News, Views and Music Issue 106 (Intro)

July 21^st:

I’m back – and I’m very annoyed! No, not with The Queen for once or even the Spice Girls for once but with this stupid computer. Yes, dear readers, DellBoy Mark III is back home, but with half the hard drive space, no graphics card and a CD/DVD drive that’s worked sensibly for fewer hours than the Coalition. I’m particularly angry that my webcam now seems to be non-existent, just when I’d written a great script for my first online ‘news, views and music’ video for Youtube. Alas, having commissioned him to do it already, I’ll have to keep Max the Singing Dog’s salary of bones and top hats up high until it’s made. At least bingo’s drunk his wages already! Soon I shall be hitting the phones (for a third time in a month!) and complaining – but in the meantime enjoy the (all too brief) return of some decent graphics!

Another thing that’s annoyed me this week is the media and Coalition pilloring of Charlie Gilmour, the adopted son of the Pink Floyd guitarist, who was in trouble for the grand crime of – shock, horror – throwing a bin during a demonstration. Even the passengers in a passing car (Prince Charles and Camilla) said they were a bit shocked but understood the anger on the streets and weren’t pressing charges – so how come the future of a promising 21-year-old has been ruined by a sixteen month prison sentence? While News International gets away with murder – well, not quite literally, but they’ve interfered in murder cases at least. And the amount of suicides from people facing poverty, loss of benefits or the destruction of their savings mean it should be Cameron and his cronies in the dock. If ever there was a microcosm of everything that’s wrong with life under the Coalition...

On a happier note,

                                                       

♫ Beatles News: Full marks to BBC One and the ‘Imagine’ team for their illuminating insight into the Lennons and their time in America (shown last Tuesday at 10.45pm). There’s really not much we don’t know about this period but the production team still managed to pull out a few gems, from Lennon’s studio chatter to Yoko’s home movies of him with a newly born Sean and the rare ‘ten for two’ benefit concert footage (the ‘John Sinclair’ rally). Together with the usual stories well told (and contributions from Yoko, May Pang, Elton John, producer Jack Douglas and various members of Elephants Memory) this is the best Beatles doc we’ve seen since – ooh – perhaps the similar ‘US vs John Lennon’ in 2006!

In other new words, seasoned director Martin Scorsese continues his recent run of music films with a biography of George Harrison. The two part special is due to be screened on an American channel sometime in August, with a DVD of it due to be on sale in the UK on October 10^th. Rumour is there will be a book to go with the untitled project too. Let’s just hope it’s a bit more entertaining than his Rolling Stones concert film ‘Shine A Light’!

♫ Beatles/CSNY/Simon and Garfunkel News: A couple of months ago we mentioned that a new book, ‘Fire and Rain’, was coming out featuring no less than three AAA bands (and James Taylor) to tell the troubled story of 1970. As the most popular year featured on our website there’s a whole host of good stories to tell and writer David Browne tells them well. Sure, we know the Beatles story pretty well by now but even the fall-out over ‘Let It Be’ is given new perspective, thanks to an opening chapter where Paul, George and Ringo reunite to re-record ‘I Me Mine’ at the last ever Beatles session (till 1994 at least) and then go their separate ways, with a chapter dedicated to each. We learn much about Paul Simon too, doing his best to hide from the mega fame of ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ and retreat into himself, offering up a course on song-writing that gets mixed results while Garfunkel changes his first name to ‘Arthur’ and tries to make a new life for himself in films. It’s the CSN/Y chapters, though, that are the book’s biggest revelation, with spot-on portraits of the four musicians and their many ups and downs over the course of 1970, from Crosby losing his girlfriend in a car crash, to Stills moving to England to escape being kicked out of his own band, to Nash splitting with Joni Mitchell to Young’s sudden disappearance and mega-stardom with the start of what will become ‘After The Goldrush’ and the death of Danny Whitten. Now, ‘Fire and Rain’ isn’t perfect by any means. The book could have done with more and better pictures and the choice of lyrics for the chapter titles seem idiotic in places (‘Gone your way, I’ll go mine’ and ‘a feeling I can’t hide’ make less sense than, respectively, ‘rejoice we have no choice but to carry on’ and any lines from ‘Let It Be’ or ‘The Long and Winding Road’ respectively). And I struggle to understand what James Taylor is doing here, seeing as he wasn’t in a band, his star was rising not falling across the year like the others and, good as he is, he’s hardly in the same league as the other three. But I love the way the book has been divided into seasons, not bands (as three out of the four experience a relatively happy winter and turbulent autumn) and the links between the bands, whether its Macca in the audience wondering when CSNY are going to show up, to the Nashville session-man who worked on ‘Beaucoups of Blues’ joking with Ringo that his voice is the perfect fit for ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’! Recommended. Now, let’s hope there’ll be more books like this, especially for the years 1966, 1967 and 1969...

