Posts in tag

Folk rock


Classic Album: Bob Dylan – Oh Mercy

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Not Forgotten: Jethro Tull – Stormwatch

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Not Forgotten: Jethro Tull – Under Wraps

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50 for 50 is the new 3CD career-spanning collection released to celebrate 50 years of Jethro Tull, and I just so happen to be a big Jethro Tull fan. But I just don’t ‘get’ it. Tull’s 20th anniversary in 1988 was marked by a tour, a TV documentary, and a lavishly packaged 3CD box set …

Jethro Tull had made their point with Thick as a Brick. Progressive rock simply didn’t have to be overblown and pompous, it could be cheeky, subversive, and (dare I say it) fun. Having successfully lampooned the genre with stunning results resulting in an album which was far better than the majority who took this sort …

Where to begin? The beginning I guess. My beginning. Or at least as far back as I can remember. You might be surprised to find out that I didn’t get into music until my early teens. Throughout my childhood, my parents, particularly my dad, were always playing albums, but none of them permeated into my …

Opening for an act like Richard Thompson, a man who has been at the forefront of the folk rock movement for five decades now, could easily overwhelm the unprepared. Luckily, with five albums already under their belt, and a wealth of good (and bad!) touring experience, Josienne Clarke & Ben Walker know what they are …

The new Richard Thompson album, Acoustic Rarities, arrives barely two short months after the release of its sibling, Acoustic Classics Vol II, and is released both separately, and as a bonus disc to its predecessor. Where Acoustic Classics Vol II revisited well loved numbers from Thompson’s songbook, Acoustic Rarities takes the opportunity to compliment and …

Like many acts from the 60s and &0s, when the 80s rolled around Jethro Tull struggled with something of an identity crisis, desperately trying to blend the traditional core values of their sound with new and exciting possibilities that the latest technology offered. The result was a genuine mixed bag of albums, from the synthetic …

The rise of punk triggered a wide variety of reactions among more established acts. Led Zeppelin nodded in approval, and continued to be Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd channelled their own disenfranchised feelings into the bleak Animals. A few other acts underwent underwent various identity crises, with some attempting to go ‘pop’ with mixed success (Emerson, …

Maybe it was a reaction to being a social misfit during my school days, but while my contemporaries were falling underneath the spell of various grunge and hip hop acts back in the early 90s, I had started to pay more and more attention to my parents’ album collection. As teenagers during the 70s, they …

Ah, Bob Dylan’s Christmas in the Heart. Oh how music fans far and wide chuckled at the idea of one of the 20th Century’s song writing icons deciding that it would be a shrewd career move to release an album of traditional Christmas Carols and festive favourites. Down the decades Christmas albums in general have …

For many fans 1969’s Stand Up is where the Jethro Tull’s story really starts. That’s not to say that their debut, This Was, wasn’t any good, but Stand Up is where Jethro Tull started to sound like no one other act than Jethro Tull. In the few months that split the release of This Was …