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Producer, Tom sparks up a whole load of naked truths in the hotel edition of Everyone's Rubbish, Greg blocks a good friend after being at the receiving end of AI-generated controversy and Callum Leslie finds a namesake that unites him with fellow Newsbeat host, Pete Alison. Jess plays for Reading Festival tickets, Losers Week continues in Yesterday's Quiz and Pitbull's not the only motivational speaker on today's installment of All The Latest Things!
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What to expect from this year's SCRF 2025 that begins on April 23. Louis and Abdul Karim give you the reasons why one should attend the event. Listen to #Pulse95Radio in the UAE by tuning in on your radio (95.00 FM) or online on our website: www.pulse95radio.com ************************ Follow us on Social. www.facebook.com/pulse95radio www.twitter.com/pulse95radio www.instagram.com/pulse95radio
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Here Comes The Space Cow is more than just a new LP — it's the sound of four musicians overflowing with talent but also bound by something deeper. This group plays like they were born to find each other, blending jazz grooves with just the right dash of funk. It's tight, soulful, and polished in the way only seasoned artists can pull off. Roger Kunkel (in photo) stopped by the studio to give us a taste, spinning a few tracks and gracing us with a couple of mesmerizing live performances on guitar. It was pure magic. Roger Kunkel -- Guitar, vocals. Stoo Odom -- Stand up bass, vocals. Bart VanDer Zeuuw -- Drums. Max Hart -- Hammond organ, pedal steel guitar. Roger spent his 20s touring and recording as the electric guitarist for Thin White Rope, a critically acclaimed Davis band that released five albums and played venues from CBGB to the Soviet Union to the Reading Festival. Though the group disbanded in 1992, their legacy endures, with The Guardian dubbing them cult heroes in 2015 and all five albums reissued in 2018. In the late '90s, Kunkel shifted gears, forming the jazz-surf-rock group Acme Rocket Quartet, which gained a following in the San Francisco Lounge scene. By the early 2000s, he stepped back from live performance to focus on family and study acoustic instruments like bluegrass guitar, mandolin, and fiddle. More recently, he has returned to performing with the retro country band Mike Blanchard and the Californios, released a solo acoustic album, and revived Acme Rocket Quartet.
Anabel Lee están de estreno en Radio 3: escuchamos 'Ven a jugar', nuevo single con el que el trío amplía horizontes musicales para traernos ecos de Frank Carter y Queens Of The Stone Age. Además, te traemos las últimas novedades de Arde Bogotá, The Blue Stones, The Vil Veins, Dope Lemon y Sam Fender, entre otros.Playlist:MELIFLUO - CalaveraANABEL LEE - Ven a jugarLEVITANTS - VisionariosARDE BOGOTÁ - Flores de venganzaALIZZZ - Carretera perdidaTHE BLUE STONES - Your MasterTHE BLUE STONES - Kill BoxSTRAY KIDS, YOUNG MIKO & TOM MORELLO - Come PlayTURBONEGRO - High On The CrimeWEIRD OMEN - Shake Shake (Live)BAD RELIGION - 21st Century (Digital Boy)WEEZER - Say It Ain't SoCALA VENTO - InsurrecciónVENTURI - Stone Cold Crazy ['Sheer Heart Attack Reimagined']GYOZA - Now I'm Here ['Sheer Heart Attack Reimagined']THE VIL VEINS - R U Satisfied?ROYAL BLOOD - Loose Change (Live from Reading Festival, 2015)HERMANA FURIA - Pero si me atreviera...DEAD POET SOCIETY - HurtBRKN LOVE - 20/20 VisionQUEENS OF THE STONE AGE - My God Is the SunFOO FIGHTERS - The PretenderMUSE - HysteriaMY CHEMICAL ROMANCE - TeenagersTHE WOMBATS - Blood On The Hospital FloorDOPE LEMON - Golden WolfSAM FENDER - People WatchingTHE WAR ON DRUGS - Burning (Live... Again)Escuchar audio
First Claudia Hoag McGarry, Victoria Charters, Lynelle Paulick, Elizabeth U. Flanagan, Vandana Khare, and Peter Rojas discuss the Original Works Staged Reading Festival at Center Stage Theater on Sunday, November ... The post Claudia Hoag McGarry's Original Works Staged Reading Festival and Chella Courington appeared first on Elizabeth Appraisals.
EVERY OTHER KREATIVE KONTROL EPISODE IS ONLY ACCESSIBLE TO MONTHLY $6 USD PATREON SUPPORTERS. Enjoy this excerpt and please subscribe now via this link to hear this full episode. Thanks!Filmmaker Lance Bangs and Pavement's Bob Nastanovich discuss the new film Pavements, why Lance began filming early shows by the likes of Pavement, the Replacements, and Nirvana, his mentor Jem Cohen, the story behind Lance's 2002 Pavement DVD/documentary Slow Century, what Kurt Cobain said to Bob at the Reading Festival that Nirvana invited Pavement to play, what David Berman yelled at the Lollapalooza audience that infamously flung mud and rocks at Pavement, why Bob thinks adding Rebecca Clay Cole as a member is the most interesting thing about recent Pavement tours, unusual depictions of Pavement and their crew and why releasing Alex Ross Perry's Range Life biopic was reconsidered by all involved, how the Pavements film came to be edited and re-fashioned by Lance at the band's request, how Pavement's members really feel about it, what's next for Pavement, Bob, and Lance, other future plans, and much more. Support vish on Patreon!Support Y.E.S.S., Pride Centre of Edmonton, and Letters to Santa. Follow vish online.Related episodes/links:Ep. #910: The Hard QuartetEp. #900: Fugazi and Jem CohenEp. #678: Mark IboldEp. #677: PavementEp. #481: David BermanEp. #392: Stephen MalkmusEp. #373: Pavement's Bob Nastanovich and Steve WestEp. #165: Bob Nastanovich of Silver JewsEp. #74: Stephen MalkmusSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/kreative-kontrol. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In this episode, Andrew and Dr Sam dive into the world of singing drummers—because why settle for just bashing skins when you can also belt out tunes? Expect a thorough dissection of jazz chaos theory, led by Peter Evans and his so-called “three-stooges” approach to organised sound. The duo also explore Karen Carpenter's dual talents, Red Fang's unadulterated riffage, and Mastodon's... well, let's say, questionable riff decisions. Dr Sam throws in some knowledge grenades about jazz producer legends, while Andrew recalls a traumatic encounter with Reading Festival toilets that left him missing Mastodon for a “pressing” appointment. They also ponder how Robert Wyatt of Soft Machine managed to keep it together, both rhythmically and vocally, before a window accident shifted his life forever. From awkward gig moments to a deep-dive into prog jazz and even John Grant's soundcheck playlist, this episode has it all—except, maybe, subtlety. _Featured Tracks and Artists_: - Peter Evans and friends with some chaotic jazz noodling - The Morons with "I Want to Stab You in the Neck" (naturally) - Anderson .Paak, making soul look way too easy on the Tiny Desk - Queens of the Stone Age, with zero Grohl vocals - Yoshida Tatsuya's wild prog jazz - A head-turning pick from Soft Machine with Robert Wyatt singing and drumming Grab your headphones (and maybe a stiff drink); it's a wild ride through rhythm, riffs, and a solid bit of nonsense. ### Riffs of the week #### Dr Sam's Riff - Peter Evans - Freaks (opening) #### Andrew's Riff - The Ruins of Beverast - Anchoress in Furs (opening) ### Dr Sam's track choices 1. The Morons - Stab You in the Neck (0.10) 2. Anderson .Paak - Heart Don't Stand a Chance (from NPR tiny desk) : 3.57 3. Soft Machine - Moon in June (0.20) 4. Koenjihyakkei - Rattims Friezz (1.44) ### Andrew's track choices 1. The Carpenters - Close to you (1:15) 2. Mastodon - Blood and Thunder (opening) 3. Queens of the Stone Age - Song for the dead (0:02) 4. Velvet Underground - After Hours Email us - beatmotel@lawsie.com Anderson .Paak - Heart Don't Stand a Chance (from NPR tiny desk) : 3.57 - https://youtu.be/ferZnZ0_rSM?feature=shared&t=237
Laura Ardan, principal clarinetist with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra for 39 years, joins us to kick off our new series celebrating 50 years of ASO broadcasts on our station. Plus, we learn about a free series of theatrical readings coming to 7 Stages Theater, and Mike Jordan joins us to recap his experience hosting the 2024 Atlanta Michelin Guide ceremony.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Estrenamos nuevo temón de Quincalla, 'Morir dormido', energética canción -con sabroso riff de guitarra incluido- que da título al álbum que los de Vallecas publicarán este viernes. Además, escuchamos a King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard con arreglos orquestales en su nuevo single, y las últimas novedades de Lauren Mayberry, Radio75, Larkin Poe, Dallas Frasca, Carlangas, Vera Fauna, Purple Disco Machine y Wisemen Project remezclando a The Knocks.Playlist:BILLY TIBBALS - Burn OutQUINCALLA - ConciertoQUINCALLA - Morir dormidoGUM & AMBROSE KENNY-SMITH - Fool For YouKING GIZZARD & THE LIZARD WIZARD - Phantom IslandDERBY MOTORETA'S BURRITO KACHIMBA - El ChincheLEVITANTS - VisionariosQUEENS OF THE STONE AGE - The Lost Art Of Keeping A SecretRADIO75 - Luxury of BotsMUSE - Apocalypse PleaseROYAL BLOOD - Loose Change (Live from Reading Festival, 2015)THE BLUE STONES - Your MasterFANTASTIC NEGRITO - Runaway from YouDALLAS FRASCA - Electric DaysLARKIN POE - MockingbirdSUSAN SANTOS - Hot Rod LadyLAUREN MAYBERRY - Crocodile TearsSABRINA CARPENTER - EspressoPARCELS - LeaveyourloveCARLANGAS - Los Cubatas Pt. 1CARLANGAS - TiembloVERA FAUNA - Tu vozJUNGLE - Back On 74JUNGLE - Let's Go BackJAMIE XX - Baddy On The Floor (feat. Honey Dijon)THE KNOCKS - All the Time (feat. Yelle) (Wisemen Project Remix)PURPLE DISCO MACHINE - All My Life (feat. The Magician)DEPECHE MODE - Just Can't Get EnoughEscuchar audio
MMT50 - 211In this week's episode of Pavement Top 50 Countdown, host jD is joined by Pavement superfan Martel for a deep dive into one of the top tracks in the band's catalog as the countdown continues to edge closer to the Top 10.Martel shares his Pavement origin story, recalling the magic of discovering the band back in 1994 when he first heard the Crooked Rain album. From teenage weekends at record shops to hearing those first iconic notes, Martel reflects on the life-changing moment when he became hooked on Pavement. He also recounts memories of the band's live performances, from major festivals like Reading to more intimate shows, including their legendary 1999 gig in Hull.jD and Martel discuss the unique melodic style and abstract lyrics of the featured track, diving into the mysteriousness and artistic creativity that defines Stephen Malkmus's songwriting. They explore how Pavement's music, much like the band itself, holds layers of meaning that reveal themselves over time. The two also touch on Pavement's other standout albums, including Slanted and Enchanted, Wowie Zowie, and Watery Domestic, appreciating how the band's work continues to stand the test of time.Listeners will enjoy thoughtful conversations about the band's place in 90s alternative music, the allure of their cryptic album artwork, and the continued fan devotion seen during the band's reunion tour.Tune in to hear the next track on the countdown and join jD and Martel as they celebrate the legacy of Pavement, one essential song at a time.Key Topics: • [00:52] Martel's first encounter with Pavement's music through Crooked Rain • [02:20] Pavement's distinctive sound, songwriting, and cryptic lyrics • [05:17] Iconic live performances from Reading Festival to their intimate 1999 Hull gig • [06:23] The enduring legacy of albums like Slanted and Enchanted and Wowie Zowie • [17:11] The excitement around Pavement's reunion tour and hopes for future music from Stephen MalkmusDon't miss the countdown as we get closer to unveiling the Top 10 tracks!Connect with Us:Follow the podcast on social media and stay up to date: • Instagram and Twitter: @meetingmalkmus • Facebook: facebook.com/groups/meetingmalkmusJoin the conversation, share your thoughts on Pavement's music, and let us know where your favorite tracks land on the countdown!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/meeting-malkmus-a-pavement-podcast/exclusive-contentAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
This week, we brought you live tracks and coverage from Reading festival this year, and discussed the rumours and eventually announcement of Oasis' huge reunion news! Music this week from Adult DVD, Overpass, Tara Lily, Frozemode, Kneecap, The Last Dinner Party, Nia Archives, Pendulum, The Prodigy, Barry Can't Swim, Disgusting Sister, Aziya, Carsick, 4AM Kru, Arxx, Welly, Two Door Cinema Club, Sim0ne, Imaya, Venus Grrrls, Catfish & The Bottleman, Goddard., Raye, Fontaines D.C., Liam Gallagher. Find this week's playlist here. Do try and support artists directly! Touch that dial and tune in live! We're on at CFRC 101.9 FM in Kingston, or on cfrc.ca, Sundays 8 to 9:30 PM! Get in touch with the show for requests, submissions, giving feedback or anything else: email yellowbritroad@gmail.com, Twitter @YellowBritCFRC, IG @yellowbritroad. PS: submissions, cc music@cfrc.ca if you'd like other CFRC DJs to spin your music on their shows as well. Like what we do? Donate to help keep our 101-year old station going!
