Keeping alive the glorious spirit of 1976
Everyone who is at the top of their game these days is referred to as a king or queen of something or other. In the case of Neil Peart, whose sad passing last week confirmed the end of the Rush era, his kingdom was a land where percussive perfection met insightful lyricism of a quality that placed him alongside the very bardest of the bards who have graced popular music in recent decades.
Continue ReadingAs a birthday treat to myself I took me along to the O2 Arena in London to see Alice Cooper, 71 years young, performing the London stage of his Ol’ Black Eyes Is Back tour.
Continue ReadingThere was something else about 1974, and thereabouts, which deserves a mention. Those who, like me, first discovered pop music when it was at its glammiest, in my case during the peak Slade-Sweet-Glitter era of 1972-73, felt just a twinge of disconcertment when the genre seemed to tweak itself in the direction of 1950s nostalgia a year or so later.
Continue ReadingHoly Holy is led by Mick “Woody” Woodmansey, the legendary drummer and sole surviving member of The Spiders From Mars, the quartet fronted by David Bowie during his Ziggy Stardust period in the early 1970s. The band’s description of itself as a “supergroup” is audacious and assertive, but entirely justified. I’ve seen a whole bunch of tribute bands, some of them very good, but this is something so immeasurably different as to be off the scale.
Continue ReadingTony Visconti looked up at me as I approached the table behind which he was sitting with a welcoming expression, and what appeared at least to be a genuine willingness to engage me in conversation and an eagerness to be helpful in answering any questions I might have had for him.
Continue ReadingOn Friday evening just gone I was lucky enough to have been given a ticket to see two men who, together but in their slightly different ways, played a major role in defining that decade of explosive creativity and unsurpassed musical innovation that was the 1970s.
Continue ReadingWhen submitting an old manuscript to a traditional book publisher some years back I was told that I ought to make my work “less autobiographical”. She didn’t want to hurt my feelings and so she was tactful, but what her advice amounted to was that no-one much wants to read the autobiography of somebody who is not a household name. The Glam Rock Files flies defiantly in the face of this advice,
Continue ReadingMy introduction to “pop” music came, peculiarly, in the person of Michael Jackson. We were at primary school, I was ten years old. For reasons which I cannot recall, one particular day was declared to be a “free” day – no lessons, no classwork, no booky stuff. Instead we were invited to bring in our 45s, to be played to the class on the old record player brought into school by the teacher.
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