2012/04/30

French decent soul band! "Malted Milk".

Check Brutha Dave's site !

SoulSistas And SoulBruthas! Gotta admit, I love everything Mr. Jack White does. His various incarnations over the years; The White Stripes, The Raconteurs and The Dead Weather have all seemed to get my head noddin'. Jack has just released his solo debut and he's again got me thinking this cat is our generation's modern day Blues genius. Blunderbuss was released this week and it's a Blues/Rock powerhouse of a record! Jack played on one of my favourite UK programs, Later... w/Jools Holland a few days ago and, well...DAMN! Check it out for yourself.

To be honest, don't like the White Stripes and Dead Weather is a bit heavy for me BUT I love the man, the way he creates something different every year... Brilliant last LP. We need MORE Jack White, check Dave's site, a lot of Jools performances. Dave is the man!

2012/04/26

Section 60, A Mark C's recommendation.



Download for free several songs here

We're Section 60 a five piece guitar band from sheffield. Thats right guitar, i suppose we could get shot these days for saying that word but fuck it we are what we are and we ain't going to change for fuckin trends.
Anyway like we said we're Section 60 so just listen to the songs because at the end of the day thats all that really matters.

The songs, the songs, the songs.

 

An advice from SoulBrutha Dave (Andy is a fan too): The Right now!

SoulSistas And SoulBruthas! Got another tasty little blast of music for you to check out. The sophomore album from Chicago's up and coming Soul outfit, The Right Now has been spinning at HSB HQ since the vinyl arrived a few days ago. It's such an impressive follow up that really takes this band to the next level. They just hit the road and I caught them in between gigs on their way to Philadelphia and asked them about the journey from their promising debut to, what I consider one of the best records released this year so far. Listen the music here


Congrats on a great sophomore album. I'm really digging the mature progression of your sound. You can really hear everyone just getting better all way round, playing, singing and writing. I'm interested in the journey from the first album to this. How did you arrive here? We made our first record, Carry Me Home, soon after the genesis of the band. We'd only recently solidified our lineup and hadn't spent very much time touring or arranging the material. Don't get me wrong--we definitely thought we were prepared to go into the studio and cut a mostly live record. I think we were pretty naive about what it takes to make a killer live recording under the pressure and time constraints of the studio. Carry Me Home turned out great, but it took a lot of studio time and massaging from our producers to get a top-notch product. To be continued here

2012/04/24

Wilko's life.


Wilko Johnson will released his official autobiography “Looking Back On Me” on Wednesday May 30th, 2012.  Hailed as a unique, vibrant and hotly anticipated autobiography of the former Dr Feelgood guitarist, British R&B legend and proto-punk pioneer,  the autobiography is written and collated with acclaimed music writer Zoë Howe.
 
Fascinating, funny, deeply personal and visually compelling, Looking Back At Me is a fascinating rock 'n' roll scrapbook and oral history, and genuine treasure trove, marking the first time Wilko has told his story, no holds barred.  The book can be pre-ordered online from Cadiz Music here.
Within these colourful pages, the Canvey Island raised guitarist shares his recollections on everything from his Essex childhood and his Indian odyssey as a hippy, to the wild, turbulent days of Dr Feelgood and Ian Dury and The Blockheads, to his current band featuring Norman Watt-Roy (bass) and Dylan Howe (drums). 

Wilko also expands on his love for astronomy, art, literature, clouds, poetry, sci-fi, and Shakespeare; making him the ultimate Renaissance man of rock. Amid the twists, turns and tangents, the autobiography features many previously unseen images of Wilko from throughout his life, as well as an array of ephemera and anecdotes from notable Wilko fans including Robert Plant, Alison Moyet, JJ Burnel, Keith Levene, Gavin Martin and Whispering Bob Harris. The book also features a foreword by Mick Farren. Wilko will appear at an exclusive book signing at Rough Trade East at 6pm on Wednesday May 30th.  The signing will be following by a Q&A and a half hour set featuring Wilko and his band.  Rough Trade East is located at Dray Walk, Old Truman Brewery, 91 Brick Lane, London, E1 6QL. Wilko is currently in the middle of a UK tour that continues at the Huddersfield Lawrence Batley Theatre tonight.  Click here for the April UK tour dates.

