Podcasts about Abbey Road

Episode #129 Check out the custom playlist for Episode #129Sam Carter from Architects is preparing for a European leg of the bands tour, in support of their latest album 'The Classic Symptoms of a Broken Spirit'. Sam talked to Mistress Carrie about the album listening party recently in Vegas, covid, politics, running, music, mental health, rescuing his pets in Romania, social media, Spinal Tap, The Beatles and so much more.  Find Sam Carter Online:TwitterInstagramFind Architects Online:WebsiteInstagramTwitterFacebookYoutubeTikTokFind Mistress Carrie Online:Official WebsiteThe Mistress Carrie Backstage Pass on PatreonTwitterFacebookInstagramYouTubeCameoTikTok

Hindsight being what it is, one can only imagine the reaction listeners had when they first reached the back half of side 4 of the White Album in November 68, and the sounds of "Revolution 9" came out of their stereos for the first time. While adjectives such as "bewilderment" or "confusion" probably are safe bets, The Beatles had been sowing seeds of avant-garde & outside influence in their music since they introduced the sitar on Norwegian Wood in 1965, moving to tape loops and backwards tracks and exploratory (if not self-indulgent) recording techniques on Revolver, Sgt. Pepper and Magical Mystery tour, and they'd been nothing if not progressive since day 1. All of them had experimented in making their own home-studio recordings of weirdness, and while they hadn't completely committed to putting out something like this in a traditional commercial sense, once John had Yoko's encouragement to stretch out to new artistic horizons, all bets were off. He was staying true to his art and following his muse, and Beatle fans were invited to come along for the ride. Our first taste of this is "Revolution 9," an 8 minute plus journey through playful and terrifying soundscapes, spoken word, and tape loops, with roots from the original extended take of "Revolution 1." The final product is a auditory journey through John's idea of the sonics of actual revolution: chaos, explosions, backwards sounds, eerie melodies, screaming, stereo spectrum panning creating a dizzying effect. Over 40 loops pass through the tape heads at EMI's Abbey Road studios, each faded in and out of the track in real time by John, with help from Yoko and George. It's truly a one-of-a-kind performance, using the studio as an instrument, both musical and one of chaos. And while it may have caused many listeners to ask "why?," if you look beyond the obvious, there's more important questions to ask, and more joy to be discovered. Why would an artist who's work I so admire put out something I don't get? Why don't I get it? What are my expectations, and are they fair to the artist? The more time you spend with a track like this, the more you can start to see those things and begin to appreciate the track. I, for one, appreciate that this is maybe the only song that you can never hear the same way twice. It's like a choose-your-own-adventure book, but in a song. I also like that it's essentially a non-visual soundtrack. You can listen to it and picture every element of it in your head, all are total mysteries until you imagine what's passing through your eardrums. And to add to it all, they've dropped this slice of musique concrete on a pop album that ended up in like, 30 million homes. Arguably one of the boldest and bravest artistic moves ever. The Beatles could be absolutely fearless, and what sums that up more than this? Coming back to chat with us this week is James Campion, author of the book Take A Sad Song: The Emotional Currency of Hey Jude. We had such a good time talking "Revolution 1," we had to have him back for #9! We dive deep into topics like what constitutes art, being true to yourself, Stockhausen, and more. This is one of our favorite chats yet! Grab a copy of "Take A Sad Song" anywhere you get books, or order one through jamescampion.com and he'll even sign it for you! What do you think? Too high? Too low? Or just right? Let us know in the comments on Facebook, Instagram @rankingthebeatles, or Twitter @rankingbeatles! Be sure to visit rankingthebeatles.com! Wanna show your support? Buy Us A Coffee! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/rankingthebeatles/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/rankingthebeatles/support

Time to "get" Bent, News that is!-If These Walls Could Sing Abbey Road documentary imminent!-Bruce Springsteen reveals how he rebooted on his latest project! -Jethro Tull talks new album for 2023!-Morrisey, oh, Morrisey... -Paul "The Quiet Pistol" Cook speaks...and there's more, of course.-Did you know that Jimi Hendrix's 80th birthday is almost here?We love our sponsors!!! Please visit their web sites, and support them because they make this crazy show go:Boldfoot Socks   https://boldfoot.comCrooked Eye Brewery   https://crookedeyebrewery.com/Don't forget that you can find all of our episodes, on-demand, for free right here on our web site: https://imbalancedhistory.com/   

This week we're not doing The Gaslight Anthem due to some scheduling issues, so we've pivoted to Gene Clark (y'know, of The Byrd's fame) and his fourth album No Other. When it was released this album was seen as a bit of a misfire for Gene. It didn't land well critically, and given that it was turned in way over budget, it appeared that even the label, Asylum records, were keen to drop it in the dust bin of history. Indeed, they deleted the record from their catalogue less than two years after its release. Clark then played things for the rest of his solo career, diving right into Southern fried country rock for the majority of it. In the years afterwards, Clark lamented the lack of success and acclaim for the album and continued to state that it was his masterpiece. It wouldn't see the light of day again until 1989, when a small German label reissued it around the time Clark's solo career was on the wane. After his death (and perhaps because of it) interest in his work began to climb again through the 1990s. This led to two songs from No Other appearing on a compilation that was released soon after. Yet it wasn't until the late 2010s when the album was finally released again, this time given the full 5.1 surround sounds, SACD/Blu ray treatment. This super deluxe treatment, remastered at Abbey Road and loaded with alternate studio version of the tracks, stands as true testament to his genius. He was indeed right all along – it is his best work. We go through his entire career in this episode, talking about the good and the bad. Join us next week as we dive into the album itself.

The final installment of our 5-part series on The Beatles is LIVE! Join us as we discuss the albums Abbey Road and Let It Be and the bittersweet ending to one of the most legendary bands of our time. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

It's another exciting podcast from Mike Parry and Lesley-Ann Jones as Life on Planet Porky returns. Today's topics include: LAJs night at the Sheraton, Arts Council money distribution, a new book on Abbey Road, Ringo's influence on the Beatles, Imran Khan's assassination attempt, Porky's friendship with Benazir Bhutto, Louis Tomlinson and One Direction, getting run over by your own car, Ronnie Radford, Cup final memories, Katy Perry's love of newspapers, the future of the press, Jeremy Clarkson slamming James Corden, Carpool Karaoke, and Andy Taylor's terminal cancer. It's the podcast which doesn't eat eggs, it's Life on Planet Porky.  This podcast is brought to you in association with Harry's.  Follow the show on Twitter: @PlanetPorky or Mike is: @MikeParry8 while you can find Lesley-Ann: @LAJwriter. Or you can email us questions or comments to: planetporkypod@gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you!

