Barry Adamson , baritone booming bass player with Magazine has a terrific back catalogue of albums released under his own name. Successfully walking the tightrope that straddles imagined film noir soundtracks on the one side with spoken word, sample-packed beat happenings on the other, they're the sort of albums that would and should (and maybe even have) appeared on those Mercury lists every September. Perfect for late night/early morning listening, hip to the jive advertisers and marketers have used his music to great effect over the past 15 or so years. [...]
Beatles For Sale wouldn't be many people's choice of favourite Beatles album, but it's by far my favourite Beatles album cover . You can marvel at the druggy, warped close-up that heralds Rubber Soul , and Klaus Voormann's pen and ink collage on the front of Revolver , and it's hard not to appreciate the vision behind Peter Blake's Sgt Pepper concept, but no album cover then or since probably froze the zeitgeist of a precise moment in time quite like the Robert Freeman shot for Beatles For Sale. Taken [...]
...and that's a fact. This could be a never-ending pub argument amongst (mainly middle-aged) men who should know better, but let's cut to the chase here - Stoned Love by The Supremes is the best pop/soul 73 ever. [...]
Baby What You Want Me To Do was written at the tail end of the 50s by blues guitarist Jimmy Reed . Download: 12-jimmy-reed-baby-what-you-wa nt-me-to-do.mp3 Not that he'd have known at the time, but Reed penned [...]
The Great Pyramid of Giza. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon. The Statue of Zeus at Olympia. The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. The Colossus of Rhodes. The Lighthouse of Alexandria. The Seven Wonders of the World . You'd think that by now, the 21st Century, someone somewhere might fancy updating that list. I think I missed the appeal when they were asking folk to write in with their suggestions for the 8th wonder, but if it's not too late, I'm putting forward the Glasgow Barrowlands for inclusion. [...]
When I first picked up the plank of wood I had the cheek to call a guitar, I hadn't yet mastered changing from a D to an A and back again before I realised something was missing. I needed something, anything, to disguise the bum notes from the badly-played chords I was trying to strangle out of my instrument at parent-bothering volume through my wee practice amp. That something was the fuzzbox. What a revelation! I could play along to most of The Buzzcocks ' What Do I Get and mangle a passable version of Everybody's [...]
Tommy Tedesco said that. Tommy who ? Last summer I went to the Glasgow screening of the above film about The Wrecking Crew , the crack bunch of LA sessioneers who played anonymously on a whole host of things, from film and TV scores via advertising jingles to some of the biggest-selling and best-loved songs of that golden period in early-mid 60s pop music. Tommy Tedesco was a jazz guitarist, and somehow found himself part of that inner-circle of session men and women. Made [...]
Over Christmas a pal on Facebook posted a video of Boogie Nights by Heatwave . With it's super-slinky bass sound and below-the-bell-bottoms baritone " got to keep on dancin', keep on dancin '" backing vocal, it's the sort of record that could have me Dad dancing for ages. (*Just to clarify - I'm not a Yorkshire man. I'm from further oop north than that - when I say me Dad dancing , I don't mean it could get my own father on his feet. Although it probably could. I mean that Boogie Nights makes [...]
Born To Be With You was an American top 5 single for The Chordettes in 1956. A largely forgotten piece of bobbysox balladeering, it's a proto doo wop, proto girl group paen to a just-out-of-reach romance, all minor key melodrama and vocal harmonies. It was quite clearly an influence on the young Phil Spector a few years later. A few short calendar years maybe, but it might as well have been several lightyears, given what happened in the intervening years betwixt and between The Chordettes and the golden touch of Phil [...]
My Dad's a banjo player. And that's not a strange euphemism for any dodgy Deliverance -influenced way of life. He's a straight-up, proper bluegrass bashin', six-fingered pickin' 'n strummin' banjo player. And quite good too. Plays in a band and everything. Which is more than I do these days. Maybe once I retire..... As a teenager when I was learning to play the cheap plank of wood and rubber band combo that passed as my first electric guitar, he'd show me how to play the chords to any number of Buddy Holly songs, when all [...]
Some of you may have read this before (2009 and 2011, to be exact). 254 years young today. I love Burns. Had him drummed into me at school. In fact, anyone who goes to school in the West of Scotland knows all about him. And as a teacher, I love banging on about him to my class. Here’s a brief potted history for any uninitiated out there… Born on the 25th January, 1759 in Alloway (now a posh part of Ayr). Scrawny boy, wasn’t expected to live long. Helped his dad [...]
