Hopefully, you'll have seen the new issue of Uncut by now, which includes a terrific cover story on The Who's early ascendancy, plus Cream, Matthew E White, Jeff Lynne, Kurt Vile, and more - including a piece by Allan on Kevin Ayers.
Far be it for me to hang around with the popular kids, but the internet seems full these past couple of days with opinion on Kanye West’s “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy”, culminating in a sort of collective music journalist meltdown in the face of Pitchfork awarding the album a fabled 10.0 rating.
Jimi Hendrix: Not Necessarily Stoned. . .But Beautiful
A few of us from the office went last night to the launch of the Jimi Hendrix Live At Monterey DVD and CD at the Hippodrome in Leicester Square, a swanky former nightclub now used for corporate events. I was last there for a party that followed IPC’s annual editorial awards, an event made especially memorable by a spectacular fall down a particularly steep flight of stairs, after which things become very vague, my memory of subsequent events – getting home, things like that – almost wholly non-existent.
I’ve just been reading Re-Make/Re-Model, Michael Bracewell’s new book on the formative years of Roxy Music and was particularly struck by an early passage in which Bryan Ferry – thankfully not talking about fox-hunting or the Third Reich – waxes nostalgically about a music shop in Newcastle called Windows, where as a teenager he spent many astonished hours browsing through racks of records he couldn’t always afford, but liked anyway just to spend time poring over.