Dave catches up with Kieran Crowley, Alex reports from the Introducing stage at Reading Festival plus Hannah is with Moogieman for the next segment in our Connections series.
This week on the BBC Introducing in Oxfordshire and Berkshire podcast, Dave meets singer-songwriter Camille Baziadoly, Alex is at Reading Festival ahead of the big weekend with the BBC Introducing head honchos Kelly and Fuzz, plus hear about Reading's excellent 'Closer to Home' gig night at The Purple Turtle, and Hannah get's to know No Fret. What a show!Here's this week's tracklist: • Tongue - Basingstoke montykeates - EASY Saint Boy - Wild Horses emily jeffri - DENY Shiny Brain Crayons - Saweeet (Summer Nights) Henjila - BLOCKED Third Lung - Tic Tac Danny Mellin - You and Your Friends Just Josh - Never Thought Ellur - God Help Me Now Hey B - You (feat. Kvng Zkey) Lilith Ai - Go! Camille Baziadoly - Skin on Fire Maisy's Rainbow Dream - Puddles of Madness BlckHry - Milkyway Ameliah Jayne - Wildflower Auctioneers - Spur of the Moment Black House - Deep In The Water (feat. Alika) No Fret - Just Fine Without You Sofia Isobel - Mr Donny Hathaway Bottomless Brunch - Rocket Fuel Bronwyn Leonard - Run Jerzy Bulx - Ordinary World (Extended) • If you're making music in Oxfordshire and Berkshire, send us your tunes with the BBC Introducing Uploader: https://www.bbc.co.uk/introducing/uploader
We also catch up with Libby as she heads to Reading Festival, dive into a heated dinner debate, and witness Vernon Kay giving Greg a playful telling-off!
This week Frankie has a stack of brand new indie and alternative tunes. He's found a name for the guess the artist/song/year segment and he takes a deep dive look at the incredible Reading Festival lineup of 2002. For more info and tracklisting, visit: https://thefaceradio.com/the-bugle/Tune into new broadcasts of The Bugle, 1st and 3rd Monday from 4 - 6 PM EST / 9 - 11 PM GMT.//Dig this show? Please consider supporting The Face Radio: http://support.thefaceradio.com Support The Face Radio with PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/thefaceradio. Join the family at https://plus.acast.com/s/thefaceradio. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Owen Blackhurst, Seb White and Tommy Stewart are back again to talk Tommy's outfit, Seb's anniversary, Mrs White, hot curries on hot days, fish and chips, Kentish Town, Keir Starmer, the Spice Girls, 1996, Three Lions, Gary Barlow, Fugees, Oasis, Spaceman, Niko Kranjčar, Joe Rogan, Miley Cyrus, The Undertaker, The Rock, South Park, Christmas Day for football fans, Test cricket, Fabrizio Ravanelli, Reading Festival, Juventus, adidas, acid, Middlesbrough, Spice Boys Liverpool, Reebok, Juninho, Food of the Cods, David Beckham, Match of the Day, Raith Rovers, Gordon Brown, the Bayern Munich scoreboard, East Anglia, King Charles the Cnut, Norwich, Paul Lambert, 3–0 down back to town, The Dam Busters, World War II in Colour, Nigeria's Olympic immortals, King Nwankwo Kanu, Portsmouth, Paul Merson, the FA Cup, the UEFA Cup, AC Milan, Ronaldo & Rooney, Theirry Henry, heat maps, Celestine Babayaro, sex before kick off, Tommy's bucket list, Owen's birthday, Reservoir Logs, Viz, WrestleMania in London, Wembley, Sadiq Khan, Crocs, Birkenstocks, Harry Potter, Steve Coogan as Mick McCarthy, Roy Keane, broken cars, SEAT Ibizas, Van Life UK, The Goosemobile, Pep Guardiola, cutting the sole of your foot, Tenerife 2008, My Little Pony plasters, water polo, The Inbetweeners, the little general, and somehow so much more. Get the latest issue of MUNDIAL Mag hereFollow MUNDIAL on Twitter - @mundialmagFollow MUNDIAL on Instagram - @mundialmag Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
This week, with Glastonbury just gone, we're now well and truly in the throes of festival season, so to celebrate all that music has to offer we're bringing you some of our best - and funniest - festival stories!First up, we have the lovely Danny Jones from McFly! Here, he tells us how the band shaped his youth and how waiting 19 years to play at Glastonbury made him value those experiences more than ever! Then, the legendary Noddy Holder takes us all the way back to 1980 where Slade's set at Reading Festival led to 80,000 people singing Merry Xmas Everybody in the baking August Heat! And, last but not least, we have the brilliant Krishnan Guru-Murthy who dives into his incredible family lineage and glows with pride at his 16 year old son's Glastonbury debut!If you liked what you heard, listen to their full episodes here: Danny Jones, Noddy Holder and Krishnan Guru-Murthy.For all the latest news, click here to follow us on Instagram! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
This month we go to eleven. One higher.The big talk is all about music, what did jazz ever do to Johnny? Do dogs like Def Leppard? Was the boy who verbally abused Five Star on Going Live ever brought to justice?there's a harvest festival quiz where we make Ben eat eight unlabelled cans of mystery foodstuffs.And some superb beers from Renegade.Genuine high-octane thrills, or your money back.Additional music by SergeQuadrado, AlexiAction, Muzaproduction, Ashot-Danielyan, Julius H, RomanSenykMusic, AudioCoffee, SoundGalleryBy, Grand_Project, geoffharvey, Guitar_Obsession, Lexin_Music, AhmadMousavipour, melodyayresgriffiths, DayNigthMorning, litesaturation, 1978DARK, lemonmusicstudio, Onoychenkomusic, soundly, Darockart, Nesrality, - All can be found on Pixabay.Main Reclining Pair theme by Robert John Music. Contact me for details.