♫ Kinks News: What an interesting night last Friday was. Dave Davies got a whole documentary to himself, made by the exact same production team as the Ray Davies ‘Imagine’; special at xmas (ie Julian Temple and Alan Yentob) and the contrast to the first doc and the personalities of the brothers couldn’t have been more different. Ray spent his whole time talking about The Kinks and his relationship not just with his brother but all his family and the whole of the band – it took Dave 12 minutes to mention his brother and a good half hour to mention ‘The Kinks’ by name. Ray began his discussion seated behind a broken down piano in an old village hall which was the first place The Kinks ever professionally played (as ‘The Ray Davis [SIC] Quartet’). Dave showed us round his new homeland in Exmoor, wandering around the moors where he’s found peace since his stroke of 2003 (which, Dave being Dave, never even got a mention there were so many things to talk about). There was even a great finale where Yentob asked Dave if there was anything in his life he’d want to change; despite coming after a scene where a still unstable Dave falls over he replies adamantly ‘no!’ The same question was out to brother Ray last year – and he claimed there wasn’t a thing he wouldn’t change! ‘That sums up the two of us quite well!’ said Dave, with a chuckle. The result was similarly moving to the Ray Davies doc, if a little bit rambling – again, this was a second doc very much made for fans who know the story inside out, rather than casual fans who probably got more than a little lost. Still, Dave always was a very good interviewee and it’s nice to see him closer to full health than we’ve seen for a while, plus as a bonus we got to see even more of the teenage Davies brothers as filmed at a family get together circa 1962 (as seen briefly in Ray’s doc). Quote of the doc? The late great Pete Quaife in 1996 telling us that ‘we had Jimi Hendrix down one end of the stage – and Noel Coward up the other!’

The highlight of the night, though, was the ‘Kinks at the BBC’ doc. The show dispensed with the usual suspects (‘You Really Got Me’ TOTP 1964, Waterloo Sunset TOTP 1966, Lola TOTP 1970, ‘Got Love If You Want It’ Beat Room 1964) within the first 10 minutes, leaving the way clear for some clips that haven’t been seen since the day they were broadcast (a live vocal TOTP version of ‘Apeman’ from 1970, ‘Cuppa Tea’ from the Old Grey Whistle Test 1973, a raucous ‘Till The End Of The Day’ from 1973, ‘The Informer’ from 1993 and ‘To The Bone’ from Ray’s ‘Storyteller’ show on Jools Holland 1995). Fascinating! Let’s hope the Beeb devote a second hour to The Kinks because there’s at least as much BBC footage in existence – and still no showing for the old afternoon play starring Ray ‘The Loneliness of the Long Distance Piano Player’! The night ended with repeats of the Ray Davies clip and the excellent ‘Brothers’ documentary from the late 90s, featuring Oasis, The Beach Boys and Dire Straits as well as the Davies brothers. BBC4 like to repeat their triumphs ad infinitum, so if you’re a Kinks fan keep your eyes peeled (talking of which, you can see the Ray Davies ‘Imagine’ doc in the early hours of next Tuesday, July 19^th).  

