Vinyl Release

Sort By: Post DateTitle Publish Date
Steve Sutherland  |  Sep 06, 2023
This debut record didn't launch the band to stardom, but remains much-loved by fans and the musicians it influenced. Steve Sutherland hears the 180g reissue

A funny thing happens when you get to a certain age and you've had a bit of a past life; people start writing about you. You crop up in their memoirs or they mention your name in interviews and reminiscences. As a rule these things are best avoided, especially if you're thin-skinned about personal criticism, although I can mostly handle the contrary opinions and character assassinations, writing them off as differences of perspective or sour grapes.

Steve Sutherland  |  May 07, 2024
Ex-Happy Mondays stars Shaun Ryder and Bez returned to the top of the UK charts with this rockin', rollin' and rappin' LP. Steve Sutherland applauds its return on 180g

Pinch yourself. You're not dreaming, although it might get a bit Alice In Wonderland a little later on. We are dining al fresco on a terrace overlooking vineyards near Nice in the South of France. At the head of the table is our host, Michael Hutchence, who we have popped over from London to interview.

Steve Sutherland  |  May 31, 2019
This debut LP laid down a beat that courses through the veins of rock 'n' roll to this very day. Steve Sutherland pays tribute as he hears the 180g reissue on Sundazed

What's the baddest record ever made? I don't mean baddest as in worst. I mean baddest as in bad-ass, brimming with threat and braggadocio. A few candidates immediately spring to mind. Honey Boy Martin's 'Dreader Than Dread' threatens to shank you and send you to the graveyard. Johnny Cash's 'The Man In Black' is a pretty broody dude. Dr John The Night Tripper's 'I Walk On Gilded Splinters' boasts destructive powers of magic malignancy.

Steve Sutherland  |  Nov 04, 2022
Cobbled together by Malcolm McLaren to bring the 'Burundi beat' to the masses, this New Wave group made a brief but memorable impression on Steve Sutherland

Anyone remember SFX? Anyone? No? Nobody? Not to worry. It didn't live that long. SFX was a music magazine launched in November 1981, and which died on the vine in the Summer of '82. It was edited by ex-NME writer Max Bell and the twist was that all the content was on a cassette tape, not printed on paper. Billed as 'The only music magazine on C-60', there were about 19 issues in all, sold in the shops mounted on cardboard.

Steve Sutherland  |  Mar 06, 2020
It was a release that had all the pundits scratching their heads for how best to describe it. Steve Sutherland sits transfixed like Alice in Wonderland by this 180g reissue

Let's get this party started with the tree surgeon. Yup, the tree surgeon. To be strictly accurate, $250's worth of tree surgeon because that's how much Don Van Vliet charged Straight, his record company, for the services of an arboriculturalist's services during the recording of the album we're here to celebrate.

Steve Sutherland  |  Mar 14, 2022
Boasting three of his most cherished songs, this LP would put Stevens in the vanguard of the '70s singer-songwriter movement. Steve Sutherland hears the 180g reissue

In Malibu, it seems, miracles really do happen. 'I was an Englishman. I didn't know it wasn't wise to go out at that time of day and take a swim, so I did. I decided to turn back and head for shore and at that point I realised, "I'm fighting the Pacific". There was no way I was going to win. There was no-one on this earth who could help me so I did the most instinctive thing... I called out to God and said, "God, if you save me, I'll work for you", and in that moment a wave came from behind me and pushed me forward. He saved me... The tide somehow had changed and I was able to get back to land.'

Steve Sutherland  |  Dec 07, 2020
Packed with tracks that would become staples of rock radio, this 1970 LP from Creedence Clearwater Revival is now released on 180g vinyl. Steve Sutherland listens...

Let's talk 'covers'. Surely everyone knows the rule by now: a cover version is only acceptable if it takes the original and does something different with it, which at least equals or at best improves it. There. It's not exactly rocket science is it? So how come there are still so very few classic cover versions after all these many years?

Steve Sutherland  |  May 16, 2023
Adding Neil Young to CSN brought supergroup status and a multi-selling album, but the band were not happy, says Steve Sutherland, as he hears the 180g reissue

This is Graham Nash talking about David Crosby just over a year ago: 'Who are you? Are you a decent person? Or are you an a**hole? It would be very easy for me to get into why I don't want to do any more Crosby, Stills and Nash or Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young work. There are too many reasons. It's too complicated. It's too painful. I'm just telling you, it's over. It's an incredible shame because when we're good, we make very good music that touches people's hearts and changes their minds. But he tore the heart out of CSN and CSN&Y because he's not a really great person'.