Episode one hundred and fifty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “See Emily Play", the birth of the UK underground, and the career of Roger Barrett, known as Syd. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-five-minute bonus episode available, on "First Girl I Loved" by the Incredible String Band. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources No Mixcloud this time, due to the number of Pink Floyd songs. I referred to two biographies of Barrett in this episode -- A Very Irregular Head by Rob Chapman is the one I would recommend, and the one whose narrative I have largely followed. Some of the information has been superseded by newer discoveries, but Chapman is almost unique in people writing about Barrett in that he actually seems to care about the facts and try to get things right rather than make up something more interesting. Crazy Diamond by Mike Watkinson and Pete Anderson is much less reliable, but does have quite a few interview quotes that aren't duplicated by Chapman. Information about Joe Boyd comes from Boyd's book White Bicycles. In this and future episodes on Pink Floyd I'm also relying on Nick Mason's Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd and Pink Floyd: All the Songs by Jean-Michel Guesdon and Philippe Margotin. The compilation Relics contains many of the most important tracks from Barrett's time with Pink Floyd, while Piper at the Gates of Dawn is his one full album with them. Those who want a fuller history of his time with the group will want to get Piper and also the box set Cambridge St/ation 1965-1967. Barrett only released two solo albums during his career. They're available as a bundle here. Completists will also want the rarities and outtakes collection Opel.  ERRATA: I talk about “Interstellar Overdrive” as if Barrett wrote it solo. The song is credited to all four members, but it was Barrett who came up with the riff I talk about. And annoyingly, given the lengths I went to to deal correctly with Barrett's name, I repeatedly refer to "Dave" Gilmour, when Gilmour prefers David. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A note before I begin -- this episode deals with drug use and mental illness, so anyone who might be upset by those subjects might want to skip this one. But also, there's a rather unique problem in how I deal with the name of the main artist in the story today. The man everyone knows as Syd Barrett was born Roger Barrett, used that name with his family for his whole life, and in later years very strongly disliked being called "Syd", yet everyone other than his family called him that at all times until he left the music industry, and that's the name that appears on record labels, including his solo albums. I don't believe it's right to refer to people by names they choose not to go by themselves, but the name Barrett went by throughout his brief period in the public eye was different from the one he went by later, and by all accounts he was actually distressed by its use in later years. So what I'm going to do in this episode is refer to him as "Roger Barrett" when a full name is necessary for disambiguation or just "Barrett" otherwise, but I'll leave any quotes from other people referring to "Syd" as they were originally phrased. In future episodes on Pink Floyd, I'll refer to him just as Barrett, but in episodes where I discuss his influence on other artists, I will probably have to use "Syd Barrett" because otherwise people who haven't listened to this episode won't know what on Earth I'm talking about. Anyway, on with the show. “It's gone!” sighed the Rat, sinking back in his seat again. “So beautiful and strange and new. Since it was to end so soon, I almost wish I had never heard it. For it has roused a longing in me that is pain, and nothing seems worth while but just to hear that sound once more and go on listening to it for ever. No! There it is again!” he cried, alert once more. Entranced, he was silent for a long space, spellbound. “Now it passes on and I begin to lose it,” he said presently. “O Mole! the beauty of it! The merry bubble and joy, the thin, clear, happy call of the distant piping! Such music I never dreamed of, and the call in it is stronger even than the music is sweet! Row on, Mole, row! For the music and the call must be for us.” That's a quote from a chapter titled "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" from the classic children's book The Wind in the Willows -- a book which for most of its length is a fairly straightforward story about anthropomorphic animals having jovial adventures, but which in that one chapter has Rat and Mole suddenly encounter the Great God Pan and have a hallucinatory, transcendental experience caused by his music, one so extreme it's wiped from their minds, as they simply cannot process it. The book, and the chapter, was a favourite of Roger Barrett, a young child born in Cambridge in 1946. Barrett came from an intellectual but not especially bookish family. His father, Dr. Arthur Barrett, was a pathologist -- there's a room in Addenbrooke's Hospital named after him -- but he was also an avid watercolour painter, a world-leading authority on fungi, and a member of the Cambridge Philharmonic Society who was apparently an extraordinarily good singer; while his mother Winifred was a stay-at-home mother who was nonetheless very active in the community, organising a local Girl Guide troupe. They never particularly encouraged their family to read, but young Roger did particularly enjoy the more pastoral end of the children's literature of the time. As well as the Wind in the Willows he also loved Alice in Wonderland, and the Little Grey Men books -- a series of stories about tiny gnomes and their adventures in the countryside. But his two big passions were music and painting. He got his first ukulele at age eleven, and by the time his father died, just before Roger's sixteenth birthday, he had graduated to playing a full-sized guitar. At the time his musical tastes were largely the same as those of any other British teenager -- he liked Chubby Checker, for example -- though he did have a tendency to prefer the quirkier end of things, and some of the first songs he tried to play on the guitar were those of Joe Brown: [Excerpt: Joe Brown, "I'm Henry VIII I Am"] Barrett grew up in Cambridge, and for those who don't know it, Cambridge is an incubator of a very particular kind of eccentricity. The university tends to attract rather unworldly intellectual overachievers to the city -- people who might not be able to survive in many other situations but who can thrive in that one -- and every description of Barrett's father suggests he was such a person -- Barrett's sister Rosemary has said that she believes that most of the family were autistic, though whether this is a belief based on popular media portrayals or a deeper understanding I don't know. But certainly Cambridge is full of eccentric people with remarkable achievements, and such people tend to have children with a certain type of personality, who try simultaneously to live up to and rebel against expectations of greatness that come from having parents who are regarded as great, and to do so with rather less awareness of social norms than the typical rebel has. In the case of Roger Barrett, he, like so many others of his generation, was encouraged to go into the sciences -- as indeed his father had, both in his career as a pathologist and in his avocation as a mycologist. The fifties and sixties were a time, much like today, when what we now refer to as the STEM subjects were regarded as new and exciting and modern. But rather than following in his father's professional footsteps, Roger Barrett instead followed his hobbies. Dr. Barrett was a painter and musician in his spare time, and Roger was to turn to those things to earn his living. For much of his teens, it seemed that art would be the direction he would go in. He was, everyone agrees, a hugely talented painter, and he was particularly noted for his mastery of colours. But he was also becoming more and more interested in R&B music, especially the music of Bo Diddley, who became his new biggest influence: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, "Who Do You Love?"] He would often spend hours with his friend Dave Gilmour, a much more advanced guitarist, trying to learn blues riffs. By this point Barrett had already received the nickname "Syd". Depending on which story you believe, he either got it when he started attending a jazz club where an elderly jazzer named Sid Barrett played, and the people were amused that their youngest attendee, like one of the oldest, was called Barrett; or, more plausibly, he turned up to a Scout meeting once wearing a flat cap rather than the normal scout beret, and he got nicknamed "Sid" because it made him look working-class and "Sid" was a working-class sort of name. In 1962, by the time he was sixteen, Barrett joined a short-lived group called Geoff Mott and the Mottoes, on rhythm guitar. The group's lead singer, Geoff Mottlow, would go on to join a band called the Boston Crabs who would have a minor hit in 1965 with a version of the Coasters song "Down in Mexico": [Excerpt: The Boston Crabs, "Down in Mexico"] The bass player from the Mottoes, Tony Sainty, and the drummer Clive Welham, would go on to form another band, The Jokers Wild, with Barrett's friend Dave Gilmour. Barrett also briefly joined another band, Those Without, but his time with them was similarly brief. Some sources -- though ones I consider generally less reliable -- say that the Mottoes' bass player wasn't Tony Sainty, but was Roger Waters, the son of one of Barrett's teachers, and that one of the reasons the band split up was that Waters had moved down to London to study architecture. I don't think that's the case, but it's definitely true that Barrett knew Waters, and when he moved to London himself the next year to go to Camberwell Art College, he moved into a house where Waters was already living. Two previous tenants at the same house, Nick Mason and Richard Wright, had formed a loose band with Waters and various other amateur musicians like Keith Noble, Shelagh Noble, and Clive Metcalfe. That band was sometimes known as the Screaming Abdabs, The Megadeaths, or The Tea Set -- the latter as a sly reference to slang terms for cannabis -- but was mostly known at first as Sigma 6, named after a manifesto by the novelist Alexander Trocchi for a kind of spontaneous university. They were also sometimes known as Leonard's Lodgers, after the landlord of the home that Barrett was moving into, Mike Leonard, who would occasionally sit in on organ and would later, as the band became more of a coherent unit, act as a roadie and put on light shows behind them -- Leonard was himself very interested in avant-garde and experimental art, and it was his idea to play around with the group's lighting. By the time Barrett moved in with Waters in 1964, the group had settled on the Tea Set name, and consisted of Waters on bass, Mason on drums, Wright on keyboards, singer Chris Dennis, and guitarist Rado Klose. Of the group, Klose was the only one who was a skilled musician -- he was a very good jazz guitarist, while the other members were barely adequate. By this time Barrett's musical interests were expanding to include folk music -- his girlfriend at the time talked later about him taking her to see Bob Dylan on his first UK tour and thinking "My first reaction was seeing all these people like Syd. It was almost as if every town had sent one Syd Barrett there. It was my first time seeing people like him." But the music he was most into was the blues. And as the Tea Set were turning into a blues band, he joined them. He even had a name for the new band that would make them more bluesy. He'd read the back of a record cover which had named two extremely obscure blues musicians -- musicians he may never even have heard. Pink Anderson: [Excerpt: Pink Anderson, "Boll Weevil"] And Floyd Council: [Excerpt: Floyd Council, "Runaway Man Blues"] Barrett suggested that they put together the names of the two bluesmen, and presumably because "Anderson Council" didn't have quite the right ring, they went for The Pink Floyd -- though for a while yet they would sometimes still perform as The Tea Set, and they were sometimes also called The Pink Floyd Sound. Dennis left soon after Barrett joined, and the new five-piece Pink Floyd Sound started trying to get more gigs. They auditioned for Ready Steady Go! and were turned down, but did get some decent support slots, including for a band called the Tridents: [Excerpt: The Tridents, "Tiger in Your Tank"] The members of the group were particularly impressed by the Tridents' guitarist and the way he altered his sound using feedback -- Barrett even sent a letter to his girlfriend with a drawing of the guitarist, one Jeff Beck, raving about how good he was. At this point, the group were mostly performing cover versions, but they did have a handful of originals, and it was these they recorded in their first demo sessions in late 1964 and early 1965. They included "Walk With Me Sydney", a song written by Roger Waters as a parody of "Work With Me Annie" and "Dance With Me Henry" -- and, given the lyrics, possibly also Hank Ballard's follow-up "Henry's Got Flat Feet (Can't Dance No More) and featuring Rick Wright's then-wife Juliette Gale as Etta James to Barrett's Richard Berry: [Excerpt: The Tea Set, "Walk With Me Sydney"] And four songs by Barrett, including one called "Double-O Bo" which was a Bo Diddley rip-off, and "Butterfly", the most interesting of these early recordings: [Excerpt: The Tea Set, "Butterfly"] At this point, Barrett was very unsure of his own vocal abilities, and wrote a letter to his girlfriend saying "Emo says why don't I give up 'cos it sounds horrible, and I would but I can't get Fred to join because he's got a group (p'raps you knew!) so I still have to sing." "Fred" was a nickname for his old friend Dave Gilmour, who was playing in his own band, Joker's Wild, at this point. Summer 1965 saw two important events in the life of the group. The first was that Barrett took LSD for the first time. The rest of the group weren't interested in trying it, and would indeed generally be one of the more sober bands in the rock business, despite the reputation their music got. The other members would for the most part try acid once or twice, around late 1966, but generally steer clear of it. Barrett, by contrast, took it on a very regular basis, and it would influence all the work he did from that point on. The other event was that Rado Klose left the group. Klose was the only really proficient musician in the group, but he had very different tastes to the other members, preferring to play jazz to R&B and pop, and he was also falling behind in his university studies, and decided to put that ahead of remaining in the band. This meant that the group members had to radically rethink the way they were making music. They couldn't rely on instrumental proficiency, so they had to rely on ideas. One of the things they started to do was use echo. They got primitive echo devices and put both Barrett's guitar and Wright's keyboard through them, allowing them to create new sounds that hadn't been heard on stage before. But they were still mostly doing the same Slim Harpo and Bo Diddley numbers everyone else was doing, and weren't able to be particularly interesting while playing them. But for a while they carried on doing the normal gigs, like a birthday party they played in late 1965, where on the same bill was a young American folk singer named Paul Simon, and Joker's Wild, the band Dave Gilmour was in, who backed Simon on a version of "Johnny B. Goode". A couple of weeks after that party, Joker's Wild went into the studio to record their only privately-pressed five-song record, of them performing recent hits: [Excerpt: Joker's Wild, "Walk Like a Man"] But The Pink Floyd Sound weren't as musically tight as Joker's Wild, and they couldn't make a living as a cover band even if they wanted to. They had to do something different. Inspiration then came from a very unexpected source. I mentioned earlier that one of the names the group had been performing under had been inspired by a manifesto for a spontaneous university by the writer Alexander Trocchi. Trocchi's ideas had actually been put into practice by an organisation calling itself the London Free School, based in Notting Hill. The London Free School was an interesting mixture of people from what was then known as the New Left, but who were already rapidly aging, the people who had been the cornerstone of radical campaigning in the late fifties and early sixties, who had run the Aldermaston marches against nuclear weapons and so on, and a new breed of countercultural people who in a year or two would be defined as hippies but at the time were not so easy to pigeonhole. These people were mostly politically radical but very privileged people -- one of the founder members of the London Free School was Peter Jenner, who was the son of a vicar and the grandson of a Labour MP -- and they were trying to put their radical ideas into practice. The London Free School was meant to be a collective of people who would help each other and themselves, and who would educate each other. You'd go to the collective wanting to learn how to do something, whether that's how to improve the housing in your area or navigate some particularly difficult piece of bureaucracy, or how to play a musical instrument, and someone who had that skill would teach you how to do it, while you hopefully taught them something else of value. The London Free School, like all such utopian schemes, ended up falling apart, but it had a wider cultural impact than most such schemes. Britain's first underground newspaper, the International Times, was put together by people involved in the Free School, and the annual Notting Hill Carnival, which is now one of the biggest outdoor events in Britain every year with a million attendees, came from the merger of outdoor events organised by the Free School with older community events. A group of musicians called AMM was associated with many of the people involved in the Free School. AMM performed totally improvised music, with no structure and no normal sense of melody and harmony: [Excerpt: AMM, "What Is There In Uselesness To Cause You Distress?"] Keith Rowe, the guitarist in AMM, wanted to find his own technique uninfluenced by American jazz guitarists, and thought of that in terms that appealed very strongly to the painterly Barrett, saying "For the Americans to develop an American school of painting, they somehow had to ditch or lose European easel painting techniques. They had to make a break with the past. What did that possibly mean if you were a jazz guitar player? For me, symbolically, it was Pollock laying the canvas on the floor, which immediately abandons European easel technique. I could see that by laying the canvas down, it became inappropriate to apply easel techniques. I thought if I did that with a guitar, I would just lose all those techniques, because they would be physically impossible to do." Rowe's technique-free technique inspired Barrett to make similar noises with his guitar, and to think less in terms of melody and harmony than pure sound. AMM's first record came out in 1966. Four of the Free School people decided to put together their own record label, DNA, and they got an agreement with Elektra Records to distribute its first release -- Joe Boyd, the head of Elektra in the UK, was another London Free School member, and someone who had plenty of experience with disruptive art already, having been on the sound engineering team at the Newport Folk Festival when Dylan went electric. AMM went into the studio and recorded AMMMusic: [Excerpt: AMM, "What Is There In Uselesness To Cause You Distress?"] After that came out, though, Peter Jenner, one of the people who'd started the label, came to a realisation. He said later "We'd made this one record with AMM. Great record, very seminal, seriously avant-garde, but I'd started adding up and I'd worked out that the deal we had, we got two percent of retail, out of which we, the label, had to pay for recording costs and pay ourselves. I came to the conclusion that we were going to have to sell a hell of a lot of records just to pay the recording costs, let alone pay ourselves any money and build a label, so I realised we had to have a pop band because pop bands sold a lot of records. It was as simple as that and I was as naive as that." Jenner abandoned DNA records for the moment, and he and his friend Andrew King decided they were going to become pop managers. and they found The Pink Floyd Sound playing at an event at the Marquee, one of a series of events that were variously known as Spontaneous Underground and The Trip. Other participants in those events included Soft Machine; Mose Allison; Donovan, performing improvised songs backed by sitar players; Graham Bond; a performer who played Bach pieces while backed by African drummers; and The Poison Bellows, a poetry duo consisting of Spike Hawkins and Johnny Byrne, who may of all of these performers be the one who other than Pink Floyd themselves has had the most cultural impact in the UK -- after writing the exploitation novel Groupie and co-writing a film adaptation of Spike Milligan's war memoirs, Byrne became a TV screenwriter, writing many episodes of Space: 1999 and Doctor Who before creating the long-running TV series Heartbeat. Jenner and King decided they wanted to sign The Pink Floyd Sound and make records with them, and the group agreed -- but only after their summer holidays. They were all still students, and so they dispersed during the summer. Waters and Wright went on holiday to Greece, where they tried acid for the first of only a small number of occasions and were unimpressed, while Mason went on a trip round America by Greyhound bus. Barrett, meanwhile, stayed behind, and started writing more songs, encouraged by Jenner, who insisted that the band needed to stop relying on blues covers and come up with their own material, and who saw Barrett as the focus of the group. Jenner later described them as "Four not terribly competent musicians who managed between them to create something that was extraordinary. Syd was the main creative drive behind the band - he was the singer and lead guitarist. Roger couldn't tune his bass because he was tone deaf, it had to be tuned by Rick. Rick could write a bit of a tune and Roger could knock out a couple of words if necessary. 'Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun' was the first song Roger ever wrote, and he only did it because Syd encouraged everyone to write. Syd was very hesitant about his writing, but when he produced these great songs everyone else thought 'Well, it must be easy'" Of course, we know this isn't quite true -- Waters had written "Walk with me Sydney" -- but it is definitely the case that everyone involved thought of Barrett as the main creative force in the group, and that he was the one that Jenner was encouraging to write new material. After the summer holidays, the group reconvened, and one of their first actions was to play a benefit for the London Free School. Jenner said later "Andrew King and myself were both vicars' sons, and we knew that when you want to raise money for the parish you have to have a social. So in a very old-fashioned way we said 'let's put on a social'. Like in the Just William books, like a whist drive. We thought 'You can't have a whist drive. That's not cool. Let's have a band. That would be cool.' And the only band we knew was the band I was starting to get involved with." After a couple of these events went well, Joe Boyd suggested that they make those events a regular club night, and the UFO Club was born. Jenner and King started working on the light shows for the group, and then bringing in other people, and the light show became an integral part of the group's mystique -- rather than standing in a spotlight as other groups would, they worked in shadows, with distorted kaleidoscopic lights playing on them, distancing themselves from the audience. The highlight of their sets was a long piece called "Interstellar Overdrive", and this became one of the group's first professional recordings, when they went into the studio with Joe Boyd to record it for the soundtrack of a film titled Tonite Let's All Make Love in London. There are conflicting stories about the inspiration for the main riff for "Interstellar Overdrive". One apparent source is the riff from Love's version of the Bacharach and David song "My Little Red Book". Depending on who you ask, either Barrett was obsessed with Love's first album and copied the riff, or Peter Jenner tried to hum him the riff and Barrett copied what Jenner was humming: [Excerpt: Love, "My Little Red Book"] More prosaically, Roger Waters has always claimed that the main inspiration was from "Old Ned", Ron Grainer's theme tune for the sitcom Steptoe and Son (which for American listeners was remade over there as Sanford and Son): [Excerpt: Ron Grainer, "Old Ned"] Of course it's entirely possible, and even likely, that Barrett was inspired by both, and if so that would neatly sum up the whole range of Pink Floyd's influences at this point. "My Little Red Book" was a cover by an American garage-psych/folk-rock band of a hit by Manfred Mann, a group who were best known for pop singles but were also serious blues and jazz musicians, while Steptoe and Son was a whimsical but dark and very English sitcom about a way of life that was slowly disappearing. And you can definitely hear both influences in the main riff of the track they recorded with Boyd: [Excerpt: The Pink Floyd, "Interstellar Overdrive"] "Interstellar Overdrive" was one of two types of song that The Pink Floyd were performing at this time -- a long, extended, instrumental psychedelic excuse for freaky sounds, inspired by things like the second disc of Freak Out! by the Mothers of Invention. When they went into the studio again with Boyd later in January 1967, to record what they hoped would be their first single, they recorded two of the other kind of songs -- whimsical story songs inspired equally by the incidents of everyday life and by children's literature. What became the B-side, "Candy and a Currant Bun", was based around the riff from "Smokestack Lightnin'" by Howlin' Wolf: [Excerpt: Howlin' Wolf, "Smokestack Lightnin'"] That song had become a favourite on the British blues scene, and was thus the inspiration for many songs of the type that get called "quintessentially English". Ray Davies, who was in many ways the major songwriter at this time who was closest to Barrett stylistically, would a year later use the riff for the Kinks song "Last of the Steam-Powered Trains", but in this case Barrett had originally written a song titled "Let's Roll Another One", about sexual longing and cannabis. The lyrics were hastily rewritten in the studio to remove the controversial drug references-- and supposedly this caused some conflict between Barrett and Waters, with Waters pushing for the change, while Barrett argued against it, though like many of the stories from this period this sounds like the kind of thing that gets said by people wanting to push particular images of both men. Either way, the lyric was changed to be about sweet treats rather than drugs, though the lascivious elements remained in. And some people even argue that there was another lyric change -- where Barrett sings "walk with me", there's a slight "f" sound in his vocal. As someone who does a lot of microphone work myself, it sounds to me like just one of those things that happens while recording, but a lot of people are very insistent that Barrett is deliberately singing a different word altogether: [Excerpt: The Pink Floyd, "Candy and a Currant Bun"] The A-side, meanwhile, was inspired by real life. Both Barrett and Waters had mothers who used  to take in female lodgers, and both had regularly had their lodgers' underwear stolen from washing lines. While they didn't know anything else about the thief, he became in Barrett's imagination a man who liked to dress up in the clothing after he stole it: [Excerpt: The Pink Floyd, "Arnold Layne"] After recording the two tracks with Joe Boyd, the natural assumption was that the record would be put out on Elektra, the label which Boyd worked for in the UK, but Jac Holzman, the head of Elektra records, wasn't interested, and so a bidding war began for the single, as by this point the group were the hottest thing in London. For a while it looked like they were going to sign to Track Records, the label owned by the Who's management, but in the end EMI won out. Right as they signed, the News of the World was doing a whole series of articles about pop stars and their drug use, and the last of the articles talked about The Pink Floyd and their association with LSD, even though they hadn't released a record yet. EMI had to put out a press release saying that the group were not psychedelic, insisting"The Pink Floyd are not trying to create hallucinatory effects in their audience." It was only after getting signed that the group became full-time professionals. Waters had by this point graduated from university and was working as a trainee architect, and quit his job to become a pop star. Wright dropped out of university, but Mason and Barrett took sabbaticals. Barrett