♫ Simon and Garfunkel News: I’ve finally got hold of the 40^th anniversary set of ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ (released back in May – some seven months after the actual anniversary!) and I’m impressed. I’ve never been a big fan of this album – to me it’s the weakest of the five S and G produced between 1964 and 1970 – but suddenly,when put together with the extras on this set, it makes perfect sense as the tonic to a troubled country in one of its most troubled years. Whatever your take on ‘Bridge’ (a mishmash of styles with no rockers up to the standard of the ballads or a near perfect sequence of arrangmenets and singing) the album glows better than ever thanks to the presence of an extra CD full of 17 live recordings from several shows taped in 1969 (only two of which have been heard before, on the ‘Best Of Simon and Garfunkel’ compilation) and an excellent companion DVD. We non-American fans have read about the TV special ‘Songs of America’ for years, a fascinating mix of S and G rehearsing in the studio and backstage at concerts and newsreels of that turbulent year set to the duo’s songs. The whole thing was so controversial the show’s original sponsors A T and T pulled out and the show was given a screening on a minor channel where –in Paul Simon’s words – it got pasted by a figure-skating show in the ratings. Much of it is boring – long, drawn out sequences of bland highways and destruction and confusion that is old to us now but was oh so awfully new at the time, with even Paul’s comments about ‘last year’s Woodstock festival’ seeming like they should belong in a different century not just another  decade. Much of it is revealing too – ‘Bridge’ has never sounded as strong as it does accompanying shots of JFK, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King and their respective funeral cars and trains, whilst hearing ‘America’ from the ‘Bookends’ album, usually a hymn of innocence and longing, set to a backdrop of a smoky grey industrial broken-down America gives the song a whole new slant. We also learn much about the duo themselves – the booklet and accompanying documentary may claim they were getting along well with the same sort of atmosphere but all I feel is tension, Simon pulling a face at Garfunkel’s haughty claims of knowing how to sing perfect harmonies and speaking over his partner with a diatribe about how Beethoven wrote his own rules about harmony. Garfunkel’s ‘Then Beethoven was a fool!’ might be said in jest, but the hurt look on his face suggests there’s more significance to the conversation than meets the eye. The show is awfully close in style to ‘Let It Be’, with the same sense that a generation and not just a duo is breaking up before our eyes and the voyeuristic nature of the cameras capturing arguments means we don’t know whether to stare or hide. There’s a fascinating modern-day documentary too featuring S, G and engineer Roy Halee where bygones and bygones and the troubled waters are past, but still featuring some revealing stories, such as Arty spending eight sessions struggling to get the first verse to ‘Bridge’ right, before spending his lunch break in the grounds of a huge church, filling himself with spiritual vibes that allowed him to nail the vocal on his return. It may not be the best album ever made but ‘Bridge’ finally feels like an album worthy of the weight its always been afforded with this three-part package, well worth the reasonable £12.99 asking price. Now where are the anniversary editions of ‘Parsley, Sage’ and ‘Bookends’?!    

ANNIVERSARIES: Happy birthday to our dearly missed AAA men born between July 18^th and 24^th: Clarence White (guitarist with The Byrds 1968-72) who would have been 67 on July 19^th and Keith Godchaux (keyboardist with The Grateful Dead 1973-79) who would have been 63 on the same day; also John Lodge (bassist with The Moody Blues 1967-present) who turns 68 on July 20^th and Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam who turns 64 on July 21^st. Anniversaries of events include: CSN release their prestigious and much loved eponymous debut album (July 18^th 1969); One of Otis Reddings’ last projects, with Carla Thomas, ‘Tramp’ reaches the charts (July 19^th 1967); Simon and Garfunkel begin their first reunion tour, which will break down in recriminations a few months later (July 19^th 1983); Jane Asher shocks the music press by announcing her six-month long engagement to Paul McCartney is off, after the couple have spent nearly five years together (July 20^th 1968); 4000 fans unable to get tickets to a Beatles show in Blackpool rush the arena and the Beatles have to get flown in by helicopter (July 21^st 1963); The Beatles’ first American album ‘Introducing...’ is released on the small label Vee Jay Records. It becomes the only Beatles LP ever to miss the charts in America! (July 22^nd 1963); The Dire Straits’ first eponymously titled record hits the LP charts (July 22^nd 1978); Four days after his 31^st birthday Grateful Dead keyboardist dies in a car crash (July 23^rd 1979) and finally, Jefferson Airplane receive their only gold disc for ridiculously high sales of their second album ‘Surrealistic Pillow’ (July 24^th 1967). 

News, Views and Music Issue 62 (Intro)

♫ Hello. This is the Alan Archives Computer. I’m tired of having ham-fisted amateurs poking at my keys so this week - in celebration of the top five focussing on all musical things that go bump in the night – I thought I’d talk to you directly instead. Well, what a week it’s been readers – there I was hoping for a rest when suddenly – whoosh – another programme to do with the AAA appears on the schedules. It’s enough to give me battery ache, especially with all the Youtubing and Facebooking I’ve been doing the rest of the week (it really says something when the Alan’s Album Archive Avatar has a better life than the person does). So without further ado here’s all the work that I’ve been doing this week, let’s hope you lap(top) it up like we did.

