WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . .
Strange, eccentric and sometimes mad people or unusual events and albums in the music world.Subscribe to my newsletter for weekly updates.
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . BILLY NICHOLLS' WOULD YOU BELIEVE: Care for Pet Sounds inna English accent, guv'nor?
1 Oct 2023 | 3 min read
In the second part of his 2002 autobiography 2Stoned, Andrew Loog Oldham – manager and sometime producer of the young Stones, founder of Immediate Records and more – wrote about the profound impact the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds had on him. He had managed the Stones through the madness of those early years when they were being belted by the British media and the... > Read more
Feeling Easy
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . JO ANN CAMPBELL: Another case of the singer not the song
3 Jul 2023 | 3 min read
If you were to believe standard histories of Fifties rock'n'roll, women were marginal figures at best and, in some books, non-existent. The great Wanda Jackson often gets a mention (her career as a rockabilly singer was short, she got religion) but beyond that the river runs dry. There were, of course, quite a number of young women – black and white –... > Read more
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . BARRY MARKWICK: Lennon, McCartney and Markwick
26 Jun 2023 | 3 min read | 1
Few people know the backroads and by-ways of New Zealand music like Chris Bourke, the current editor of AudioCulture. A former editor of Rip It Up '86-'88, he delivered the Crowded House biography Something So Strong and two remarkable books of historical research, the essential Blue Smoke; The Lost Dawn of New Zealand Popular Music 1918-1964 and Goodbye Maoriland; The Songs and Sounds of... > Read more
Can't Buy Me Love
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . TONY BURROWS: The famous anonymous star
29 Apr 2023 | 4 min read
Was it three times? Or four? Not even Tony Burrows is absolutely certain but he thinks it was three. Three times on the same 1970 episode of Britain's Top of the Pops television show where he appeared in three different bands: White Plains (singing My Baby Loves Lovin'), Edison Lighthouse (Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes) and Brotherhood of Man (United We Stand). He was also in... > Read more
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . . HAL BLAINE'S PSYCHEDELIC PERCUSSION: Trippin' out daddy-o!
12 Apr 2023 | 2 min read
The first thing to acknowledge is the drumming genius of Hal Blaine, one of those extraordinary players who was a member of the famous and informal Wrecking Crew so played on Phil Spector productions and numerous sessions for Sinatra, Presley, the Beach Boys, Byrds and hundreds more. He played on around 150 top 10 American singles and literally hundreds more which were top 40 chart hits.... > Read more
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . DAVID SPINOZZA: Three Beatles and all the rest
4 Mar 2023 | 3 min read
A number of big stars have mentioned this, so we'll repeat it here: the most expensive cars in the recording studio parking lot belong to the session musicians. It might be a joke – most stars don't drive themselves to studios – but it says something about the lifestyle of those who have avoided the excesses and weariness of touring in favour of studio sessions, be they on... > Read more
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . JOYCE HATTO: The classical genius who wasn't
23 Jan 2023 | 2 min read
As many politicians and Milli Vanilla would attest, the problem isn't just what you did in the first place, it is the lying afterwards which compounds matters. When the lies are revealed what follows is scorn, contempt and public opprobrium. You get fired, the work dries up, friends and neighbours shun you . . . and sometimes you can only see one way out to end the... > Read more
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . ZOOGZ RIFT: Speaking more than Frankly
7 Jan 2023 | 3 min read | 1
Because his music and career was so diverse, heretical and dispirate, few would try to follow in the footsteps of Frank Zappa. He seems to have spawned no progeny. With one notable exception: Zoogz Rift. Mr Rift -- born Robert Pawlikowski in '53 -- recorded a couple of dozen albums for the SST label, among them Idiots on the Minature Golf Course, Amputees in Limbo, Can You Smell My... > Read more
With My Bare Hands (extract only)
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . HP LOVECRAFT: High, here and gone.
19 Dec 2022 | 4 min read | 1
Now, I'm neither ashamed nor proud of this, but some while back – decades ago – I enjoyed perpetrating pranks and hoaxes, especially postal pranks. Of the latter I would, for example, anonymously send increasingly large blocks of wood to a friend in some far flung place inviting him to join my “Plank of the Month Club”. Or I would send off elaborate... > Read more
The White Ship
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . SANDY BULL: He had the whole world in his hands
12 Dec 2022 | 5 min read | 1
Just a thought, but if Sandy Bull had been British, magazines like Uncut and Mojo would be running major, rediscovery features about him and placing him in the pantheon of innovative guitarists like Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Richard Thompson and – especially – Davy Graham. But Bull – who recorded fewer than a dozen albums between his debut in '63 and death in 2001... > Read more
Improvisation for Oud 1 (live 1969)
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . JANDEK: Stranger in an even stranger land
5 Dec 2022 | 3 min read
In his very interesting 2001 book about cult figures and outsider musicians Songs in the Key of Z, Irwin Chusid had chapters on some figures (Wild Man Fischer, Syd Barrett, Florence Foster Jenkins, Daniel Johnston, Tiny Tim, Harry Partch etc) who have largely been accepted into the grand pantheon of the weird but rather wonderful. And then there were the others like the talentless Shaggs... > Read more
Cave In On You, from Ready for the House
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . HARRY KALAPANA: Aloha from Yugoslavia?