in particular seems to have seen this very much as a temporary thing, talking about how he was making so much money it would be foolish not to take the opportunity while it lasted, but how he was going to resume his studies in a year. "Arnold Layne" made the top twenty, and it would have gone higher had the pirate radio station Radio London, at the time the single most popular radio station when it came to pop music, not banned the track because of its sexual content. However, it would be the only single Joe Boyd would work on with the group. EMI insisted on only using in-house producers, and so while Joe Boyd would go on to a great career as a producer, and we'll see him again, he was replaced with Norman Smith. Smith had been the chief engineer on the Beatles records up to Rubber Soul, after which he'd been promoted to being a producer in his own right, and Geoff Emerick had taken over. He also had aspirations to pop stardom himself, and a few years later would have a transatlantic hit with "Oh Babe, What Would You Say?" under the name Hurricane Smith: [Excerpt: Hurricane Smith, "Oh Babe, What Would You Say?"] Smith's production of the group would prove controversial among some of the group's longtime fans, who thought that he did too much to curtail their more experimental side, as he would try to get the group to record songs that were more structured and more commercial, and would cut down their improvisations into a more manageable form. Others, notably Peter Jenner, thought that Smith was the perfect producer for the group. They started work on their first album, which was mostly recorded in studio three of Abbey Road, while the Beatles were just finishing off work on Sgt Pepper in studio two. The album was titled The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, after the chapter from The Wind in the Willows, and other than a few extended instrumental showcases, most of the album was made up of short, whimsical, songs by Barrett that were strongly infused with imagery from late-Victorian and Edwardian children's books. This is one of the big differences between the British and American psychedelic scenes. Both the British and American undergrounds were made up of the same type of people -- a mixture of older radical activists, often Communists, who had come up in Britain in the Ban the Bomb campaigns and in America in the Civil Rights movement; and younger people, usually middle-class students with radical politics from a privileged background, who were into experimenting with drugs and alternative lifestyles. But the  social situations were different. In America, the younger members of the underground were angry and scared, as their principal interest was in stopping the war in Vietnam in which so many of them were being killed. And the music of the older generation of the underground, the Civil Rights activists, was shot through with influence from the blues, gospel, and American folk music, with a strong Black influence. So that's what the American psychedelic groups played, for the most part, very bluesy, very angry, music, By contrast, the British younger generation of hippies were not being drafted to go to war, and mostly had little to complain about, other than a feeling of being stifled by their parents' generation's expectations. And while most of them were influenced by the blues, that wasn't the music that had been popular among the older underground people, who had either been listening to experimental European art music or had been influenced by Ewan MacColl and his associates into listening instead to traditional old English ballads, things like the story of Tam Lin or Thomas the Rhymer, where someone is spirited away to the land of the fairies: [Excerpt: Ewan MacColl, "Thomas the Rhymer"] As a result, most British musicians, when exposed to the culture of the underground over here, created music that looked back to an idealised childhood of their grandparents' generation, songs that were nostalgic for a past just before the one they could remember (as opposed to their own childhoods, which had taken place in war or the immediate aftermath of it, dominated by poverty, rationing, and bomb sites (though of course Barrett's childhood in Cambridge had been far closer to this mythic idyll than those of his contemporaries from Liverpool, Birmingham, Newcastle, or London). So almost every British musician who was making music that might be called psychedelic was writing songs that were influenced both by experimental art music and by pre-War popular song, and which conjured up images from older children's books. Most notably of course at this point the Beatles were recording songs like "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane" about places from their childhood, and taking lyrical inspiration from Victorian circus posters and the works of Lewis Carroll, but Barrett was similarly inspired. One of the books he loved most as a child was "The Little Grey Men" by BB, a penname for Denys Watkins-Pitchford. The book told the story of three gnomes,  Baldmoney, Sneezewort, and Dodder, and their adventures on a boat when the fourth member of their little group, Cloudberry, who's a bit of a rebellious loner and more adventurous than the other three, goes exploring on his own and they have to go off and find him. Barrett's song "The Gnome" doesn't use any precise details from the book, but its combination of whimsy about a gnome named Grimble-gromble and a reverence for nature is very much in the mould of BB's work: [Excerpt: The Pink Floyd, "The Gnome"] Another huge influence on Barrett was Hillaire Belloc. Belloc is someone who is not read much any more, as sadly he is mostly known for the intense antisemitism in some of his writing, which stains it just as so much of early twentieth-century literature is stained, but he was one of the most influential writers of the early part of the twentieth century. Like his friend GK Chesterton he was simultaneously an author of Catholic apologia and a political campaigner -- he was a Liberal MP for a few years, and a strong advocate of an economic system known as Distributism, and had a peculiar mixture of very progressive and extremely reactionary ideas which resonated with a lot of the atmosphere in the British underground of the time, even though he would likely have profoundly disapproved of them. But Belloc wrote in a variety of styles, including poems for children, which are the works of his that have aged the best, and were a huge influence on later children's writers like Roald Dahl with their gleeful comic cruelty. Barrett's "Matilda Mother" had lyrics that were, other than the chorus where Barrett begs his mother to read him more of the story, taken verbatim from three poems from Belloc's Cautionary Tales for Children -- "Jim, Who Ran away from his Nurse, and was Eaten by a Lion", "Henry King (Who chewed bits of String, and was cut off in Dreadful Agonies)", and "Matilda (Who Told Lies and Was Burned to Death)" -- the titles of those give some idea of the kind of thing Belloc would write: [Excerpt: The Pink Floyd, "Matilda Mother (early version)"] Sadly for Barrett, Belloc's estate refused to allow permission for his poems to be used, and so he had to rework the lyrics, writing new fairy-tale lyrics for the finished version. Other sources of inspiration for lyrics came from books like the I Ching, which Barrett used for "Chapter 24", having bought a copy from the Indica Bookshop, the same place that John Lennon had bought The Psychedelic Experience, and there's been some suggestion that he was deliberately trying to copy Lennon in taking lyrical ideas from a book of ancient mystic wisdom. During the recording of Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the group continued playing live. As they'd now had a hit single, most of their performances were at Top Rank Ballrooms and other such venues around the country, on bills with other top chart groups, playing to audiences who seemed unimpressed or actively hostile. They also, though made two important appearances. The more well-known of these was at the 14-Hour Technicolor Dream, a benefit for International Times magazine with people including Yoko Ono, their future collaborator Ron Geesin, John's Children, Soft Machine, and The Move also performing. The 14-Hour Technicolor Dream is now largely regarded as *the* pivotal moment in the development of the UK counterculture, though even at the time some participants noted that there seemed to be a rift developing between the performers, who were often fairly straightforward beer-drinking ambitious young men who had latched on to kaftans and talk about enlightenment as the latest gimmick they could use to get ahead in the industry, and the audience who seemed to be true believers. Their other major performance was at an event called "Games for May -- Space Age Relaxation for the Climax of Spring", where they were able to do a full long set in a concert space with a quadrophonic sound system, rather than performing in the utterly sub-par environments most pop bands had to at this point. They came up with a new song written for the event, which became their second single, "See Emily Play". [Excerpt: The Pink Floyd, "See Emily Play"] Emily was apparently always a favourite name of Barrett's, and he even talked with one girlfriend about the possibility of naming their first child Emily, but the Emily of the song seems to have had a specific inspiration. One of the youngest attendees at the London Free School was an actual schoolgirl, Emily Young, who would go along to their events with her schoolfriend Anjelica Huston (who later became a well-known film star). Young is now a world-renowned artist, regarded as arguably Britain's greatest living stone sculptor, but at the time she was very like the other people at the London Free School -- she was from a very privileged background, her father was Wayland Young, 2nd Baron Kennet, a Labour Peer and minister who later joined the SDP. But being younger than the rest of the attendees, and still a little naive, she was still trying to find her own personality, and would take on attributes and attitudes of other people without fully understanding them,  hence the song's opening lines, "Emily tries, but misunderstands/She's often inclined to borrow somebody's dream til tomorrow". The song gets a little darker towards the end though, and the image in the last verse, where she puts on a gown and floats down a river forever *could* be a gentle, pastoral, image of someone going on a boat ride, but it also could be a reference to two rather darker sources. Barrett was known to pick up imagery both from classic literature and from Arthurian legend, and so the lines inevitably conjure up both the idea of Ophelia drowning herself and of the Lady of Shallot in Tennyson's Arthurian poem, who is trapped in a tower but finds a boat, and floats down the river to Camelot but dies before the boat reaches the castle: [Excerpt: The Pink Floyd, "See Emily Play"] The song also evokes very specific memories of Barrett's childhood -- according to Roger Waters, the woods mentioned in the lyrics are meant to be woods in which they had played as children, on the road out of Cambridge towards the Gog and Magog Hills. The song was apparently seven minutes long in its earliest versions, and required a great deal of editing to get down to single length, but it was worth it, as the track made the top ten. And that was where the problems started. There are two different stories told about what happened to Roger Barrett over the next forty years, and both stories are told by people with particular agendas, who want particular versions of him to become the accepted truth. Both stories are, in the extreme versions that have been popularised, utterly incompatible with each other, but both are fairly compatible with the scanty evidence we have. Possibly the truth lies somewhere between them. In one version of the story, around this time Barrett had a total mental breakdown, brought on or exacerbated by his overuse of LSD and Mandrax (a prescription drug consisting of a mixture of the antihistamine diphenhydramine and the sedative methaqualone, which was marketed in the US under the brand-name Quaalude), and that from late summer 1967 on he was unable to lead a normal life, and spent the rest of his life as a burned-out shell. The other version of the story is that Barrett was a little fragile, and did have periods of mental illness, but for the most part was able to function fairly well. In this version of the story, he was neurodivergent, and found celebrity distressing, but more than that he found the whole process of working within commercial restrictions upsetting -- having to appear on TV pop shows and go on package tours was just not something he found himself able to do, but he was responsible for a whole apparatus of people who relied on him and his group for their living. In this telling, he was surrounded by parasites who looked on him as their combination meal-ticket-cum-guru, and was simply not suited for the role and wanted to sabotage it so he could have a private life instead. Either way, *something* seems to have changed in Barrett in a profound way in the early summer of 1967. Joe Boyd talks about meeting him after not having seen him for a few weeks, and all the light being gone from his eyes. The group appeared on Top of the Pops, Britain's top pop TV show, three times to promote "See Emily Play", but by the third time Barrett didn't even pretend to mime along with the single. Towards the end of July, they were meant to record a session for the BBC's Saturday Club radio show, but Barrett walked out of the studio before completing the first song. It's notable that Barrett's non-cooperation or inability to function was very much dependent on circumstance. He was not able to perform for Saturday Club, a mainstream pop show aimed at a mass audience, but gave perfectly good performances on several sessions for John Peel's radio show The Perfumed Garden, a show firmly aimed at Pink Floyd's own underground niche. On the thirty-first of July, three days after the Saturday Club walkout, all the group's performances for the next month were cancelled, due to "nervous exhaustion". But on the eighth of August, they went back into the studio, to record "Scream Thy Last Scream", a song Barrett wrote and which Nick Mason sang: [Excerpt: Pink Floyd, "Scream Thy Last Scream"] That was scheduled as the group's next single, but the record company vetoed it, and it wouldn't see an official release for forty-nine years. Instead they recorded another single, "Apples and Oranges": [Excerpt: Pink Floyd, "Apples and Oranges"] That was the last thing the group released while Barrett was a member. In November 1967 they went on a tour of the US, making appearances on American Bandstand and the Pat Boone Show, as well as playing several gigs. According to legend, Barrett was almost catatonic on the Pat Boone show, though no footage of that appears to be available anywhere -- and the same things were said about their performance on Bandstand, and when that turned up, it turned out Barrett seemed no more uncomfortable miming to their new single than any of the rest of the band, and was no less polite when Dick Clark asked them questions about hamburgers. But on shows on the US tour, Barrett would do things like detune his guitar so it just made clanging sounds, or just play a single note throughout the show. These are, again, things that could be taken in two different ways, and I have no way to judge which is the more correct. On one level, they could be a sign of a chaotic, disordered, mind, someone dealing with severe mental health difficulties. On the other, they're the kind of thing that Barrett was applauded and praised for in the confines of the kind of avant-garde underground audience that would pay to hear AMM or Yoko Ono, the kind of people they'd been performing for less than a year earlier, but which were absolutely not appropriate for a pop group trying to promote their latest hit single. It could be that Barrett was severely unwell, or it could just be that he wanted to be an experimental artist and his bandmates wanted to be pop stars -- and one thing absolutely everyone agrees is that the rest of the group were more ambitious than Barrett was. Whichever was the case, though, something had to give. They cut the US tour short, but immediately started another British package tour, with the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Move, Amen Corner and the Nice. After that tour they started work on their next album, A Saucerful of Secrets. Where Barrett was the lead singer and principal songwriter on Piper at the Gates of Dawn, he only sings and writes one song on A Saucerful of Secrets, which is otherwise written by Waters and Wright, and only appears at all on two more of the tracks -- by the time it was released he was out of the group. The last song he tried to get the group to record was called "Have You Got it Yet?" and it was only after spending some time rehearsing it that the rest of the band realised that the song was a practical joke on them -- every time they played it, he would change the song around so they would mess up, and pretend they just hadn't learned the song yet. They brought in Barrett's old friend Dave Gilmour, initially to be a fifth member on stage to give the band some stability in their performances, but after five shows with the five-man lineup they decided just not to bother picking Barrett up, but didn't mention he was out of the group, to avoid awkwardness. At the time, Barrett and Rick Wright were flatmates, and Wright would actually lie to Barrett and say he was just going out to buy a packet of cigarettes, and then go and play gigs without him. After a couple of months of this, it was officially announced that Barrett was leaving the group. Jenner and King went with him, convinced that he was the real talent in the group and would have a solo career, and the group carried on with new management. We'll be looking at them more in future episodes. Barrett made a start at recording a solo album in mid-1968, but didn't get very far. Jenner produced those sessions, and later said "It seemed a good idea to go into the studio because I knew he had the songs. And he would sometimes play bits and pieces and you would think 'Oh that's great.' It was a 'he's got a bit of a cold today and it might get better' approach. It wasn't a cold -- and you knew it wasn't a cold -- but I kept thinking if he did the right things he'd come back to join us. He'd gone out and maybe he'd come back. That was always the analogy in my head. I wanted to make it feel friendly for him, and that where we were was a comfortable place and that he could come back and find himself again. I obviously didn't succeed." A handful of tracks from those sessions have since been released, including a version of “Golden Hair”, a setting by Barrett of a poem by James Joyce that he would later revisit: [Excerpt: Syd Barrett, “Golden Hair (first version)”] Eleven months later, he went back into the studio again, this time with producer Malcolm Jones, to record an album that later became The Madcap Laughs, his first solo album. The recording process for the album has been the source of some controversy, as initially Jones was producing the whole album, and they were working in a way that Barrett never worked before. Where previously he had cut backing tracks first and only later overdubbed his vocals, this time he started by recording acoustic guitar and vocals, and then overdubbed on top of that. But after several sessions, Jones was pulled off the album, and Gilmour and Waters were asked to produce the rest of the sessions. This may seem a bit of a callous decision, since Gilmour was the person who had replaced Barrett in his group, but apparently the two of them had remained friends, and indeed Gilmour thought that Barrett had only got better as a songwriter since leaving the band. Where Malcolm Jones had been trying, by his account, to put out something that sounded like a serious, professional, record, Gilmour and Waters seemed to regard what they were doing more as producing a piece of audio verite documentary, including false starts and studio chatter. Jones believed that this put Barrett in a bad light, saying the outtakes "show Syd, at best as out of tune, which he rarely was, and at worst as out of control (which, again, he never was)." Gilmour and Waters, on the other hand, thought that material was necessary to provide some context for why the album wasn't as slick and professional as some might have hoped. The eventual record was a hodge-podge of different styles from different sessions, with bits from the Jenner sessions, the Jones sessions, and the Waters and Gilmour sessions all mixed together, with some tracks just Barrett badly double-tracking himself with an acoustic guitar, while other tracks feature full backing by Soft Machine. However, despite Jones' accusations that the album was more-or-less sabotaged by Gilmour and Waters, the fact remains that the best tracks on the album are the ones Barrett's former bandmates produced, and there are some magnificent moments on there. But it's a disturbing album to listen to, in the same way other albums by people with clear talent but clear mental illness are, like Skip Spence's Oar, Roky Erickson's later work, or the Beach Boys Love You. In each case, the pleasure one gets is a real pleasure from real aesthetic appreciation of the work, but entangled with an awareness that the work would not exist in that form were the creator not suffering. The pleasure doesn't come from the suffering -- these are real artists creating real art, not the kind of outsider art that is really just a modern-day freak-show -- but it's still inextricable from it: [Excerpt: Syd Barrett, "Dark Globe"] The Madcap Laughs did well enough that Barrett got to record a follow-up, titled simply Barrett. This one was recorded over a period of only a handful of months, with Gilmour and Rick Wright producing, and a band consisting of Gilmour, Wright, and drummer Jerry Shirley. The album is generally considered both more consistent and less interesting than The Madcap Laughs, with less really interesting material, though there are some enjoyable moments on it: [Excerpt: Syd Barrett, "Effervescing Elephant"] But the album is a little aimless, and people who knew him at the time seem agreed that that was a reflection of his life. He had nothing he *needed* to be doing -- no  tour dates, no deadlines, no pressure at all, and he had a bit of money from record royalties -- so he just did nothing at all. The one solo gig he ever played, with the band who backed him on Barrett, lasted four songs, and he walked off half-way through the fourth. He moved back to Cambridge for a while in the early seventies, and he tried putting together a new band with Twink, the drummer of the Pink Fairies and Pretty Things, Fred Frith, and Jack Monck, but Frith left after one gig. The other three performed a handful of shows either as "Stars" or as "Barrett, Adler, and Monck", just in the Cambridge area, but soon Barrett got bored again. He moved back to London, and in 1974 he made one final attempt to make a record, going into the studio with Peter Jenner, where he recorded a handful of tracks that were never released. But given that the titles of those tracks were things like "Boogie #1", "Boogie #2", "Slow Boogie", "Fast Boogie", "Chooka-Chooka Chug Chug" and "John Lee Hooker", I suspect we're not missing out on a lost masterpiece. Around this time there was a general resurgence in interest in Barrett, prompted by David Bowie having recorded a version of "See Emily Play" on his covers album Pin-Ups, which came out in late 1973: [Excerpt: David Bowie, "See Emily Play"] At the same time, the journalist Nick Kent wrote a long profile of Barrett, The Cracked Ballad of Syd Barrett, which like Kent's piece on Brian Wilson a year later, managed to be a remarkable piece of writing with a sense of sympathy for its subject and understanding of his music, but also a less-than-accurate piece of journalism which led to a lot of myths and disinformation being propagated. Barrett briefly visited his old bandmates in the studio in 1975 while they were recording the album Wish You Were Here -- some say even during the recording of the song "Shine On, You Crazy Diamond", which was written specifically about Barrett, though Nick Mason claims otherwise -- and they didn't recognise him at first, because by this point he had a shaved head and had put on a great deal of weight. He seemed rather sad, and that was the last time any of them saw him, apart from Roger Waters, who saw him in Harrod's a few years later. That time, as soon as Barrett recognised Waters, he dropped his bag and ran out of the shop. For the next thirty-one years, Barrett made no public appearances. The last time he ever voluntarily spoke to a journalist, other than telling them to go away, was in 1982, just after he'd moved back to Cambridge, when someone doorstopped him and he answered a few questions and posed for a photo before saying "OK! That's enough, this is distressing for me, thank you." He had the reputation for the rest of his life of being a shut-in, a recluse, an acid casualty. His family, on the other hand, have always claimed that while he was never particularly mentally or physically healthy, he wasn't a shut-in, and would go to the pub, meet up with his mother a couple of times a week to go shopping, and chat to the women behind the counter at Sainsbury's and at the pharmacy. He was also apparently very good with children who lived in the neighbourhood. Whatever the truth of his final decades, though, however mentally well or unwell he actually was, one thing is very clear, which is that he was an extremely private man, who did not want attention, and who was greatly distressed by the constant stream of people coming and looking through his letterbox, trying to take photos of him, trying to interview him, and so on. Everyone on his street knew that when people came asking which was Syd Barrett's house, they were meant to say that no-one of that name lived there -- and they were telling the truth. By the time he moved back, he had stopped answering to "Syd" altogether, and according to his sister "He came to hate the name latterly, and what it meant." He did, in 2001, go round to his sister's house to watch a documentary about himself on the TV -- he didn't own a TV himself -- but he didn't enjoy it and his only comment was that the music was too noisy. By this point he never listened to rock music, just to jazz and classical music, usually on the radio. He was financially secure -- Dave Gilmour made sure that when compilations came out they always included some music from Barrett's period in the group so he would receive royalties, even though Gilmour had no contact with him after 1975 -- and he spent most of his time painting -- he would take photos of the paintings when they were completed, and then burn the originals. There are many stories about those last few decades, but given how much he valued his privacy, it wouldn't be right to share them. This is a history of rock music, and 1975 was the last time Roger Keith Barrett ever had anything to do with rock music voluntarily. He died of cancer in 2006, and at his funeral there was a reading from The Little Grey Men, which was also quoted in the Order of Service -- "The wonder of the world, the beauty and the power, the shapes of things, their colours lights and shades; these I saw. Look ye also while life lasts.” There was no rock music played at Barrett's funeral -- instead there were a selection of pieces by Handel, Haydn, and Bach, ending with Bach's Allemande from the Partita No. IV in D major, one of his favourite pieces: [Excerpt: Glenn Gould, "Allemande from the Partita No. IV in D major"]  As they stared blankly in dumb misery deepening as they slowly realised all they had seen and all they had lost, a capricious little breeze, dancing up from the surface of the water, tossed the aspens, shook the dewy roses and blew lightly and caressingly in their faces; and with its soft touch came instant oblivion. For this is the last best gift that the kindly demi-god is careful to bestow on those to whom he has revealed himself in their helping: the gift of forgetfulness. Lest the awful remembrance should remain and grow, and overshadow mirth and pleasure, and the great haunting memory should spoil all the after-lives of little animals helped out of difficulties, in order that they should be happy and lighthearted as before. Mole rubbed his eyes and stared at Rat, who was looking about him in a puzzled sort of way. “I beg your pardon; what did you say, Rat?” he asked. “I think I was only remarking,” said Rat slowly, “that this was the right sort of place, and that here, if anywhere, we should find him. And look! Why, there he is, the little fellow!” And with a cry of delight he ran towards the slumbering Portly. But Mole stood still a moment, held in thought. As one wakened suddenly from a beautiful dream, who struggles to recall it, and can re-capture nothing but a dim sense of the beauty of it, the beauty! Till that, too, fades away in its turn, and the dreamer bitterly accepts the hard, cold waking and all its penalties; so Mole, after struggling with his memory for a brief space, shook his head sadly and followed the Rat.

