In 1968 the BBC Radiophonic Workshop existed to score continuity idents, radio drama and the odd Doctor Who cue, not to make records. It had no mandate to release music and no budget line for a pop album. That did not stop two of its staff engineers from making one anyway, after the building emptied […]
The story sells itself, which is the first reason to distrust it. Five boys at St Gregory’s College in Obalende, Lagos, borrow instruments, get signed by EMI, and cut a psychedelic rock album while still in school uniform. Try and Love came out on EMI Nigeria in 1973, catalogue NEMI (LP) 0032, with a parallel […]
The Paisley Underground had no shared sound. What held the Dream Syndicate, the Bangles, Rain Parade and the Three O'Clock together was a 1972 compilation and a handful of terrible clubs.
Hamilton's Simply Saucer cut a proto-punk classic in a basement in 1974 and on a mall roof in 1975. Nobody released it until 1989.
Most scenes are named after the fact, by journalists reaching for a shorthand. Anatolian rock is one of the rare ones that arrived with a brief. In 1965 the Istanbul daily Hürriyet announced a competition called Altın Mikrofon, the Golden Microphone, and attached a rule to it that read less like a contest condition than […]
For most bands, an underground reputation is a phase, a rung on the way up. For Les Rallizes Dénudés it was the entire architecture of a fifty-year career, built on refusal. No studio album. No interviews. No sanctioned records for decades. A frontman, guitarist Takashi Mizutani, who dressed in black behind dark sunglasses and receded
Most rock scenes are born from clubs, labels, or a couple of bands who refuse to sound like anyone else. Zamrock was born from a policy memo. In the first turbulent decade after Zambia declared independence from British rule in 1964, president Kenneth Kaunda paired the slogan “One Zambia, one nation” with a broadcasting decr
