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An introduction to Brute Force
If anything symbolised the insanity of the Beatles' Apple set-up, and its dadaist approach to running a business, it was a 1968 single called King of Fuh by the New Jersey-born Brute Force. George...
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Happy birthday Elvis
Elvis would have been 77 today. As he only lived to be 42 we were spared that 1986 album, produced by Bob Clearmountain and wrecked by gated reverb; also his ill-advised cover of With Or Without You;...
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Gene Clark: No Other
The Byrds, hailed in the beginning as the American Beatles, turned out to be as fractious and egotistical as their UK counterparts were tight, gang-like and grounded. Possibly for this reason, the Byrd...
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30 years on: Felt's Crumbling The Antiseptic Beauty
 On New Year's Eve 1989, I was in a pub in Manchester, talking pop with a bunch of friends. We reflected on two English singers who had illuminated the previous decade with great originality but no...
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Greg Shaw spreads the word
October 2004 was a grim month for pop obsessives and record collectors, especially those who had come of age in the seventies and eighties. In the space of ten days we lost three great navigators of...
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The mystery of Bobbie Gentry
In Las Vegas, 1969, you had the choice of witnessing either Elvis Presley, Tom Jones or Bobbie Gentry putting on the style. All were star attractions. Yet while the King became immortal and Jones The...
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The Girls, and other girls with guitars
The Beatles visited Paris for the first time in January 1964. With the distaff population of Britain - even the Queen - in their pocket, they assumed the land of Bardot would be easily conquered. Some...
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Gene Vincent: the road is rocky
The more time goes by, the more it seems to me that Gene Vincent has the strongest claim to be the ultimate 50s rocker. Certainly he was the biker's choice. For a start he had the tortured, twisted...
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A conversation with Brian Matthew
Brian Matthew was there at the birth of British Rock'n'roll, presenting Saturday Club on the BBC's Light Programme. In the sixties he introduced the Beatles to millions of BBC radio listeners, and even...
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Paul Williams 'Someday Man'
There's a Paul Williams documentary called Still Alive which has just come out in the States. Rumer has recorded his Travellin' Boy on her new album. So it seems a good time to take a look at his first...
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Barry Gibb and Barbra Streisand: 'Guilty'
If you were looking for a duo to sell massively in the black American market of 1980, Isle of Man-born Barry Gibb and America's latterday answer to Marie Lloyd would not have been the likeliest...
View ArticleHow HMV can save itself
This is a piece I wrote almost exactly a year ago. I've left it intact as I think it's all still relevant, but please bear this in mind.Not too long ago the flagship HMV shop on Oxford Street was a...
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Now That's What I Call Music! 30 years on
With HMV and Woolworths having gone the way of listening booths and shellac, no one piece of public space could be said to represent modern pop. If you had to locate each of the primary colours of pop...
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The Teardrop Explodes' Wilder revisited
Julian Cope’s unlikely, uneven career over the last three decades - eco-warrior, psych rock savant, sire of the standing stone - has almost entirely overshadowed the music of his first band, the...
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There's nothing on telly
Like most kids my age I wouldn't have missed Scooby Doo for the world. But a couple of times a week - during what, in the 1970s, was called Childrens Hour - I would sit my portable cassette recorder on...
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1976: the calm before the storm
When the Top Of The Pops re-runs began in 2011, a lot of people saw them as evidence that 1976 was pop's worst ever year. This could only have been said by people who hadn't lived through the cheap...
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Britpop before Britpop
1991 was a golden year for dance-based chart pop - the KLF, SexKylie, N-Joi's Anthem - but less so for guitar-based bands. Manchester and baggy were past their best, shoegazing was an intriguing but...
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Croydon Municipal: a new record label
Tomorrow sees the first release on the Croydon Municipal label, which will specialise in unearthing forgotten albums, lost 45s and 78s from the mid 20th century.There is a bottomless treasure chest to...
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Sparks: 'Kimono My House'
"Heartbeat, increasing heartbeat." Sparks put the fear of God into pre-teens in 1974 with their debut Top Of The Pops appearance. As pretty boy Russell Mael flashed his baby blues and the agitated,...
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Why I wrote 'Yeah Yeah Yeah'
A few years ago I reviewed a DVD box set of Tony Palmer's mid-seventies TV series All You Need Is Love for the Guardian. An epic history of twentieth century popular music, it ended with Stomu Yamashta...
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An interview with Dory Previn
The second release on the Croydon Municipal label is Dory Langdon's My Heart Is A Hunter from 1958. It's a jazz vocal album with a rambunctious tomboy charm. It was originally titled The Leprechauns...
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The Midcentury Minx
Some days, it isn't so hard to see why rock'n'roll pissed off so many people. While the pop charts of the immediate pre-rock era were top-heavy with novelty songs about doggies in the window and baby's...
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Corky Hale, queen of harps
The latest Croydon Municipal release is from the little known but wonderful harp player Corky Hale, and it's a gorgeous, summer evening of an album, a collection of instrumentals from 1957. Her...
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Big I Little i: the independent charts
I grew up obsessed with the charts. Like thousands of other kids, I'd listen to the new Radio 1 Top 30, with the Top 5 played in full on Tuesday lunchtime, then write down the new chart in an exercise...
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The making of How We Used To Live
Like most good stories, this one starts in a pub. For over a decade my band, Saint Etienne, has worked with director Paul Kelly on various short films and documentaries, beginning with Finisterre in...
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