At one point in Episode 25, Jane and I were talking about keeping the plates spinning while drinking and I said something to the effect that being an alcoholic requires you to be leading at least two lives at the same time. That got me thinking about spies.Paul McCartney wrote one of the greatest spy movie themes ever. When I first heard “Live and Let Die,” I was 10 or 11 and I thought it was just the coolest song. One of the advantages of having an early morning paper route is that you can sing and hum and no one can hear you. I can remember softly singing this as I delivered papers in the dark:When you've got a job to doYou've got to do it wellYou've got to give the other fellow hell.I don't think the Des Moines Register was necessarily looking for that level of commitment from their carriers, but I was ready. So, like I said, Paul McCartney wrote one of the great spy movie themes of all time and then he wrote this:I've always been obsessed with spies and espionage. I was a lonely, shy kid and spent a lot of time watching everyone else. I had a difficult time connecting with people and always felt very awkward. Consequently, I tried to be a really keen observer of other people, why did they do the things they did, what were the appropriate reactions? I was a little like the young boy at the school befriended by Jim Prideaux in “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy”: “You're a good watcher, aren't you? You notice things.”Like every good spy story, mine evolved from being simply a “good watcher,” to realizing that I had tracks to cover, secrets to keep. I'm not sure when thoughts like that began to creep into my consciousness, but I quickly determined that my success in life, my ability to make friends, connect with people, generally get along in the world, required me to keep an awful lot of stuff secret. I came to believe there was a part of me that was so shameful, humiliating, wrong, bad, defective, that it could simply never be shared with other people.I'm pretty sure that narrative was a big part of the reason I saw such a bright light when I started drinking at 15 or 16. The strain of carrying around all of those secrets was already a lot. I'm sorry, don't get the idea that I drank because I liked the taste or just wanted to be popular at parties. By 17, I was sitting by myself at a bar in the afternoon. That's how deeply ingrained it was in me, how deeply cut that groove already was. I needed to drink—that question was already settled.I've told the story about the night I realized I was an alcoholic: The sudden realization, of course while drinking alone, that drinking was way too important to me, occupied way too big a part of my life, was really already beyond my control. The icy churn in my gut came from knowing that I couldn't even conceive of a situation where I could or would stop drinking. Now I had a real secret to keep:I was an actual teenage alcoholic.This was not a game to me, what was at stake was the most important thing in my life: My drinking. If I couldn't keep this secret, I'd lose it and that simply couldn't happen. It was a huge secret to keep and I did. I was a pretty f*****g awesome spy.By my Junior year of high school I was a pretty ferocious everyday drinker and weed smoker. I also played basketball, had a part-time job after school at the local newspaper and was the state debate champion. I think my debate coach was the only person who knew I was drinking, and he had no inkling how much. He walked past the scene of a Beach Party I had staged in my room at the Cedar Rapids Marriott and came to my very hungover breakfast table the next morning expressing concern, but suggesting that he knew it had been the work of "older kids." That was another important piece of the puzzle for this budding spy: I realized that people really didn't want to believe I was an alcoholic or had a problem. That was very, very useful knowledge and helped me keep drinking for the next four decades.I managed a pretty successful career, raised a family, had what looked like a pretty idyllic life and no one really suspected anything until it all finally blew up in 2011. My alcoholism came as a complete surprise to everyone, that's how well disguised it was. Well, I knew it was coming. I had known since that night at Magoo's in 1981. I knew there would be a day of catastrophe, when everything finally got discovered—I just didn't know when that was going to be.I'm fascinated by the story of how the British and Americans ultimately broke the German and Soviet codes in World War II. I think about Kim Philby and the Cambridge Five, who reached the highest levels of British society and the intelligence establishment, all while spying for the Soviets. Philby, who had risen to head of Counter Intelligence at MI6, had to know the Americans were steadily decrypting all of the intercepted Soviet communications from the war and that there was inevitably going to be a day when he would finally and inexorably be exposed as traitor.Back when I was 17, I listened to the Beatles, a lot. I loved the medley on the B side of Abbey Road, but I used to think it was weird that the words that resonated with this 17-year-old were from “Golden Slumber”:Once there was a way to get back homewardOnce there was a way to get back homeBoy, you're gonna carry that weight,Carry that weight a long timeI didn't understand why those words always hit me so hard until I read about Kim Philby and the Cambridge Five, then I completely understood the feeling of being incrementally crushed, a little every day, by the knowledge of the impending catastrophic discovery. The other thing that really struck me was the story of how the British, aided by the ULTRA decrypts, intercepted almost all of the German spies sent during the war and then doubled them back to provide false intelligence to the Nazis. The British literally hired an army of writers to concoct the back stories and fake intelligence and managed to keep the Germans thinking they had an intact ring of spies for most of the war. I thought that was brilliant and took careful note.I started trying to get sober in 2010 and quickly realized that I wasn't interested in actually giving up drinking. It occurred to me that most of my problems came from people knowing that I was drinking. If I could just do a better job of hiding it, well, that would be way better than having to give it up. For the next 10 years, my life was a mix of actual attempts to get sober interspersed with fictional periods of sobriety. It was a horrifying, wilderness of mirrors way to live. I'm not sure I knew myself when I was trying and when I was pretending.I dated someone for 18 months and pretended to be sober the entire time. I drank almost every day and even though she lived only three blocks from my house and we saw each other nearly every day, well, she had no idea until the very end. When she broke up with me, she asked if I had been drunk on the night of our first date. The first date where I told her that I was a “recovering alcoholic” and had been sober for “ a while.” I fooled everyone, friends, wives, colleagues, bosses, my kids, everyone, and for a long, long time. That doesn't really generate any feelings of pride in my tradecraft.Like CIA agents working in Moscow, I needed to generate time in the “Black” to do my drinking. Since my drinking occupied several hours a day, every day, it became necessary to generate an entire fictional life to cover over the fact that my real life was mostly spent on a collection of carefully located and concealed bar stools. I told my girlfriend I was seeing friends, going to church, going to a meeting, going to a game, whatever lie was necessary to generate an hour or two when I could peacefully drink without fear of being discovered. I was exactly like the British writers conjuring up lives of actually-imprisoned spies.There's always a whiff of romance and intrigue and elegance in spy movies. But that is a fantasy. The actual life of a spy is small and dark and lonely and limned with fear. I lived that way for 40 years and did it in service to what I thought was my most important strategic interest—my drinking. That's not a pleasant realization.Kim Philby drank away the last years of his life in Moscow and though he had the Order of Lenin pinned to his jacket, I'll bet he also realized that he had given his entire life in the service of a monstrous lie. When my very elaborately-conceived deception operation finally collapsed, I realized the secret I had been protecting almost my entire life was the thing actually destroying it.“Spies Like Us” was a terrible movie and Dan Ackroyd and Chevy Chase were horrible at even acting like spies. I wish I'd been more like them. I wish I had been a shittier spy, a less accomplished liar, a little less skilled at sowing doubt and confusion. I wish I hadn't made people believe me so much. I wish I'd been hapless and bungling and hadn't been able to keep my stories straight. That would have saved a lot of people a lot of heartache. I look back on big chunks of my life and wonder whether it was really ever me or was all it just an operation? Was it all just a cover I was building? Those questions are sort of academic at this point. That water is well past the bridge.The adult version of me took complete responsibility for my decision to live life like a spy. The choice I thought I had made to conceal and protect what was most important to me: drinking. I've never really told that part of my story before and revisiting that young secret agent really stirred up a lot in me. I usually speak very matter of factly about the origin story of my alcoholism. If I qualify at a meeting, I typically just say that I started drinking at 15 or 16 and was a “white light drinker.” That's my pet phrase, Dr. Ruth Fox, who wrote an amazing book in 1955 titled simply, “Alcoholism: Its Scope, Cause and Treatment” describes someone like me as a “Primary Addict:”The primary addict, from his first introduction to beverage alcohol, uses it as an aid to adjust to his environment.Alcoholism, p. 142She goes on to describe me a little more thoroughly:The primary addict is one in whom the predisposing traits are so developed and so sharply marked that his first recourse to this socially approved narcotic is only a matter of time..In the case of the primary addict, the decisive symptom, loss of control, appears early in his drinking history. Thereafter, his own sense of self-esteem, depreciated to begin with, will take a merciless pounding…If he thought he was unworthy before, now he is given proof.Alcoholism, p. 143-44The process of recruiting agents, “assets,” usually involves identifying and exploiting vulnerabilities. It's not a very pretty or kind process and it often involves luring someone to cross a line they may not have even known was even there. That's pretty much how alcohol worked on me. Once that line is crossed and the subject realizes they are now complicit, how much they now have to lose, well, that's when the trap closes and no one has too much of a choice after that. “Choice” is the funny word. People often like to describe addicts and alcoholics as people who make “bad choices.” For sure we do, lots and lots of them. I am coming to see those “choices” as symptoms of my addiction, not the cause of it.Sure, I made that choice to drink that first drink, take that first hit of weed way back in 1977 or 1978. I had no real idea back then, that “choice” meant enlisting in a lifetime of deception in service of a terrible secret. I only knew that from the time I first started drinking, it was something that was “necessary” for me, not something I did for fun. Drinking for me was kind of how I imagined eating without taste buds would be. It's something I had to have. I was convinced I couldn't navigate the world without it.The Big Book talks about alcoholics reaching the point of no return, for me, that happened frighteningly early. I had no idea where I was headed or how long I would struggle. I had no idea there was even a line to be crossed. The horrible thing is that I think, even if someone blessed with foreknowledge of all of the pain and struggle and heartbreak that was waiting in front of me had been siting in that awful black vinyl booth with me at Magoo's that night back in 1981, I'm pretty sure I would have still ordered that third drink. I see now that I never had a choice. I did what I thought was necessary and once I crossed that invisible line, well, it became an imperative. Already weighed down with the crushing shame and fear of being an alcoholic, that 17 year-old didn't make a choice, didn't really have a choice. He just knew he had to keep the secret.It turns out the secret wasn't so terrible and wasn't much of a secret by the end. What was terrible, was living that way for 40 years. It's heartbreaking to look back. The sadness is for someone who took on the burden of an overwhelming secret way too early. Keeping that secret for so long cost him a lot and was a very, very lonely business. I know him pretty well, he never meant to hurt anyone, and that's still the hardest thing he carries around. He just knew he didn't fit in the world as is and he did the best he could. I have a ton of respect for him; he took on that pretty heavy burden and carried it for a long, long time. He was resourceful, never quit and was so brave. And despite it all, all of the failures to come, the losses, the relapses, everything, I realize now he never gave up believing there was a way back home.In real life, espionage is a capital crime That's why, in the real world, being discovered as a spy is typically a pretty unfortunate thing. Me finally being discovered as a spy? I think the end of my career as a spy is probably when my life actually began again.Thanks for Letting Me Share This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thanksforlettingmeshare.substack.com

