Category Archives: Rock

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He Said – She Said Special Cross Cultural Edition – Typically English – Typically Japanese ! ! !

If he chooses a track about octopus's . . I will kill him ! ! !

If he chooses a track about octopuses . . I will kill him ! ! !

sakura 1Welcome to the special Cross Cultural Edition of He Said – She Said ! ! !  This time we decided to show what we think is typical of the music from each other’s counties ! ! !  So I will be picking typically English tracks and Mr P will be picking typically Japanese tracks ! ! !

We think it will be fun and hope you like the post ! ! !

Mr P-1This time we have chosen to visit each other’s musical heritage in a fantastic cross cultural exchange type of a thing. I think it’s interesting to see how others see us, through the medium of music. We have chosen one contemporary  track, one oldie and one traditional.  We hope you enjoy the tracks.

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Dover – Sister

sister

Good to have a slow topic from time to time. Been filling up i-tunes with cds from my collection and had forgotten how much I loved this album when I bought it. 16 songs. Not one over 3 minutes long. Guitars, simple bass lines and a ballsy female vocalists, who are sisters hence the name of the album. The name of the group comes from the brand of jeans their mum used to sell in her shop. Spanish group from Majadahonda (a town just up the road from Maki Towers) – they sing in English so shouldn’t be too hard to relate to. Here from 1995 are half a dozen tracks from their début album.

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Groovy Garage

5443358-201205-wg-san-francisco-haight

Grab bag of groovy garage / punk / psych / indie / powerpop / whatever tunes that caught my ear, now that i seem to be able to listen to music again.

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New Black Angels – “Don’t Play With Guns”

The Black Angels: I dig their droney psyche doom pop the most, ya know?

This song is the first inkling of their fourth album, “Indigo Meadow”, which is agonisingly not out ’til April.

The Black Angels’ first album was also my 3rd favourite of the noughties, list fans.

Unrelated, but we are now only 9 posts off the 2,000 mark, so if anyone has any ideas about how to mark this, um, landmark – please say so in the comments. Cheers. 

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Axe One

Yeah, so this is a lazy playlist (click the playlist button bottom left for full set) or some of my favorite acts of axe heroism. Haven’t been in the mood to listen to much lately, stuff on my mind to sort. But Shane’s list last week (sorry love, i will get there, just haven’t had the brain space to give it the attention it deserves) reminded me that it’s probably time to get this series up and going again.

So free dates – claim as you wish. Repeat offenders welcome if you have new stuff to share.

Jan 15
Jan 22
Jan 29
Feb 5
Feb 12
Feb 19

That ought to get us started. Tech help available for any who need it.

Feel free to treat this as a challenge and post your own favorite selfless acts of axe heroism.

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♫ “OK you lot, take it …” ♫

Ah, it’s great to see a band put some effort in. After years of trying, I finally got to a Thunder Christmas Party gig. After this evening, and with pretty much all of my customers having finished work for the holidays at Friday lunchtime, I think I can safely say the holiday season has started.

2012 has been a strange old year, and in some respects I won’t be sad to see the back of it, but on the other hand, there was the Olympics, LFC collecting silverware again, DsSis at the Royal Albert Hall, the West Country RR Social, the truth about Hillsborough, etc., etc.

But as we get to the end of another year (or even a 5,125 year cycle, if you’re Mayan), let’s start the “out with the old, and in with the new” chit-chat, shall we? I wish you all a Merry Christmas, and a better 2013 than you had a 2012.

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Stones O2 29/11/2012

Ok, so i fully realize that i’m the only one who cares about this sort of thing. But it’s been a very good week for Stones fans. They did two 50-year anniversary concerts at O2 this week, one show earlier, and another on the 29th. Tickets cost way too much, as they do for the shows in Brooklyn and Newark upcoming next month, i won’t be there and won’t be sorry not to be either. Youtube is good enough for me.

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He Said – She Said . . . It’s The J-Factor ! ! ! 

What do we do with the winners Mr P?
Exploit them ruthlessly like everyone else Ms S ! ! !

She Says:

Welcome to the J- factor ! ! !  This post is based on a popular TV series which maybe some of you have seen.  Basically we have three categories.  Solo, Group and Oldie. I will nominate one track for each category and Mr P will nominate one for each category and then you will have the chance to vote for your favourite.  We hope you have fun listening to the tracks and voting for your favourites ! ! !

He Says:

Call me S*mon C**ell and pass me a pair of high waisted trousers. It’s time for a head to head J-Factor contsest. The rules are clear ( vote for me) and the gloves are off !

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Best Cover Artists Ever? Black Crowes

Haven’t done one of these posts in a long time, but really feeling like it’s time to give these guys the shout that they deserve. (And maybe you need a little something to listen to before the list goes up.) For starters, because not just anyone can take on the Midnight Rambler and do it justice.

