Not Forgotten: Father John Misty – Fear Fun
Every now and again you encounter an act whose entire aesthetic appeals to you. From his gorgeous gatefold CD artwork, to his live presence, Father John Misty’s combination of classic singer songwriter stance and soulful rootsy vibe strikes a chord with those of us who would really like them to make albums like they used …
Not Forgotten – Mick Ronson – Slaughter on 10th Avenue
I will always argue that Mick Ronson is always massively short changed in any assessment of the career of David Bowie. Without Ronson’s arrangement acumen, iconic guitar heroics and unerring sense for what made for great rock and roll dynamics, Bowie would have been little more than a cult artist, rather than the international mega …
Not Forgotten: Ben Folds Five – Whatever and Ever Amen
Popular opinion would have us believe that most acts find their second albums much more problematic than their debuts. In some ways this is understandable as the material on debuts is generally years in the making, having been honed and perfected in the years of hard gigging and demo recordings that inevitably happen before band …
Live Review: Cud – Sheffield, The Plug – 18.10.2015
Mike Dunphy and and William Potter have departed the stage, leaving drummer Gogs Byrn to back vocalist Carl Puttnam at the end of a blistering version of “No Smoking”. Cud have just performed their 1992 masterpiece, Asquarius, in full from beginning to end with an energy that would put a quartet of teenagers to shame. …
Not Forgotten: Robert Wyatt – Rock Bottom
Rock Bottom is an album that many have attempted to emulate over the years, but few have succeeded. The genesis of the album’s creation, delayed by Wyatt’s accident that led him to spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair and its subsequent reputation as an avant-garde classic, is well documented and this album …
Not Forgotten: Ray Davies – The Storyteller
The rock star’s autobiography is big business these days, but rarely are they as revelatory, or as informative as they could be and even rarer do they actually make for enlightening reading. There are, of course, honourable exceptions. Indeed, both volumes of Julian Cope’s autobiography are wildly entertaining (whether you are actually a fan of …
Not Forgotten: Thin Lizzy – Live and Dangerous
The live album was a right of passage for the majority of 70s rockers. By and large it was a great leveller, as it could find otherwise massively successful acts amplify their lesser qualities (Led Zeppelin’s The Song Remains the Same, Yes’s Yesshows, etc), on the other hand it could be a handy document of …
Not Forgotten: Fleetwood Mac – Fleetwood Mac
The career path of Fleetwood Mac has been a long, complicated and much storied one. Following their Brit-blues-boom beginnings, they enjoyed a flurry of initial success in the UK before band founder Peter Green departed. They would then have difficulty retaining guitar players until American Bob Welch gave them a sense of stability during which …
Not Forgotten: Grandaddy – The Sophtware Slump
A few days ago, a section of social media broke. There was no huge public outcry, and certainly, the vast percentage of users barely noticed and those that did notice, simply didn’t care. For those of us among that smaller percentage, it was important. It was big. Jason Lytle mentioned he was working on a …
Not Forgotten: The Waterboys – This Is the Sea
Following a number of false starts, A Pagan Place had finally established The Waterboys as not only an act of great promise, and had come tantalisingly close to establishing them as one of the key acts of the decade and masters of the sort of epic and emotional Celtic rock that was poised to fill …