Steve Sutherland  |  Oct 06, 2023
Four years in the making, this swansong album from the electronic music pioneers swapped samples for session musicians. Steve Sutherland celebrates its brilliance

What if you could reinvent your life and have another go at it, starting somewhere, somewhen else? Me, I'd opt to have been born a decade earlier and I'd have moved to Los Angeles in 1965, aged 17. That way I'd have been hanging around the Sunset Strip in 1967 where, at the Whisky A Go Go alone, I'd have seen Love, The Doors, The Byrds, Jimi Hendrix, Buffalo Springfield, Moby Grape, Spirit, Janis Joplin, and Them with Van Morrison. I might even have hopped a short haul or thumbed a ride to Monterey where the Pop Festival was, as they say, happening.

Steve Sutherland  |  Oct 01, 2018
It was the 1962 live album that launched the Surfin' genre. Listening to the 180g reissue, Steve Sutherland still wishes the guy on the sleeve was him

Every now and then, it's OK to be wrong. Not often, I grant you, but on occasion a long-held misbelief can be way better than the actual fact. That lyric you misheard years ago maybe, a phrase which has informed your enjoyment of a particular song – until you discover that the words and meaning were something different all along. Sometimes the reality can ruin the thereafter. And it's better to continue with your fantasy.

Steve Sutherland  |  Feb 19, 2021
Steve Sutherland listens again to the debut LP that catapulted a teenage singer to stardom as over half a century later the album is re-released on 180g vinyl

Dylan digs Donovan!' This was the headline on the front cover of British weekly Melody Maker, on the 8th of May 1965. It wasn't true of course – not remotely so.

Steve Sutherland  |  May 17, 2022
The band leader was an unusual but inspired choice for the soundtrack of Otto Preminger's courtroom drama, says Steve Sutherland, as he considers the 180g reissue

Whether life was imitating art or vice versa is a moot point, but whichever way you look at it Joseph Nye Welch was one extraordinary geezer. A partner in a Boston law firm called Hale and Dorr, on the 9th of June 1954 he found himself in court challenging Senator McCarthy to provide 'before sundown' the list of 130 Communists posing a so-called subversive threat in defence plants across the US.

Steve Sutherland  |  Aug 05, 2020
Take one pale Texan and a band of top talent and you have an LP ready to rock the charts. Steve Sutherland assesses a 1972 album destined for reissue on 180g vinyl

Say what you like about Quentin Tarantino, but one thing's for sure: the man's got great taste in movies. Listed among his favourites are the obvious (Apocalypse Now, Fight Club), the not so well known but fantastic (Takashi Miike's Audition, Bong Joon-ho's The Host) and one that especially concerns us here, Richard Linklater's Dazed And Confused.

Steve Sutherland  |  Nov 07, 2023
This landmark album rewrote the folk rulebook, but that didn't stop the band splintering before it was released. Steve Sutherland hears the recent reissue on 180g vinyl

Way back in the day, I was telling Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead about one of those weird cartoons that used to pop up in episodes of Monty Python's Flying Circus on the telly. The particular cartoon in question featured a giant big toe, sliced off at the joint, which had been re-assembled as the tip of the trunk of some kind of prehistoric mammoth – an error in extrapolation which sought to ridicule scientific assumption in a similar vein to the way the Pythons mocked religion and politics, etc.

Steve Sutherland  |  Apr 05, 2024
Blending genres and fusing samples, this 1998 album – now remastered on 180g – cemented Norman Cook's status as the king of Big Beat, says Steve Sutherland

It may well have something to do with the wretched state of the world right now but have you noticed how the 1990s are back in vogue? Celebrated by those who lived through it as a halcyon decade on a par with the legendary 1960s, the '90s are being glowingly reassessed as a time of growth and hope when world politics had not gone totally crazy, we weren't all existing on the breadline, the arts were actually appreciated as something inspirational and worthwhile, and anything seemed within the range of possibility for just about everyone.

Pages

X