From the Vaults

Adam Faith: We Are In Love (1963)

18 Feb 2014 | 1 min read

Britain's Adam Faith -- born Terence Nelhams-Wright -- was one of the few late Fifties/early Sixties teen pop stars of his era who managed to survive the limitations of his voice and establish a very creditable career . . . although most of it was in acting. On his early hits like What Do You Want? in 1959 he affected the Buddy Holly style, but -- despite doing songs like Johnny Comes... > Read more

Bobby Rydell: Ghost Surfin' (c 1964)

17 Feb 2014 | <1 min read

The cover of this British album from '64 gives the title as "Bobby Rydell Sings" . . . but the most interesting two tracks are where he doesn't. Rydell was one of those lightweight US teen-pop artists whose success far outweighs his talent, and these days he has become a footnote in pop culture. In Grease the college the kids went to was Rydell High, and McCartney has said... > Read more

The Nomads: Five Years Ahead of My Time (1983)

11 Feb 2014 | <1 min read

Formed in 1981 (and still going today with two original members) Sweden's Nomads were considered garage punks and this track appears on a collection entitled A Real Cool Time Revisited; Swedish punk, pop and garage-rock 1982-1989. But on the evidence of this song they might well have been around in the late Sixties because they sound closer to a Sonics/Stooges take on psychedelic rock of... > Read more

Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band: The Intro and the Outro (1967)

10 Feb 2014 | 1 min read | 1

Few indie.rock followers would perhaps know the band Death Cab for Cutie took their name from a song by this group of musical surrealists, the song of that name appearing in the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour film in late '67 when the band were invited to sing it. The Bonzos enjoyed some patronage from various Beatles -- McCartney produced their hit I'm the Urban Spaceman under the name... > Read more

Lynyrd Skynyrd: Freebird (demo, 1970)

9 Feb 2014 | <1 min read

It's a joke that never ages, at a rock concert someone yells out "Free Bird". It's such a standard that the American writer Mitch Myers entitled his collection of rock anecdotes and fiction The Boy Who Cried Free Bird. Whoever that guy is, he's as notorious as the one who shouted "Judas" at Dylan. The joke -- for those who have never heard Lynyrd Skynyrd's Free Bird from... > Read more

The Beatles: Twist and Shout/Mr Moonlight (1962)

7 Feb 2014 | 1 min read | 1

In 1977, after years of rumours about it and litigation, the album The Beatles: Live! at the Star Club in Hamburg, Germany; 1962 appeared. For those -- like John Lennon, ironically -- who believed the Beatles were a better rock band before their manager Brian Epstein put them in suits in Liverpool, here would be the evidence of them at their most raw. The background to these rough... > Read more

Elvis Wade: Professional Lovemaker (1977)

6 Feb 2014 | 1 min read | 1

In an alternate lifetime, singer Wade Cummings could have been Elvis Presley, the man he resembled and came to impersonate. He was born into a poor but musical family in rural Tennessee (his dad a moonshiner) and he was the youngest of nine children. That's the kind of almost mythical backstory we like in our rock stars. As a kid he saw Elvis on the Ed Sullivan show, joined a band at... > Read more

Bugotak: Kon Togethy (2006)

5 Feb 2014 | 1 min read

We could fill the bottomless black hole that is From the Vaults with just oddball versions of Beatles songs. (So far we have been restrained, just Laibach, cartoon character Elmer Fudd and the Beatles Barkers *). But this track is irresistible. Bugotak is a Russian group which plays Siberian instruments, guitars, Chinese flutes and fiddles, and has George "Father Gorry"... > Read more

General Echo: Bathroom Sex (1980)

4 Feb 2014 | <1 min read | 1

General Echo (Earl Robinson, shot by police in 1980 shortly after this song appeared) is generally credited -- if that's the right word -- with shifting Jamaican reggae away from consciousness lyricals (morally uplifting and philosophically profound sentiments ) to something rather more . . . base, shall we say? He's the man we can thank for rude lyrics, ridiculous innuendo of the Carry On... > Read more

Chris Farlowe: I Just Don't Know What To With Myself (1967?)