The largest celebration of knowledge, creativity, art and innovation of its kind in the region, the Sharjah Children's Reading Festival (SCRF) is returning for its 15th edition on May 1. The highly anticipated event will take place in Expo Centre Sharjah until May 12. Listen to #Pulse95Radio in the UAE by tuning in on your radio (95.00 FM) or online on our website: www.pulse95radio.com ************************ Follow us on Social. www.instagram/com/pulse95radio www.facebook.com/pulse95radio www.twitter.com/pulse95radio www.instagram.com/pulse95radio
Matthew Bannister on Vince Power, the live music promoter whose Mean Fiddler group operated a string of London venues and built up the Reading and Leeds festivals. Olga Murray, the American lawyer who devoted her later life to helping the children of Nepal. Cecilia Eckelmann-Battistello, the Italian businesswoman who ran a major container shipping company. Akira Toriyama, the Japanese manga artist who created the Dragon Ball series which has millions of fans around the world.Interviewee: Melvin Benn Interviewee: Shaun Clarkson Interviewee: Gina Parker Interviewee: Som Paneru Interviewee: Janet Porter Interviewee: Chris Gray Interviewee: Shao Dow Producer: Gareth Nelson-DaviesArchive used; Reading Festival 2023 Aftermovie promo, Reading and Leeds Festival, YouTube uploaded 27/10/2023; Vince Power interview , BBC 6Music, 27/03/2008; Vince Power interview, BBC Radio London, 04/12/2022; The Pogues appearance at the Mean Fiddler, 26/01/201986; New Order appearance at the Reading Festival, Reading Festival,1989; Olga Murray interview, Nepal Youth Foundation, YouTube uploaded, 17/09/2012; Olga Murray presentation, TEDx Talks, YouTube uploaded 18/11/2015; Cecilia Eckelmann-Battistello acceptance speech, Lloyds Group, YouTube uploaded 28/10/2015; ShaDow Clone, Shao Dow, YouTube uploaded 26/01/2024;
With his hard, edgy tone, rough and rowdy vocals, and barroom boogie aesthetic, Canadian singer, guitarist, and keyboardist Pat Travers is a fine example of a Canadian bluesy hard rock act. He emerged during the '70s heyday of hard blues-rocking guitar heroes. His 8 albums from his 1976 debut through to 1984 netted seven Top 200 chart placements and two Top 40 singles, including the party anthem classic "Boom Boom (Out Go the Lights)." Pat is equally adept at playing funk, jazz, and prog and has toured almost annually for more than 40 years. Born in Toronto in 1954, Pat first picked up the guitar after seeing a local performance by Jimi Hendrix. He began studying the other top rock guitarists of the day - Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page. He then hooked up with '50s rock & roll vet Ronnie Hawkins (best known for performing with a backing band that would eventually become The Band. But Travers' first love was hard rock, so he packed up and headed to London. In 1976 his performance at the Reading Festival resulted in two releases before he returned to North America and set his sights on the U.S. rock market. The new Travers band lineup led to his most commercially successful period, resulting in a pair of Top 30 releases, including 1980's Crash and Burn. Unfortunately as the '80s got underway, the music changed and bluesy hard rock wasn't in demand any longer. Pat Travers continued releasing albums but they sold less so he opted to take a break from producing records although he did continue to tour solidly. And he still does. In 2022, Travers issued The Art of Time Travel, a return to hard blues-rock. Numerous controversies and triumphs have only added depth to Pat Travers' storied career, and today his musical journey continues to evolve. His story is not just a biography but a testament to the enduring power of musical expression and the indelible mark one artist can leave on the world. Pat has worked hard to establish his well deserved reputation as being one of the very best hard rock guitarists in the world today. I hope you enjoy learning about his journey. If you'd like to know more about Pat Travers, head for his website https://www.pattravers.com/ and if you would like too request a future guest for this show please reach out to me through my website https://www.abreathoffreshair.com.au
In the 53rd episode of Festpod: The Unofficial Rock Festival Guide:Timestamps ⏱:0:00 Intro05:11 -- Festival News --05:15 - Download festival release next wave of lineup INCLUDING BUSTED!?13:47 - Damnation festival lineup update - Cradle of Filth19:57 - Kanye uses Ozzy sample without permission and they're LIVID 24:22 - AI plugin - Kanye West voice31:44 - Sleep Token Arena tour announced and immediately sold out! - and just signed to major label RCA 38:33 - Volunteering with hotbox events is open 44:11 - More Bloodstock acts announced 49:07 - Leeds & Reading Festival announce more acts, scrap the “2 main stage” concept & introduce the Chevron stage - With new immersive lighting and stage design like nothing they have ever done before!55:44 - Frank Carter * The Rattlesnakes releases new album “Dark Rainbow”1:01:47 - October Ends break bumper1:02:03 -- Gig Review --1:02:11 - Eamon and Rich went to see Buckcherry, The Treatment and Rubikon;1:05:05 - Eamon went to see As Everything Unfolds in Nottingham.1:07:27 -- Gig Guide --1:07:36 - Knocked Loose1:08:08 - Skindred1:08:56 - Green Lung1:10:10 -- Festpod Favourites --1:10:12 - Raised By Owls - I'm Sorry I Wore a Dying Fetus T-Shirt to Your Baby's Gender Reveal Party1:11:16 - on Netflix - This Is Pop S1E6 “Festival Rising” 1:12:46 - https://seatfillers.co.uk/1:14:51 OutroFor early access to episodes and other exclusive benefits, join our VIP Club - support us on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/festpodIf you'd like to buy our merch, visit our merch store here: https://etsy.com/uk/shop/FestpodAll our links here: https://festpod.co.uk#festpod #festival #music #livemusic #rock #metal #rockmusic #metalmusic #podcasting #podcast Get bonus content on Patreon including exclusive outtakes of the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
This week get your nerd on with us as we are raiding the Prog Rock crypt again. However, this will be a much different journey into the world of progressiveness, as we are covering Neo-Prog from the early to mid-1980s. A much different time for progressive rock, as these bands were influenced by more than just Genesis, Yes, and King Crimson. These groups were injecting heavy doses of hard rock, new wave, punk, and pop into their progressive Day-Glo soup! Keep an open mind and give it a listen…What's this InObscuria thing? We're a podcast that exhumes obscure Rock n' Punk n' Metal and puts them in one of 3 categories: the Lost, the Forgotten, or the Should Have Beens. Prog rock in the 60s and 70s initially had mostly classical music and jazz influences, but over the last 40 years it has come to include other fusions of music styles including metal, punk, funk, folk, and electronic. From Zappa and Sgt. Pepper to the 1980s music by bands like Marillion and Pendragon… This is Neo-Prog Rock! Get yer nerd on!Songs this week include:Saga – “Wind Him Up” from Worlds Apart (1981)Twelfth Night – “East Of Eden” from Smiling At Grief (1982)IQ – “The Wake” from The Wake (1985) Pendragon – “Fly High Fall Far” from The Jewel (1985)Gowan – “Keep Up The Fight” from Gowan (1982)It Bites – “All In Red” from The Big Lad In The Windmill (1986)Please subscribe everywhere that you listen to podcasts!Visit us: https://inobscuria.com/https://www.facebook.com/InObscuriahttps://twitter.com/inobscuriahttps://www.instagram.com/inobscuria/Buy cool stuff with our logo on it!: https://www.redbubble.com/people/InObscuria?asc=uCheck out Robert's amazing fire sculptures and metal workings here: http://flamewerx.com/If you'd like to check out Kevin's band THE SWEAR, take a listen on all streaming services or pick up a digital copy of their latest release here: https://theswear.bandcamp.com/If you want to hear Robert and Kevin's band from the late 90s – early 00s BIG JACK PNEUMATIC, check it out here: https://bigjackpnuematic.bandcamp.com/
0:00 - Intro & Summary2:00 - Movie Discussion34:18- Cast & Crew/Awards42:39 - Pop Culture50:48 - Rankings & Ratings To see a full list of movies we will be watching and shows notes, please follow our website: https://www.1991movierewind.com/Follow us!https://linktr.ee/1991movierewind
Deap Vally came out of the box hard in 2011 and within two years were playing Glastonbury, Bonnaroo, and Reading Festival. The drop of Lindsey Troy and Julie Edwards released three great albums, a bunch of singles and EP's, a collab with Flaming Lips (Deap Lips) in 2019 and toured extensively since their formation. In September, they announced that they were doing their farewell tour in 2024 and here we are. We love Deap Vally and were psyched to talk with them. Enjoy! Music Deap Vally "Baby I Can Hell" Deap Vally "Royal Jelly" theme song "So Pretty" by The Charms Produced and Hosted by Steev Riccardo
This is how we gig, with our face to the pig, and we were delighted to do so this week with comedy's most dedicated music purchaser and reorderer, James Acaster, after a trip to watch newly unretired Idahoan dream-popper Youth Lagoon, with some solid time allotted to wedding DJs, prepared shibboleths and a one-man anti-Slipknot protest at Reading Festival 2000. It's the last episode-with-guest til Christmas but we'll still be putting out Gigzard-Wizard over the festive break so don't stop downloading, the day that you do is the day that you die! For extra bonus Gig Pigs episodes and exclusive content every month head over to www.patreon.com/gigpigs to support the show. Download extra swill, rate and leave review. The Extra Swill playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/45NNtgh2FbvR4emjWbAVQh Emails and recommendations in the usual places - gigpigspodcast@gmail.com Follow us! @ivo_graham @alexkealy A 'Keep It Light Media' Production Sales, advertising, and general enquiries: hello@keepitlightmedia.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
The lads are back and talk about Carnivore diet, Air Fryers, not sharing Nachos in the Cinema, Michael Duff being sacked and one sighted medical thinking. Paddy has some sad news about his Dad and the boys discuss not being invincible forever, Cwm Albion have hit the big time, Man vs Fat is changing lives, their favourite Christmas films, Ronnie O'Sullivan documentary, the upcoming CVC gig in Cardiff, Ryan's wife pissing on his chips regarding Reading Festival and Paddy's mother being proud about him being called a Paedophile over the old Morfa stadium plus much much more….@ambitioniscritcal1997 on Instagram @TheAiCPodcast on Twitter
This conversation with Donita Sparks of L7 starts with a look back at the Alternative Nation Festival in 1995 and the band's connection with Australian audiences. We'll discuss the unique qualities of Donita's guitar tone, which echoes Tom Warrior from Celtic Frost's style with a punk twist, and delve into how this sound was honed over time. The conversation will touch on the band's distinctive groove, the process of riff-writing, and Donita's musical inspirations. We'll revisit the early reception of Nirvana's Nevermind and get Donita's perspective on The Prodigy's cover of the L7 cut, "Fuel My Fire." We clear up if Jennifer Finch ever played with Moby's band and whether Oliver Stone personally reached out for the "Natural Born Killers" soundtrack contribution. Reflecting on the 30th anniversary of the notorious 'Tampongate' at the Reading Festival, we'll discuss its place in the band's history. The interview will also cover the band's advocacy efforts through Rock for Choice and whether Donita still identifies with the feminist movement, followed by her views on current issues regarding transgender individuals in sports, prisons, and beauty pageants.
SETLIST 1. Feeling This 00:00 2. What's My Age Again? 03:03 3. The Rock Show 05:43 4. Up All Night 08:35 5. Down 12:11 6. I Miss You 15:28 7. Dumpweed 20:01 8. Wishing Well 22:55 9. Happy Holidays ,You Bastard 26:28 10. Always 27:20 11. Stay Together For The Kids 32:14 12. Asthenia 36:08 13. First Date 40:39 14. Easy Target 44:52 15. All Of This 47:15 16. Hybrid Moments (Misfits Cover) 51:55 17. Man Overboard (De vuelta pero sobre Justin Bieber) 53:30 18. Ghost on the Dance Floor (Con parte de "Wannabe" y "Milkshake"de Spice Girls y Kelis) 57:18 19. All The Small Things 1:02:10 20. Carousel 1:05:35 All uploads on this channel are for promotional purposes only! The music has been converted before uploading to prevent ripping and to protect the artist(s) and label(s). If you don't want your content here please contact us immediately via email: allmusiclive@outlook.com and WE WILL REMOVE THE EPISODE IMMEDIATELY!
