Reissue CDs
Kieron Tyler
80 Aching Orphans ought to be hard work. A four-CD, 80-track, 274-minute overview chronicling 45 years of one of pop’s most wilful bands should be a challenging listen. The Residents have never made records which are straightforward or were meant to be, and have never made records conforming to prevailing trends. Sometimes, they’ve chimed with the ethos of passing zeitgeists like punk but, when that’s happened, it’s been about the times themselves rather than anything intrinsic to The Residents.However, with its flow and internal harmoniousness the casebound box set 80 Aching Orphans Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Anyone who finds Eric Clapton and The Bee Gees’ Barry Gibb stepping up to offer their services as their producer is obviously special. It’s a view reinforced by knowing Rolling Stones’ manager Andrew Loog Oldham and Small Faces were already their champions. Only one person fits this unique bill.PP Arnold has had no lack of starry support yet her passage through the music business has been disjointed. The release of The Turning Tide adds to what was known and also plugs gaps. The 13-cut album collects tracks she made with Clapton, Gibb and Elton John associate Caleb Quaye. All but two are Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Immediately before recording their first album in 1977, Motörhead were on their last legs. They went into the studio after playing what was initially conceived as their farewell show. Appropriately, no one then could have predicted that the band formed by Hawkwind’s former bass player in 1975 would become integral to rock’s rich tapestry. It wasn’t even their first attempt to make an album: one begun in 1975 had been shelved. The early Motörhead were bedevilled by false starts and upsets.The unpremeditated subsequent durability of the band has ensured Motörhead was never deleted. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
That this year is the 40th anniversary of 1977, the year punk rock went mainstream, shouldn’t obscure the pub rock foundations underpinning much of what was supposedly new. The Clash’s Joe Strummer had fronted pub circuit regulars The 101’ers. In 1976, the Sex Pistols regularly played West London pub The Nashville Rooms. The Damned came together after Brian James and Rat Scabies scouted the audience at a Nashville Pistols/101’ers show for potential members of the band they intended forming. The Damned’s future label Stiff Records was run by pub rock movers and shakers. Their producer, Nick Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In February 1965, Melody Maker asked John Lennon about his personal enthusiasm for Bob Dylan material and Dylan interpretations. “I just felt like going that way,” he said about the new acoustic guitar-based material The Beatles were then recording at Abbey Road. “If I’d not heard Dylan, it might have been that I’d written stuff and sung it like Dominic Behan, or somebody like that.” Despite the non-committal answer, Dylan’s impact on Lennon was clear – the cap he'd recently been wearing was evidence of that.Out of the public eye, Lennon – after being hipped to the album by George Harrison – Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Once heard, 1969’s Spirit of the Golden Juice is not forgotten. F. J. McMahon’s sole album is imbued with the heavy air of desolation. Its nine country tinged songs are also melodic and as good as those by Tim Hardin and Fred Neil, with whom McMahon is most often compared. Unlike them, McMahon had not steered a path through the folk circuit to achieve recognition. Instead, Spirit of the Golden Juice was pressed in the low hundreds by the small California label Accent and had no distribution. McMahon’s label mates were guitar instrumentalist Buddy Merrill, a past his sell-by-date Dick Dale and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
We’ve been here before. Not to exactly the same territory, but to a neighbouring space in the same time frame. Last year, theartsdesk looked at a reissue of 2007’s Room to Expand, the first widely available album by the minimalist pianist Hauschka. The album’s reappearance was a moment to reflect on Nils Frahm, Jóhann Jóhannsson and Christian Wallumrød, some of Hauschka’s fellow travellers in the inelegantly tagged post-classical groundswell, all of whom first attracted widespread attention a decade ago. Also mentioned in that review was Iceland’s Ólafur Arnalds. Now, his debut album Eulogy Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
TV Tube Heart, the debut album from The Radiators From Space, was issued on 21 October 1977, a week before the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks. Each was a punk rock album and one, inevitably, has been subjected to greater historical analysis and many more reissues than the other. Of course, Johnny Rotten and co’s first and only long-player was significant but the other band’s album was important too. The Radiators From Space were the Republic of Ireland’s first punk band –The Boomtown Rats, if they were punk at all, were relative Johnny-come-latelies – and TV Tube Heart remains a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Some Bizzare Album was released in January 1981. Compiled by DJ Stevo, it featured twelve unsigned acts he felt represented a fresh way of approaching pop – one enabled by the availability of synthesisers and rhythm machines. Stevo was playing the new music at the nights he hosted, putting the bands on and compiling the electronic chart for the weekly music paper Sounds. After being inundated with demo tapes, he chose the ones he liked best and issued the album.From today’s perspective, the Some Bizzare Album plays out as a prescient snapshot of what would enter the mainstream. The Fast Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Last year, the arrival of Close to the Noise Floor compelled theartsdesk’s Reissue CDs Weekly to conclude that it was “hugely important and utterly delightful”. A four-CD set, it was a thrilling, first-time overview of the UK’s early indie-synth mavericks from Blancmange to Throbbing Gristle and Muslimgauze to Sea of Wires. Now, it has spawned a follow-up.Noise Reduction System: Formative European Electronica 1974-1984 is another four-CD set. As well designed and well presented in its hardback binding as Close to the Noise Floor, it includes a crisply laid-out 52-page book with an Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
According to Pete Frame’s book Rock Family Trees, Fairport Convention had 15 different line-ups between 1968 and 1978, the period covered by the new box set Come All Ye – The First 10 Years. Fairport Convention #7, extant from November 1971 to February 1972, featured no one from the first three iterations of the band, which had taken them up to June 1969. Evidently, the actuality of Fairport Convention is fluid.Despite this, there is an established and (relatively) clearly defined arc. One traced by Come All Ye. Their first album, made with Judy Dyble as their singer, was a response to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Between them, Marylebone Beat Girls and Milk of the Tree cover the years 1964 to 1973. Each collects tracks recorded by female singers: whether credited as solo acts, fronting a band or singer-songwriters performing self-penned material. That the two compilations dovetail is coincidental – they were released by different labels on the same day – but they embrace the period when the singer-songwriter was codified and when, as the liner notes of Milk of the Tree put it, “female voices began to be widely heard in the [music] industry.”As that quote suggests, Milk of the Tree: An Anthology Of Read more ...