3 Feb 2014 | <1 min read | 1

The British r'n'b singer Chris Farlowe enjoyed a number of hits in the Sixties -- notably his cover of the Stones' Out of Time -- and this Hal David-Burt Bacharach song is much better known in versions by Dusty Springfield (see the clip below) and Dionne Warwick. But in this moving version Farlowe somewhat lets the melody be more suggested than sung in places and just digs deep into the... > Read more

Sonny Bono: Pammie's on a Bummer (1967)

29 Jan 2014 | 1 min read

Hard to know where you might start with Sonny Bono, the Republican politician who was killed in a skiing accident in 1998. He was of course much more than that and in his late 20s he worked with Phil Spector as a promo man, co-wrote the classic pop hit Needles and Pins with Jack Nitzsche and then famously teamed up with Cher as the identikit he/she look-alike couple Sonny and Cher who had... > Read more

Hep Stars: No Response (1965)

27 Jan 2014 | 1 min read | 1

At the Abba Museum in Stockholm -- more correctly Abba The Museum and The Swedish Music Hall of Fame -- you should save time for the last rooms, the bit after the Abba part. There you'll find an outline of Swedish popular music which doesn't shy from how racist some music writers were towards black artists in the Thirties (Louis Armstrong described in horrific terms) and just how everything... > Read more

The Monkees: Can You Dig It? (1968)

19 Dec 2013 | 1 min read

Just as Bob Dylan tried to demolish the myths which had built up around him with his Self Portrait album in 1970, so too the Monkees tried -- with even greater success than Dylan -- to shake off the pop image they had when they released their movie Head in '68. Helmed by Bob Rafelson (who co-produced it with Jack Nicholson), Head was a surreal, fragmented, Pythonesque series of skits,... > Read more

Big Joe Turner: Honey Hush (1953)

5 Dec 2013 | <1 min read

When white artists discovered the vast catalogue of black rhythm and blues and began to cover many of the songs -- thus giving birth to rock'n'roll in the mid Fifites -- it was to Big Joe Turner that many went. Bill Haley had a decent sized hit with his cover of Turner's Shake Rattle and Roll, and Johnny Burnette picked up on Honey Hush, a song which starts off good humoured but ends with a... > Read more

Blind Blake: He's in the Jailhouse Now (1927)

30 Oct 2013 | 1 min read

As with many blues artists of his era -- he died in 1934 in his late 30s - not too much is known about the early life of Arthur "Blind" Blake. And at the time of this writing there remains just the one photo of him. What we do know though is he accomplished a lot of firsts: it seems he was the first to mention "rock" in a song (West Coast Blues from '26); his song Come... > Read more

The Beatles: Ooh! My Soul (1963)

28 Oct 2013 | 1 min read

In a week the second installment of Beatles' sessions for the BBC will be released. And we might say belatedly because the first double CD came out in 1994. The Beatles made 275 recordings of 88 different songs for the BBC between 1962 and '65, an astonishing output and which reminds you again -- after those thousands of hours in Hamburg and the Cavern-- just how hard-working they... > Read more

Jonny Yen: Stage Struck and Take A Look At My Life (1979)

20 Oct 2013 | 1 min read | 2

Do ya ken Jonny Yen? The other day at a long lunch the discussion was of obscure New Zealand artists and my friend -- who knows the dark corners and strange recesses of New Zealand pop and rock -- was telling me about some remarkable bands of the prog-rock era, most of whom I had never heard of. However we both knew of Aellian Blade from '79 who were signed to WEA. I recalled that they... > Read more

Jimmie Rodgers: TB Blues (1931)

17 Sep 2013 | 2 min read | 1

Jerry Lee Lewis once said there were only three stylists in country music: Al Jolson, Jimmie Rodgers and, of course, Jerry Lee Lewis. Rodgers -- known as The Singing Brakeman after his time on the railroads -- brought black blues and yodeling into country music and created a sound which was at once unique, and created a template for others to draw upon. He had picked up the blues -- and... > Read more

Johnny Cash: Peace in the Valley (date unknown)

14 Sep 2013 | <1 min read

Johnny Cash died 10 years ago and, as expected, there have been tributes and considerations of his long, diverse career. And of course his position as a Mt Rushmore-like figure in American music and cultural life. Let's just say Johnny was one of the Big Ones, and while we could skate through those American Recordings with Rick Rubin to find him covering material by Soundgarden, Tom... > Read more

Johnny Guitar Watson: Funk Beyond the Call of Duty (1977)

4 Sep 2013 | 1 min read

By the time Johnny Guitar Watson made the album of which this was the title track, he was 42, had been on about 15 different labels and had really paid his dues: he'd started recording at 17, been something of an r'n'b star in the Fifties and by the Seventies had edged his way to streetcorner funk. He pioneered feedback on Space Guitar in '54, was the original Gangster of Love (in 1958, a... > Read more