                                                             

♫ Beatles News: There are two John Lennon projects in the works beside the Liam Gallagher-based film we mentioned last month. The first is a radio play scheduled for Monday, May 24^th about Lennon’s life on radio 4 – though how they’ll fit 40 years into 45 minutes is anybody’s guess! The second is a TV-film based on the end of the Beatles and the beginning of Lennon’s solo career (focusing on the ‘Primal scream’ Plastic Ono band record) starring Dr Who no 9 Christopher Eccleston, who against all the odds looks scarily like Lennon from the clips we’ve seen (although hearing that strong Mancunian accent playing a scouser might still be a shock!) Despite the rather hideous title, ‘Lennon Naked’ is due to be screened in primetime on BBC 1 sometime in June. More news if and when.

This week also sees the end of an 18-month long series of projects celebrating 40 years since Let It Be, with an understandable interruption in September last year for the 40^th anniversary of Abbey Road. The length of time is, of course, because of this album’s troubled history – recorded for the most part in January 1969, the album only saw the light of day in April 1970 when the tie-in film came out and the Beatles just had to do something with the hundreds of hours of material in their vaults (although giving the tapes to Phil Spector to finish probably wasn’t the wisest move – listen into Radio 2 on Tuesday night 10pm for more).

♫ Hollies News: Wowowowowow. For the first time in my lifetime the third best selling act of the sixties (or the second if you live in Germany) finally have a documentary programme all to themselves. For the next two Wednesday nights at 10pm on Radio 2 Brian Matthew attempts to distill 47 years’ worth of music into two hours. Let’s just hope the awful title – ‘They Aren’t Heavy, They’re The Hollies’ – isn’t a precursor of things to come. More news next issue.

♫ Oasis News: One of the weirdest compilation releases we’ve had yet in the lifetime of the AAA is due for release next month. ‘Time Flies 1994-2009’ is a double-CD set containing of every A-side Oasis ever released in their lifetime and is curious for four reasons. 1) We had an Oasis compilation three years ago which already contained a good two-thirds of the songs here (although we said at the time it was odd that the band only had one comp to their name some 13 years into their career). 2) Of these 27 tracks only two are exclusive to the original singles and now this set – 1995’s ‘Whatever’ getting its fair due at last and last year’s download-only ‘Lord Don’t Slow Me Down’ which if I remember rightly from the concert film is a very un-Oasis like mix of crashing heavy metal guitars and blues. The other 25 tracks are all available on album, some more than one. 3) If Big Brother – who took up the rights to the band’s material after original label Creation folded in 1999 – really are so desperate as to milk the Oasis cow after death while the milk’s still fresh, why the hell haven’t they released a follow-up or three to the ‘Masterplan’ comp of B-sides. There’s still a good 30 under-rated songs ripe for renewal out there. And 4) The 2000 single ‘Sunday Morning Call’ is a lovely Noel Gallagher ballad, among the very best this great and still under-rated band ever made and whilst not the band’s best-selling single it did pretty respectively. So why is it a hidden bonus track at the end and not a song in its own right?! Not that the Gallaghers probably care that much at the moment, busy as they are with other projects – Noel’s still talking about a concert tour and a ‘psychedelic acoustic’ album and Liam is busy working on his Beatles film project (see the last two ‘news and views’).  

♫ Rolling Stones: Further to our lengthy discussion of ‘Exile On Main Street’ last issue there’s yet another project related to the CD-re release. ‘Stones In Exile’ is a DVD full of fascinating sounding clips from two shelved projects fans have been dying to see for ages – the infamous ‘Cocksucker Blues’ and the only slightly more professional ‘Ladies and Gentlemen – The Rolling Stones’. And in other exile news – fantastic, the Stones have broken the record for chart performance of an album re-issue, making #1 this week with the CD (all the more remarkable given that the old issue has been available on CD uninterrupted for the past 18 years!) And those programmes we discussed last week: a thumbs up for the radio documentary which featured a very revealing interview with Mick Jagger and a rather drunken one with Keith Richards; a cautious thumbs-up for the TV ‘Exile’ documentary, which tried too hard to be arty with black-and-white shots of the band as they are now but plus points for adding interviews with Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts and lots of priceless footage from the unreleased ‘Cocksucker Blues’ documentary, including a fascinating shot of Mick jagger writing out the phrases for what become ‘Ventilator Blues’ on separate pieces of paper and then trying to join them up into a song; but a massive thumbs-down for the ‘Bigger Bang’ concert, which contained precisely two songs from ‘Exile’ amongst all the usual suspects and an unwanted return of the rape story ‘Midnight Rambler’ to the set-lists and having just spent an hour in the company of the 1972 model there’s no mistaking how old and tired the contemporary Stones now look.