2012/04/17

Being a musician today... See you on Sunday. ;)

Probably completely off till Sunday, Paris "stroll". ;)

Simon C's advice.




The Full Text of Steven Van Zandt’s Small Faces / Faces Hall of Fame Induction Speech


By Dave Swanson, Ultimate classic rock...

I’m Stevie Van Zandt. I’m here to induct the Small Faces and the Faces into the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame. I can’t read. I love Cleveland! You just can’t find a place to park! So, uh… a C note goes a long way in this town. Not too many bands get a second life. In this case I’m sure it helped having not just one, but miraculously two of the greatest white soul singers in the history of rock and roll, Steve Marriott and Rod Stewart. Steve was a child actor and walked away from a very promising acting career, deciding that music was a much better fit with his attention deficit disorder, long before it was fashionable. He started an R & B group called the Moments and went to work in a music store. As fate would have it, into that music store comes Ronnie Lane, and Steve Marriott sells him his first bass and they knew each other a little bit. Steve remembers Ronnie and his drummer friend Kenny Jones from a group called the Outcasts. Long story short, they jammed together, bonded over Marriott’s record collection then started a new group called the Small Faces.




When the original organ player didn’t quote work out, they would grab Ian McLagen from Boz and the Boz People, you all remember them. Yes because he happened to be a great keyboard and yes because he happened to be a great guy but most importantly he was the right height. By 1964, ’65, rhythm and blues had taken over the London clubs and as part of the blue eyed soul scene, the Small Faces had a decided disadvantage when compared to the Rolling Stones, the Animal, the Yardbirds, Pretty Things, Them…unlike those other groups, the Small Faces were actually good looking. These other guys were scaring everybody to death, ya know. And suddenly there were these cute little, cuddly, cheeky little devils, cheerful and friendly… playing like Booker T & The MG’s and singing like Wilson Pickett and having hits right away. My imagination isn’t good enough to picture all the sex they must have had. They became the darlings of the Mod movement. They lived the Mod lifestyle, you know, the right clothes for everything. Just as important as the right hair cut, the right dance steps, the tricked out scooters and the right amphetamines.

To further make the point of how important clothes were to the mods, the shrewd negotiators signed with heir first real manager, Don Arden, for about thirty dollars a week, a piece, because he threw in an open charge account on Carnaby Street. True! To this day, no one’s quite sure who got the better of that deal. They did a bunch of classic records which would define garage rock at its finest, and would make them a staple of our Underground Garage format. ‘All Or Nothing,’ ‘Watcha Gonna Do About It,’ ‘My Way Of Giving,’ ‘Sha La Lee,’ ‘Here Comes The Nice,’ ‘Itchycoo Park,’ ‘Tin Soldier,’ ‘Afterglow’ and of course the classic album ‘Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake.’ But ‘Itchycool Park’ was their only hit in America and tragically they never came over. So after about four or five years, Steve Marriott gets itchy indeed yet again, and splits and forms Humble Pie, who we would get to know in America. And Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood joined Lane, Jones and McLagen for the band’s second life. Rod Stewart had been around in London in several groups — Steampacket, Shotgun Express, among others.