What makes these guys such great cover artists? Well, you start with a southern boy with pipes to die for, (and Chris Robinson certainly has them) a definite requirement if you want to take on the likes of Mick, Joe Cocker, Stevie, Plant, etc. But you don’t do great Stones covers with pipes alone, and the band is more than up for the job. Brother Richie on guitar, and Chris on harp, do the Stones proud on this and many, many other Stones covers. (If i’m missing Mick and Co. at all here, it’s only because i’ve become addicted to the coke fueled live bootleg versions.)

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Why Are You Being So Toquiwa Now?


Tokyo all female three-piece TOQUIWA release their hi-energy J-punk in the UK on October the 22nd, 2012. Scopitones announced TOQUIWA’s self-titled debut on digital release and limited edition tour CD.
They begin touring the UK on 26/10 in Bournemouth – I’m going to be there (in a home made bright orange TOQUIWA T-shirt) – I also made a T-shirt using the ticket from a live Wedding Presents Ukrainian Sessions gig. But I can’t wear both.

This is the track listing and below the review are Smash Hits style questions sportingly answered by the band.

(I want to post this today – so I will have to ask Sakura to advise if I’ve got anything in the wrong places)

Photograph of the band used with permission – all designs created by arTEEsane are not for profit – please don’t use.


illustrative track from Music Ripple recorded as Pinky Piglets

The self titled album by Toquiwa on the Wedding Presents Scopitones label, should almost be called go out and get ‘em girl – such is the frantic pace that they erupt with perfect pop rock. The first 13 seconds set up the album (you heard right – 13 seconds sets out their manifesto) – Fantasticly playing the many influences and condensing them into a tight Toquiwa package.
Strangely managing to be extremely talented musicians yet still exuding that punk ethic of innocence and naivety.
The tracks have so many astonishingly catchy segments and hooks, you wonder how the pace can be kept up, but keep up they do, building and building, twisting styles and era’s together as if timelines were squeezed, squashed and smashed into their musical brains. Until in comes out sounding as though these things should always have sat together (superbly) in each 3 minute track.
Not only that, they know how to sequence an album – just as your head might explode keeping up – (ten second bar room blues, into superfly 70′s style, into a quiet millisecond break – roaring back into .. you get the drift – I’m loath to compare because it all sounds so Toquiwa – but as reference you could detect The Animals merging with a Curtis Mayfield track with hints of Kirsty MacColl’s weariness and wonder, while a Status Quo repetitive rock riff underpins a track – and quite loud quiet indie rock aesthetics jostle in) they take a breather with a ballad – and then we are invited to party hard once again, ending with an enthusiastic Wedding Present adaption to thrill and inspire while closing the album out.
It’s fantastic fun – superbly performed and feverishly played. Total enjoyment.

Would they be happy to answer my frivolous questions linking to each song on the album?:

各曲に関連した私のくだらない質問に答えていただけたら幸いです。

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Toquiwa – The Spill Interview part 1

It was a chance meeting out side Shibuya station in Tokyo that resulted in Japanese girl punk-pop band Toquiwa’s signing to a UK record lable and collaborating with The Wedding Present.

Toquiwa (as Pinky Piglets) were playing a street live out side the famous Shibuya station in the heart of one of Tokyo’s most popular entertainment districts when the promoter who was booking the Wedding Present Japanese tour walked past and stopped to listen and had one of those wonderful “A ha ! ! !” moments.   He booked Pinky Piglets as they were called at the time to support Wedding Present and the start of a common journey with the two bands began.

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The older you get, the quicker they come

It’s Tom Petty’s 62nd birthday – and this time the Guardian gets it right (thanks to me)


For TP’s birthday this year I thought I’d do one of amylee’s lists of 11, and these are eleven of his lesser-known songs, some from his solo albums and some with the Heartbreakers. And guess what, I love all of them – they’re all in my top 50. And I don’t think I’ve posted any of them before. But if you want to play the dump-one-keep-one game, feel free – I won’t be cross.

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Epic Blowout Stones ‘Spillover

3 ‘Spillers (Amy, Fuel, and Shane) – 3 Stones Playlists. Enjoy.

