Some of my favourite soul performances go to the ragged-throated extremes of the style – Lorraine Ellison’s apocalyptic “Stay With Me”, for instance. But more of them are like “I Heard It Through The Grapevine”, wh[…]

 
In an NME interview, John Peel once named this record as his personal worst of all time. The man heard a really very large number of bad records so this claim made quite an impression on me. And it’s easy to imagine the young Peel, earnest[…]

Amen Corner flap dangerously on the boundary between dreamy and drippy, and then tip right over thanks to the washed out vocals of Andy Fairweather-Low, whose voice is a pale and smeary thing, a wimpy croak that leeches any real delight out of the so[…]

The first time I heard this – one of the songs from this era that was entirely new to me – I thought it sounded like a terrible mess. Everything about it was heavy-handed, lead-footed, fuzzy, all its elements slopping into one another and[…]

 
The appearance of not one, but two instrumentals in the late 60s lists shouldn’t be taken as any great sign of a revival: the first months of the year are generally the time when minority tastes can break through. This represents a hiccup in[…]

 
The link between bouncy music-hall and Jamaican pop would create whole careers for some people, though Paul McCartney didn’t get the mix right. The crucial ingredients he’s missing are wit and bite – there’s no reason that […]

I AM THE GOD OF POLL-FIRE AND I BRING YOU… tickboxes. 44-year-old tickboxes. Mid-August 68 and the TODALLY bonkers world of Art Brown was here, soon giving way to a string of killer Bs, Beach Boys, Bee Gees and The Beatles Band. The latter clearly […]

As a small schoolboy a yearly highlight was “Camp 200” – this was something my school organised whereby 200 boys would go to a campsite in the wilds and woods of deepest Surrey and spend a weekend there. For an 8 or 9 year old it wa[…]

 
Even though I’ve never actually seen TGTBATU I’ve heard the original score often enough, dry empty and ragged where Montenegro’s is polished and full of incident. In the days before film soundtrack releases the shops were full of[…]

 
First appearance at Number One for this hardy perennial: probably the best version to reach the top, which is saying something about the others as I still can’t stand it. The charm of the Beatles’ original – yet another Beatles s[…]