28 Nov 2022 | 4 min read
Of all the many hundreds of musical styles across the planet, only one has managed to embed itself in popular, post-Fifties music which exists along the Western axis of London-New York-America's West Coast: reggae. Yes, there are belated flickers and influences (if not downright copying) of Fela Anikulapo Kuti's Afrobeat and some aspects of Sahara blues and Indian music out there. But... > Read more
Hawaiian Lullaby
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . SPADE COOLEY: Shame on him
15 Oct 2022 | 4 min read
When country singer Spade Cooley went face down after a heart attack in November 1969 there were doubtless a few would have said he deserved to die, and that it should have happened sooner. The were ironies aplenty also: Cooley – born Donnell Clyde Cooley in Oklahoma in 1910 – was attending a benefit concert for sheriff's deputies where he played, having been released on... > Read more
You'll Rue The Day
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . WILD MAN FISCHER: Psycho street singer and shouter
10 Jul 2022 | 2 min read | 2
Given Frank Zappa's proclivity towards oddball performers and different musicians -- Captain Beefheart, the GTOs, the Shaggs -- it's hardly surprising he should be the one who brought Wild Man Fischer into the vocabulary of outsider musicians. And Fischer was very outside. In '68 Zappa recorded a double album of Fischer's singing and rants as An Evening with Wild Man Fischer, the title... > Read more
Monkeys Vs Donkeys
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . VOICE OF BACEPROT: Heavy from the hijab
25 Jun 2022 | 3 min read
Over a long lunch recently – where the best conversations happen – a friend and I were talking about how music informs our very being. In her case it was obvious: she's a musician a long time in the game and someone others look up to as a contemporary. For me it's been the odd bit of tinkling and strum'n' . . . damn! Got that chord wrong. Again! So in truth, I'm just... > Read more
School Revolution
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . MIDORI TAKADA: Through a glass, brightly
8 May 2022 | 2 min read
It's a given these days. The moment you write about a musician who exists in an obscure corner of the mainstream world – or has absolutely no presence there at all – then someone in the internet world will weigh in telling you about their longtime fandom, offer footnotes, advance the better album you should have referenced and so on . . . Well, let's open the discussion on... > Read more
Blue Fox: Midori Tanaka and JPC Percussion Ensemble
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . THE NAMELOSERS: Hair, boots, suits but no hits
2 May 2022 | 1 min read
Actually we probably don't need to talk about The Namelosers, a very short-lived Swedish band who meant nothing outside of Sweden and not even that much there. But their brief story is interesting because it was such a common one in the mid-Sixties. Johnny Andersson and Tommy Hansson met in 1962 in Malmo and talked about getting a band together. They became Tony Lee... > Read more
Land of 1000 Dances
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . DAVID MARKS: The boy who left the beach too soon
24 Jan 2022 | 6 min read | 1
He came out of Erie, Pennsylvania and was of Jewish-Italian heritage. At age five or thereabouts he was enthralled by the mandolin playing of his grandfather Carlo and the singing of those he called Uncle Benny and Uncle Johnny (also on guitar) from the old country. When Benny and Johnny appeared on the Amateur Hour television show in late 1953 the boy was even more impressed. Music... > Read more
Surfin' USA
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . SNOWY WHITE: Enter snowman, exit snowman
27 Dec 2021 | 5 min read | 1
At the fag-end of the Yardbirds' career – after losing guitarist Eric Clapton and founder-member/bassist Paul Samwell-Smith, and as Clapton's replacement Jeff Beck was on the way out the door – an in-demand session guitarist signed on. He'd played on tracks by the Kinks, Who, the Stones, Them, Marianne Faithfull, Petula Clark, Donovan, Shirley Bassey . . . He'd actually... > Read more
Kill (1981 demo), by Thin Lizzy ft Scott Gorham and Snowy White
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . MONICA ZETTERLUND: From smalltown Sweden to the world stage
13 Dec 2021 | 3 min read
From this physical and historical distance, it is easy to consider Monica Zetterlund, who died in 2005 aged 67, as simply “world famous in Sweden”. But there was time when she was infamous in her homeland. It came when she represented Sweden in the 1963 Eurovision Song Contest. Her song En Gang i Stockholm/Once Upon a Time in Stockholm (aka Winter City) scored... > Read more