Back in 1970s Scotland there was a drink called Creamola Foam . You might remember it. It came in orange and raspberry flavours and was aimed solely at children, who up until then got their fizzy fix from stealing their dad's mixers when he wasn't paying attention, before adding that same mixer to a big cup of additive-heavy, wheeze-inducing orange juice. Teeth-meltingly magic and free of faff, the instructions on the Creamola Foam tin told you simply to add one level teaspoon to a cup of water, stir and drink. [...]
So, the most surprising, genuinely uplifting and fist-pumping pop moment of this week was, of course, the sneaking-out of the new David Bowie single with all the silence and stealth of a top-secret Radiohead campaign. And with an album to follow too! I like Where Are We Now? , it kinda reminds me of Wild Is The Wind or Loving The Alien or Always Crashing In The Same Car or any other of those other slow-burning beauties of his that appear fully-formed and worm their way into your head forever. [...]
It's the annual, token Plain Or Pan Christmas posting. And this year it's a cracker. Boom, boom! At the televised Michael Jackson funeral/tribute on the telly after his death there was a piece of slo-mo footage that was absolutely dynamite, and it's stuck with me ever since. I can't seem to find it on the You Tube (copyright, Rob Bryden) so you'll need to make do with my 3 and a half year old memories. In it, a barely into double figures Michael, wearing [...]
Robert George Meek was better known as Joe Meek . A maverick record constructor, sonic architect and visionary of what was possible from the seemingly impossible, he led a turbulent life, permanently perched on the line right between madness and genius. Many of the main protagonists in the Joe Meek story went onto bigger and more successful things (though not necessarily better ), but equally, many of the characters who crossed paths with Meek during his quest for sonic perfection ended up troubled, broke (mentally, physically and financially) and even dead. By comparison, Joe Meek's story makes Phil [...]
Cor! Eh? You beauty! (Nudge, Nudge). Knowotoimean? (Adopts Sid James cackly wheeze). I mean, 'oo wouldn't? Eh? Eh! Ow's yer father? Eh? Eh ? She'd get it! And no mistake! Let's slip into sumfink more comfortable, shall we? Yeah, let's slip into something more comfortable. Like the honeyed tones of La Cracknell and her backing band of boffins and beard strokers tackling some of the finest moments in thinking man's pop. With mixed results. Saint Etienne annoy me. Not in the way that wasps annoy [...]
A fuggy haze hangs low over the East River between Manhattan's Financial District and the brownstones of Brooklyn. Clattering like one of those wooden toy snakes across the Williamsburg Bridge weaves a long, low train, lazily rolling its way along the J line. Sprayed in a dulling array of pinks, greens and primary colours, tagged to within an inch of illegibility to those over 35, its contents sit in silence, oblivious to the multi-coloured carnage in which they are cocooned. Inside is not much different. It looks violent . It feels violent . Doors, windows, seat coverings; every [...]
Field Music are a real enigma. Nominees for this year's Mercury Music Prize, like most who appear on the list they occupy a strange place somewhere between cult band and the mainstream. A hotchpotch of clanging riffs with prog leanings, their music isn't all that original. Their music isn't all that groundbreaking either. Plenty of other artists have used similar instruments to similar effect. And their music, like plenty of artists before them, is not that well-known outwith those in the know (think this generation's XTC). But their music is colossal. And tuneful. And therefore radio-friendly. And by rights they should [...]
Jeez! Plain Or Pan used to be all about Beta Band outtakes and multiple versions of La's demos, the odd foosty soul survivor and long-forgotten obscurios by long-forgotten oddballs. It still is, of course, but just not today. I have a long-time love of disco . To these ears, it doesn't matter that it's considered kinda naff and uncool, which, when placed next to any amount of other musical bits n' pieces, it may well be. In the mid-late 70s, when straddled by the ugly, oiky twin-headed monster [...]
It's the mid 90s and Everything Must Go has just been released by the Manic Street Preachers . An album full of Spectorish bombast and tunes for van drivers to whistle, it's light years away from their previous album, the Richey Edwards-enhanced The Holy Bible , an album so difficult to digest in one sitting that Everything Must Go sounded like S Club 7 in comparison. And whilst the hardcore MSP fans point to The Holy Bible as 'the one', the million+ sales and ubiquity of Everything Must Go (despite [...]
Plain Or Pan?
Arctic Monkeys | Do I Wanna Know? (Official Video)
Listen to Arctic Monkeys’ new single, “Do I Wanna Know?”
Arctic Monkeys Release New Song And Video ‘Do I Wanna Know?’
The Hot Five