Rapper, comedian and actor Ben Bailey Smith AKA Doc Brown joins Jack and Robin this week to share his personal Beatles. Ben chats about growing up with Abbey Road, this eclectic formative music tastes, and how his career has seen him navigate the different worlds of comedy, music and acting. You can currently see Ben is the new Star Wars series, Andor, on Disney+.You can hear the track by Saigon which samples The Beatles' Girl, here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkvWj9E4CnQ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

RATE BUSH! What are your most favorite and least-loved songs on Kate Bush's Hounds of Love? Three months before some very strange things catapulted Miss Bush into a new generation's consciousness, Sam had us sit down to dissect an album that most purists wouldn't dare break into separate parts. While Adam went overboard (groan) researching the second side's epic Ninth Wave song story, newbies Dan and Jim obliviously took it in like men with children in their eyes...or something. Guest rankers include keyboard guru and Abbey Road expert Brian Kehew (Moog Cookbook, The Who, Prince and more) and San Diego Music Award winner Marie Haddad from the world's greatest coverband, Baby Bushka. Hear it at WeWillRankYouPod.com, Apple, Spotify and your running shoe outlet. Follow us and weigh in with your favorites on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter @wewillrankyoupod . FILE UNDER/SPOILERS: Kate Bush, Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God), art pop, Hounds of Love, Donald Sutherland, The Big Sky, Peter Gabriel, Mother Stands for Comfort, Fairlight CMI, Cloudbusting, progressive pop, The Ninth Wave, Marie Haddad, And Dream of Sheep Under Ice, Baby Bushka, Waking the Witch, art rock, Watching You Without Me, Brian Kehew, Jig of Life, the Futureheads, Hello Earth, Outkast, The Morning Fog, progressive rock, 1985. US: http://www.WeWillRankYouPod.com wewillrankyoupod@gmail.com http://www.facebook.com/WeWillRankYouPod http://www.instagram.com/WeWillRankYouPod http://www.twitter.com/WeWillRankYouPo http://www.YourOlderBrother.com (Sam's music page) http://www.YerDoinGreat.com (Adam's music page) https://open.spotify.com/user/dancecarbuzz (Dan's playlists)

On the latest episode of The Hatchards Podcast, Ryan and Matt make their (triumphant?) return to interview the illustrious music journalist David Hepworth on the occasion of the release of his new book, "Abbey Road: The Inside Story of the World's Most Famous Recording Studio."Many people will recognise the famous zebra crossing. Some visitors may have graffitied their name on its hallowed outer walls. Others might even have managed to penetrate the iron gates. But what draws in these thousands of fans here, year after year? What is it that really happens behind the doors of the most celebrated recording studio in the world? It may have begun life as an affluent suburban house, but it soon became a creative hub renowned around the world as a place where great music, ground-breaking sounds and unforgettable tunes were forged - nothing less than a witness to, and a key participant in, the history of popular music itself. What has been going on there for over ninety years has called for skills that are musical, creative, technical, mechanical, interpersonal, logistical, managerial, chemical and, romantics might be tempted to add, close to magic.David spoke to us about The Beatles' creative relationship with the studio, how its engineers defined the sound of pop music for a generation, and why Ryan is wrong about the legacy of David Bowie.

Bob Seaman and Bob Walkow have known each other for 50+ years and have played in Erie Beatles tribute band, Abbey Road, since the 1990s. Both of them started playing music in the 1960s, and we cover how each of them got started and what bands they played in over the years. Thanks again to the JPT Foundation for sponsoring the the Erie Music History podcast. The goal of the foundation is to provide education scholarships to grade school-age children as well as annual giving to local organizations and charities. The foundation also has a large hall that hosts bingo four days a week and is available for rentals.  Many thanks to everyone who has donated or provided financial support for this podcast. If you would like to become a Patreon supporter (it's only $5/month and you can cancel anytime) go to the Erie Music History Podcast page on Patreon.com.You can also support the podcast via Venmo. Click on the “support this podcast” link on the home page for more info.   For information on what bands/musicians are playing in Erie, PA and the surrounding area, please check out Jack Stevenson's 2 Man Happy Hour podcast and webpage. 

David Hepworth has written a new book on the hallowed London recording studio that has given us music from The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Kate Bush, Radiohead, Amy Winehouse and Adele.

We're back! Your Own Personal Beatles returns for its third series, and kicking things off is a fascinating conversation with Architects front man, Beatles obsessive, and one of the loveliest blokes in metal, Sam Carter!We chat to Sam about The Beatles' influence on metal, doing a live album in Abbey Road's studio 2, and his touring hobby of digging for rare Beatles gems in all corners of the world.It's good to be back. If you'd like to get ad-free episodes of the podcast before everyone else, as well as other goodies, you can sign up to our Patreon. www.patreon.com/personalbeatles Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Roger Waters compuso esta canción cuando un Syd Barret irreconocible se asomó para ver a sus antiguos amigos durante la grabación de un álbum en los estudios Abbey Road. Hoy veremos qué nos desvela...

Episode 87 celebrates the coming of fall while also taking one look back at summer. Looking forward to fall there is a special Road Trip that showcases a beautiful fall foliage drive from each of the six New England states.  There are nearly limitless scenic drives throughout the region and these are only a taste of what is out there.  Looking back to summer there's a brand new Top 5 celebrating some of the most popular defunct New England amusement parks of yesteryear.  These might not exist anymore but they left long-lasting memories for those generations that got to experience them.Many lighthouses have unique stories behind them.  Perhaps none is more unique than that of the Three Sisters of Nauset.  Once standing proudly on the bluffs of Eastham, Massachusetts these diminutive lighthouses were separated for decades before being reunited in a field far removed from the ocean's waves.  How did they get there?We go way Back In the Day to look at what it was like as a child of the 1980s getting a crash course in 1950s television through the onset of Nick at Nite.  Dennis the Menace, Mr. Ed, Car 54, and so many more became must-watch for a generation of 80s kids.There is a brand new This Week In History and Time Capsule focusing on the release of The Beatles famed Abbey Road album.Helpful Links from this Episode(available through Buzzsprout)Purchase Iconic Hotels and Motels of Cape CodBuy Me A Coffee!Wear Your WishKiwi's Kustoms - EtsyDJ Williams MusicKeeKee's Cape Cod KitchenChristopher Setterlund's YouTube ChannelChristopher Setterlund.comThe In My Footsteps Podcast BlogSearching for the Lady of the DunesListen to Episode 86 here.Support the show

Mike Parry and Lesley-Ann Jones welcome you to the latest great adventure from Planet Porky - the brightest object in the night sky! Topics today include: Bryan Ferry, Boy George selling his house, the anniversary of Abbey Road, Paul and John's unique chemistry, The High Chaparral, how you'd spend your Euromillions, newsagents, who shot JR, wellness coaching, super foods and how to live a longer life, Royal houses, the future of the monarchy, living on a boat, the Ukrainian refugee love triangle taking a sinister turn, Colditz, and how Porky was the first to receive the news of the death of Douglas Bader. It's the podcast that gets all the scoops, it's Life on Planet Porky.  Follow the show on Twitter: @PlanetPorky or Mike is: @MikeParry8 while you can find Lesley-Ann: @LAJwriter. Or you can email us questions or comments to: planetporkypod@gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you!