      

♫ ANNIVERSARIES: Happy bopping birthdays to the following AAA names (May 31^st-June 6^th): Ronnie Wood (guitarist with the Rolling Stones 1975-date) who turns 63 on June 1^st, Charlie Watts (drummer with the Rolling Stones 1962-date) who turns 69 on June 2^nd and Michael Clarke (drummer with The Byrds 1965-68) who would have been 66 on June 3^rd. Anniversaries of events include: John and Yoko record their first single ‘Give Peace A Chance’ during their second bed-in at a Montreal Hotel (May 31^st 1969); The Who break the record for the loudest ever concert at a show at Charlton Athletic’s Football Ground using a 76,000-watt ampage system (May 31^st 1976); The Rolling Stones land at JFK airport for the first time, kick-starting a 45-year love affair with the United States (June 1^st 1964); The Beatles release ‘Sgt Peppers’ (June 1^st 1967); Ronnie Wood plays his first gig with the Rolling Stones on his 28^th birthday after jamming with them the previous year (June 1^st 1975); The Rolling Stones make their first V appearance in America – being laughed at by host Dean Martin for their long hair, ho ho they got the last laugh by finishing off his career! (June 3^rd 1964); Ringo Starr collapses with tonsillitis, forcing the other Beatles to tour with last-minute replacement and ‘week-long Beatle’ Jimmy Nichol (June 3^rd 1964); The Searchers release their debut LP ‘Sweets For My Sweet’ (June 4^th 1963); Murray Wilson, manager and father to 3/5^ths of The Beach Boys dies of a heart attack, accelerating the decline of elder son Brian (June 4^th 1973); The Hollies – with Graham Nash back in the ranks for the first time since 1968 – score their first hit in nearly a decade with ‘Stop! In The Name Of Love’ (June 4^th 1983); Copyright laws in Russia are relaxed, leading to Western groups getting royalties for the first time – the Rolling Stones are the earliest group to benefit under the new law (June 5^th 1976); The Silver Beatles and The Pacemakers, the two leading groups in Liverpool along with The Searchers, share their first gig together at the Grosvenor Ballroom (June 6^th 1960); The Beatles have their first session at Abbey Road Studios – band, manager and critics still disagree other whether this second meeting between the fab four and George Martin is a recording date or an audition (June 6^th 1962) and finally, John and Yoko team up with Frank Zappa for a gig at the Fillmore East, later released by both partnerships under separate names (June 6^th 1971).

And happy hopping birthdays to these old friends (June 7^th-13^th): Clarence White (guitarist with The Byrds 1969-72) who would have been 66 on June 7^th and Billy Kreutzmann (drummer with The Grateful Dead 1965-95) who turns 64 on June 7^th. Anniversaries of events include: The Rolling Stones release their debut single ‘C’mon’ and make their first British TV appearance on Thank Your Lucky Stars on the same day (June 7^th 1963); John and Yoko appear on David Frost’s TV show (June 7^th 1969); Brian Jones officially leaves The Rolling Stones less than a month before his death (June 8^th 1969); Oz Magazine release their ‘school kids’ magazine and get charged under obscenity laws – John Lennon is among celebrities who help out with the fine (June 8^th 1969); The Beatles’ legend reaches a new level when the band play their first post-Hamburg gig in Liverpool – just weeks before the band looked finished with three of the four members deported from Germany (and amazingly John Lennon is the one who stayed legal!; June 9^th 1962); The Rolling Stones visit Chess Records where many of their favourite blues records were made – they add to the long list of hits with ‘It’s All Over Now’ (recorded June 10^th 1964); The Beatles release a single and an LP with the same name – A Hard Day’s Night – and both make #1 (June 10^th 1964); Janis Joplin plays her first gig with Big Brother and the Holding Company (June 10^th 1966); The Rolling Stones, taking a break from recording ‘Beggars Banquet’ at London’s Olympic Studios, return to find the building on fire! (June 11^th 1968); The Beatles receive their MBEs from the Queen at her ‘keen pad’ Buckingham Palace (June 12^th 1965) and finally, Mick Taylor officially joins the Rolling Stones (June 13^th 1969).         

