1960s
Kieron Tyler
A reissue can be an aide-mémoire, a reminder that a record which has been off the radar for a while needs revisiting, that it deserves fresh attention.In that spirit, this column has looked at straight vinyl reissues of albums of varying styles, from various periods; from the well-known to those which attracted barely any consideration when they first surfaced. In the latter category, there is the reissue of Horizoning by the Canadian folk-inclined singer-songwriter Stefan Gnyś whose sole album had, until 2024, never advanced beyond the 12 two-sided acetate discs which were specially cut in Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Vanilla Fudge could provoke a strong reaction. Writing about them in 1982, Tom Hibbert – then best-known for his contributions to Smash Hits – said of their February 1968 second album, The Beat Goes On, that “on one side of the bombastic concept LP, Vanilla Fudge summed up the history of music from Mozart, through Cole Porter and Elvis, to The Beatles concluding that it was all worthless.”“On the other side,” continued Hibbert. “Fudge unleash on the unwary listener their vision of the ‘now generation,’ in the form of a dull reworking of Sonny Bono’s ‘The Beat Goes on.’ This was the recurring Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
For John Leyton, it was third time lucky as far as his singles were concerned. The actor’s manager Robert Stigwood teamed him with producer Joe Meek, but Leyton's first two 45s – August 1960’s “Tell Laura I Love Her” and October 1960's “The Girl on the Floor Above” – didn’t made waves. The next one – July 1961’s “Johnny Remember Me” – was it, the hit, the chart topper.While its predecessors were underpowered and, in the case of “Tell Laura I Love Her,” a cursory cover of a US hit, “Johnny Remember Me” was something else. Recorded at Meek’s home studio in north London’s Holloway rather than Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Last month a portrait of Alan Turing by AI robot AI-Da sold at Sotheby’s for $1.08 million – proof that, in some people’s eyes, artificial intelligence can produce paintings worth as much as those made by human hands.Depending on your view of AI, this can either be a very exciting or deeply depressing idea; whichever way you lean, it makes Tate Modern’s exhibition of work by the pioneers of machine art extremely timely.This exhaustive (and exhausting) show starts in the 1950s with Japanese artist Atsuko Tanaka. In response to the neon signs brightening up Osaka’s streets in the aftermath of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
For most of Canada’s listening public, their country-man Stefan Gnyś – pronounced G'neesh – wasn’t a concern. The 300 copies of his 1969 single didn’t make it to shops. There was little promotion and limited radio play. Gnyś had paid RCA Limited Recording Services to press the seven-incher. Beyond this transaction, there was no record company involvement.“Horizoning” and its B-side “Evangeline” were recorded on 21 April 1969 at St. Catherine, Ontario’s Heidebrecht Recording Services, a facility usually dedicated to recording radio jingles. Eight other tracks were recorded that day. John Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“The last we had was a bit of a flop. I own up about it, it was quite bad.” Speaking to the BBC’s Brian Matthew on 4 April 1967, Yardbirds’ frontman Keith Relf is candid about the chart fate of his band’s last single, October 1966’s “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago.”Hearing a major figure in British pop being so frank is made doubly surprising as “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago” was an epoch-defining single, one of the earliest signals that psychedelia was looming. Despite having broken ground, Relf was speaking in terms of chart positions rather than innovation. Relatively, though, it had Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Tucker Zimmerman is singing a number called “Don’t Go Crazy (Go in Peace)”. At 83, he performs sitting down. Surrounded by support band Iji, who act as his pick-up, he approaches the song in a whispery, affable voice. At the start of his set he was assisted to his seat but, knees aside, he’s not frail. He’s just laid back, a Sixties original, strumming gently. “Don’t go crazy,” he sings, “Go with the flow, go in peace.” Although he’s advised us to not think about politics, it’s hard not to. Yet his hour-long show soothes, offers a window into some of what’s best about America.Tucker is one of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
After the chart success of his second album, June 1969’s Hot Buttered Soul, it was inevitable that any single had to represent Isaac Hayes in a different way to the LP. The album’s 12-minute version of “Walk on by” would not work as a seven-incher. There was also “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” which clocked in at over 18 minutes. They did, though, become the A- and B-sides of a tie-in single. But only after significant editing.The decision to truncate album tracks for the singles market set a pattern. Follow-up album The Isaac Hayes Movement opened with a just-short of 12-minute cover of “I Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The name is so familiar it inhibits analysis. Gerry and the Pacemakers – Gerry Marsden and his band, a group with a designation pronouncing they made the pace, were with the trends. For a while, the case can be made that this is how it was. After The Beatles smashed into the charts, Gerry and the Pacemakers occupied the rung below them as the UK’s second-most commercially successful new band.Famously, and noted so often it’s a cliché, they were the first British group to score three number ones with their first three singles: "How do You do it?" "I Like it" and "You’ll Never Walk Alone." All Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Undertakers were central to the Merseybeat boom. The best of what they issued on single in 1963 and 1964 captured the raw, stomping sound adored by Liverpool’s audiences. But hits were elusive and they dropped off the musical map at the end of 1964. The Beatles never forget The Undertakers though. In 1968, former Undertaker Jackie Lomax was signed to their label Apple.Tomorrow Never Comes: The NYC Sessions 1967-1968 captures a different aspect of the end game to that represented by Lomax’s solo endeavours. What’s heard are the final recordings by the rump of The Undertakers, made by a Read more ...
Robert Beale
Martin Duncan’s 2008 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream remains one of the best and funniest things Opera North has ever done – back now again (it was also seen in 2013-14), in the company’s autumn season of revivals.The idea, hinted at in the staging and suggested in its original publicity, that Britten’s vision of Shakespeare’s enchanted world could be presented in terms of “psychedelia” and even likened to an acid trip, on the grounds that those things were part of the 1960s and Britten completed his opera in 1960, is, strictly speaking, a minor anachronism. Such things came late in Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Just over two weeks before Christmas 1967, The Rolling Stones issued Their Satanic Majesties Request. The album’s title appeared to serve time on the peace-and-love, flowers-for-everyone good vibes of the psychedelic era. A year later, the Stones’ next LP, Beggars Banquet, went further. It opened with "Sympathy for the Devil." “Just call me Lucifer…or I'll lay your soul to waste,” sang Mick Jagger.The Stones were already troubled. There was the Redlands drug raid in February 1967 and the subsequent upholding of the appeal against the prison sentences handed down to Jagger and Keith Richards. Read more ...