Dizzy Gillespie was a name I'd known since childhood, and a boy called Gillespie at school was nicknamed Dizzy, but until investigating jazz, I believed him to be an early rock and roller like Chubby Checker. Looking at the cover photo, it reminds me that one of the reasons my mum cited for not letting me learn the trumpet was the permanent deformation of the cheeks it would cause (rather than the awful din she'd have to put up with). I can see where she got that idea. So, th

Welcome to album review number 800, three years and ten months after commencing this project. At this rate, New Year's Eve 2028 seems like a reasonable completion date to aim for. No special choice for this milestone, just what was next on the list. We've caught up with the recent purchases and we're back going through the old friends, which this Neil Young album certainly is. Neil Young was enjoying a run of critical success at this point. Two years earlier, Harvest Moon had

Robert Wyatt, one of the founders of the Canterbury scene, and denier that it was ever really a thing, has long been someone whose music I have admired, even if I've struggled at times. His ability to remain unconcerned about critical acclaim and selling shedloads of records, led to a steady, if sporadic output until his retirement from music over a decade ago. This is an album of minimal production, great simplicity, and dark, sad themes. It feels intensely personal, which d

This is one of the many Jah Wobble CDs I've picked up over the years (17 to be precise), yet which rarely get an outing. Wobble makes music which is always interesting, and never seems to stay still, always working in different genres and with different themes. This album is, as the title suggests, inspired by the poetry of William Blake, and combines JW's bass heavy ambient themes with (mostly) spoken recitations of Blake's poems. Opening with the long piece Songs Of Innocen

It's 1987 and I don't know if you've heard, but Wire are back and they aren't a punk group any more. We all know, that despite the three chord simplicity of their debut album, they never were just a punk band, and even a cursory listen to 1979's 154 album shows there's far more going on. After that album, various musical and contractual difficulties sent the band their separate ways, with Colin Newman releasing a couple of albums of varying degrees of commerciality, Graham Le

This is the last of the Lutterworth Ry Cooder purchases, and I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that while I'm a fan of his guitar playing, I struggle with him more as a songwriter or bandleader. This 1987 album is a real Americana roots music outing, drawing from country, blues, rock'n'roll, Cajun influences, and as I've hinted in the past it's not really my thing, even if I can appreciate when it's done well. There are lots of covers, all OK, not inspiring, including John

In the summer of 1978 I worked, first as a pot washer, then as a barman in Butlins in Filey, North Yorkshire. One midweek night, when the bar was a little quieter than usual, and I was feeling poorly, I knocked off a bit early, and went back to the 'chalet' (falling down shared room), took to my bed and put the radio on for company - just as John Peel kicked off his show with Hong Kong Garden, the Banshees' soon to be released debut single. My first exposure to Siouxsie. The

This one is yet another purchase for a ridiculously small sum in Harborough Market. Widely regarded as a stone cold classic, it's only taken me 50 years to get round to enjoying Stevie Wonder's 1976 double album. By 1976, Wonder had enough clout, enough knowledge of the industry and enough courage to dictate his own musical journey. Despite being only 26 when this was released, he had a decade of hits behind him. This album isn't just the hit singles (although there are plent

This CD wasn't going to be left on the racks in Harborough Market, and came home with me for a couple of quid. It had long been on my wish list. Of course, had I been a vinyl purist, I'd have been looking for the original, entitled Metal Box and on three 12" singles, currently a snip at a mere £150+ on Ebay. The CD is also available in a mini metal box, but it sounds like a storage nightmare. So let's consider this as it was first intended, in three parts (although this is, o

Another purchase from Harborough Market, this is the second Velevet Underground album, without the dulcet tones of Nico or the artistic gudance of Andy Warhol. I wasn't previously familiar with this album so was unsure what to expect. What I didn't expect was the abysmal quality of the recording. The ear soon tunes in, but it's a shock at first, and made me wonder if it was my copy. Wikipedia talks of the speed of its recording, and the use of new effects equipment leading to

