rock/metal rewind
A Buyers Guide to Randy Newman
Quick – who is the greatest songwriter America has ever produced? Okay, how many of you said Bob Dylan? More than three quarters of you I should imagine and you may even be right, but how many of you looked beyond the obvious and said Randy Newman? Quite a few probably, because you’re reading an …
A Buyers Guide to Led Zeppelin
Led Zeppelin. You’ve heard of them right? They were quite good at that rock music thing back in the day and after years of putting it off their chief architect is finally getting around to releasing their studio albums in remastered and expanded form. Quite why it has taken Jimmy Page until now to finally …
A Buyers Guide to Free
The late 60s were an exciting time for blues based rock in the UK, Cream was the supergroup, Fleetwood Mac had genuine hit singles and we haven’t even mentioned Led Zeppelin yet. Hot on the heels of these heavy hitters were four little skinny guys, younger than their contemporaries, they could still play the blues …
A buyers guide to The Hold Steady
It’s October 2007 and it’s a time of change for me. I’d recently come out of a medium-term relationship, my career was stagnating and I spent a Saturday evening with a drunken and bullish jazz musician friend once again declaring at great length that because I prefer rock and roll to the stuff he makes …
A buyers guide to Jethro Tull
Jethro Tull are a band who are special to me. They’re the first band I saw live, the first band that I felt a genuine connection to, the first band where my adolescent mind went ‘Yep, this is for me’. Given that my peers at the time were obsessing over Nirvana or the contemporary hiphop …