Reissue CDs
Kieron Tyler
Liverpool’s The Cryin’ Shames were responsible for two of mid-Sixties Britain’s most striking single’s tracks. The February 1966 top side “Please Stay” was so eerie, so wraithlike it came across as an attempt to channel the experience of making successful contact with a spirit presence. “Come on Back,” an unpolished September 1966 B-side, could pass for US garage punk at its most paint-peeling.The Cryin’ Shames only issued three singles, so that’s a pretty high batting average in terms of quality. Add in the crunching Bob Dylan re-write “What’s News Pussycat” (sic), “Please Stay’s” flip, and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Late summer 1966. Jazz was Margo Guryan’s thing. She was not interested in pop music. This changed when she was played The Beach Boys’s “God Only Knows.” Amazed by what she heard, she tuned in to pop radio for the first time. Her head was further turned by The Beatles and The Mamas & the Papas. A copy of “God Only Knows’s” parent album Pet Sounds was bought.Newly thrilled by a pop she saw as more innovative than a jazz scene she thought too full of Ornette Coleman imitators, she wrote a song titled “Think of Rain.” In tune with the burgeoning harmony pop style, its baroque leanings and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Moving Away from the Pulsebeat” is the final track – barring the locked-groove return of the two-note guitar refrain from “Boredom” – of Buzzcocks’ March 1978 debut album, Another Music In A Different Kitchen. At five minutes 40 seconds it didn’t cleave to the short, sharp punk template. Also, it was largely instrumental. And it had a drum solo.Buzzcocks had emerged with punk yet weren’t going along with it or, rather, what it had been reflexedly characterised as. Their label, United Artists, had faith in “Moving Away from the Pulsebeat” and pressed it onto a one-sided promotional-only 12- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“We hope if you like it, you'll buy it,” says Paul McCartney. It’s 4 April 1963 and The Beatles are on stage and about to perform their third single “From Me to You.” It’s out in a week.To his left, John Lennon instantly responds to the entreaty. “And if you don't like it,” he retorts. “Don't buy it.”This atypical approach to promotion was witnessed by the audience gathered in the Roxburgh Hall of Stowe School, a Buckinghamshire all-boys institution hosting a late afternoon concert nominated as “probably The Beatles most unusual live gig” by the foremost Beatles scholar Mark Lewisohn Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Jon Savage's The Secret Public How The LGBTQ+ Aesthetic Shaped Pop Culture 1955-1979 accompanies the titular author/historian/journalist’s book of almost the same name. The Secret Public: How LGBTQ Resistance Shaped Popular Culture (1955–1979) and this 41-track double CD each track exactly what their titles say, drilling into what has often paralleled or underlain yet repeatedly influenced a constantly evolving mainstream.Little Richard is seen on the cover of the book and the compilation. Other figures crop up twice on the CD set: British producer and songwriter Joe Meek (with Joe Meek Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Original pressings of Love And Poetry sell for up to £2,800. Copies of the August 1969 debut album by Andwellas Dream can sometimes also be found for £700, a relative bargain in the context of the upper limit of the prices the collector’s market has settled on.There were two follow-up albums – each credited to Andwella. August 1970’s World's End fetches around £40 to £80; People's People, issued in late 1970, attracts prices of £50 to £100. Cult stuff then, with interest centred on that first album. And where there’s such appeal, repressings follow. Love And Poetry was first reissued in 1995 Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The name, Caron and Michelle Maso explained to Los Angeles radio DJ Rodney Bingenheimer, was a literal description. “We’re both like five feet. We’re all grown up, but we’re still little.”Little Girls, the band the Maso sisters formed and fronted was active in Los Angeles over 1980 to 1985. On vinyl, though, the evidence for their existence was limited. In 1981, they contributed a track to the compilation album Rodney On The ROQ Volume 2 – named after Bingenheimer and KROQ, the radio station he worked for. Two years on, there was the six-track, 12-inch EP Thank Heaven! Finally, in 1985, a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
West Coast Consortium’s first single was July 1967’s “Some Other Someday,” a delightful slice of Mellotron-infused harmony pop which wasn’t too far from The Ivy League’s “Funny How Love Can be” and The Rockin’ Berries’ “He’s in Town” – each of which were hits in, respectively, 1965 and 1964. All three bands were on the Pye label and its associated imprint Piccadilly.“Some Other Someday” wasn’t a hit, but it did pick up play on the pirate station Radio Luxembourg. On the single’s flip, the similarly luscious “Look Back.” The topside was co-written by Tony Macaulay, who had signed the band to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Edinburgh’s Rezillos were booked to play Middlesbrough’s Rock Garden on Wednesday 14 September 1977. “I Can’t Stand my Baby,” their debut single, had been issued in July and they were on the road subsequent to its release, positive music press reviews and regular spins from John Peel. Their humour-laced, Day-Glo art-punk was making waves.In Middlesbrough, the bill was filled out by local band Lice? – their name taken from a cautionary poster about pubic lice – and Macclesfield/Salford outfit Warsaw, who’d had a line-up change the previous month when their drummer Steve Brotherdale left. His Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Three years ago, the release of Till Another Time 1988-1996 generated a thumbs up. A compilation of recordings by the Baltimore and/or New York-based Linda Smith it was, according to this column, “stunning” and “significant.” Until this point, knowledge of Smith had “largely been the province of the do-it-yourself world of music.”Now, two Linda Smith albums are reissued. Nothing Else Matters originally came out on CD-only in 1995. I So Liked Spring was its follow-up, appearing on cassette in 1996. Nothing Else Matters had been preceded by four cassette-only albums which remain un-reissued. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Brazzaville is on the north side of the Congo River. It is the capital of the Republic of the Congo. Kinshasa is on the south side of the Congo. It is capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly known as Zaïre. The cities face each other, about 1.5km apart, divided by the river and being in different nations.Congo Funk! - Sound Madness from the Shores of the Mighty Congo River (Kinshasa/Brazzaville 1969-1982) unites them by collecting 14 tracks demonstrating their musical fortunes were intertwined. Take the compilation’s Les Bantous De La Capitale, who were formed in Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Half-way through this three-CD set, the energy level suddenly shifts upwards. It’s just one track of the 67 collected, but in this context this basic, blunt recording stands on its own. Issued in October 1974, Dr. Feelgood’s debut single “Roxette” was an early sign that British music could change, needed to change.Along with “Roxette,” Patterns on the Window - The British Progressive Pop Sounds of 1974 features a few other tracks associated with the back-to-basics pub rock phenomenon: Ace’s soul-rock hit “How Long,” Brinsley Schwarz’s “The Ugly Things” and Kilburn & The High Roads's “ Read more ...