Welcome back to another search for the very worst album of all time, yes, it's Trve. Crvp. Pop!. Steve and Sam are back and are looking at My Beauty, the second solo album from former (and current) Dexy's Midnight Runners frontman, released on the 21st of September 1999.Rowland was one of the biggest stars in music in Britain in the 1980's, but after Dexy's split in 1987 he spiralled into depression and drug addiction and decided to quit music. After a spell living on the streets Rowland signed to Creation Records, home of Oasis, Primal Scream, My Bloody Valentine and, of course, 3 Colours Red, and released a set of covers, with the lyrics changed to reflect his recent struggles. It should have been a triumphant comeback, but Rowland decided to portray himself on the front cover wearing a dress and lingerie, much to the confusion of the UK music press, and then turn up fully made up and in a dress at the Reading Festival in 1999 a month before the album was released. It was a disaster and completely overshadowed the music on My Beauty. Rowland, it was reported, only sold 500 copies of the album and he became the punchline to many a joke at the time. But, 24 years on, does the music stand up? ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★
Here in Episode 135 of the No Name Music Cast, it is Tim's turn to pick the topic and he chooses to talk about his 'Driving Rock' playlist!We cover The Beards, Hall & Oates, ZZ Top and Deep Purple to name only a few.We also cover Las Vegas, Concert Seating and the Reading Festival!https://www.facebook.com/NoNameMusicCast/Tim's Driving Rock playlist can be found HERE!
Harrison and Marty dive into an iconic post-reunion Alexisonfire performance (read: YouTube video): Alexisonfire Reading Festival 2015-08-29 | 720p. Watch the video along with us here: https://youtu.be/W8YnCsNTGjQ?si=HUk7SrW97abH3Aoo https://www.instagram.com/theonlypodever/ https://www.theonlypodeveralexisonfire.ca/
Guests Yoad Nevo - producer, mix engineer Waves Developer Paulee Bow Magical Synth Adventurer Youtube video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spK39wraI6E For preshow and Ad free version and much more: Patreon.com/sonicstate SYNTHESIZER TOUR DE FORCE The authentic sound of 200 synthesizers, from vintage to modern 4,000+ presets and layers deliver incredible sound with hardware soul Feature-packed dual-layer engine with fx, arpeggiator and more check it out at Http://bit.ly/uvisynth3 iZotope has a ton of excellent tutorials on mixing mastering and more. You can check them out for free over at their Youtube Channel. We are also offering an exclusive 10% discount code on any of their plug-ins. Use the code SONIC10 at checkout: iZotope.com/sonictalk 00:00:16 SHOW START 00:02:40 AD: Join Our Patreon 00:04:14 EMOM Dates 00:12:39 Granularize Volca Sample 00:23:06 AD: iZotope Music Essentials 00:24:12 Yoad picked: Shaperbox 3 00:31:24 Great Matriarch Patch 00:44:18 AD: UVI Synth Anthology 4 00:45:22 UVI Synth Anthology 4 00:53:58 EMOM Dates 00:55:08 nickhowesuk asks via - [twitch] - QQ anyone else notice that almost everyone at Reading Festival had the same live rig? Moog..Nord .. Roland .. is the live kB market dominated by these three ? Where to Watch/Listen - We now stream the live show to Youtube Live, Facebook Live as well as at Sonicstate.com/live every Weds at 4pm UK time- please do join in. Preshow available on Twitch. You can also download the audio version from RSS FEED
Graham Sayle got tried by his school students, talks DIY BMX culture and building cool asf tables. Download AMPOLLO - the FREE app that lets you practice at home with songs, using its AI stem-removing super smart tech: https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id1659856412?pt=125376217&ct=Giles&mt=8 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Kat Moss tells us about watching MCR Reading Fest videos, building lego all day and a good good shot at 101 Part Time Jobs BINGO Download AMPOLLO - the FREE app that lets you practice at home with songs, using its AI stem-removing super smart tech: https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id1659856412?pt=125376217&ct=Giles&mt=8 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
At Khazali's first festival, he told us about serving bubble teas (can you choke on them?) and gave a good whack at 101 Part Time Jobs BINGO... Download AMPOLLO - the FREE app that lets you practice at home with any song, using its AI stem-removing super smart tech: https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id1659856412?pt=125376217&ct=Giles&mt=8 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Theresa from Yonaka joined me to talk about her first job at the fish + chip shop, retail days and camping essentials. Download AMPOLLO - the FREE app that lets you practice at home with any song, using its AI stem-removing super smart tech: https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id1659856412?pt=125376217&ct=Giles&mt=8 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Liverpool's Jamie Webster on having a good festival time, working for his dad, loving pub gigs and lookalike couples... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Nieve Ella talks being a hairdressers' duaghter, The 1975 and gives a luke warm go at 101 Part Time Jobs B I N G O... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
James and Damien from The Murder Capital take me in at Reading Festival, talking Limp Bizkit, fisherman dads, wanting to sample Vashti Bunyan and a hot shot at 101 Part Time Jobs Bingo... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Georgia joins me at Reading 2023 with her love for QOTSA and Arctic Monkeys, Reply All'ing and her Pop Bitch dream. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
KennyHoopla regales us with his Domino's days, his ideal hardcore singer steez and provides a good shot at 101 Part Time Jobs Bingo! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Garageband Superstar on meeting Joe Cole, festival imodium and a claim as winner of 101 Part Time Jobs bingo... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Full band Yard Act join on the first in a week of Reading Special 101's. Topics broached include paper rounds, Isle of Man creamaries and the Poo Lady. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
All... well, not all, some... SOME of the things that happened on Sunday at the Reading Festival. ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★
Steve's at the Reading Festival. Here's what he saw on Friday and Saturday. ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★
Hello! Join Ed and Geoff as they go down to the woods today. And boy, are they sure of a big surprise. It turns out Britain only has 2.5% of the ancient woodland it once had! These hubs of biodiversity are hugely important for tackling the nature and climate crisis, but they're not in a good way. Nick Phillips from The Woodland Trust talks to us about why it's not too late to save them. Fancy some forest bathing? Suzanne Simmons tells us why urban trees do so much for us in our everyday lives. And finally, Rebecca Wrigley speaks to us about rewilding and how woodlands and forests can regenerate all by themselves, all with a healthy amount of Lord of the Rings chat. Plus: It's our final episode before our summer break. Is it wise for Ed to head to Reading Festival? Get in touch!We'd love to hear from you over the summer with your ideas, feedback or experiences of forest bathing, get in touch via email (reasons@cheerfulpodcast.com) or via the website!GuestsNick Phillips, Principal Forestry Policy Advocate, Woodland Trust (@treepolicy / @WoodlandTrust)Suzanne Simmons, Projects Director, Trees for Cities (@TreesforCities)Rebecca Wrigley, CEO, Rewilding Britain (@RewildingB)More information Learn more about the work of The Woodland Trust, Trees for Cities, and Rewilding BritainWoodland trust information on ancient woodlandVisit Fingle Woods Costa Rica restoring its forests (Guardian)How to start forest bathing Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Episode 166 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Crossroads", Cream, the myth of Robert Johnson, and whether white men can sing the blues. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a forty-eight-minute bonus episode available, on “Tip-Toe Thru' the Tulips" by Tiny Tim. 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/ Errata I talk about an interview with Clapton from 1967, I meant 1968. I mention a Graham Bond live recording from 1953, and of course meant 1963. I say Paul Jones was on vocals in the Powerhouse sessions. Steve Winwood was on vocals, and Jones was on harmonica. Resources As I say at the end, the main resource you need to get if you enjoyed this episode is Brother Robert by Annye Anderson, Robert Johnson's stepsister. There are three Mixcloud mixes this time. As there are so many songs by Cream, Robert Johnson, John Mayall, and Graham Bond excerpted, and Mixcloud won't allow more than four songs by the same artist in any mix, I've had to post the songs not in quite the same order in which they appear in the podcast. But the mixes are here -- one, two, three. This article on Mack McCormick gives a fuller explanation of the problems with his research and behaviour. The other books I used for the Robert Johnson sections were McCormick's Biography of a Phantom; Up Jumped the Devil: The Real Life of Robert Johnson, by Bruce Conforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow; Searching for Robert Johnson by Peter Guralnick; and Escaping the Delta by Elijah Wald. I can recommend all of these subject to the caveats at the end of the episode. The information on the history and prehistory of the Delta blues mostly comes from Before Elvis by Larry Birnbaum, with some coming from Charley Patton by John Fahey. The information on Cream comes mostly from Cream: How Eric Clapton Took the World by Storm by Dave Thompson. I also used Ginger Baker: Hellraiser by Ginger Baker and Ginette Baker, Mr Showbiz by Stephen Dando-Collins, Motherless Child by Paul Scott, and Alexis Korner: The Biography by Harry Shapiro. The best collection of Cream's work is the four-CD set Those Were the Days, which contains every track the group ever released while they were together (though only the stereo mixes of the albums, and a couple of tracks are in slightly different edits from the originals). You can get Johnson's music on many budget compilation records, as it's in the public domain in the EU, but the double CD collection produced by Steve LaVere for Sony in 2011 is, despite the problems that come from it being associated with LaVere, far and away the best option -- the remasters have a clarity that's worlds ahead of even the 1990s CD version it replaced. And for a good single-CD introduction to the Delta blues musicians and songsters who were Johnson's peers and inspirations, Back to the Crossroads: The Roots of Robert Johnson, compiled by Elijah Wald as a companion to his book on Johnson, can't be beaten, and contains many of the tracks excerpted in this episode. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before we start, a quick note that this episode contains discussion of racism, drug addiction, and early death. There's also a brief mention of death in childbirth and infant mortality. It's been a while since we looked at the British blues movement, and at the blues in general, so some of you may find some of what follows familiar, as we're going to look at some things we've talked about previously, but from a different angle. In 1968, the Bonzo Dog Band, a comedy musical band that have been described as the missing link between the Beatles and the Monty Python team, released a track called "Can Blue Men Sing the Whites?": [Excerpt: The Bonzo Dog Band, "Can Blue Men Sing the Whites?"] That track was mocking a discussion that was very prominent in Britain's music magazines around that time. 1968 saw the rise of a *lot* of British bands who started out as blues bands, though many of them went on to different styles of music -- Fleetwood Mac, Ten Years After, Jethro Tull, Chicken Shack and others were all becoming popular among the kind of people who read the music magazines, and so the question was being asked -- can white men sing the blues? Of course, the answer to that question was obvious. After all, white men *invented* the blues. Before we get any further at all, I have to make clear that I do *not* mean that white people created blues music. But "the blues" as a category, and particularly the idea of it as a music made largely by solo male performers playing guitar... that was created and shaped by the actions of white male record executives. There is no consensus as to when or how the blues as a genre started -- as we often say in this podcast "there is no first anything", but like every genre it seems to have come from multiple sources. In the case of the blues, there's probably some influence from African music by way of field chants sung by enslaved people, possibly some influence from Arabic music as well, definitely some influence from the Irish and British folk songs that by the late nineteenth century were developing into what we now call country music, a lot from ragtime, and a lot of influence from vaudeville and minstrel songs -- which in turn themselves were all very influenced by all those other things. Probably the first published composition to show any real influence of the blues is from 1904, a ragtime piano piece by James Chapman and Leroy Smith, "One O' Them Things": [Excerpt: "One O' Them Things"] That's not very recognisable as a blues piece yet, but it is more-or-less a twelve-bar blues. But the blues developed, and it developed as a result of a series of commercial waves. The first of these came in 1914, with the success of W.C. Handy's "Memphis Blues", which when it was recorded by the Victor Military Band for a phonograph cylinder became what is generally considered the first blues record proper: [Excerpt: The Victor Military Band, "Memphis Blues"] The famous dancers Vernon and Irene Castle came up with a dance, the foxtrot -- which Vernon Castle later admitted was largely inspired by Black dancers -- to be danced to the "Memphis Blues", and the foxtrot soon overtook the tango, which the Castles had introduced to the US the previous year, to become the most popular dance in America for the best part of three decades. And with that came an explosion in blues in the Handy style, cranked out by every music publisher. While the blues was a style largely created by Black performers and writers, the segregated nature of the American music industry at the time meant that most vocal performances of these early blues that were captured on record were by white performers, Black vocalists at this time only rarely getting the chance to record. The first blues record with a Black vocalist is also technically the first British blues record. A group of Black musicians, apparently mostly American but led by a Jamaican pianist, played at Ciro's Club in London, and recorded many tracks in Britain, under a name which I'm not going to say in full -- it started with Ciro's Club, and continued alliteratively with another word starting with C, a slur for Black people. In 1917 they recorded a vocal version of "St. Louis Blues", another W.C. Handy composition: [Excerpt: Ciro's Club C**n Orchestra, "St. Louis Blues"] The first American Black blues vocal didn't come until two years later, when Bert Williams, a Black minstrel-show performer who like many Black performers of his era performed in blackface even though he was Black, recorded “I'm Sorry I Ain't Got It You Could Have It If I Had It Blues,” [Excerpt: Bert Williams, "I'm Sorry I Ain't Got It You Could Have It If I Had It Blues,”] But it wasn't until 1920 that the second, bigger, wave of popularity started for the blues, and this time it started with the first record of a Black *woman* singing the blues -- Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues": [Excerpt: Mamie Smith, "Crazy Blues"] You can hear the difference between that and anything we've heard up to that point -- that's the first record that anyone from our perspective, a hundred and three years later, would listen to and say that it bore any resemblance to what we think of as the blues -- so much so that many places still credit it as the first ever blues record. And there's a reason for that. "Crazy Blues" was one of those records that separates the music industry into before and after, like "Rock Around the Clock", "I Want to Hold Your Hand", Sgt Pepper, or "Rapper's Delight". It sold seventy-five thousand copies in its first month -- a massive number by the standards of 1920 -- and purportedly went on to sell over a million copies. Sales figures and market analysis weren't really a thing in the same way in 1920, but even so it became very obvious that "Crazy Blues" was a big hit, and that unlike pretty much any other previous records, it was a big hit among Black listeners, which meant that there was a market for music aimed at Black people that was going untapped. Soon all the major record labels were setting up subsidiaries devoted to what they called "race music", music made by and for Black people. And this sees the birth of what is now known as "classic blues", but at the time (and for decades after) was just what people thought of when they thought of "the blues" as a genre. This was music primarily sung by female vaudeville artists backed by jazz bands, people like Ma Rainey (whose earliest recordings featured Louis Armstrong in her backing band): [Excerpt: Ma Rainey, "See See Rider Blues"] And Bessie Smith, the "Empress of the Blues", who had a massive career in the 1920s before the Great Depression caused many of these "race record" labels to fold, but who carried on performing well into the 1930s -- her last recording was in 1933, produced by John Hammond, with a backing band including Benny Goodman and Jack Teagarden: [Excerpt: Bessie Smith, "Give Me a Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer"] It wouldn't be until several years after the boom started by Mamie Smith that any record companies turned to recording Black men singing the blues accompanied by guitar or banjo. The first record of this type is probably "Norfolk Blues" by Reese DuPree from 1924: [Excerpt: Reese DuPree, "Norfolk Blues"] And there were occasional other records of this type, like "Airy Man Blues" by Papa Charlie Jackson, who was advertised as the “only man living who sings, self-accompanied, for Blues records.” [Excerpt: Papa Charlie Jackson, "Airy Man Blues"] But contrary to the way these are seen today, at the time they weren't seen as being in some way "authentic", or "folk music". Indeed, there are many quotes from folk-music collectors of the time (sadly all of them using so many slurs that it's impossible for me to accurately quote them) saying that when people sang the blues, that wasn't authentic Black folk music at all but an adulteration from commercial music -- they'd clearly, according to these folk-music scholars, learned the blues style from records and sheet music rather than as part of an oral tradition. Most of these performers were people who recorded blues as part of a wider range of material, like Blind Blake, who recorded some blues music but whose best work was his ragtime guitar instrumentals: [Excerpt: Blind Blake, "Southern Rag"] But it was when Blind Lemon Jefferson started recording for Paramount records in 1926 that the image of the blues as we now think of it took shape. His first record, "Got the Blues", was a massive success: [Excerpt: Blind Lemon Jefferson, "Got the Blues"] And this resulted in many labels, especially Paramount, signing up pretty much every Black man with a guitar they could find in the hopes of finding another Blind Lemon Jefferson. But the thing is, this generation of people making blues records, and the generation that followed them, didn't think of themselves as "blues singers" or "bluesmen". They were songsters. Songsters were entertainers, and their job was to sing and play whatever the audiences would want to hear. That included the blues, of course, but it also included... well, every song anyone would want to hear. They'd perform old folk songs, vaudeville songs, songs that they'd heard on the radio or the jukebox -- whatever the audience wanted. Robert Johnson, for example, was known to particularly love playing polka music, and also adored the records of Jimmie Rodgers, the first country music superstar. In 1941, when Alan Lomax first recorded Muddy Waters, he asked Waters what kind of songs he normally played in performances, and he was given a list that included "Home on the Range", Gene Autry's "I've Got Spurs That Jingle Jangle Jingle", and Glenn Miller's "Chattanooga Choo-Choo". We have few recordings of these people performing this kind of song though. One of the few we have is Big Bill Broonzy, who was just about the only artist of this type not to get pigeonholed as just a blues singer, even though blues is what made him famous, and who later in his career managed to record songs like the Tin Pan Alley standard "The Glory of Love": [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, "The Glory of Love"] But for the most part, the image we have of the blues comes down to one man, Arthur Laibley, a sales manager for the Wisconsin Chair Company. The Wisconsin Chair Company was, as the name would suggest, a company that started out making wooden chairs, but it had branched out into other forms of wooden furniture -- including, for a brief time, large wooden phonographs. And, like several other manufacturers, like the Radio Corporation of America -- RCA -- and the Gramophone Company, which became EMI, they realised that if they were going to sell the hardware it made sense to sell the software as well, and had started up Paramount Records, which bought up a small label, Black Swan, and soon became the biggest manufacturer of records for the Black market, putting out roughly a quarter of all "race records" released between 1922 and 1932. At first, most of these were produced by a Black talent scout, J. Mayo Williams, who had been the first person to record Ma Rainey, Papa Charlie Jackson, and Blind Lemon Jefferson, but in 1927 Williams left Paramount, and the job of supervising sessions went to Arthur Laibley, though according to some sources a lot of the actual production work was done by Aletha Dickerson, Williams' former assistant, who was almost certainly the first Black woman to be what we would now think of as a record producer. Williams had been interested in recording all kinds of music by Black performers, but when Laibley got a solo Black man into the studio, what he wanted more than anything was for him to record the blues, ideally in a style as close as possible to that of Blind Lemon Jefferson. Laibley didn't have a very hands-on approach to recording -- indeed Paramount had very little concern about the quality of their product anyway, and Paramount's records are notorious for having been put out on poor-quality shellac and recorded badly -- and he only occasionally made actual suggestions as to what kind of songs his performers should write -- for example he asked Son House to write something that sounded like Blind Lemon Jefferson, which led to House writing and recording "Mississippi County Farm Blues", which steals the tune of Jefferson's "See That My Grave is Kept Clean": [Excerpt: Son House, "Mississippi County Farm Blues"] When Skip James wanted to record a cover of James Wiggins' "Forty-Four Blues", Laibley suggested that instead he should do a song about a different gun, and so James recorded "Twenty-Two Twenty Blues": [Excerpt: Skip James, "Twenty-Two Twenty Blues"] And Laibley also suggested that James write a song about the Depression, which led to one of the greatest blues records ever, "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues": [Excerpt: Skip James, "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues"] These musicians knew that they were getting paid only for issued sides, and that Laibley wanted only blues from them, and so that's what they gave him. Even when it was a performer like Charlie Patton. (Incidentally, for those reading this as a transcript rather than listening to it, Patton's name is more usually spelled ending in ey, but as far as I can tell ie was his preferred spelling and that's what I'm using). Charlie Patton was best known as an entertainer, first and foremost -- someone who would do song-and-dance routines, joke around, play guitar behind his head. He was a clown on stage, so much so that when Son House finally heard some of Patton's records, in the mid-sixties, decades after the fact, he was astonished that Patton could actually play well. Even though House had been in the room when some of the records were made, his memory of Patton was of someone who acted the fool on stage. That's definitely not the impression you get from the Charlie Patton on record: [Excerpt: Charlie Patton, "Poor Me"] Patton is, as far as can be discerned, the person who was most influential in creating the music that became called the "Delta blues". Not a lot is known about Patton's life, but he was almost certainly the half-brother of the Chatmon brothers, who made hundreds of records, most notably as members of the Mississippi Sheiks: [Excerpt: The Mississippi Sheiks, "Sitting on Top of the World"] In the 1890s, Patton's family moved to Sunflower County, Mississippi, and he lived in and around that county until his death in 1934. Patton learned to play guitar from a musician called Henry Sloan, and then Patton became a mentor figure to a *lot* of other musicians in and around the plantation on which his family lived. Some of the musicians who grew up in the immediate area around