Keeping alive the glorious spirit of 1976
To understand the unique place that 1976 holds in the annals of popular music and culture, it is first necessary to reflect awhile on what had gone immediately before. As the Summer of Love passed into the realms of ever more distant memory and the seemingly interminable 1960s – with its mods and rockers, beats […]
Continue ReadingTo those of us whose day it was, for so many years all human existence revolved around Thursday evenings and the thirty-minute broadcast on BBC1 which brought us news of all the latest movements from the UK singles’ charts. Whichever football team one supported, which school one went to – Top of the Pops was […]
Continue Reading1. Concorde enters service On January 21st 1976 a British Airways Concorde took off from London Heathrow airport with a full compliment of passengers destined for Bahrain, while at the exact same time Air France’s maiden Concorde flight left the runway at Paris’ Orly airport for Rio de Janeiro. After initially having been refused permission […]
Continue Reading. Think of this iconic 1976 sci-fi movie and the mind becomes inexorably fixed upon a vision of the gaunt, pallid figure with wavy red locks that was David Bowie playing Thomas Jerome Newton, the visitor from another planet come to Earth to find water with which to sate the desperate thirsts of his drought-stricken […]
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 ReadingSeeing your favourite artist or band on film is these days simply a matter of logging into YouTube or something similar and typing your choice into the search bar, but it wasn’t always so. Time was, one was compelled to wait patiently in eager anticipation of their next appearance on Top Of The Pops. Unless, […]
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