WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . .
Strange, eccentric and sometimes mad people or unusual events and albums in the music world.Subscribe to my newsletter for weekly updates.
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . TUCKER ZIMMERMAN: He who never went away is back
11 Oct 2024 | 4 min read | 1
It seems no matter how many diverse artists you seek out, follow their influences into obscure corners or go down blind alleys to chivvy out little-known singers, there's always someone whose name you have never heard before. What makes it worse in the case of Belgium-based, American-born singer-songwriter Tucker Zimmerman – now in his Seventies – is that he was hailed by no... > Read more
Lorelei
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . JUNE MILLINGTON: Not here to fanny about
19 Aug 2024 | 5 min read
June Millington was a striking figure in the early Seventies when she sang and played in a band with her sister Jean. If her name isn't well known the band's certainly was. They were called Fanny. In America where they formed (California in the last Sixties) the name wasn't especially controversial, it meant bum. But in Britain when they took off it meant something different, the lunar... > Read more
Charity Ball
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . VERNON DALHART: Are you ready for the country?
16 Jun 2024 | 4 min read
While it's not uncommon to hear people speak of some kind of "parallel universe" where another and different version of ourselves might exist, few would actually believe it exists. But every now and again someone comes along who . . . The child, born in northeast Texas on a cattle ranch in 1883, had the perfect name for a country singer who had been brought up tough in a... > Read more
The Wreck of the Old 97
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . PATTY WATERS' ALBUM, SINGS: It's black then gets blackblackblack
20 May 2024 | 3 min read | 1
Now. We could talk about singer Patty Waters' lengthy career because she's 78 and still around and sometimes performing.* At least she was in 2020 before that Covid thing hit. But . . . we have focused on just this, her debut album Sings from 1965 because . . . Well . . . First, let's tell you the label it is on: ESP-Disk. For some that will be the... > Read more
Moon, Don't Come Up Tonight
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . ZZ HILL: Suited up for Soulville
13 May 2024 | 2 min read
Arzell Hill was a soul and blues singer who came to serious attention in the early Eighties with his crossover hits Cheating in the Next Room and the terrific Down Home Blues. He was in his mid Forties at the time and had been recording two decades, mostly with little success beyond admiration and critical appreciation. It was dreadful tragedy then that just two years after he was enjoying... > Read more
Nothing Takes the Place of You
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . CHARLEY PATTON: A riddle wrapped in an enigma
28 Apr 2024 | 5 min read
So little is really known about Charley Patton that people have had to fill in the gaps with belief, rumour and myth. The date of his birth in south Mississippi can only be located somewhere between 1881 and 1891 (although consensus is forming around the latter), and it seems the man who raised him and whose name he took was not his natural father. And even his first name is... > Read more
High Water Everywhere (Part 2)
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . ROSEMARY BROWN: Music from the great beyond
10 Mar 2024 | 6 min read
When the English composer and pianist Rosemary Brown died in 2001 at age 85 she took with her an intimate knowledge of the works by some of the greatest classical composers. This is not uncommon of course. Classical performers and conductors always have a deep and personal connection to the music of those whose compositions they have studied and played. But Brown's connection to... > Read more
Valse Brillante in E Minor
WE NEEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . CY GRANT: The dreaming soul of blackness
15 Jan 2024 | 3 min read
We could start with his war record: he was a flight lieutenant navigator on an RAF Avro Lancaster in 103 Squadron (one of the few black officers in the airforce) but was shot down over Holland in 1943 and imprisoned at Stalag Luft III (made famous in the film The Great Escape and the book The Wooden Horse for the escapes which took place from there). Or we could consider his earlier life in... > Read more
Every Night When the Sun Goes In
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . BILLY NICHOLLS' WOULD YOU BELIEVE: Care for Pet Sounds inna English accent, guv'nor?
