The history of popular music is littered with performers who quit, or more often, were ousted, from bands just as they were on the cusp of fame. Pete Best is the classic industry archetype having been usurped from a certain Liverpool band’s drum stool by Ringo Starr, just a year before the outbreak of Beatlemania. Best’s grunge counterpart Jason Everman had the misfortune to […]
New Releases
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Bauhaus drummer Kevin Haskins was behind the kit for one of the most iconic groups of the late ’70s and early ’80s. Now he’s got together with Cleopatra Records to document his life and times with the band in a glossy, coffee table art book. Featuring largely unseen memorabilia, Bauhaus Undead is Haskins personal account of the goth rockers turbulent history, from their inception […]
Recorded at the same Skyline studios, where they made their best-selling major label debut Flood, I Like Fun feels like a hearkening back to They Might Be Giants‘ glory days of old. TMBG fans have long learned to expect the unexpected and this their 20th album is typically eclectic, mixing and mashing genres from surf-punk to funk, college rock to avant […]
XTC fans have been rather spoiled with new product of late, after years of relative inactivity since the band ground to a halt in 2006, there have been a wave of re-issues, a feature-length documentary and, at the end of last year, the first EP from TC&I. For the benefit of anyone not living in the XTC universe, TC&I […]
Words Matt Catchpole, Pictures Sam Wells The Damned’s place in history is secured as one of the triumvirate of London bands that kick-started the punk rock revolution. And yet despite being first out of the traps with a bona fide punk single, New Rose in 1976, they’ve often been dismissed as the jokers in the pack. For the sheer effrontery of […]
Emerging from the Bristol Party scene of the late 1980s, Massive Attack have been hailed as one of the most original and influential groups the UK has produced. Now a new book seeks to lift the lid on the band, their home city and the network of artists and collaborators that broke through alongside them. Massive Attack Out of the […]
The pale hordes who descend on Whitby for the biannual Goth Weekend may just have found the perfect soundtrack for their journey. With esteemed Cocteau Twins/This Mortal Coil producer John Fryer at the controls, York-based duo Mary and the Ram have come up with a modernist take on coffin-rattlers like Bauhaus, Love and Rockets and The Sisters of Mercy. Fryer is also famed for his […]
Father-daughter combos are as rare as hen’s teeth in the music industry, but for London-based duo SPC ECO, it’s clearly a formula that works. The pair recently celebrated their 10th anniversary as a band with the release of Calm – their 9th full studio album. Dad Dean Garcia is a seasoned veteran having formed one half of indie band Curve in the 1990s, before […]
REM have unveiled a new mini-documentary to mark the 25th anniversary re-mastered release of Automatic for the People. Featuring new interviews with Michael Stipe, Peter Buck and Mike Mills, along with co-producer Scott Litt, the film charts the making of what many consider to be the band’s finest album “Culturally, 1992 in America was not an easy place to be,” Stipe remarks on the background to […]
Robert Plant has been enjoying a late career renaissance since 2007’s excellent Raising Sand collaboration with country/bluegrass singer Alison Krauss. Carry Fire, his 11th solo studio album, sees the Led Zeppelin frontman backed once again by The Sensational Space Shifters – a quartet of multi-instrumentalists – who clearly share his enthusiasm for finding new approaches to music. Produced by Plant himself, the album covers similar territory […]