Reissue CDs
Kieron Tyler
Outside his home country Madagascar, Damily was first heard via a couple of tracks on the 2004 French compilation album Tsapiky, Panorama D'une Jeune Musique De Tulear, an overview of the tsapiky dance music of the south-west of the island. He’d moved to France in 2003. His first internationally issued full-length album, Ravinahitsy, followed in 2007. Since then, there’s been three more albums: the last of which was 2018’s Valimbilo.The new compilation Early Years – Madagascar Cassette Archives soundtracks a previously untold backstory by revealing what Damily’s music was like on his Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Like mellotrons before them, synthesisers could project a strange and deep emotion – something in the wiring had an inherent melancholy. Previous generations had often disparaged synths as dehumanising machines but, at the turn of the 80s, a new generation of musicians appeared who could coax them into creating modern and decidedly moving music. It was almost as if these groups had intentionally set out to prove the doubters wrong.”The strapline from the back of the Saint Etienne-compiled The Tears of Technology lays out the 20-track collection’s mission statement: to rescue synth-infused Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The enduring status of The Beatles shouldn’t distract from them having been one amongst many Liverpool bands while they found their feet. In October 1961, local impresario and Cavern Club DJ/MC Bob Wooler worked out that there were 125 active bands in Liverpool and its environs, and that he knew of 249 overall since he began working with music in the city.At that point, like The Beatles, King Size Taylor and the Dominoes were on the rise. They had come together in 1958 in Seaforth, north of Liverpool, as a union of rock ’n rollers The Dominoes and six-foot-five guitarist Ted “Kingsize” Taylor Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Even though nothing on Tape Archive Essence 1973–1978 was released at the time it was recorded, every track evokes material which was issued. Any fan of the German legends Cluster and Harmonia needs this album gathering extracts from tapes key member Hans-Joachim Roedelius recorded on his own during the period when both outfits were active.Cluster was initially Kluster, a trio which released a couple of experimental, free-form albums. After performing live at Göttingen University in May 1971, Conrad Schnitzler left and the remaining members Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius changed Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
How Mitch Ryder is seen depends on particular perspectives. The Detroit blue-eyed soul belter racked up a string of US hits on 45 in 1966 and 1967. He made many albums, became an oldies radio staple and a perennial live draw. In the UK though he was small beer and his only sniff at the charts was with “Jenny Take A Ride”, which brushed the outside edge of the Top 30 in early 1966.However, one section of Britain’s music-loving public was keenly attuned to his take on soul. Ryder’s May 1966 single “Break Out” was initially played in the late Sixties at Manchester’s Twisted Wheel, and then Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“An exercise in bizarre mixtures, combining the bleak acid hangover of half-hearted Velvet Underground impersonators with muted razzmatazz: a long and rather stylish joke.”The April 1980 New Musical Express review of The Monochrome Set’s debut album wasn’t entirely favourable but it captured the difficulty of getting to grips with the band. A combination of raised-eyebrow archness and dolefulness confirmed the band was setting-out its own path. Further confirmation of their slipperiness came in October 1980 when a second album was released.Strange Boutique, the debut, and its follow-up Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A raga-rock circularity. Finger cymbals. A distant, etiolated female vocal. A fuggy atmosphere. A kinship with Jefferson Airplane’s “Come Up The Years”, The Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Just Like Honey” and The Velvet Underground’s “All Tomorrow’s Parties”. Hangman’s Beautiful Daughters' “Love is Blue” is a beautiful, haunting recording.The band’s “Outta My Head” is as great, but is taken at a faster tempo and along the lines of US Sixties psych-garage rockers The Neighb'rhood Childr'n or “Don't Cry Your Tears”, the 1981 single by Edinburgh band The Delmontes.“Outta My Head” and “Love is Blue” are Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“My favorite in the place was Karen Dalton. She was a tall white blues singer and guitar player, funky, lanky and sultry. Karen had a voice like Billie Holiday’s and played the guitar like Jimmy Reed and went all the way with it. I sang with her a couple of times.”Well Bob, that’s how you remember it. Dylan was writing in his 2004 memoir Chronicles Volume One about encountering Dalton at the Fred Neil-compered Cafe Wha? in the first half of 1961. Part of what he says seems fair. On 1969’s It’s So Hard To Tell Who’s Going To Love You, the first of her two albums, she melded Billie Holiday’s Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Two of the 84 tracks on A Slight Disturbance In My Mind: The British Proto-Psychedelic Sounds of 1966 are covers of songs from Revolver. One is a rendering of “Tax Man” (sic) by a band named Loose Ends which was enterprisingly issued as a single on the same August 1966 day The Beatles’ album was released. Despite the addition to the arrangement of bongos, spiralling soul-type organ and an odd spindly guitar line it’s pretty faithful to the original and not too exciting.The other is Hertfordshire band The Mirage’s re-rendering of “Tomorrow Never Knows”, which hit record shops in December 1966 Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Two years before he took on The Beatles, George Martin was working with another artiste who would go on to have success in America. Martin first encountered Matt Monro in 1960 when he signed him to the label he ran, Parlophone. The “Portrait of my Love” single charted later in the year. In summer 1961, “My Kind of Girl” hit America’s single’s charts. His 1965 version of ”Yesterday” had a Martin arrangement. The same year, Monro – born Terry Parsons – moved to America after he had been picked up by Capitol Records, which also had The Beatles on its books. Also relevant to Monro, Capitol had Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Through previous archive releases or bootlegs, deep-digging Cream fans will already be familiar with much of what’s on Goodbye Tour – Live 1968. The legitimate 1969 album Goodbye Cream included three tracks from the 19 October 1968 Los Angeles Forum show, heard here in full. Another trio of tracks on this set, from a 4 October 1968 Oakland show, appeared on the 1972 Live Cream Volume II album. The 26 November 1968 Royal Albert Hall set has done the rounds in various forms. As for bootlegs, all the shows collected on Goodbye Tour have circulated in their complete form.What's new is Goodbye Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The titles conveyed the enthusiasm. “A Girl Named Sandoz”, “Gratefully Dead”, “Monterey”, “San Franciscan Nights” and “Yes, I am Experienced”. LSD, The Grateful Dead, Monterey Pop Festival, San Francisco and Jimi Hendrix. There they were, explicit tags confirming that The Animals’ Eric Burdon had been psychedelicised. Three years on from 1964's “House of the Rising Sun”, he was a changed man.It wasn’t unusual for British pop. Whole bands and members of outfits who had traded in edgy R&B and blues had tuned in. The Pretty Things did so. Zoot Money turned his Big Roll band into Dantalian’s Read more ...