Among the King Crimson bootlegs at Harborough Market (mostly live shows and suchlike) was this official release from the 1990s 'Double Trio' set up of two trios of guiar, bass and drums - Fripp, Gunn, Mastelotto v Belew, Levin, Bruford. It says 57 minutes of improvised music and poster on the sticker. Does anyone old enough to enjoy the Mighty Crim really want a poster of their heroes? One folded down to the size of a CD? I thought not. So, how to sum this up? The only previo

The second of the Lutterworth haul of Ry Cooder albums is this one from 1982. The more I listen to Cooder the more I come to believe that I'm not as convinced by his music as I am by he himself seeming to be a good egg, and this is a fairly lacklustre outing. UFO Has Landed In The Ghetto is a futuristic (for the 1980s), proto rap piece, which is a solid, if uninspiring song, while covers of Dylan's I Need A Woman, Curtis Mayfield's Gypsy Woman and Carl Perkins' Blue Suede Sho

There's a lovely chap who sells CDs in Harborough Market, and if you buy anything more than a couple, the cost seems to add up to somewhere between half and two-thirds of what conventional arithmetic would suggest. For cash, obviously. So it's always a pleasure to purchase from him, and he's been particularly good recently on old prog favourites. I can't remember if I ever owned this on vinyl, but I certainly knew it well from teenage years. While not the first Genesis album,

I bought this album on vinyl in the late 1980s from the excellent Reckless Records in Soho's Berwick St, and was captivated at first listen. John Peel had championed the band, and this was their first album release on a major Western label, although about 30 albums had previously been released in Zimbabwe, and a couple in UK on the DiscAfrique label. At the time I, rather pretentiously, would offer the opinion that the future of pop music lay in the African continent and we'd

Zappa is like a very itchy wound. Unfortunately, I can't help scratching it, and too often it becomes poisonous, and leaves me feeling worse and a little grubby. But sometimes it's very satisfying. I have history with this album, having previously owned it on double cassette. I picked it up from a short lived second hand record shop in Deal, owned by a chap whom I uncharitably knew as 'Harry the Robber'. The name stemmed from the one time I carted about 50 LPs which I never l

On a recent visit to Lutterworth - I know, this jet setting life that you all envy - I happened upon a charity shop which seemed to have recently adopted a new policy of sorting out the interesting stuff from the dross, and charging a little more for it. Included was some kind donor's Ry Cooder collection, so I snapped this and two others up. It's an early Cooder album of American traditional / older blues songs, which, while nothing amazing happens, provides forty minutes of

It's been very quiet on here for a couple of weeks, and there's a backlog of recent purchases to be dealt with. One of these is this album (for which Oxfam charged a ...er... realistic price), effectively three archive sessions (from 1975) from the punk/garage band which spawned both Pere Ubu and the Dead Boys. Most of the main players of the band are no longer with us. First to go was Peter Faulkner, tragically young in 1977, while David Thomas, who spent a lifetime leading

This was a cheap purchase from Harborough Market a couple of weeks ago, continuing my frugal examination of the Lambchop back catalogue. My first grumble about this one is the CD packaging, while the tracing paper biro sketch of what appears to be a sex orgy (one side too graphic for Discogs to show), unless it gives some basic details about the album, it's style over function. This album seems a bit heavier in country and western themes than previous albums, alongside a few

My introduction to this was the 1975 Ken Russell film, which we all dashed to see on release, and it was only later that I borrowed (and of course, taped) the album from a friend. I picked the CD album up in a sale much, much later - this version being the 1996 reissue. I think it still stands up today, even if only as a naive attempt by a young man to do something a little more than the standard ten song album, and create something bigger than the band had previously done. F

A couple of quid in Harborough Market was the asking price for this 30th anniversary reissue (issued 27 years after in 2002!) of the mighty Crim's live album from 1975. Recorded in Asbury Park, NJ and Providence, RI during the band's USA tour, this was released following Fripp's disbandment of the group in early 1975. Opening with an excerpt from Fripp's No Pussyfooting collaboration with Eno as the band take the stage, we kick off with a splendidly raucous version of Larks T