Patton included Tommy Johnson: [Excerpt: Tommy Johnson, "Big Road Blues"] Pops Staples: [Excerpt: The Staple Singers, "Will The Circle Be Unbroken"] Robert Johnson: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Crossroads"] Willie Brown, a musician who didn't record much, but who played a lot with Patton, Son House, and Robert Johnson and who we just heard Johnson sing about: [Excerpt: Willie Brown, "M&O Blues"] And Chester Burnett, who went on to become known as Howlin' Wolf, and whose vocal style was equally inspired by Patton and by the country star Jimmie Rodgers: [Excerpt: Howlin' Wolf, "Smokestack Lightnin'"] Once Patton started his own recording career for Paramount, he also started working as a talent scout for them, and it was him who brought Son House to Paramount. Soon after the Depression hit, Paramount stopped recording, and so from 1930 through 1934 Patton didn't make any records. He was tracked down by an A&R man in January 1934 and recorded one final session: [Excerpt, Charlie Patton, "34 Blues"] But he died of heart failure two months later. But his influence spread through his proteges, and they themselves influenced other musicians from the area who came along a little after, like Robert Lockwood and Muddy Waters. This music -- or that portion of it that was considered worth recording by white record producers, only a tiny, unrepresentative, portion of their vast performing repertoires -- became known as the Delta Blues, and when some of these musicians moved to Chicago and started performing with electric instruments, it became Chicago Blues. And as far as people like John Mayall in Britain were concerned, Delta and Chicago Blues *were* the blues: [Excerpt: John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, "It Ain't Right"] John Mayall was one of the first of the British blues obsessives, and for a long time thought of himself as the only one. While we've looked before at the growth of the London blues scene, Mayall wasn't from London -- he was born in Macclesfield and grew up in Cheadle Hulme, both relatively well-off suburbs of Manchester, and after being conscripted and doing two years in the Army, he had become an art student at Manchester College of Art, what is now Manchester Metropolitan University. Mayall had been a blues fan from the late 1940s, writing off to the US to order records that hadn't been released in the UK, and by most accounts by the late fifties he'd put together the biggest blues collection in Britain by quite some way. Not only that, but he had one of the earliest home tape recorders, and every night he would record radio stations from Continental Europe which were broadcasting for American service personnel, so he'd amassed mountains of recordings, often unlabelled, of obscure blues records that nobody else in the UK knew about. He was also an accomplished pianist and guitar player, and in 1956 he and his drummer friend Peter Ward had put together a band called the Powerhouse Four (the other two members rotated on a regular basis) mostly to play lunchtime jazz sessions at the art college. Mayall also started putting on jam sessions at a youth club in Wythenshawe, where he met another drummer named Hughie Flint. Over the late fifties and into the early sixties, Mayall more or less by himself built up a small blues scene in Manchester. The Manchester blues scene was so enthusiastic, in fact, that when the American Folk Blues Festival, an annual European tour which initially featured Willie Dixon, Memhis Slim, T-Bone Walker, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, and John Lee Hooker, first toured Europe, the only UK date it played was at the Manchester Free Trade Hall, and people like Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones and Jimmy Page had to travel up from London to see it. But still, the number of blues fans in Manchester, while proportionally large, was objectively small enough that Mayall was captivated by an article in Melody Maker which talked about Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies' new band Blues Incorporated and how it was playing electric blues, the same music he was making in Manchester. He later talked about how the article had made him think that maybe now people would know what he was talking about. He started travelling down to London to play gigs for the London blues scene, and inviting Korner up to Manchester to play shows there. Soon Mayall had moved down to London. Korner introduced Mayall to Davey Graham, the great folk guitarist, with whom Korner had recently recorded as a duo: [Excerpt: Alexis Korner and Davey Graham, "3/4 AD"] Mayall and Graham performed together as a duo for a while, but Graham was a natural solo artist if ever there was one. Slowly Mayall put a band together in London. On drums was his old friend Peter Ward, who'd moved down from Manchester with him. On bass was John McVie, who at the time knew nothing about blues -- he'd been playing in a Shadows-style instrumental group -- but Mayall gave him a stack of blues records to listen to to get the feeling. And on guitar was Bernie Watson, who had previously played with Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages. In late 1963, Mike Vernon, a blues fan who had previously published a Yardbirds fanzine, got a job working for Decca records, and immediately started signing his favourite acts from the London blues circuit. The first act he signed was John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, and they recorded a single, "Crawling up a Hill": [Excerpt: John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, "Crawling up a Hill (45 version)"] Mayall later called that a "clumsy, half-witted attempt at autobiographical comment", and it sold only five hundred copies. It would be the only record the Bluesbreakers would make with Watson, who soon left the band to be replaced by Roger Dean (not the same Roger Dean who later went on to design prog rock album covers). The second group to be signed by Mike Vernon to Decca was the Graham Bond Organisation. We've talked about the Graham Bond Organisation in passing several times, but not for a while and not in any great detail, so it's worth pulling everything we've said about them so far together and going through it in a little more detail. The Graham Bond Organisation, like the Rolling Stones, grew out of Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated. As we heard in the episode on "I Wanna Be Your Man" a couple of years ago, Blues Incorporated had been started by Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies, and at the time we're joining them in 1962 featured a drummer called Charlie Watts, a pianist called Dave Stevens, and saxophone player Dick Heckstall-Smith, as well as frequent guest performers like a singer who called himself Mike Jagger, and another one, Roderick Stewart. That group finally found themselves the perfect bass player when Dick Heckstall-Smith put together a one-off group of jazz players to play an event at Cambridge University. At the gig, a little Scottish man came up to the group and told them he played bass and asked if he could sit in. They told him to bring along his instrument to their second set, that night, and he did actually bring along a double bass. Their bluff having been called, they decided to play the most complicated, difficult, piece they knew in order to throw the kid off -- the drummer, a trad jazz player named Ginger Baker, didn't like performing with random sit-in guests -- but astonishingly he turned out to be really good. Heckstall-Smith took down the bass player's name and phone number and invited him to a jam session with Blues Incorporated. After that jam session, Jack Bruce quickly became the group's full-time bass player. Bruce had started out as a classical cellist, but had switched to the double bass inspired by Bach, who he referred to as "the guv'nor of all bass players". His playing up to this point had mostly been in trad jazz bands, and he knew nothing of the blues, but he quickly got the hang of the genre. Bruce's first show with Blues Incorporated was a BBC recording: [Excerpt: Blues Incorporated, "Hoochie Coochie Man (BBC session)"] According to at least one source it was not being asked to take part in that session that made young Mike Jagger decide there was no future for him with Blues Incorporated and to spend more time with his other group, the Rollin' Stones. Soon after, Charlie Watts would join him, for almost the opposite reason -- Watts didn't want to be in a band that was getting as big as Blues Incorporated were. They were starting to do more BBC sessions and get more gigs, and having to join the Musicians' Union. That seemed like a lot of work. Far better to join a band like the Rollin' Stones that wasn't going anywhere. Because of Watts' decision to give up on potential stardom to become a Rollin' Stone, they needed a new drummer, and luckily the best drummer on the scene was available. But then the best drummer on the scene was *always* available. Ginger Baker had first played with Dick Heckstall-Smith several years earlier, in a trad group called the Storyville Jazzmen. There Baker had become obsessed with the New Orleans jazz drummer Baby Dodds, who had played with Louis Armstrong in the 1920s. Sadly because of 1920s recording technology, he hadn't been able to play a full kit on the recordings with Armstrong, being limited to percussion on just a woodblock, but you can hear his drumming style much better in this version of "At the Jazz Band Ball" from 1947, with Mugsy Spanier, Jack Teagarden, Cyrus St. Clair and Hank Duncan: [Excerpt: "At the Jazz Band Ball"] Baker had taken Dobbs' style and run with it, and had quickly become known as the single best player, bar none, on the London jazz scene -- he'd become an accomplished player in multiple styles, and was also fluent in reading music and arranging. He'd also, though, become known as the single person on the entire scene who was most difficult to get along with. He resigned from his first band onstage, shouting "You can stick your band up your arse", after the band's leader had had enough of him incorporating bebop influences into their trad style. Another time, when touring with Diz Disley's band, he was dumped in Germany with no money and no way to get home, because the band were so sick of him. Sometimes this was because of his temper and his unwillingness to suffer fools -- and he saw everyone else he ever met as a fool -- and sometimes it was because of his own rigorous musical ideas. He wanted to play music *his* way, and wouldn't listen to anyone who told him different. Both of these things got worse after he fell under the influence of a man named Phil Seaman, one of the only drummers that Baker respected at all. Seaman introduced Baker to African drumming, and Baker started incorporating complex polyrhythms into his playing as a result. Seaman also though introduced Baker to heroin, and while being a heroin addict in the UK in the 1960s was not as difficult as it later became -- both heroin and cocaine were available on prescription to registered addicts, and Baker got both, which meant that many of the problems that come from criminalisation of these drugs didn't affect addicts in the same way -- but it still did not, by all accounts, make him an easier person to get along with. But he *was* a fantastic drummer. As Dick Heckstall-Smith said "With the advent of Ginger, the classic Blues Incorporated line-up, one which I think could not be bettered, was set" But Alexis Korner decided that the group could be bettered, and he had some backers within the band. One of the other bands on the scene was the Don Rendell Quintet, a group that played soul jazz -- that style of jazz that bridged modern jazz and R&B, the kind of music that Ray Charles and Herbie Hancock played: [Excerpt: The Don Rendell Quintet, "Manumission"] The Don Rendell Quintet included a fantastic multi-instrumentalist, Graham Bond, who doubled on keyboards and saxophone, and Bond had been playing occasional experimental gigs with the Johnny Burch Octet -- a group led by another member of the Rendell Quartet featuring Heckstall-Smith, Bruce, Baker, and a few other musicians, doing wholly-improvised music. Heckstall-Smith, Bruce, and Baker all enjoyed playing with Bond, and when Korner decided to bring him into the band, they were all very keen. But Cyril Davies, the co-leader of the band with Korner, was furious at the idea. Davies wanted to play strict Chicago and Delta blues, and had no truck with other forms of music like R&B and jazz. To his mind it was bad enough that they had a sax player. But the idea that they would bring in Bond, who played sax and... *Hammond* organ? Well, that was practically blasphemy. Davies quit the group at the mere suggestion. Bond was soon in the band, and he, Bruce, and Baker were playing together a *lot*. As well as performing with Blues