But we would meet him as the incredible singer in one of the greatest bands of all time, the far too short lived, Jeff Beck Group. Just to quickly illustrate how media coverage was slightly different back then, I remember my bass player breathlessly rushing into rehearsal holding up a Rolling Stone magazine declaring, ‘Look everybody, Rod Stewart is white!’ We said, ‘Get the hell outta here, gimme that thing. White! Ahh… the pictures just faded.’ We had never heard anybody quite like him. We also have Jeff Beck to thank for introducing us to Ronnie Wood. But, as a bass player. And those first two Jeff Beck albums have some of the greatest bass playing you’ll ever hear in your life. But it turns out, he was a great guitar player before he was a great bass player, in another British Invasion group that forgot to invade, called the Birds. B-I-R-D-S. It’s like 1964, Ronnie’s like 16, 17 years old, he was already a great guitar player. A fantastic tone… I’m still trying to get it. And by the way, the Birds were the darlings of the Mods before the Small Faces and the Who, so no surprise Ronnie Wood fit right in with the Faces. When Rod and Ronnie joined the group, they decided to slightly alter the name. But changing the Small Faces to the Proudly Large Noses would have made the other three guys feel a bit inadequate. So they decided to just drop the Small part and they became the Faces. They would tour America with great records like ‘Three Button Hand Me Down,’ ‘Had Me A Real Good Time,’ ‘Flying,’ ‘Stay With Me,’ ‘Ooo La La,’ ‘Pool Hall Richard’ and many others. After all is said and done, both the Small Faces and the Faces had one thing very much in common — for a bunch of guys who never took themselves too seriously, they made some of the most soulful, beautiful music anyone’s ever made. They could rock as hard as anybody when they felt like it, and you may not have expected it, could be as touching and as personally engaging as a ballad could be delivered.

History would prove them profoundly influential in the ten years both groups existed. And regardless of how things may have ended, at their peak, both incarnations communicated what all great bands communicate, the camaraderie of a group of guys doing what they loved and knowing they needed each other to so it. It’s my honor, and my pleasure, to proudly welcome Steve Marriott, Ronnie Lane, Kenny Jones, Ian McLagen, Ron Wood and Rod Stewart…The Small Faces and the Faces to the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame!

2012/04/16

Small Faces finally conquer the States (Express.co.uk)


THIS weekend sees The Small Faces receive one of the most coveted awards the music world has to offer. Close to four-and-a-half decades after they split up, the group are inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, joining an elite club of legends.

Only half a dozen acts are chosen each year by the US-based institution, and what makes the inclusion of four unassuming east London lads particularly special is that it’s the first time in its 30-year history the hall of fame has opened its doors to a band that never played live in America.

“It’s a great honour,” says drummer Kenney Jones. “It’s not as well-known in this country, but in America it’s like a music biz knighthood. It used to bug me that we didn’t get in earlier, I thought they’d forgotten about us. Every year I’d see the list of nominees and wonder: ‘What’s going on? Where are we?’

“I assumed we’d shot ourselves in the foot by never going over there, but Mac (keyboard player Ian McLagan) couldn’t get a work permit because of a minor drugs conviction. Trivial by today’s standards, but it left us stuck at home.

“It hit us hard, because there was a feeling we could have done really well in the States, that we would have slotted right in, our sound was so attuned to America’s own music. There was no YouTube or internet, of course, so if you didn’t go over there and play you might as well not have existed.” To be continued HERE

2012/04/07

Released soon: MOD: The Rise and Reign of British Youth Culture. (Niels)


Product Description

Welcome to the world of the sharp-suited Mods. The Italianistas. The moped-riding, all-night-dancing instigators of what became, from its myriad sources, a Very British Culture.

But Mod was so much more than this. It wasn't just the suits. It wasn't just the consumerism or the hedonism. Mod was the DNA that formed the music, fashion, art and architecture of the latter half of the twentieth century.

Mod became a symbol of post-imperial British culture. It began life as the quintessential working-class movement of affluent Britain -- the conspicuous consumption of clothes, records and drugs were an assertion of individuality and an expression of discontent with the snobbery and prudery of British life. It was a popular cult that transformed into a mainstream phenomenon; a style that became a revolution.

Richard Weight tells the story of Britain's biggest and most influential youth cult, from its origins in the Soho jazz scene of the 1950s through to its explosion amid Beatlemania in the 1960s. Along the way he takes in the many influences that shaped it: from Be-Bop Jazz to RnB and Soul and Jamaican Ska, together with French and Italian fashion, Anglo-American Pop Art and continental Dadaism. And finally, Weight examines Mod's relationship hippie escapism, punk iconoclasm and eventually the politics of the far-right, as the cultural nationalism that Mod had spawned took on a more sinister form. As a result, Mods were condemned by moralists of the left and right alike.

Several decades on from the original Mod generation, today's fashion and music industries still pay tribute to those early days. Mod's journey from moral panic to commercial manipulation, from violent reaction to nostalgic remodeling, testifies to its enduring legacy.

