Every retelling of the Amen break opens with the same statistic: the most sampled recording in history, thousands of tracks deep. It is a true fact and a useless one. Counting appearances tells you the break spread. It does not tell you what anyone actually did with it, and that is where the interesting lineage […]
Most bands form to play. The Desperate Bicycles formed in March 1977 for the specific purpose of recording and releasing a single on their own label, and they were not being coy about it. They owned an amplifier and a bass guitar. The Dalston studio supplied everything else. Three hours later they had two songs, […]
In 1983 Roland set out to fix a machine that was not broken so much as misunderstood. The TR-808 had been dismissed as a toy, its synthetic booms judged unconvincing next to the sampled snares of the LinnDrum. So the TR-909 chased credibility: a crisper snare, six-bit sampled hi-hats and cymbals, and MIDI to lock […]
Ask a touring guitar band to name the best room they have ever played and a startling number of them, from every scene and every decade, land on the same answer: a former dancehall on Glasgow’s Gallowgate that was never designed for rock music at all. The Barrowland Ballroom was engineered in the 1930s for […]
Most scenes fight over who started them. Bristol spent the 1990s fighting over what to call the thing at all. The genre the wider world settled on, trip-hop, was rejected by nearly everyone who supposedly invented it. Massive Attack disliked it. Tricky disliked it. Portishead distanced themselves so firmly that they preferred to talk ab
British music writers spent the mid-1990s selling a war. On one side, shoegaze: introverted, effects-drunk, staring at the floor. On the other, Britpop: chins up, choruses out, Union Jack on the amp. The story needed enemies, and it got them. What it conveniently ignored was that one guitarist quietly held a passport to both sides. [&he
Before it meant IDM, Warp Records meant bleep and bass: how Sheffield and West Yorkshire producers built British bass music out of steel-city sub-bass and Detroit futurism.
In February 1978, a 22-year-old on Van Halen’s debut album spent one minute and 42 seconds rewriting what a guitar was allowed to sound like. “Eruption” landed like a piece of alien technology, and for a generation of players the two-hand tapping that powered it became synonymous with one name. The problem with origin
A Solo That Wasn’t Supposed to Survive In 1960, inside the low-ceilinged Nashville room known as the Quonset Hut, engineer Glenn Snoddy was cutting a Marty Robbins country ballad called “Don’t Worry.” When the session reached its instrumental break, the part Grady Martin was playing came back through the console
How a sealed bank vault under no-man's-land became the room that carried Detroit techno into reunified Berlin.
