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Living To Music – The Stone Roses ‘The Stone Roses’

by on 21. Dec, 2011 in Art & Design, CD’s / Digital, DJ / Club Culture, DJ Appearances, Hear, Living To Music, Manchester, Merseyside, Photography, Psychedelia, Records, The Beatles, The Eighties, The Nineties

As we enter 2012 I thought this would be the ideal Living To Music choice to kick off the year, especially given that the first Sunday in January is also the first day of a new year. This highly acclaimed and much-loved 1989 LP, which perfectly caught the mood of the times, provides us with the opportunity to re-visit the past, whilst looking ahead to the summer. When an announcement was made earlier this year, that The Stone Roses are to re-form for 2 shows at Manchester’s Heaton Park in June 2012 (with a 3rd later added), there was genuine intrigue and anticipation. This wasn’t a case of another comeback cash-in, but something more symbolic. If ever there was a band with unfinished business to accomplish, it’s The Stone Roses.

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My Favourite Number 1

by on 21. Oct, 2011 in Black Culture, Hear, Merseyside, My First / My Favourite, Records, The Seventies, The Sixties

Without ever properly considering this question I’ve heard myself instinctively tell people, on more than one occasion, that mine is ‘Double Barrel’ by Dave & Ansil Collins, which claimed the top spot on the UK chart for 2 weeks in May 1971, when I was 11. Like everyone else, I assumed Dave & Ansil were brothers, but Dave was Dave Barker, who’d had previous success in Jamaica as a solo artist working with the great producer Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry. For ‘Double Barrel’ he’d been brought into the studio by another producer, Winston Riley, and asked to add a talking voice to Ansil’s backing track (Ansil was really Ansell, also sometimes credited as Ansel – I’ll stick to the spelling on the single I owned). Dave was encouraged, as he told Lloyd Bradley in ‘Bass Culture’, to “t’ink big like some big giant man. Like Hercules or James Bond, Double-O-Seven, or somet’ing”. Taking up the challenge he toasted the unforgettable line “I am the magnificent, I'm backed by the shack of a soul boss most turnin' stormin' sound o'soul…”

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Astrid And The Exis

by on 22. Sep, 2011 in Art & Design, Film, Merseyside, Photography, The Beatles, The Sixties

Stayed in a mad hotel last Friday, the Karim Rashid designed Nhow in Berlin. If you like pink, then this is the place for you – it’s literally everywhere. Not really my cup of tea, all a bit garish and, as someone put it ‘Barbie girl in a Barbie world’, but certainly somewhere you’re not going to forget in a hurry. Described as a ‘music and lifestyle hotel’, you can have guitars and keyboards delivered to your room, and the upper section of the building houses two recording studios, which are run by the company that manage Berlin’s legendary Hansa studio (best known for David Bowie and Iggy Pop’s patronage in 1977 - ‘Heroes’ and ‘Lust For Life’, both recorded there, and ‘Low’ and ‘The Idiot’ partly recorded).

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The Press Officer

by on 26. Aug, 2010 in Books, Merseyside, Psychedelia, Read, The Beatles, The Sixties

More than interested to recently hear that Liam Gallagher has acquired the rights to one of my favourite Beatles related books, ‘The Longest Cocktail Party’ (1972), and plans to make it into a film. Told from the perspective of ‘house hippy’ Richard DiLello, this wonderfully entertaining memoir aptly describes itself as ‘An insiders diary of The Beatles, their million-dollar Apple Empire, and its wild rise and fall’. What really sets it apart is that the books central character is neither John, Paul, George or Ringo, but Derek Taylor, the bands press officer who, alongside fellow Liverpudlians Brian Epstein, Neil Aspinall and Mal Evans, played key supporting roles as part of the Beatle inner-circle.

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The One That Got Away

by on 23. Jun, 2010 in Black Culture, Hear, Merseyside, See, The Beatles, The Sixties

Filmed by Granada TV in 1964, this is a wonderful piece of footage of Liverpool’s The Chants performing on Merseyside - there's something very heartfelt about it, especially the close-ups showing some of the girls swooning over them. The song is ‘I Could Write A Book’ and was written by Rodgers & Hart, originally appearing in the 1940 musical ‘Pal Joey’ (later, in 1957, made into a movie, where it was sung by Frank Sinatra). It would be the second single by The Chants, released on PYE records, and famously given the thumbs up by all four Beatles on the TV show Juke Box Jury (Dec 7th 1963), although even the Fabs’ wholehearted endorsement failed to help it break into the charts.

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And In The End The Love You Take Is Equal To The Love You Make

by on 21. Jun, 2010 in Merseyside, Misc, Read, The Beatles, The Sixties

The Beatles remain the best band ever. Others have and will continue to do new things with rock and roll, but The Beatles will forever mark the forms high renaissance. These are the guys who figured it out, took it to another level and defined it for generations to come.

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