The Beatles
9 posts
Now 50 Years Old 'The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society' Evokes An Arcadian Vision Of A Fast Disappearing England
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 […]
In June 1967 five musicians went into London’s Abbey Road studios to record The Zombies‘ second album Odessey and Oracle. Though not an initial success, the record came to be regarded as one of the landmark albums of the late 1960s, right up there with The Beach Boys‘ Pet Sounds and The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper. Half a century later the surviving members of […]
My first encounter with Robyn Hitchcock came while watching the BBC’s Whistle Test in the late 1980s. Hitchcock was performing one of his most lauded songs Brenda’s Iron Sledge, featuring the immortal lyric: All aboard Brenda’s Iron Sledge/Please don’t call me Reg/It’s not my name.
The resurgence – I nearly said resurrection – of ’60s survivors The Zombies is surely one of the most wonderful stories in modern rock music. Despite breaking up before its 1968 release, the band and their extraordinary album Odessey and Oracle were never forgotten.