Amy:

I was born in 1960. I knew the early Stones tunes from the radio mostly. Caught the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, even at 3 years old, i somehow knew this was an important thing to see. Amazing, actually. But never knew a peep about the Stones on there. First Stones album i bought was Hot Rocks, followed by More Hot Rocks which i figured had all the oldies i ever needed. Never saw any reason to get the older albums – they all had pretty much the same songs on them anyway! So there are still plenty of oldies i’ve never heard. Wanted to get a sampler of some of them on the list, but Shanes’ covers list made my job a lot easier – there would have been a lot of duplicates – and most of those songs probably aren’t new to folks on here anyway. Shane’s Empty Heart was newtome and great, i hear echoes of that one, and Heart of Stone and Time is on My Side in the snotnose garage bands i’m liking now. Under My Thumb and Play With Fire would have probably made my list – i think they foreshadow some of the darker tunes yet to come. Some other standouts for me – Ruby Tuesday, As Tears Go By, Lady Jane, Sitting on a Fence, Spider and the Fly, Not Fade Away, The Last Time, I’m Free – although biggies like Get Off of My Cloud (sorry, Fintan), Satisfaction, Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, and Mothers’ Little Helper still don’t do much for me.
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‘spillover: The Rolling Stones.

Rules are simple:
Pick your favourite Rolling stones tune – try to narrow it down so it doesn’t get too overwhelming – and in the spirit of RR tell us why it rocks your socks.

Amy or Fuel will give you a deadline for nominations and then one of them will pick a playlist – (I always narrowed it down to fit on a blank CD – it gave me something to aim for)… they might even do one each and we’ll vote to see who wins and who loses (I’m joking – grrr).

If anyone wants to add their favourite Rolling Stones cover tracks – then I will curate that – and pick a CD80 of them there tunes too.

The idea of ‘spillover is to get a really unique CD80 (or two) of an artists work – if the compilers choice fits perfectly in a playlist then they can put it in. This isn’t RR.
There’s no one song for each player either – if ten people said ‘Paint it Black’ say, is their fav – it just means it’s popular.

It has to be artists that have a large amount of albums. Because when I started this – I didn’t want it to be definitive – i.e we post the ‘so called’ best tracks – then no one ever needs to buy another song from said artist … whatever anyone’s views of music sharing is – I wanted it to celebrate a body of work. Inspire people to dig further. Like a mixtape to hook you in.

So if you’re down on you’re luck, and you can’t harmonise -
do the ‘spillover challenge with smiles in your eyes.

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Black Lips

It sure does warm my heart to hear some young whippersnapper college garage punkers that have done their Stones homework. They don’t have to fake the southern accents either. Here’s a little mini sampler.

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Life On Mars

Thought it might be nice to make a little playlist of Songs About Mars to accompany the exciting first photo the Mars Rover beamed back. Not a terribly original idea, there were already a few playlists out there on the interwebs. A lot of the usual suspects – Bowie, T Rex, Coldplay, etc, and plenty of shoehorns. Tucked in among the shoehorns was this new-to-me (am i the only one who had never heard it before?) beauty that only mentions Mars in passing, but any excuse will do to post it. Axe-fucking-tastic.

Jimi Hendrix – The Stars That Play With Laughing Sam’s Dice

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Waiting for Monday

I’m in this photo – those are my blue sleeves on the barrier

Talking of waiting…I’ve just realised that it’s now a week since I saw Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers in Cork…and I won’t see them again till Monday! Gee whiz, the waiting is the hardest part. So to cheer myself up I’ve made a playlist of the songs they did in Ireland. The setlists weren’t very different (and believe me, I have complained). So I’m sitting here listening to this, and it occurred to me that perhaps some of you might like to listen too. These aren’t the actual performances, mind, but they’re all live recordings (except one) of the songs I heard last week.

So just imagine, if you will, that it’s a week ago in the Marquee in Cork, TP&TH have just come on stage, I am standing beneath TP’s mic stand and my favourite band are playing just for me.

1 Listen To Her Heart
2 You Wreck Me
3 I Won’t Back Down
4 Here Comes My Girl
5 Handle With Care
6 Good Enough
7 Oh Well
8 I’m A Man
9 Something Big
10 King’s Highway
11 Free Fallin’
12 It’s Good To Be King
13 Something Good Coming
14 Learning To Fly
15 Yer So Bad
16 I Should Have Known It
17 Refugee
18 Runnin’ Down A Dream
19 Mary Jane’s Last Dance
20 American Girl

And while I’m at it I thought I’d post this week’s Buried Treasure Show, which is specially good (apart from the Dave Clark Five, of whom TP is strangely fond). It’s no. 154. I won’t bother with the playlist, because you can find it on TP’s website – as he will tell you.

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The English Market, Cork

There was no water, but the fountain was still very pretty

Last Friday, after I’d checked into my hotel in Cork, I went for a bit of a wander round the town until it was time to start looking for the venue for the gig, and I discovered the English Market. (That’s ‘discovered’ in the sense of Columbus discovering America, of course, since lots of people already knew it was there.) It’s a covered market that somehow winds its way behind the ordinary shops – there are at least 3 entrances that I found and there may well be a few more. And it’s a place of many gustatory delights.