Incorporated, they continued playing in the Johnny Burch Octet, and they also started performing as the Graham Bond Trio. Sometimes the Graham Bond Trio would be Blues Incorporated's opening act, and on more than one occasion the Graham Bond Trio, Blues Incorporated, and the Johnny Burch Octet all had gigs in different parts of London on the same night and they'd have to frantically get from one to the other. The Graham Bond Trio also had fans in Manchester, thanks to the local blues scene there and their connection with Blues Incorporated, and one night in February 1963 the trio played a gig there. They realised afterwards that by playing as a trio they'd made £70, when they were lucky to make £20 from a gig with Blues Incorporated or the Octet, because there were so many members in those bands. Bond wanted to make real money, and at the next rehearsal of Blues Incorporated he announced to Korner that he, Bruce, and Baker were quitting the band -- which was news to Bruce and Baker, who he hadn't bothered consulting. Baker, indeed, was in the toilet when the announcement was made and came out to find it a done deal. He was going to kick up a fuss and say he hadn't been consulted, but Korner's reaction sealed the deal. As Baker later said "‘he said “it's really good you're doing this thing with Graham, and I wish you the best of luck” and all that. And it was a bit difficult to turn round and say, “Well, I don't really want to leave the band, you know.”'" The Graham Bond Trio struggled at first to get the gigs they were expecting, but that started to change when in April 1963 they became the Graham Bond Quartet, with the addition of virtuoso guitarist John McLaughlin. The Quartet soon became one of the hottest bands on the London R&B scene, and when Duffy Power, a Larry Parnes teen idol who wanted to move into R&B, asked his record label to get him a good R&B band to back him on a Beatles cover, it was the Graham Bond Quartet who obliged: [Excerpt: Duffy Power, "I Saw Her Standing There"] The Quartet also backed Power on a package tour with other Parnes acts, but they were also still performing their own blend of hard jazz and blues, as can be heard in this recording of the group live in June 1953: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Quartet, "Ho Ho Country Kicking Blues (Live at Klooks Kleek)"] But that lineup of the group didn't last very long. According to the way Baker told the story, he fired McLaughlin from the group, after being irritated by McLaughlin complaining about something on a day when Baker was out of cocaine and in no mood to hear anyone else's complaints. As Baker said "We lost a great guitar player and I lost a good friend." But the Trio soon became a Quartet again, as Dick Heckstall-Smith, who Baker had wanted in the band from the start, joined on saxophone to replace McLaughlin's guitar. But they were no longer called the Graham Bond Quartet. Partly because Heckstall-Smith joining allowed Bond to concentrate just on his keyboard playing, but one suspects partly to protect against any future lineup changes, the group were now The Graham Bond ORGANisation -- emphasis on the organ. The new lineup of the group got signed to Decca by Vernon, and were soon recording their first single, "Long Tall Shorty": [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Long Tall Shorty"] They recorded a few other songs which made their way onto an EP and an R&B compilation, and toured intensively in early 1964, as well as backing up Power on his follow-up to "I Saw Her Standing There", his version of "Parchman Farm": [Excerpt: Duffy Power, "Parchman Farm"] They also appeared in a film, just like the Beatles, though it was possibly not quite as artistically successful as "A Hard Day's Night": [Excerpt: Gonks Go Beat trailer] Gonks Go Beat is one of the most bizarre films of the sixties. It's a far-future remake of Romeo and Juliet. where the two star-crossed lovers are from opposing countries -- Beatland and Ballad Isle -- who only communicate once a year in an annual song contest which acts as their version of a war, and is overseen by "Mr. A&R", played by Frank Thornton, who would later star in Are You Being Served? Carry On star Kenneth Connor is sent by aliens to try to bring peace to the two warring countries, on pain of exile to Planet Gonk, a planet inhabited solely by Gonks (a kind of novelty toy for which there was a short-lived craze then). Along the way Connor encounters such luminaries of British light entertainment as Terry Scott and Arthur Mullard, as well as musical performances by Lulu, the Nashville Teens, and of course the Graham Bond Organisation, whose performance gets them a telling-off from a teacher: [Excerpt: Gonks Go Beat!] The group as a group only performed one song in this cinematic masterpiece, but Baker also made an appearance in a "drum battle" sequence where eight drummers played together: [Excerpt: Gonks Go Beat drum battle] The other drummers in that scene included, as well as some lesser-known players, Andy White who had played on the single version of "Love Me Do", Bobby Graham, who played on hits by the Kinks and the Dave Clark Five, and Ronnie Verrell, who did the drumming for Animal in the Muppet Show. Also in summer 1964, the group performed at the Fourth National Jazz & Blues Festival in Richmond -- the festival co-founded by Chris Barber that would evolve into the Reading Festival. The Yardbirds were on the bill, and at the end of their set they invited Bond, Baker, Bruce, Georgie Fame, and Mike Vernon onto the stage with them, making that the first time that Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, and Jack Bruce were all on stage together. Soon after that, the Graham Bond Organisation got a new manager, Robert Stigwood. Things hadn't been working out for them at Decca, and Stigwood soon got the group signed to EMI, and became their producer as well. Their first single under Stigwood's management was a cover version of the theme tune to the Debbie Reynolds film "Tammy". While that film had given Tamla records its name, the song was hardly an R&B classic: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Tammy"] That record didn't chart, but Stigwood put the group out on the road as part of the disastrous Chuck Berry tour we heard about in the episode on "All You Need is Love", which led to the bankruptcy of Robert Stigwood Associates. The Organisation moved over to Stigwood's new company, the Robert Stigwood Organisation, and Stigwood continued to be the credited producer of their records, though after the "Tammy" disaster they decided they were going to take charge themselves of the actual music. Their first album, The Sound of 65, was recorded in a single three-hour session, and they mostly ran through their standard set -- a mixture of the same songs everyone else on the circuit was playing, like "Hoochie Coochie Man", "Got My Mojo Working", and "Wade in the Water", and originals like Bruce's "Train Time": [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Train Time"] Through 1965 they kept working. They released a non-album single, "Lease on Love", which is generally considered to be the first pop record to feature a Mellotron: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Lease on Love"] and Bond and Baker also backed another Stigwood act, Winston G, on his debut single: [Excerpt: Winston G, "Please Don't Say"] But the group were developing severe tensions. Bruce and Baker had started out friendly, but by this time they hated each other. Bruce said he couldn't hear his own playing over Baker's loud drumming, Baker thought that Bruce was far too fussy a player and should try to play simpler lines. They'd both try to throw each other during performances, altering arrangements on the fly and playing things that would trip the other player up. And *neither* of them were particularly keen on Bond's new love of the Mellotron, which was all over their second album, giving it a distinctly proto-prog feel at times: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Baby Can it Be True?"] Eventually at a gig in Golders Green, Baker started throwing drumsticks at Bruce's head while Bruce was trying to play a bass solo. Bruce retaliated by throwing his bass at Baker, and then jumping on him and starting a fistfight which had to be broken up by the venue security. Baker fired Bruce from the band, but Bruce kept turning up to gigs anyway, arguing that Baker had no right to sack him as it was a democracy. Baker always claimed that in fact Bond had wanted to sack Bruce but hadn't wanted to get his hands dirty, and insisted that Baker do it, but neither Bond nor Heckstall-Smith objected when Bruce turned up for the next couple of gigs. So Baker took matters into his own hands, He pulled out a knife and told Bruce "If you show up at one more gig, this is going in you." Within days, Bruce was playing with John Mayall, whose Bluesbreakers had gone through some lineup changes by this point. Roger Dean had only played with the Bluesbreakers for a short time before Mayall had replaced him. Mayall had not been impressed with Eric Clapton's playing with the Yardbirds at first -- even though graffiti saying "Clapton is God" was already starting to appear around London -- but he had been *very* impressed with Clapton's playing on "Got to Hurry", the B-side to "For Your Love": [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "Got to Hurry"] When he discovered that Clapton had quit the band, he sprang into action and quickly recruited him to replace Dean. Clapton knew he had made the right choice when a month after he'd joined, the group got the word that Bob Dylan had been so impressed with Mayall's single "Crawling up a Hill" -- the one that nobody liked, not even Mayall himself -- that he wanted to jam with Mayall and his band in the studio. Clapton of course went along: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and the Bluesbreakers, "If You Gotta Go, Go Now"] That was, of course, the session we've talked about in the Velvet Underground episode and elsewhere of which little other than that survives, and which Nico attended. At this point, Mayall didn't have a record contract, his experience recording with Mike Vernon having been no more successful than the Bond group's had been. But soon he got a one-off deal -- as a solo artist, not with the Bluesbreakers -- with Immediate Records. Clapton was the only member of the group to play on the single, which was produced by Immediate's house producer Jimmy Page: [Excerpt: John Mayall, "I'm Your Witchdoctor"] Page was impressed enough with Clapton's playing that he invited him round to Page's house to jam together. But what Clapton didn't know was that Page was taping their jam sessions, and that he handed those tapes over to Immediate Records -- whether he was forced to by his contract with the label or whether that had been his plan all along depends on whose story you believe, but Clapton never truly forgave him. Page and Clapton's guitar-only jams had overdubs by Bill Wyman, Ian Stewart, and drummer Chris Winter, and have been endlessly repackaged on blues compilations ever since: [Excerpt: Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton, "Draggin' My Tail"] But Mayall was having problems with John McVie, who had started to drink too much, and as soon as he found out that Jack Bruce was sacked by the Graham Bond Organisation, Mayall got in touch with Bruce and got him to join the band in McVie's place. Everyone was agreed that this lineup of the band -- Mayall, Clapton, Bruce, and Hughie Flint -- was going places: [Excerpt: John Mayall's Bluesbreakers with Jack Bruce, "Hoochie Coochie Man"] Unfortunately, it wasn't going to last long. Clapton, while he thought that Bruce was the greatest bass player he'd ever worked with, had other plans. He was going to leave the country and travel the world as a peripatetic busker. He was off on his travels, never to return. Luckily, Mayall had someone even better waiting in the wings. A young man had, according to Mayall, "kept coming down to all the gigs and saying, “Hey, what are you doing with him?” – referring to whichever guitarist was onstage that night – “I'm much better than he is. Why don't you let me play guitar for you?” He got really quite nasty about it, so finally, I let him sit in. And he was brilliant." Peter Green was probably the best blues guitarist in London at that time, but this lineup of the Bluesbreakers only lasted a handful of gigs -- Clapton discovered that busking in Greece wasn't as much fun as being called God in London, and came back very soon after he'd left. Mayall had told him that he could have his old job back when he got back, and so Green was out and Clapton was back in. And soon the Bluesbreakers' revolving door revolved again. Manfred Mann had just had a big hit with "If You Gotta Go, Go Now", the same song we heard Dylan playing