Moondog died on 8 September 1999, four months after Mr. Scruff sampled Bird's Lament on Ninja Tune. His rounds, odd metres and city sounds were loop music before the machines.
Fifty years after The Saints pressed 500 copies of (I'm) Stranded in Brisbane, the details show that almost everything later read as punk ideology was a practical workaround.
Thirty-eight years ago this week, on 22 August 1988, 10 Records and Virgin put out a single that had no business existing. “Big Fun” by Inner City was not conceived as a hit, not written for a label, and not even actively pitched by the man who made it. Kevin Saunderson had recorded the backing […]
Richard David James was born on 18 August 1971 in Limerick and raised in Cornwall. The birthday gets marked every year. The more useful anniversary is the second half of that sentence, because the label he ended up co-founding was not built out of a taste. It was built out of a postcode. A supply […]
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
On this day in 1973, the largest paying rock audience ever assembled walked into a Grand Prix racetrack in upstate New York, and rock history has spent the last five decades pretending it barely happened. The Summer Jam at Watkins Glen drew roughly 600,000 people on July 28, 1973, a figure that held the Guinness […]