News, Views and Music Issue 58 (Intro)

April 29:

Helloooooooooooooooo and welcooooooooooome to anooooooooother issue of everyooooone’s favooooourite newsletter. Ah that’s better, sorry, we seem to have a sticking key which seems to have sorted itself out now. Well, I can’t say I’ve seen much action from my Record Collector advert yet but we are slowly working our way up to our second thousand views so please keep visiting, keep writing in and keep nagging everybody you know with a modicum of musical taste to visit the site. Meantime, we’ve got another packed issue for you, full of – rather suitably – a handful of news, a plethora of views and a whole tonne of music so enough of me nattering, read oooooooooooooooooooon (darn it).  

                                                                                

♫ CSN News: This is only for our American readers, alas, but Graham Nash has yet another exhibition of his many rock and roll photographs taking place in San Francisco this June. Titled ‘Taking Aim’, the gallery features a hundred photographs of artists from all eras of music, from Elvis to Nirvana with lots of obscure artists as well as the more obvious ones, taken by a legion of photographers down the years as well as some by Nash himself. Best of all, Graham has recorded an ‘audio tour’ for the event, which is apparently full of anecdotes about the musicians and Graham’s memories of each of them. There’s no mention of whether Graham’s two bands – CSN and The Hollies – are included, but rather sweetly Graham’s ex, Joni Mitchell, is.   

♫ Rolling Stones News: The long awaited CD re-issue of the band’s 1972 album ‘Exile On Main Street’ is finally here (News and Views passim), over a year since the last batch of Stones re-issues from the 90s and 00s (which arguably didn’t need re-mastering anyway). This double album is now represented on two CDs, with the second disc containing 10 unissued songs released officially for the first time – including unheard songs Following The River, Pass Down The Wine, Plundered My Soul and Dancing In The Light as well as alternate takes and mixes of album tracks. The set, which comes out on May 17^th, is accompanied by yet another ridiculous Rollers rip-off: a deluxe set containing the CDs, an LP of the same and a 30-minute DVD including a selection of footage from the legendary unfinished film Cocksucker Blues.  ‘Plundered My Soul’ is also being released as a 1000-copy limited edition 7” vinyl ahead of the album on 17^th April (to celebrate ‘record store day’ apparently – whatever happened to ‘overworked internet reviewer day’?!), although given the hefty price tag I think most of us will settle for hearing it on the album in a month’s time. In a busy few months for the Stones, there’s no less than three DVDs on the band due out: ‘Rare and Unseen’ on April 20^th (including footage of Jagger on ‘World In Action’, Richards at the Berlin film festival and lots of local news reports about the band), ‘Stones In Exile’ sometime in June (a making of ‘Exile On Main Street’ due for broadcast on BBC International sometime soon) and the long awaited unscreened mid-60s concert/documentary ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, The Rolling Stones’ sometime in the Autumn.    

♫Paul Simon News: One of the more unexpected musical stories of the year is the emergence of Paul Simon’s son Harper, releasing his debut album ‘Harper Simon’ this month at the age of 37. The album has got rave reviews so far and fans of his dad’s might want to take note of it thanks to a collaboration between father and son on the album track ‘Ha Ha’. Rather than a debut record, though, Harper feels like an old friend - Paul’s frequently mentioned his son in his lyrics with Harper the babe in arms on the lullaby ‘St Judy’s Comet (‘Rhymin’ Simon), the ‘child of my first marriage’ in ‘Graceland’ and Harper also  starred alongside his dad in the feature film ‘One Trick Pony’ (see review no 78 for more).

♫ 10cc News: Fans of 10cc might be interested to learn that Eric Stewart’s old band from the 1960s, The Mindbenders, are finally getting the retrospective we’ve been crying out for on this site since goodness knows when. ‘A Groovy Kind Of Love: The Complete LPs and Singles 196-68’ is slightly misleading, inasmuch as its only complete from the period when lead singer Wayne Fontana left and Eric Stewart stepped up to be the band’s lead singer as well as their lead guitarist and main songwriter. The set does, of course, feature the title track – the only hit the band had without Fontana – although lesser known singles like ‘The Letter’ and Groovy Kind Of Love’s B-side ‘Love Is Good’ (which, I think, is the first time Eric ever got a songwriting credit although I’m not as fully up to speed with this band as I am with the AAA groups) are equally welcome to have back on our shelves. Word has it the ‘Groovy Kind Of Love’ album is a bit disappointment – and the two reviews of this set I’ve seen have been decidedly miserly about the whole thing – but thanks to record company Retro for finally delivering half of the set we asked for aeons ago in one of our 10cc reviews.

