blues
Music Reissues Weekly: Shake That Thing - The Blues in Britain 1963-1973Sunday, 24 September 2023
In September 1955, the grandly named London Skiffle Centre set up for business each Thursday in a room above the Round House pub in Soho’s Wardour Street. A prime mover in the venture was blues acolyte Cyril Davies. Two months after the opening,... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: Playing for the Man at the Door - Field Recordings from the Collection of Mack McCormickSunday, 13 August 2023
Between the late 1950s and around 1971, Robert “Mack” McCormick (1930–2015) travelled through his base-state Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, west Louisiana and parts of Arkansas and Oklahoma looking for musicians to record. It wasn’t a random process:... Read more... |
Album: Bob Dylan - Shadow KingdomSaturday, 27 May 2023
Dylan’s Shadow Kingdom first crossed our paths in July 2021, his first streaming event, and coming little more than a year after the garden of unearthly delights that was Rough and Rowdy Ways. To enter this kingdom, you were given a key code... Read more... |
Album: Rickie Lee Jones - Pieces of TreasureMonday, 01 May 2023
Reuniting with Russ Titelman, the producer of her eponymous 1979 debut and its follow-up 1981’s Pirates, Rickie Lee Jones approaches the great American songbook as if she was reuniting with an old flame, the thrill of it smouldering and... Read more... |
Album: The Zombies - Different GameThursday, 30 March 2023
There’s something charmingly unassuming and humble about The Zombies. Nowadays their 1968 second album Odyssey and Oracle regularly figures in all time greatest albums lists, but it was a flop at the time and its reputation grew through a gradually... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: Duffy Power - Innovations, Live at the BBCSunday, 19 March 2023
Sometime in early October 1963 John Lennon and Paul McCartney encountered The Rolling Stones and offered them one of their songs; one which became the London blues aficionado’s second single. “I Wanna be Your Man” was duly recorded on 7 October 1963... Read more... |
Album: Van Morrison - Moving on SkiffleWednesday, 08 March 2023
This double album takes Van Morrison back to one of his early muses – Skiffle and its repertoire, that precursor to the rock'n'roll years that took hold of Britain in the 1950s, having percolated across the USA through the first half of the century... Read more... |
Album: Larkin Poe - Blood HarmonyFriday, 11 November 2022
The Larkin Poe story goes back to 2010, when they released four beautiful and distinctive seasons-related EPs, displaying the Lovell sisters Rebecca and Megan’s rich, absorbing vocal harmonies, slippery slide guitar work and a winning with with... Read more... |
Savala Nolan: Don't Let It Get You Down review - finding voice in the liminalThursday, 29 September 2022
Liminal: a word that conjures thresholds and between states. Caught between three languages – the adjective is a borrowing from the Latin that enters English by way of German – liminal also has three distinct definitions.There is the underused sense... Read more... |
Album: Ben Harper - Bloodline MaintenanceSaturday, 23 July 2022
Throughout the 1990s and the first decade of this century, Ben Harper achieved global stardom, although the UK was a territory where he never achieved lift-off. By contrast, in the US, Australia and much of Europe, he’s regarded as a heavyweight (he... Read more... |
Album: Jack White - Entering Heaven AliveWednesday, 20 July 2022
Jack White’s last couple of albums, Boarding House Reach from 2018 and Fear of the Dawn from April this year, were both driven by experimentalism, dipping into electronics, hip hop, noise and more. They were both, to differing degrees, admirable in... Read more... |
Album: Neil Young and Crazy Horse - ToastThursday, 07 July 2022
Neil Young put Toast to one side in 2001, dismayed at its blue emotional terrain. Depicting his marriage to Pegi Young hanging by a thread, it was recorded with Crazy Horse in San Francisco’s Toast studio, where Coltrane once worked, but rats now... Read more... |