I love discovering new music, and I also love sharing those discoveries with others. This week's guest on NSTS is indie singer songwriter Annabelle Chvostek, and her music is definitely worth sharing. Annabelle's latest record is called String of Pearls, recorded in both Canada and Uruguay, and features jazz, tango, and classical musicians from both countries. We chat about how the record was made, her relationship with Bruce Cockburn, 90s art rock, Joni Mitchell, and the influence of The Beatles' Abbey Road record. Chvostek's playlist: The Beatles – Come Together Joni Mitchell – Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire Sarah Vaughn – Honeysuckle Rose PJ Harvey – To Bring You My Love Bruce Coburn – Night Train      

Joaquina hace parte de la primera promoción de artistas de un novedoso programa musical en Miami que nació de la alianza entre los prestigiosos Abbey Road Studios de Londres, Universal Music Group y la escuela Art House Academy de Miami del maestro Julio Reyes Copello. Es una joven cantautora venezolana de 18 años que sin duda es una de las grandes promesas de la música latina.La semana pasada lanzó su primer sencillo - Rabia - Esta es su historia.https://www.instagram.com/joaquina/https://www.instagram.com/humbertoelgato/https://www.instagram.com/revolucionnetwork/https://www.instagram.com/gatomediainc/https://www.instagram.com/julioreyesmusic/

he gave them firm instructions that they were to stay put

From high school dropout to EMI to Abbey Road to Pink Floyd to the Alan Parsons Project and the new album...we cover it all!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to episode 48 of the official podcast of Your Unofficial Boys. Every week we review beers, talk sports and discuss funny current events. Please like and Subscribe! Episode Guide: Beers of the Week Pumpkin Blaster by Sugar Creek Brewing Co. (Charlotte, NC) - 3.75 Oktoberfest by Trophy Brewing (Raleigh, NC) - Rating: 3.75 Fact of the Week: Did you know Tiger Woods' real first name is Eldrick. Did you know before 1850 golf balls were made of leather and were stuffed with feathers. Did you know The 1939 novel Gadsby is the longest published book that doesn't contain the letter 'e.' The longest place name in the world is 85 letters long. This Week in History Abraham Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. British physician Dr. Charles Drysdale warns against the use of tobacco. The Beatles release "Abbey Road" album, their final recordings as a quartet. Serena Williams was born. Arnold Palmer Died. Your Unofficial News Einstein's brain was stolen when he died. A Brazilian man was killed in bed when a cow fell through the roof and landed on him. A shipment of baby wipes turns out to be $11.8 million worth of cocaine. Nursing home-hired stripper gets a rise out of vets. Man arrested after nearly 10-hour standoff with police in Washington, D.C. Unofficial Fanzone Week 3 Match-Ups Week 2 Fantasy Rewind Trey Lance is out for the year with a broken ankle. MLB Records. Unofficial Thoughts Would you accept a million dollars to be deported from the US? You can never come back, but you get to take one person with you. Would you rather be falsely accused of murder and be found guilty, or never be able to stop cumming? Please go follow us on our social media and subscribe to our podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcast and Google Podcast. Also check out our website www.yourunofficialboys.com. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/your-unofficial-boys/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/your-unofficial-boys/support

In this episode we're debuting on of the most famous and beloved albums of all time from quite possibly the most commercially successful and musical act of the last 100 years. Listen along as we break down The Beatles' Abbey Road and talk about Beatlemania at large. You can find us at https://mtgoatmore.buzzsprout.com/ or by searching Mt. GOATmore on your favorite podcast host.Contact us at facebook.com/mtgoatmore or send us an email at andremtgoatmore@gmail.com 

Brenna Ehrlich is Chief Research Editor at Rolling Stone as well as a young adult author, short story writer, and freelance journalist. In this episode, Jack and Brenna discuss how The Beatles can be introduced to you at any age, how the John & Paul Dynamic is evident in many other bands, the best cover of "Monkberry Moon Delight", and more!   Follow Brenna on Twitter @BrennaEhrlich and check out her new book, "Killing Time", here.   If you enjoy this episode, please remember to subscribe to this podcast so you can receive a notification on your phone every week when a new episode is released! Follow us on Twitter Follow us on Instagram Follow us on YouTube ------------------------------ The Beatles were an English rock band, formed in Liverpool in 1960, that comprised John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. They are regarded as the most influential band of all time[1] and were integral to the development of 1960s counterculture and popular music's recognition as an art form. Rooted in skiffle, beat and 1950s rock 'n' roll, their sound incorporated elements of classical music and traditional pop in innovative ways; the band later explored music styles ranging from ballads and Indian music to psychedelia and hard rock. As pioneers in recording, songwriting and artistic presentation, the Beatles revolutionised many aspects of the music industry and were often publicised as leaders of the era's youth and sociocultural movements. Led by primary songwriters Lennon and McCartney, the Beatles evolved from Lennon's previous group, the Quarrymen, and built their reputation playing clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg over three years from 1960, initially with Stuart Sutcliffe playing bass. The core trio of Lennon, McCartney and Harrison, together since 1958, went through a succession of drummers, including Pete Best, before asking Starr to join them in 1962. Manager Brian Epstein moulded them into a professional act, and producer George Martin guided and developed their recordings, greatly expanding their domestic success after signing to EMI Records and achieving their first hit, "Love Me Do", in late 1962. As their popularity grew into the intense fan frenzy dubbed "Beatlemania", the band acquired the nickname "the Fab Four", with Epstein, Martin and other members of the band's entourage sometimes given the informal title of "fifth Beatle". By early 1964, the Beatles were international stars and had achieved unprecedented levels of critical and commercial success. They became a leading force in Britain's cultural resurgence, ushering in the British Invasion of the United States pop market, and soon made their film debut with A Hard Day's Night (1964). A growing desire to refine their studio efforts, coupled with the untenable nature of their concert tours, led to the band's retirement from live performances in 1966. At this time, they produced records of greater sophistication, including the albums Rubber Soul (1965), Revolver (1966) and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), and enjoyed further commercial success with The Beatles (also known as "the White Album", 1968) and Abbey Road (1969). Heralding the album era, their success elevated the album to the dominant form of record consumption over singles; they also inspired a greater public interest in psychedelic drugs and Eastern spirituality, and furthered advancements in electronic music, album art and music videos. In 1968, they founded Apple Corps, a multi-armed multimedia corporation that continues to oversee projects related to the band's legacy. After the group's break-up in 1970, all principal members enjoyed success as solo artists and some partial reunions have occurred. Lennon was murdered in 1980 and Harrison died of lung cancer in 2001. McCartney and Starr remain musically active. The Beatles are the best-selling music act of all time, with estimated sales of 600 million units worldwide. They hold the record for most number-one albums on the UK Albums Chart (15), most number-one hits on the Billboard Hot 100 chart (20), and most singles sold in the UK (21.9 million). The band received many accolades, including seven Grammy Awards, four Brit Awards, an Academy Award (for Best Original Song Score for the 1970 documentary film Let It Be) and fifteen Ivor Novello Awards. They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988, and each principal member was inducted individually between 1994 and 2015. In 2004 and 2011, the group topped Rolling Stone's lists of the greatest artists in history. Time magazine named them among the 20th century's 100 most important people.

Dig the podcast, SUBSCRIBE to this VAN SESSIONS YOUTUBE CHANNEL! Support the show: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/banyanmedia Recorded during Ogden's First Friday Art Stroll. Supported by a generous grant from Ogden City Arts along with love from Roosters Brewing.  Thanks to everyone who came out to the live show! Join us every First Friday for recordings at The Monarch Building in Ogden, Utah. SONG "Come Together" The Beatles COVER, by Standards & Substandards on Van Sessions at The Monarch "Come Together" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles, written by John Lennon and credited to Lennon–McCartney. The song is the opening track on their 1969 album Abbey Road and was also released as a single coupled with "Something". The song reached the top of the charts in the United States and peaked at No. 4 in the United Kingdom. - Wiki MUSICIAN/BAND | Standards & Substandards "We're an easygoing quartet (vocals, piano, bass, drums) that loves to play whimsical re-creations, interesting blends of genres, classic jazz standards, or ironic twists on simple tunes. We'll just as happily perform an upbeat jazz standard as a bluesy torch song, and we'll also blur traditions of funk, pop, rock, and blues as the spirit moves us. In short, we just like playing music as we've reimagined it. It doesn't hurt to have a charismatic vocalist/diva and playful instrumentalists." - Standards & Substandards Website WEBSITE: https://substandards.band/ YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOZ8wFwVuSnLf7fic5Lfu5g FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/StandardsandSubstandards INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/standards_and_substandards/ SUPPORTERS The Monarch Building: https://themonarchogden.com/ Ogden City Arts: https://www.ogdencity.com/707/Arts Roosters Brewing: https://www.roostersbrewingco.com/ CREDITS Producer / Host: R. Brandon Long, The Banyan Collective Logistics / Bookings: Todd Oberndorfer, The Banyan Collective Audio Mix: Scott Rogers (The Proper Way Band) Video Assistant: Isla Long Photographer: Ruth Silver  FOLLOW Van Sessions Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vansessions/ Van Sessions Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thevansessions Like what you hear, buy us beer: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/banyanmedia Bookings: todd@thebanyancollective.com A Banyan Collective Production, copyright August 2022

I was blessed to be interviewed by Deb Drummond "Ultrapreneur" Business leader, Creator of Seven Companies, Janice Joplin Fan, International Women's speaker from Vancouver, BC. YOU have a story to tell. Hear the first ten minutes on YouTube As Andy Warhol once said “everyone will be famous for 15 minutes”, and you have no idea where your story might lead. Our guest today is the intrepid Dave Henning, joining us from Costa Rica. He shares how he found out early the importance of investing in himself and how hanging around positive, inspiring, higher-level people opened doors of opportunity for him. Over his 30+ year career as a DJ and radio talk show host, he has heard and shared the real-life stories of courage and survival from people who have Been. Through. It. He speaks on and writes about the power of encouragement and how to implement it in your business and life. There is power in calling people by name – seeing them for what they can be, not by what they are, asking questions to get to know them and infusing them with HOPE for a new and fresh start. Dave's Favourite album: Abbey Road, by The Beatles – specifically Side B #business, #encouragement, #famous, #fresh, #hope, #inspiring, #investing, #minutes, #opportunity, #positive, #start

My guest today survives in the world of music because of his open mindedness when it comes to musical settings. In an early time he probably would have been picked up by one of the Titans and caravan around the world playing 3 sets a night at some club. His identity would be one known by the records he did as an accompanist and the photos. His identity would be his unique sound that would enable him to live comfortably in some urban Mecca taking in the foghorns of the bay or the Sun striking the mountain tops high above Morrison where some mushroom addled youth would be on the other side of Abbey Road. But my guest is living during this age of empowerment. He is unable to peg or pigeon hole because he deftly moves across the musical spectrum which now consists of Aakash Mittal, Greg Harris' funky vibe quintet, the Colorado Symphony Orchestra, Duos and Trios within the milieu of constant pleasures and pains. The great mandolin player David Grisman said, "if you want to have a band then you need to have a gig." In today's world a band is an expensive proposition so my guest consistently reintroduces himself to audiences at schools, universities and Sunday @ Vic's.

This week, we look back to March of 2020 - and our conversation with Emily Everett from Quaintrelle & Abbey Road Farm. Emily Everett joins the podcast to talk about her journey from the East Coast to Portland, with an update on Quaintrelle and Abby Road Farm.  Right at the Fork is supported by: Zupan's Markets: www.zupans.com RingSide Steakhouse: www.RingsideSteakhouse.com  Portland Food Adventures: www.PortlandFoodAdventures.com

Jake Fogelnest is an Emmy Award nominated writer, producer, and broadcaster. In 1994, when Jake was 14 years old, he started his own pop culture TV show called "Squirt TV on MTV". Jake has since worked on shows such as Comedy Central's “Corporate”, Marvel's "Runaways", and "Wet Hot American Summer". Jake's a huge Beatles fan and loves all kinds of music. In this episode, Jake and Jack discuss how COVID affected the creative process that The Beatles once innovated, Magic Alex and his legacy, why The Beatles bring the world together, the mysterious Carnival of Light song, and more. Follow Jake on Twitter: @jakefogelnest If you enjoy this episode, please remember to subscribe to this podcast so you can receive a notification on your phone every week when a new episode is released! Follow us on Twitter Follow us on Instagram Follow us on YouTube ------------------------------ The Beatles were an English rock band, formed in Liverpool in 1960, that comprised John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. They are regarded as the most influential band of all time[1] and were integral to the development of 1960s counterculture and popular music's recognition as an art form. Rooted in skiffle, beat and 1950s rock 'n' roll, their sound incorporated elements of classical music and traditional pop in innovative ways; the band later explored music styles ranging from ballads and Indian music to psychedelia and hard rock. As pioneers in recording, songwriting and artistic presentation, the Beatles revolutionised many aspects of the music industry and were often publicised as leaders of the era's youth and sociocultural movements. Led by primary songwriters Lennon and McCartney, the Beatles evolved from Lennon's previous group, the Quarrymen, and built their reputation playing clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg over three years from 1960, initially with Stuart Sutcliffe playing bass. The core trio of Lennon, McCartney and Harrison, together since 1958, went through a succession of drummers, including Pete Best, before asking Starr to join them in 1962. Manager Brian Epstein moulded them into a professional act, and producer George Martin guided and developed their recordings, greatly expanding their domestic success after signing to EMI Records and achieving their first hit, "Love Me Do", in late 1962. As their popularity grew into the intense fan frenzy dubbed "Beatlemania", the band acquired the nickname "the Fab Four", with Epstein, Martin and other members of the band's entourage sometimes given the informal title of "fifth Beatle". By early 1964, the Beatles were international stars and had achieved unprecedented levels of critical and commercial success. They became a leading force in Britain's cultural resurgence, ushering in the British Invasion of the United States pop market, and soon made their film debut with A Hard Day's Night (1964). A growing desire to refine their studio efforts, coupled with the untenable nature of their concert tours, led to the band's retirement from live performances in 1966. At this time, they produced records of greater sophistication, including the albums Rubber Soul (1965), Revolver (1966) and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), and enjoyed further commercial success with The Beatles (also known as "the White Album", 1968) and Abbey Road (1969). Heralding the album era, their success elevated the album to the dominant form of record consumption over singles; they also inspired a greater public interest in psychedelic drugs and Eastern spirituality, and furthered advancements in electronic music, album art and music videos. In 1968, they founded Apple Corps, a multi-armed multimedia corporation that continues to oversee projects related to the band's legacy. After the group's break-up in 1970, all principal members enjoyed success as solo artists and some partial reunions have occurred. Lennon was murdered in 1980 and Harrison died of lung cancer in 2001. McCartney and Starr remain musically active. The Beatles are the best-selling music act of all time, with estimated sales of 600 million units worldwide. They hold the record for most number-one albums on the UK Albums Chart (15), most number-one hits on the Billboard Hot 100 chart (20), and most singles sold in the UK (21.9 million). The band received many accolades, including seven Grammy Awards, four Brit Awards, an Academy Award (for Best Original Song Score for the 1970 documentary film Let It Be) and fifteen Ivor Novello Awards. They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988, and each principal member was inducted individually between 1994 and 2015. In 2004 and 2011, the group topped Rolling Stone's lists of the greatest artists in history. Time magazine named them among the 20th century's 100 most important people.  

