I’ve always had a soft spot for Secret Messages. I’m fairly sure that it was the second ELO album that I ever bought, on compact cassette because it was the late 80s and cassettes were still a thing. I have … Continue reading Hello, My Old Friend: ELO’s Secret Messages Revisited
By the mid-80s, Jeff Lynne was getting pissed off with Electric Light Orchestra, the band that he had co-founded in 1971 and been the driving force behind for the next 14 years. He had become much more interested in producing … Continue reading Stuck in the Middle: The Rise and Fall of Electric Light Orchestra Part II
The problem with reviewing things on a strictly amateur basis is that it’s often very hard to be impartial. The things that I review are chosen by me and as such, are more often than not, things that I’m attracted … Continue reading ‘Fingers Crossed’ by Miki Berenyi: Review
*The album, not the band (but yes, also the band). There is a classic rock ‘n’ roll anecdote surrounding the release of the Electric Light Orchestra’s eponymous first album and like most stories of this nature, it’s only probably true. … Continue reading Still No Answer: 50 Years of Electric Light Orchestra*
2021 looks set to be a good year for the music documentary, what with Edgar Wright’s The Sparks Brothers and the Beatles documentary Get Back waiting in the wings, so it seems like as good a time as any to … Continue reading Six Favourite Music Documentaries
Yellow Submarine (1968), the animated feature film based around the music of the Beatles, was a fixture on British TV when I was growing up in the 70s. I must have seen it half a dozen times before I became … Continue reading Nothing is Real: One More Trip in the Yellow Submarine
I’ve been a fan of sibling art-rockers Sparks for many years, from seeing them on Top of the Pops in the 1970s (John Lennon, Hitler on the telly, blah) to seeing them many times live at various locations with my … Continue reading Oy, the Mael Boys Already!
If you speak to anyone born in the early 70s, they’ll always have a soft spot for Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of the War of the Worlds. That’s because there was a copy in almost every house in Great Britain; … Continue reading Love & Terror: Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of the War of the Worlds
Famously, upon hearing the final cut of Blondie’s AutoAmerican, the A&R man at Chrysalis Records hated it and said, “I don’t hear a single.” The band had risen from their punk roots in New York’s Bowery to conquer the world … Continue reading I Don’t Hear a Single: Blondie’s AutoAmerican
I’m a curious sort of fellow. By that I mean that whenever something grabs my interest, I want to find out more about it. If I become interested in a TV show, I want to find out more about its … Continue reading A Know-Nothing Westerner’s Guide to SCANDAL
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