♫ Traveling Wilburys News: Why is nearly everything connected with this 90s supergroup so expensive? Anyway, Genesis – the book publishers behind George Harrison’s multi-hundred pound autobiog ‘I Me Mine’ in 1980 – are at it again with a Wilburys collection of photographs priced at £195 (that’s around £1.25 a page). To be fair if you do buy this book you do get a load of ‘special features’ – facsimile lyrics and correspondence between the band on a variety of forms from letters to post-it notes (!), but personally I’m going to wait for the half-price paperback (it may have taken 22 years but I did get ‘I Me Mine’ for a fiver eventually!)

♫ Happy birthdays this week (April 19-25^th) go to Jack Nitzsche (keyboard player with Crazy Horse 1971 and producer of various Buffalo Springfield and Neil Young tracks) who turns 73 on April 22^nd and Traveling Wilburys member Roy Orbison who would have been 74 on April 23^rd. Anniversaries of events include: the first meeting between the Beatles and the Stones during the latter’s gig on home soil at London’s Crawdaddy Club. Despite what you may have read in biogs and press releases of the time the band gets on very well indeed and become firm friends over the next decade (April 21^st 1963); Janis Joplin wows the crowds at London’s Royal Albert Hall during her first – and as it turned out only – European tour (April 21^st 1969); A lot of things happened on the roof of the Beatles’ Apple building – a less remembered event than the one in the ‘Let It Be’ film is John Winston Lennon changing his middle name to Ono ‘because she changed her surname and my name now has more O’s in it which is considered lucky’ or something like that; April 22^nd 1969); as part of the conditions of not giving Keith Richards a life sentence for drugs possession, the Stones perform the first of two shows for the blind in Toronto – rumour has it a blind fan Keith had looked after on each of the Stones’ Canadian tours wrote to the judge telling him how kind the guitarist had been to her hence the rather odd court condition (April 22^nd 1979); Pete Ham of Badfinger commits suicide after yet another failed business deal scuppers the band’s fortunes (April 23^rd 1975) and finally, four months after McCartney’s drug bust losses the band a fortune, Wings officially disband after Denny Laine walks out of sessions for the album which becomes Macca’s ‘Tug Of War’ LP (April 25^th 1981).

And for the following week (April 26^th-May 2^nd): Happy birthdays to AAA friends Klaus Voormann (Beatle friend, bassist and sleeve illustrator) who turns 68 on April 29^th; no less than two girlfriends of Stephen Stills referenced on many a CSN album, Judy Collins (who turns 71 on May 1^st) and Rita Cootlidge (who turns 66 on the same day) and finally, Jo Callis (synthesiser with The Human League 1981-85) who turns 55 on May 2^nd. Anniversaries of events include: the release of the first Stones LP (April 26^th 1964); Ringo Starr and his twin Ognir Rrats starr in a rather odd TV special ‘Prince And The Pauper’ plugging the ‘Bad Boy’ album (April 26^th 1978); It’s a good week for Ringo in fact – he marries second wife and former Bond girl Barbara Bach on April 27^th 1981; Andrew Loog Oldham sees the ramshackle Rolling Stones perform for the first time at their ‘home’ club the Crawdaddy and signs a contract with them to be their manager the next day (April 28^th 1963); Dark Side Of the Moon tops the American charts – for a total of one week, despite staying in the top 200 charts for a ridiculous 15 years (April 28^th 1973); The Kinks, supported by The Yardbirds, headline their first UK tour (when they actually get it together enough to turn up – cancelled Kinks shows are legendary among fans, April 30^th 1965); Roger Daltrey’s film ‘McVicar’ about the escaped and reformed convict premieres in London – the other members of The Who get a credit for ‘musical supervision’ (April 30^th 1980); A sad day for collectors as The Beach Boys officially scrap ‘Smile’ (May 2^nd 1967); On the same day in 1979 The Who’s film ‘Quadrophenia’ premieres – a mere six years after the double album of the same name came out – and The Who Two debut in concert, with Small Faces drummer Kenny Jones taking over from Keith Moon a year after the latter drummer’s death (May 2^nd) and finally, Pink Floyd’s single ‘Another Brick In The Wall’ is famously banned in South America after children take it up as a rallying cry against the poor education and services on offer there (May 2^nd 1980.