1 Oct 2023 | 3 min read
In the second part of his 2002 autobiography 2Stoned, Andrew Loog Oldham – manager and sometime producer of the young Stones, founder of Immediate Records and more – wrote about the profound impact the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds had on him. He had managed the Stones through the madness of those early years when they were being belted by the British media and the... > Read more
Feeling Easy
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . JO ANN CAMPBELL: Another case of the singer not the song
3 Jul 2023 | 3 min read
If you were to believe standard histories of Fifties rock'n'roll, women were marginal figures at best and, in some books, non-existent. The great Wanda Jackson often gets a mention (her career as a rockabilly singer was short, she got religion) but beyond that the river runs dry. There were, of course, quite a number of young women – black and white –... > Read more
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . BARRY MARKWICK: Lennon, McCartney and Markwick
26 Jun 2023 | 3 min read | 1
Few people know the backroads and by-ways of New Zealand music like Chris Bourke, the current editor of AudioCulture. A former editor of Rip It Up '86-'88, he delivered the Crowded House biography Something So Strong and two remarkable books of historical research, the essential Blue Smoke; The Lost Dawn of New Zealand Popular Music 1918-1964 and Goodbye Maoriland; The Songs and Sounds of... > Read more
Can't Buy Me Love
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . TONY BURROWS: The famous anonymous star
29 Apr 2023 | 4 min read
Was it three times? Or four? Not even Tony Burrows is absolutely certain but he thinks it was three. Three times on the same 1970 episode of Britain's Top of the Pops television show where he appeared in three different bands: White Plains (singing My Baby Loves Lovin'), Edison Lighthouse (Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes) and Brotherhood of Man (United We Stand). He was also in... > Read more
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . . HAL BLAINE'S PSYCHEDELIC PERCUSSION: Trippin' out daddy-o!
12 Apr 2023 | 2 min read
The first thing to acknowledge is the drumming genius of Hal Blaine, one of those extraordinary players who was a member of the famous and informal Wrecking Crew so played on Phil Spector productions and numerous sessions for Sinatra, Presley, the Beach Boys, Byrds and hundreds more. He played on around 150 top 10 American singles and literally hundreds more which were top 40 chart hits.... > Read more
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . DAVID SPINOZZA: Three Beatles and all the rest
4 Mar 2023 | 3 min read
A number of big stars have mentioned this, so we'll repeat it here: the most expensive cars in the recording studio parking lot belong to the session musicians. It might be a joke – most stars don't drive themselves to studios – but it says something about the lifestyle of those who have avoided the excesses and weariness of touring in favour of studio sessions, be they on... > Read more
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . JOYCE HATTO: The classical genius who wasn't
23 Jan 2023 | 2 min read
As many politicians and Milli Vanilla would attest, the problem isn't just what you did in the first place, it is the lying afterwards which compounds matters. When the lies are revealed what follows is scorn, contempt and public opprobrium. You get fired, the work dries up, friends and neighbours shun you . . . and sometimes you can only see one way out to end the... > Read more
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . ZOOGZ RIFT: Speaking more than Frankly
7 Jan 2023 | 3 min read | 1
Because his music and career was so diverse, heretical and dispirate, few would try to follow in the footsteps of Frank Zappa. He seems to have spawned no progeny. With one notable exception: Zoogz Rift. Mr Rift -- born Robert Pawlikowski in '53 -- recorded a couple of dozen albums for the SST label, among them Idiots on the Minature Golf Course, Amputees in Limbo, Can You Smell My... > Read more
With My Bare Hands (extract only)
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . HP LOVECRAFT: High, here and gone.
19 Dec 2022 | 4 min read | 1
Now, I'm neither ashamed nor proud of this, but some while back – decades ago – I enjoyed perpetrating pranks and hoaxes, especially postal pranks. Of the latter I would, for example, anonymously send increasingly large blocks of wood to a friend in some far flung place inviting him to join my “Plank of the Month Club”. Or I would send off elaborate... > Read more
The White Ship
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . SANDY BULL: He had the whole world in his hands
12 Dec 2022 | 5 min read | 1
Just a thought, but if Sandy Bull had been British, magazines like Uncut and Mojo would be running major, rediscovery features about him and placing him in the pantheon of innovative guitarists like Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Richard Thompson and – especially – Davy Graham. But Bull – who recorded fewer than a dozen albums between his debut in '63 and death in 2001... > Read more
Improvisation for Oud 1 (live 1969)
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . JANDEK: Stranger in an even stranger land
5 Dec 2022 | 3 min read
In his very interesting 2001 book about cult figures and outsider musicians Songs in the Key of Z, Irwin Chusid had chapters on some figures (Wild Man Fischer, Syd Barrett, Florence Foster Jenkins, Daniel Johnston, Tiny Tim, Harry Partch etc) who have largely been accepted into the grand pantheon of the weird but rather wonderful. And then there were the others like the talentless Shaggs... > Read more
Cave In On You, from Ready for the House
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . HARRY KALAPANA: Aloha from Yugoslavia?
28 Nov 2022 | 4 min read
Of all the many hundreds of musical styles across the planet, only one has managed to embed itself in popular, post-Fifties music which exists along the Western axis of London-New York-America's West Coast: reggae. Yes, there are belated flickers and influences (if not downright copying) of Fela Anikulapo Kuti's Afrobeat and some aspects of Sahara blues and Indian music out there. But... > Read more