2012/04/06

A bit more about the Sons' single!





it's out on iTunes and Spotify. The single was recorded at RAK studios where everything from All mod cons to Beady Eye's lp was recorded with Richard Woodcraft engineering, who worked on the Arctic Monkeys recordings and also mastered at air studios by Ray Staff who worked on George Harrison's All things must pass and has just remastered Ziggy Stardust.

RIP Jim Marshall (Cpt Stax' idea)

2012/04/04

Alabama Shakes, new band alert 2 (MikeC)


Ballroom D, on the fourth floor of the Austin Convention Center, is a cavernous, charmless room, colored in corporate grays and tans. But on March 14, when the room was transformed into the “Radio Day Stage” for the South by Southwest Music Conference, the smell of sterility was overwhelmed by a whiff of skepticism. Much of what’s left of the music industry had crowded into the SRO room to hear the Alabama Shakes, to see if the buzz band of the moment could possibly live up to its hype. After all, this group of four twentysomethings from small-town Alabama was appearing on magazine covers and being touted by Paste, The New York Times and NPR before they’d even released a debut album. I was just one of dozens of music critics in the room with arms crossed and notebooks ready, doubtful the band could live up to expectations.

Taking the stage were three skinny, clean-shaven guys (guitarist Heath Fogg, drummer Steve Johnson and guest keyboardist Ben Tanner), the bushy-bearded bassist Zac Cockrell and the big-boned female singer Brittany Howard. She wore a plaid shirt, black capris and nerdy, black-frame glasses stuck in her unruly hair. Their odd, small-town-Southern appearance was a good sign—at least they weren’t being hyped because they looked like L.A. models TBC HERE

Black Keys live, Zane Low Show.

The Black Keys performing Howlin For You, Next Girl, Gold On The Ceiling, Thick Freakness, I'll Be Your Man, Your Touch, Little Black Submarines, Dead And Gone, Tighten Up, Lonely Boy and I Got Mine in the BBC Radio 1 Live Loung for Zane Lowe February 2012


2012/04/03

Bax!

@Quelli che il calcio! Dedicated to our fellow Italian mods'

Eon Ballinger's show, celebrating the Stranglers...



Bon Iver live session.



4AD and Jagjaguwar have collaborated on a live session that captures a truly unique Bon Iver performance, featuring Justin Vernon and Sean Carey. On recent tours fans will have become accustomed to seeing Vernon flanked by an eleven-piece band, with the swell in numbers lending a grandiose element to even his most delicate songs. Sidestepping expectations, the idea Vernon presented for this session was to provide a wildly different experience.

Recorded in AIR Studio's Lyndurst Hall - a building that was originally a church and missionary school designed in 1880 by the great Victorian architect Alfred Waterhouse (designer of the Natural History Museum) - Vernon was joined only by Carey, with the pair positioning themselves opposite one another at two grand pianos. Although neither Justin nor Sean's first instrument is piano, they were able to remodel the songs in a way that showcases their complimentary vocals and, perhaps more strikingly, a seemingly effortless ability to experiment with form and structure.

As such, fans are treated to jaw-dropping interpretations of several songs from both the new album and the 'Blood Bank' EP, as well as a cover of Bonnie Raitt's "I Can't Make You Love Me". And interpretation is an apt word, as these songs are artfully abstracted from their original incarnations. Rather than layer the sound as on 'Bon Iver, Bon Iver', the focus is on paring back, in part evoking the minimalist approach of contemporary classical music, while remaining true enough to the source material to retain those elements characteristic of Bon Iver.

As on "Babys" and "Hinnom, TX", Vernon's trademark falsetto is positioned centre stage, framed by subtle and unexpected instrumental flourishes that render the performance simultaneously weighty and airless. It's quite an achievement that songs so widely-known and loved in their recorded form are able gain in emotional impact, and stands as testament to Bon Iver's singular talent.

1. Hinnom, TX
2. Wash.
3. I Can't Make You Love Me
4. Babys
5. Beth/Rest

Director: Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard
Recording & Mixing: Jake Jackson with Brian Joseph
Recorded in London at AIR Studios, October 16, 2011