American filmmaker Ken Burns is renowned for his documentary films and television series, many of which chronicle American history and culture, such as "The Civil War," "Baseball," "Jazz," and "Country Music." Burns's documentaries have earned two Academy Award nominations and have won several Emmy Awards, among other honors. His latest documentary is "The U.S. and the Holocaust," which premieres this month and was produced with longtime collaborators Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein. But before that, he worked at a record store where the best-selling album of his tenure was “Abbey Road.” He still thinks about the Beatles every day. In this conversation with our host Kenneth Womack, Burns discusses what his creative process shares with the Beatles' and reveals the secret ingredient that he believes has made the band's catalog so timeless. And he makes the case for a significant portion of the top 10 “quintessential” Beatles' songs aren't written by Paul or John. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/everythingfabfour/support

Dans l'album Abbey Road

Jake Fogelnest is an Emmy Award nominated writer, producer, and broadcaster. In 1994, when Jake was 14 years old, he started his own pop culture TV show called "Squirt TV on MTV". Jake has since worked on shows such as Comedy Central's “Corporate”, Marvel's "Runaways", and "Wet Hot American Summer". Jake's a huge Beatles fan and loves all kinds of music. In this episode, Jake and Jack discuss the Sgt. Pepper movie, how The Beatles influenced modern comedy with "A Hard Day's Night", and how The Beastie Boys sampled The Beatles on their legendary album, "Paul's Boutique".  Follow Jake on Twitter: @jakefogelnest If you enjoy this episode, please remember to subscribe to this podcast so you can receive a notification on your phone every week when a new episode is released! Follow us on Twitter Follow us on Instagram Follow us on YouTube ------------------------------ The Beatles were an English rock band, formed in Liverpool in 1960, that comprised John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. They are regarded as the most influential band of all time[1] and were integral to the development of 1960s counterculture and popular music's recognition as an art form. Rooted in skiffle, beat and 1950s rock 'n' roll, their sound incorporated elements of classical music and traditional pop in innovative ways; the band later explored music styles ranging from ballads and Indian music to psychedelia and hard rock. As pioneers in recording, songwriting and artistic presentation, the Beatles revolutionised many aspects of the music industry and were often publicised as leaders of the era's youth and sociocultural movements. Led by primary songwriters Lennon and McCartney, the Beatles evolved from Lennon's previous group, the Quarrymen, and built their reputation playing clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg over three years from 1960, initially with Stuart Sutcliffe playing bass. The core trio of Lennon, McCartney and Harrison, together since 1958, went through a succession of drummers, including Pete Best, before asking Starr to join them in 1962. Manager Brian Epstein moulded them into a professional act, and producer George Martin guided and developed their recordings, greatly expanding their domestic success after signing to EMI Records and achieving their first hit, "Love Me Do", in late 1962. As their popularity grew into the intense fan frenzy dubbed "Beatlemania", the band acquired the nickname "the Fab Four", with Epstein, Martin and other members of the band's entourage sometimes given the informal title of "fifth Beatle". By early 1964, the Beatles were international stars and had achieved unprecedented levels of critical and commercial success. They became a leading force in Britain's cultural resurgence, ushering in the British Invasion of the United States pop market, and soon made their film debut with A Hard Day's Night (1964). A growing desire to refine their studio efforts, coupled with the untenable nature of their concert tours, led to the band's retirement from live performances in 1966. At this time, they produced records of greater sophistication, including the albums Rubber Soul (1965), Revolver (1966) and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), and enjoyed further commercial success with The Beatles (also known as "the White Album", 1968) and Abbey Road (1969). Heralding the album era, their success elevated the album to the dominant form of record consumption over singles; they also inspired a greater public interest in psychedelic drugs and Eastern spirituality, and furthered advancements in electronic music, album art and music videos. In 1968, they founded Apple Corps, a multi-armed multimedia corporation that continues to oversee projects related to the band's legacy. After the group's break-up in 1970, all principal members enjoyed success as solo artists and some partial reunions have occurred. Lennon was murdered in 1980 and Harrison died of lung cancer in 2001. McCartney and Starr remain musically active. The Beatles are the best-selling music act of all time, with estimated sales of 600 million units worldwide. They hold the record for most number-one albums on the UK Albums Chart (15), most number-one hits on the Billboard Hot 100 chart (20), and most singles sold in the UK (21.9 million). The band received many accolades, including seven Grammy Awards, four Brit Awards, an Academy Award (for Best Original Song Score for the 1970 documentary film Let It Be) and fifteen Ivor Novello Awards. They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988, and each principal member was inducted individually between 1994 and 2015. In 2004 and 2011, the group topped Rolling Stone's lists of the greatest artists in history. Time magazine named them among the 20th century's 100 most important people.  

►► FREE Start to Finish Guide to Creating a Song https://www.fairairmusic.com/StartGuide How important are chamber reverbs to our mixes? One word… ESSENTIAL. If there's one mixing tip that I believe is crucial to a professional sounding mix, it's using a chamber reverb for all instrument tracks. This is especially true when working with home studio recordings. The good news is that we have amazing sounding chamber reverb plugins to replicate iconic recording studios. The same ones that produced some of the greatest albums of all time! That's right. Abbey Road and Capitol Studios. In this episode you'll learn: • A brief history on how reverb chambers became to be• Why adding a chamber reverb to your mix will elevate it to a professional sound• Which chamber reverb is best for certain elements Hope you enjoy! Emily

John Illsley is the bass guitarist of the band Dire Straits. He has received multiple BRIT and Grammy Awards, and a Heritage Award. As one of the founding band members, with guitarist brothers Mark and David Knopfler, and drummer Pick Withers, Illsley played a role in the development of Dire Straits' sound. By the time the group disbanded in 1995 changes in personnel meant that Illsley and lead singer Mark Knopfler were the only two original band members remaining. Illsley was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Dire Straits in 2018. In this episode, John speaks with Jack about his thoughts on The Beatles, their influence on him and Dire Straits, Paul McCartney's bass playing, whether or not there will be a biopic about Dire Straits, and his favorite Dire Straits record. Check out John's recent solo album, VIII: https://open.spotify.com/album/4VVX7O3Jc8yJ0wJih8jTXf?si=qlKyeTrARSaN2RoXTbB0Hw You can also buy John's book, "My Life in Dire Straits", here: https://www.amazon.com/My-Life-Dire-Straits-Biggest-ebook/dp/B08WBXZCQ1 If you like this episode, be sure to follow this podcast! Follow us also on Twitter and Instagram. Or click here for more information: Linktr.ee/BeatlesEarth ------------------------------- The Beatles were an English rock band, formed in Liverpool in 1960, that comprised John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. They are regarded as the most influential band of all time and were integral to the development of 1960s counterculture and popular music's recognition as an art form. Rooted in skiffle, beat and 1950s rock 'n' roll, their sound incorporated elements of classical music and traditional pop in innovative ways; the band later explored music styles ranging from ballads and Indian music to psychedelia and hard rock. As pioneers in recording, songwriting and artistic presentation, the Beatles revolutionised many aspects of the music industry and were often publicised as leaders of the era's youth and sociocultural movements. Led by primary songwriters Lennon and McCartney, the Beatles evolved from Lennon's previous group, the Quarrymen, and built their reputation playing clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg over three years from 1960, initially with Stuart Sutcliffe playing bass. The core trio of Lennon, McCartney and Harrison, together since 1958, went through a succession of drummers, including Pete Best, before asking Starr to join them in 1962. Manager Brian Epstein moulded them into a professional act, and producer George Martin guided and developed their recordings, greatly expanding their domestic success after signing to EMI Records and achieving their first hit, "Love Me Do", in late 1962. As their popularity grew into the intense fan frenzy dubbed "Beatlemania", the band acquired the nickname "the Fab Four", with Epstein, Martin and other members of the band's entourage sometimes given the informal title of "fifth Beatle". By early 1964, the Beatles were international stars and had achieved unprecedented levels of critical and commercial success. They became a leading force in Britain's cultural resurgence, ushering in the British Invasion of the United States pop market, and soon made their film debut with A Hard Day's Night (1964). A growing desire to refine their studio efforts, coupled with the untenable nature of their concert tours, led to the band's retirement from live performances in 1966. At this time, they produced records of greater sophistication, including the albums Rubber Soul (1965), Revolver (1966) and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), and enjoyed further commercial success with The Beatles (also known as "the White Album", 1968) and Abbey Road (1969). Heralding the album era, their success elevated the album to the dominant form of record consumption over singles; they also inspired a greater public interest in psychedelic drugs and Eastern spirituality, and furthered advancements in electronic music, album art and music videos. In 1968, they founded Apple Corps, a multi-armed multimedia corporation that continues to oversee projects related to the band's legacy. After the group's break-up in 1970, all principal members enjoyed success as solo artists and some partial reunions have occurred. Lennon was murdered in 1980 and Harrison died of lung cancer in 2001. McCartney and Starr remain musically active. The Beatles are the best-selling music act of all time, with estimated sales of 600 million units worldwide.[4][5] They hold the record for most number-one albums on the UK Albums Chart (15), most number-one hits on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart (20), and most singles sold in the UK (21.9 million). The band received many accolades, including seven Grammy Awards, four Brit Awards, an Academy Award (for Best Original Song Score for the 1970 documentary film Let It Be) and fifteen Ivor Novello Awards. They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988, and each principal member was inducted individually between 1994 and 2015. In 2004 and 2011, the group topped Rolling Stone's lists of the greatest artists in history. Time magazine named them among the 20th century's 100 most important people. Dire Straits were a British rock band formed in London in 1977 by Mark Knopfler (lead vocals and lead guitar), David Knopfler (rhythm guitar and backing vocals), John Illsley (bass guitar and backing vocals) and Pick Withers (drums and percussion). They were active from 1977 to 1988 and again from 1990 to 1995. Their first single, "Sultans of Swing", from their 1978 self-titled debut album, reached the top ten in the UK and US charts. It was followed by hit singles including "Romeo and Juliet" (1981), "Private Investigations" (1982), "Twisting by the Pool" (1983), "Money for Nothing" (1985), and "Walk of Life" (1985). Their most commercially successful album, Brothers in Arms (1985), has sold more than 30 million copies; it was the first album to sell a million copies on compact disc[4][5] and is the eighth-bestselling album in UK history. According to the Guinness Book of British Hit Albums, Dire Straits have spent over 1,100 weeks on the UK albums chart, the fifth most of all time. Dire Straits' sound draws from various influences, including country, folk, the blues rock of J. J. Cale, and jazz.[7] Their stripped-down sound contrasted with punk rock and demonstrated a roots rock influence that emerged from pub rock. There were several changes in personnel, with Mark Knopfler and Illsley being the only members who lasted from the beginning of the band's existence to the end. After their first breakup in 1988, Knopfler told Rolling Stone: "A lot of press reports were saying we were the biggest band in the world. There's not an accent then on the music, there's an accent on popularity. I needed a rest." They disbanded for good in 1995, after which Knopfler launched a solo career full-time. He has since declined numerous reunion offers. Dire Straits were called "the biggest British rock band of the 80s" by Classic Rock magazine; their 1985–1986 world tour, which included a performance at Live Aid in July 1985, set a record in Australasia. Their final world tour from 1991 to 1992 sold 7.1 million tickets. Dire Straits won four Grammy Awards, three Brit Awards (Best British Group twice), two MTV Video Music Awards, and various other awards. They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018. Dire Straits have sold over 120 million units worldwide, including 51.4 million certified units, making them one of the best-selling music artists. Brothers Mark and David Knopfler, from Newcastle in northeast England, and friends John Illsley and Pick Withers, from Leicester in the east midlands, formed Dire Straits in London in 1977. Withers was already a 10-year music business veteran, having been a session drummer for Dave Edmunds, Gerry Rafferty, Magna Carta and others through the 1970s; he was part of the group Spring, which recorded an album for RCA in 1971. At the time of the band's formation, Mark was working as an English teacher, Illsley was studying at Goldsmiths' College, and David was a social worker. Mark and Withers had both been part of the pub rock group Brewers Droop at different points in and around 1973. The band was initially known as the Café Racers. The name Dire Straits was coined by a musician flatmate of Withers, allegedly thought up while they were rehearsing in the kitchen of a friend, Simon Cowe, of Lindisfarne. In 1977, the group recorded a five-song demo tape which included their future hit single, "Sultans of Swing", as well as "Water of Love" and "Down to the Waterline".[18][19] After a performance at the Rock Garden in 1977, they took a demo tape to MCA in Soho but were turned down. They then went to DJ Charlie Gillett, presenter of Honky Tonk on BBC Radio London.[20] The band simply wanted advice, but Gillett liked the music so much that he played "Sultans of Swing" on his show. Two months later, Dire Straits signed a recording contract with the Vertigo division of Phonogram Inc. In October 1977, the band recorded demo tapes of "Southbound Again", "In the Gallery" and "Six Blade Knife" for BBC Radio London; in November, demo tapes were made of "Setting Me Up", "Eastbound Train" and "Real Girl". The original Dire Straits line-up in Hamburg, Germany (1978); L to R: John Illsley, Mark Knopfler, Pick Withers and David Knopfler The group's first album, Dire Straits, was recorded at Basing Street studios in Notting Hill, London in February 1978, at a cost of £12,500. Produced by Muff Winwood, it was first released in the United Kingdom on Vertigo Records, then a division of Phonogram Inc. It came to the attention of A&R representative Karin Berg, working at Warner Bros. Records in New York City. She felt that it was the kind of music audiences were hungry for, but only one person in her department agreed at first. Many of the songs on the album reflected Mark Knopfler's experiences in Newcastle, Leeds and London. "Down to the Waterline" recalled images of life in Newcastle; "In the Gallery" is a tribute to Leeds sculptor/artist Harry Phillips (father of Steve Phillips); "Wild West End" and "Lions" were drawn from Knopfler's early days in the capital. That year, Dire Straits began a tour as opening band for Talking Heads, after the re-released "Sultans of Swing" finally started to climb the UK charts. This led to a United States recording contract with Warner Bros. Records; before the end of 1978, Dire Straits had released their self-titled debut worldwide. They received more attention in the US, but also arrived at the top of the charts in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Dire Straits eventually went top 10 in every European country. The following year, Dire Straits embarked on their first North American tour. They played 51 sold-out concerts over a 38-day period. "Sultans of Swing" scaled the charts to No. 4 in the United States and No. 8 in the United Kingdom.[24][26] The song was one of Dire Straits' biggest hits and became a fixture in the band's live performances. Bob Dylan, who had seen the band play in Los Angeles, was so impressed that he invited Mark Knopfler and drummer Pick Withers to play on his next album, Slow Train Coming. Recording sessions for the group's second album, Communiqué, took place in December 1978 at Compass Point Studios in Nassau, Bahamas. Released in June 1979, Communiqué was produced by Jerry Wexler and Barry Beckett and went to No. 1 on the German album charts, with the debut album Dire Straits simultaneously at No. 3. In the United Kingdom, the album peaked at No. 5 in the album charts. Featuring the single "Lady Writer", the second album continued in a similar vein to the first and displayed the expanding scope of Knopfler's lyricism on the opening track, "Once Upon a Time in the West".[28] In the coming year, however, this approach began to change, along with the group's line-up.

