a quasi-soundtrack of the film. But the version to get is the book-bound CD/DVD configuration Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The press ad for Spirit’s debut album wasn’t shy. “Five came together for a purpose: to blow the sum of man’s musical experience apart and bring it together in more universal forms. They became a single musical being: Spirit. It happens in the first album.” Of the band’s bassist Mark Andes, it declared “the strings are his nerve endings”. Drummer Ed Cassidy apparently “hears tomorrow and he plays it now”.Now was February 1968 and such hyperbole would have been baseless if the band being bigged-up wasn’t special. As it happened, Spirit actually were. Their eponymous album was packed with great Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
This column last encountered Cocteau Twins in 2015 when the compilation The Pink Opaque and the Tiny Dynamine/Echoes in a Shallow Bay album, which collected two EPs, were reissued on vinyl only. Now, it’s the turn of two albums-as-such: 1983's Head Over Heels and 1984's Treasure.The overriding question from then still applies: neither record is rare in its original form and neither fetches a high price. The reissues sell for around £17. Decent-shape first pressings fetch £3 or £4 less than that. Why would anyone buy a vinyl reissue of either?And, upending a review’s normal structure, the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The similarity is intentional. The cover design of When the Day is Done – The Orchestrations of Robert Kirby nods explicitly to that of Nick Drake’s debut album Five Leaves Left. That wasn’t just the first record by the singer-songwriter, it was also first time most people heard Kirby’s string arrangements. He and Drake had been friends at Cambridge University. The album’s producer Joe Boyd commissioned arrangements by Richard Hewson but Drake rejected them and the call was made to Kirby, who had already worked with him live.For Kirby, this was the beginning of a career which flourished until Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“That colourful character Zoot Money has recently been writing at length in support of psychedelic music. Now, what’s the score Zoot, has it got a contribution to make to the scene?” It’s 14 January 1967 and BBC presenter Brian Matthew is putting his guest on the spot.“I think so,” responds Money. “It’s an art form. Everything has to be broken open and seen in as many different ways as possible. I suppose that’s why we’re here, to break it open and find out what’s inside, that it was there all the time.”Six months later, Money announced the break-up of his group the Big Roll Band and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
What is music? When pondering archive releases, compilations and reissues the question doesn’t come up. Knowledge of context and history means there’s never a need to muse on this fundamental issue. A package, say, dedicated to Northern Soul says what it is and the prime considerations are how well it has been executed and defining its place in the relevant narrative. The same applies to anything previously covered in this column.However, the release of the Voyager Golden Record raises this concern. Twenty-seven pieces of music are collected, ranging from a Navajo Chant to part of Beethoven’s Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
During the British Invasion years, a Cleveland, Ohio band called The Choir ploughed a Brit-focussed furrow from late 1964. Initially and tellingly, they were named The Mods. Their prime mover, Dann Klawon, was a subscriber the switched-on UK monthly Rave, had missed a Mods show to hitch-hike to a Rolling Stones concert and was the first Clevelander to own a copy of “Purple Haze”. His band became The Choir in 1966, played on Who and Yardbirds’ bills, and went through continuous line-up changes. Even so, they issued three singles over 1966 to 1968 beginning with the classic “It’s Cold Outside Read more ...