Bread stall in the English Market

I didn’t buy anything that first day, even though there was a man on one of the stalls frying potatoes, which looked lovely, and a sign behind him saying Potatoes and Sausage 4 Euros. But I had had such a huge breakfast in the Dublin hotel that morning that I really wasn’t hungry. I knew I was only going to get a ‘mini breakfast’ at the Cork hotel the next day so I decided to come back to the market after that – there would be time for a second breakfast before I caught the bus to the airport. Instead I went in search of the venue, which doesn’t have much of an internet presence (for instance, there’s no map showing it), and was surprised when I found it that there was no queue there yet, although it was 3 o’clock by then; so I started one, and was subsequently interviewed by the local radio station and achieved my aim of being leant on the barrier immediately below TP’s mic when the gig started. But I’m not talking about the gig here, of course. This is about the market.

The next morning I found that the hotel’s definition of a mini breakfast wasn’t the same as mine and I was once again not hungry when I turned up mid-morning at the English Market again. I had hoped that my appetite would’ve returned, but it hadn’t, so the potato and sausage man had no business from me. I bought some white chocolate buttons from the chocolate man, though, and sat down in the cafe with a coffee till it was bus time…Incidentally the coffee I had in Ireland was (nearly all) wonderful, even the kind provided by Aer Lingus.

Though there were stalls with all sorts of food in the market, the majority were of interest to carnivores only, especially fans of chicken and fish. (They didn’t even have that much fish in Kirkcudbright!)

Tripe and burgers

Several of the stalls had tripe. On this one there were also ready-battered burgers. I was not sorry to have to leave both those things behind. I walked along to St Patrick’s Quay and sat down at the bus stop, only to find I’d left the chocolate buttons in the cafe. Well, they’re bad for you anyway. And at the airport they had Ben and Jerry’s ice cream.

At the bus stop

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Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea – All New Podcast !

Yes, that’s right ‘Spillers, an all-new PODCAST! Long overdue, I know….but, better late than never, right? Well, don’t agree until you’ve listened to it !

It’s a very random and eclectic mix based on whatever was in my box of records at the time….and there were so many I didn’t get to that I wanted to include. They’ll have to wait until next time, I suppose.

Listen until the end for some exciting news ! Well, exciting for me, not perhaps for anyone else !

Enjoy !

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Novecento Connection: Círculo Polar – The End

A while back I posted an e.p. by Círculo Polar, some friends of mine, who just happen to be regulars down at my mate Quique’s pizza restaurant. Some of you may remember it. They were thrilled with the response and enjoyed interacting with some of you here. Well they’ve called it a day but not before recording and releasing an album. They’ve asked me to share it with you. So here it is. The album is called Mainstreet / Meanstreet.

Mainstreet

Ignition
Velvet Sky
I’m Not Fading
Revolution
Who Are You?


Meanstreet

Mainstreet
Weird Love
Nothing Stays Till The End
Started Underground

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So, tfd, were you disappointed?

TP shows off the fancy embroidery on his weskit

Well, folks, I was…with Regina Spektor. I thought the first song she did, with no accompaniment except her own tapping on the mic, was really excellent. And I also liked the second song with her band. But after that I just felt everything was far too samey. Perhaps I should’ve taken more time beforehand to become familiar with her stuff…but she’s not on the European leg of the tour so I’m going to forget about her for now and investigate Jonathan Wilson (who?) the new opening act.

So anyway. We were in the Frank Erwin Center in Austin, TX, which is a basketball arena. I’d been thinking that the venue would be quite small, because a basketball court is small, but this proved not to be the case. It was vast (and sold out). They must like their basketball a whole lot in Austin. Matt and I had whiled away the time before the show started having very expensive drinks in the VIP lounge and we had enjoyed ourselves so much talking to fellow TP&TH fans that we had neglected to go and look at the merchandise…but never mind, I’ll have 6 more opportunities to buy stuff and I now know which T shirt Matt would like for his birthday.

Where was I? Oh yes. Imagine that we’re no longer in the VIP lounge but in our third-row seats watching the techies set up for the band. There was an enclosure with gear in it on the floor on our side of the stage and we saw some celebrity kiddiwinks having a tea party there, and after that Benmont Tench came and wandered round a bit, and so did Ron Blair, and so did someone who might have been Mrs TP, only I wasn’t quite sure. And then the lights went down, and everybody stood up and started to make a noise, and then it looked like this:

TP&TH get going

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tfd fears allayed

TP x 5

A video about the lighting design for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ current tour was posted on their website the other day and I got a bit worried, because there didn’t seem to be any video screens and I’m going to be quite far back for at least one of the concerts I’m going to.

But it seems I needn’t have worried!