Nirvana, Nevermind Welcome to The Guys Review, where we review media, products and experiences.  **READ APPLE REVIEWS/Fan Mail**Mention Twitter DM group - like pinned tweet @The_GuysReviewRead emails theguysreviewpod@gmail.com Nirvana Nevermind​ Produced by Butch Vig. Kurt CobainKrist NovoselicDave GrohlReleased September 24, 1991 Budget $65,000 ($141,394.57 in 2022) Rating: google users: 96% RYM 3.95/5. ON spotify Nirvana has around 24M listerner a month. On Youtube Nevermind album has 4,9M views  Nevermind is the second studio album by the american grunge band Nirvana, released on September 24, 1991 by DGC Records. It was Nirvana's first release on a major label and the first to feature drummer Dave Grohl.Produced by Butch Vig, Nevermind features a more polished, radio-friendly sound then the band's prior work. Recording took place at Sound city studio in Van Nuys, California, and smart studios in Madison Wisconsin in May and June -91, with mastering being completed in August of that year st The Mastering Lab, California.Written primarily by frontman Kurt Cobain, the album is noted for channeling a range of emotions, being noted as dark, humorous, and disturbing. Thematically, it includes anti-establishment views, anti-sexism, Frustration, alienation and troubled love inspired by Cobain's broken relationship with Bikini kill's Toby Vail. Contrary to the popular hedonistic themes of drugs and sex at the time, writers have observed that Nevermind re-invigorated sensitivity to mainstream rock. According to Cobain, the sound of the album was influenced by bands such as Pixies, R.E.M, The Smithereens, and the Melvins. While the album is considered a cornerstone of the grunge genre, it is noted for its musical diversity, which includes acoustic ballads ("Polly" and "´Something in the way") and Punk-inspired Hard Rock("Territorial Pissings" and "Stay Away"). Nevermind became an unexpected critical and commercial success, charting highly on charts across the world. By January 1992, it reached number one on the US Billboard 200 and was selling approximately 300,000 copies a week. The lead single "Smells like teen spirit" reached the top 10 of the US Billboard Hot 100 and went on to be inducted into the Grammy hall of fame. Its video was also heavily rotated on MTV. Three other successful singles were released: "Come as you Are", "Lithium", and "In Bloom". The album was voted the best album of the year in Pass & Jop critics' poll, while "Smells Like Teen Spirit" also topped the single of the year and video of the year polls. The album also garnered the band three Grammy Award nominations in total across the 34th and 35th Grammy Awards, including Best Alternative music album. AwardsHere cometh thine shiny awards Sire. My Lord Tucker the Wanker second Earl of Wessex. Lord of the Furries. Heir of Lord baldy the one eyed snake wrestler. Protector of Freedom units. Step Sibling with funny feelings down stairs. Entertainer of uncles. Jailor of innocent. Spanker of innocent milk maids and stable boys. Nirvana has 1 win and 6 Nominations NominationsBest Alternative Music AlbumNevermind (Album)Wins Best Alternative Music PerformanceMTV Unplugged In New York  Tracks1) "Smells Like Teen Spirit" Written by: Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic, Dave Grohl 5:01 Released September 10, 1991 as the lead single for the album.-One of the catchiest intro hooks of all time.-Very nonsensical and def full of contradictions; but it give the feeling of angst its supposed to.-Cobain said it was an attempt to write a song in the style of the Pixies, a band he admired:"I was trying to write the ultimate pop song. I was basically trying to rip off the Pixies. I have to admit it. When I heard the Pixies for the first time, I connected with that band so heavily that I should have been in that band—or at least a Pixies cover band. We used their sense of dynamics, being soft and quiet and then loud and hard."When Cobain presented the song to his bandmates, it comprised just the main guitar riff and the chorus vocal melody. Cobain said the riff was "clichéd", similar to a riff by Boston or the Richard Berry song "Louie Louie". Bassist Krist Novoselic dismissed it as "ridiculous"; in response, Cobain made the band play it for an hour and a half. Eventually, Novoselic began playing it more slowly, inspiring drummer Dave Grohl to create the drum beat, which drew from disco artists like The Gap Band. As a result, it is the only song on Nevermind to credit all three band members as writers. 2) "In Bloom" Written by Kurt Cobain 4:14 Released November 30, 1992 "In Bloom" was released as the album's fourth and final single in November 1992-The lyrics are just making fun of listeners who don't understand what Cobain is talking about. Never realized that.-I like to visualization and juxtaposition of the clean cut 50's style band to them wearing dresses and tearing everything up.-According to the 1993 Nirvana biography Come As You Are by Michael Azerrad, "In Bloom" was originally written about "the jocks and shallow mainstream types" of the underground music scene the band began to find in their audience after the release of their 1989 debut album, Bleach. In his biography of Cobain, Heavier Than Heaven, Charles R. Cross asserted that the song was a "thinly disguised portrait" of Cobain's friend Dylan Carlson. 3) "Come As You Are" Written by Kurt Cobain 3:38 Released March 2, 1992 as the second single from Nevermind.-Great song, all of the intros are very catchy and pull you in.-Interesting visuals in the music video... Lots of sperm swimming around and flowing water.-The origin of the song's title is unclear, but Charles R. Cross speculated the song may have been named after a motto used by the Morck Hotel in Cobain's hometown of Aberdeen, Washington. The Morck was one of many places Cobain stayed in after leaving home for a time while he was seventeen years old 4) "Breed" written by Kurt Cobain 3:03 Released September 24, 1991-Much heavier sound than the previous tracks. High energy and poppy.-Reading the lyrics, it is a bunch of just nonsense.-Lyrically, the song addresses themes of teenage apathy and fear within the American middle-class. Stevie Chick of Kerrang wrote that lyrics such as "We can plant a house, we can build a tree" displayed Cobain's "gift for crafting witty, purposeful nonsense. 5) "Lithium" written Kurt Cobain 4:16 Released July 13, 1992 as the third single from Nevermind.-Very chilled vibe from the previous tracks-It's still got a LOT of energy in the YEAH parts that gets hard.-As Cobain explained, "In the song, a guy's lost his girl and his friends and he's brooding. He's decided to find God before he kills himself. It's hard for me to understand the need for a vice like [religion] but I can appreciate it too. People need vices.” 6) "Polly" written by Kurt Cobain 2:57 Released September 24, 1991-Very downtrodden song. considering the content, not surprising.-This is a really dark song. Jesus.-Cobain wrote "Polly" about an incident in Tacoma, Washington involving the abduction and rape of a 14-year-old girl in August 1987. Gerald Arthur Friend kidnapped the girl while she was leaving a rock concert, suspended her upside down from a pulley in his mobile home and raped and tortured her with a blow torch. She managed to escape by jumping from his truck at a gas station, attracting attention from surrounding people. Arthur was later arrested and convicted for his crimes. Cobain's addition to the story was to have the victim fool the kidnapper into thinking she was enjoying what he was doing to her, causing him to let his guard down long enough for her to escape.-In his Nirvana biography Come As You Are, journalist Michael Azerrad noted that rape seemed to be a consistent theme in Cobain's songs and interviews, as if Cobain was "apologizing for his entire gender." However, Cobain explained, "I don't feel bad about being a man at all. There are all kinds of men that are on the side of the woman and support them and help influence other men. In fact, a man using himself as an example toward other men can probably make more impact than a woman can". 7) "Territorial Pissings" written by Kurt Cobain and Chet Powers. 2:22-Very punk and heavy.-I have no idea how Kurt would be able to perform this song live... It hurts my voice hearing his guttural screams.-this song is a two-and-a-half-minute punk lambasting of the typical "Macho Man." In addition to being about sexism, the song is also about the way Kurt Cobain saw Native Americans treated around his home town of Aberdeen, Washington. 8) "Drain You" written by Kurt Cobain 3:43 Released September 24, 1991 as a promotional single-
Good song, musically in the same category as the more popular Nirvana tracks. Heavy, but simple and poppy.-The strangest "love" song I've ever heard.-In the 1993 Nirvana biography Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana, Michael Azerrad described "Drain You" as "a love song, or rather a song about love," in which the babies in the lyrics "represent two people reduced to a state of perfect innocence by their love." Cobain told Azerrad that the lyrics made him think of "two brat kids who are in the same hospital bed." The song's imagery predicted the medical themes that would feature heavily in the lyrics of Nirvana's following album, In Utero.-According to the 2001 Cobain biography Heavier Than Heaven by Charles Cross, "Drain You" was one of "a half dozen...memorable songs" Cobain wrote following his break-up with American musician, Tobi Vail, in November 1990. Cross described the lyric, "It is now my duty to completely drain you," as "both an acknowledgement of the power [Vail] had over [Cobain] and an indictment." 9) "Lounge Act" written by Kurt Cobain 2:36-Super bass heavy.-It reminds me of Offspring sound-This is a song about heartache in a relationship.-The title comes from the fact that Nirvana thought that the bass intro sounded like something a cheesy lounge band would use.-This is the only song Kurt Cobain admitted was about his much maligned ex-girlfriend, Tobi Vail. 10) "Stay Away" written by Kurt Cobain 3:32-Very punk inspired-Pretty simple and to the point; confusion and agitation, easier to push people away than try to explain things to them.-Again, no idea how he would be able to sing anything else after this song. Dang.-Originally titled Pay To Play, this song appears to be about many things, including annoyance ("stay away"), lack of popularity ("I'd rather be dead than cool"), and predictability in people ("every line ends in a rhyme"). 11) "On a Plain" written by Kurt Cobain 3:16. Released on the album in September 1991, released as a promotional single in 1992.-Very much in the vein of the other tracks. Again, somewhat nonsensical, but still angsty and full of energy-Good track, I remember the single.-In a July 1993 interview in New York City, Cobain told English journalist Jon Savage that "On a Plain" was about "classic alienation, I guess," although he then noted he had to change his explanation every time he was asked about the meaning to his songs, saying that his lyrics were largely taken from "pieces of poetry thrown together," and that his poetry was "not usually thematic at all." 12) "Something in the Way" written by Kurt Cobain 3:52-Very downtrodden and depressing-Very heavy and moody-Doesn't have the explosive energy the other tracks did. But it's still solid and full of feeling.-Never released as a single and never a consistent part of the band's live setlist, "Something in the Way" charted for the first time in August 2020, after appearing in the first trailer for the 2022 superhero film, The Batman. The song peaked at number two on Billboard's US Rock Digital Songs Sales chart, and number five on their US Alternative Digital Songs Sales charts.[2] It also reached the top 20 in both Amazon Music's and iTunes' digital music charts-Cobain himself suggested that the song was not necessarily autobiographical, telling Nirvana biographer Michael Azerrad that the lyrics were "like if I was living under the bridge and I was dying of AIDS, if I was sick and I couldn't move and I was a total street person. That was kind of the fantasy of it". 13) "Endless, Nameless" written by Kurt Cobain-Very heavy and chaotic-I honestly don't know if I've ever heard this one before, but I'm not a fan of it... I don't like jam bandy type music. Sounds like they're just making noise.-According to Come As You Are, Cobain himself was unsure of what he was singing during the performance, but believed the lyrics included the lines, "I think I can, I know I can."-According to author Chuck Crisafulli, the song's placement on Nevermind was in part inspired by the use of hidden tracks by the Beatles, such as "Her Majesty" on their 1969 album, Abbey Road. **TRIPLE LINDY AWARD** **REVIEW AND RATING** TOP 5Stephen:1 Breakfast club2 T23 Sandlot4color out of space5 Mail order brides Chris:1. sandlots2. T23. trick r treat4. rocky horror picture show5. hubie halloween Trey:1) Boondocks Saints2) Mail Order Brides3) Tombstone4) Very bad things5) She out of my league  Tucker:1. T22: Tombstone4: My Cousin Vinny5: John WickNational treasure WHAT ARE WE DOING NEXT WEEK? Web: https://theguysreview.simplecast.com/EM: theguysreviewpod@gmail.comIG: @TheGuysReviewPodTW: @The_GuysReview - Twitter DM groupFB: https://facebook.com/TheGuysReviewPod/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYKXJhq9LbQ2VfR4K33kT9Q Please, Subscribe, rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts from!! Thank you,-The Guys