earlier: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "If You Gotta Go, Go Now"] But their guitarist, Mike Vickers, had quit. Tom McGuinness, their bass player, had taken the opportunity to switch back to guitar -- the instrument he'd played in his first band with his friend Eric Clapton -- but that left them short a bass player. Manfred Mann were essentially the same kind of band as the Graham Bond Organisation -- a Hammond-led group of virtuoso multi-instrumentalists who played everything from hardcore Delta blues to complex modern jazz -- but unlike the Bond group they also had a string of massive pop hits, and so made a lot more money. The combination was irresistible to Bruce, and he joined the band just before they recorded an EP of jazz instrumental versions of recent hits: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"] Bruce had also been encouraged by Robert Stigwood to do a solo project, and so at the same time as he joined Manfred Mann, he also put out a solo single, "Drinkin' and Gamblin'" [Excerpt: Jack Bruce, "Drinkin' and Gamblin'"] But of course, the reason Bruce had joined Manfred Mann was that they were having pop hits as well as playing jazz, and soon they did just that, with Bruce playing on their number one hit "Pretty Flamingo": [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "Pretty Flamingo"] So John McVie was back in the Bluesbreakers, promising to keep his drinking under control. Mike Vernon still thought that Mayall had potential, but the people at Decca didn't agree, so Vernon got Mayall and Clapton -- but not the other band members -- to record a single for a small indie label he ran as a side project: [Excerpt: John Mayall and Eric Clapton, "Bernard Jenkins"] That label normally only released records in print runs of ninety-nine copies, because once you hit a hundred copies you had to pay tax on them, but there was so much demand for that single that they ended up pressing up five hundred copies, making it the label's biggest seller ever. Vernon eventually convinced the heads at Decca that the Bluesbreakers could be truly big, and so he got the OK to record the album that would generally be considered the greatest British blues album of all time -- Blues Breakers, also known as the Beano album because of Clapton reading a copy of the British kids' comic The Beano in the group photo on the front. [Excerpt: John Mayall with Eric Clapton, "Ramblin' On My Mind"] The album was a mixture of originals by Mayall and the standard repertoire of every blues or R&B band on the circuit -- songs like "Parchman Farm" and "What'd I Say" -- but what made the album unique was Clapton's guitar tone. Much to the chagrin of Vernon, and of engineer Gus Dudgeon, Clapton insisted on playing at the same volume that he would on stage. Vernon later said of Dudgeon "I can remember seeing his face the very first time Clapton plugged into the Marshall stack and turned it up and started playing at the sort of volume he was going to play. You could almost see Gus's eyes meet over the middle of his nose, and it was almost like he was just going to fall over from the sheer power of it all. But after an enormous amount of fiddling around and moving amps around, we got a sound that worked." [Excerpt: John Mayall with Eric Clapton, "Hideaway"] But by the time the album cane out. Clapton was no longer with the Bluesbreakers. The Graham Bond Organisation had struggled on for a while after Bruce's departure. They brought in a trumpet player, Mike Falana, and even had a hit record -- or at least, the B-side of a hit record. The Who had just put out a hit single, "Substitute", on Robert Stigwood's record label, Reaction: [Excerpt: The Who, "Substitute"] But, as you'll hear in episode 183, they had moved to Reaction Records after a falling out with their previous label, and with Shel Talmy their previous producer. The problem was, when "Substitute" was released, it had as its B-side a song called "Circles" (also known as "Instant Party -- it's been released under both names). They'd recorded an earlier version of the song for Talmy, and just as "Substitute" was starting to chart, Talmy got an injunction against the record and it had to be pulled. Reaction couldn't afford to lose the big hit record they'd spent money promoting, so they needed to put it out with a new B-side. But the Who hadn't got any unreleased recordings. But the Graham Bond Organisation had, and indeed they had an unreleased *instrumental*. So "Waltz For a Pig" became the B-side to a top-five single, credited to The Who Orchestra: [Excerpt: The Who Orchestra, "Waltz For a Pig"] That record provided the catalyst for the formation of Cream, because Ginger Baker had written the song, and got £1,350 for it, which he used to buy a new car. Baker had, for some time, been wanting to get out of the Graham Bond Organisation. He was trying to get off heroin -- though he would make many efforts to get clean over the decades, with little success -- while Bond was starting to use it far more heavily, and was also using acid and getting heavily into mysticism, which Baker despised. Baker may have had the idea for what he did next from an article in one of the music papers. John Entwistle of the Who would often tell a story about an article in Melody Maker -- though I've not been able to track down the article itself to get the full details -- in which musicians were asked to name which of their peers they'd put into a "super-group". He didn't remember the full details, but he did remember that the consensus choice had had Eric Clapton on lead guitar, himself on bass, and Ginger Baker on drums. As he said later "I don't remember who else was voted in, but a few months later, the Cream came along, and I did wonder if somebody was maybe believing too much of their own press". Incidentally, like The Buffalo Springfield and The Pink Floyd, Cream, the band we are about to meet, had releases both with and without the definite article, and Eric Clapton at least seems always to talk about them as "the Cream" even decades later, but they're primarily known as just Cream these days. Baker, having had enough of the Bond group, decided to drive up to Oxford to see Clapton playing with the Bluesbreakers. Clapton invited him to sit in for a couple of songs, and by all accounts the band sounded far better than they had previously. Clapton and Baker could obviously play well together, and Baker offered Clapton a lift back to London in his new car, and on the drive back asked Clapton if he wanted to form a new band. Clapton was as impressed by Baker's financial skills as he was by his musicianship. He said later "Musicians didn't have cars. You all got in a van." Clearly a musician who was *actually driving a new car he owned* was going places. He agreed to Baker's plan. But of course they needed a bass player, and Clapton thought he had the perfect solution -- "What about Jack?" Clapton knew that Bruce had been a member of the Graham Bond Organisation, but didn't know why he'd left the band -- he wasn't particularly clued in to what the wider music scene was doing, and all he knew was that Bruce had played with both him and Baker, and that he was the best bass player he'd ever played with. And Bruce *was* arguably the best bass player in London at that point, and he was starting to pick up session work as well as his work with Manfred Mann. For example it's him playing on the theme tune to "After The Fox" with Peter Sellers, the Hollies, and the song's composer Burt Bacharach: [Excerpt: The Hollies with Peter Sellers, "After the Fox"] Clapton was insistent. Baker's idea was that the band should be the best musicians around. That meant they needed the *best* musicians around, not the second best. If Jack Bruce wasn't joining, Eric Clapton wasn't joining either. Baker very reluctantly agreed, and went round to see Bruce the next day -- according to Baker it was in a spirit of generosity and giving Bruce one more chance, while according to Bruce he came round to eat humble pie and beg for forgiveness. Either way, Bruce agreed to join the band. The three met up for a rehearsal at Baker's home, and immediately Bruce and Baker started fighting, but also immediately they realised that they were great at playing together -- so great that they named themselves the Cream, as they were the cream of musicians on the scene. They knew they had something, but they didn't know what. At first they considered making their performances into Dada projects, inspired by the early-twentieth-century art movement. They liked a band that had just started to make waves, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band -- who had originally been called the Bonzo Dog Dada Band -- and they bought some props with the vague idea of using them on stage in the same way the Bonzos did. But as they played together they realised that they needed to do something different from that. At first, they thought they needed a fourth member -- a keyboard player. Graham Bond's name was brought up, but Clapton vetoed him. Clapton wanted Steve Winwood, the keyboard player and vocalist with the Spencer Davis Group. Indeed, Winwood was present at what was originally intended to be the first recording session the trio would play. Joe Boyd had asked Eric Clapton to round up a bunch of players to record some filler tracks for an Elektra blues compilation, and Clapton had asked Bruce and Baker to join him, Paul Jones on vocals, Winwood on Hammond and Clapton's friend Ben Palmer on piano for the session. Indeed, given that none of the original trio were keen on singing, that Paul Jones was just about to leave Manfred Mann, and that we know Clapton wanted Winwood in the band, one has to wonder if Clapton at least half-intended for this to be the eventual lineup of the band. If he did, that plan was foiled by Baker's refusal to take part in the session. Instead, this one-off band, named The Powerhouse, featured Pete York, the drummer from the Spencer Davis Group, on the session, which produced the first recording of Clapton playing on the Robert Johnson song originally titled "Cross Road Blues" but now generally better known just as "Crossroads": [Excerpt: The Powerhouse, "Crossroads"] We talked about Robert Johnson a little back in episode ninety-seven, but other than Bob Dylan, who was inspired by his lyrics, we had seen very little influence from Johnson up to this point, but he's going to be a major influence on rock guitar for the next few years, so we should talk about him a little here. It's often said that nobody knew anything about Robert Johnson, that he was almost a phantom other than his records which existed outside of any context as artefacts of their own. That's... not really the case. Johnson had died a little less than thirty years earlier, at only twenty-seven years old. Most of his half-siblings and step-siblings were alive, as were his son, his stepson, and dozens of musicians he'd played with over the years, women he'd had affairs with, and other assorted friends and relatives. What people mean is that information about Johnson's life was not yet known by people they consider important -- which is to say white blues scholars and musicians. Indeed, almost everything people like that -- people like *me* -- know of the facts of Johnson's life has only become known to us in the last four years. If, as some people had expected, I'd started this series with an episode on Johnson, I'd have had to redo the whole thing because of the information that's made its way to the public since then. But here's what was known -- or thought -- by white blues scholars in 1966. Johnson was, according to them, a field hand from somewhere in Mississippi, who played the guitar in between working on the cotton fields. He had done two recording sessions, in 1936 and 1937. One song from his first session, "Terraplane Blues", had been a very minor hit by blues standards: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Terraplane Blues"] That had sold well -- nobody knows how well, but maybe as many as ten thousand copies, and it was certainly a record people knew in 1937 if they liked the Delta blues, but ten thousand copies total is nowhere near the sales of really successful records, and none of the follow-ups had sold anything like that much -- many of them had sold in the hundreds rather than the thousands. As Elijah Wald, one of Johnson's biographers put it "knowing about Johnson and Muddy Waters but not about Leroy Carr or Dinah Washington was like knowing about, say, the Sir Douglas Quintet but not knowing about the Beatles" -- though *I* would add that the Sir Douglas Quintet were much bigger during the sixties than Johnson was during his lifetime. One of the few white people who had noticed Johnson's existence at all was John Hammond, and he'd written a brief review of Johnson's first two singles under a pseudonym in a Communist newspaper. I'm going to quote it here, but the word he used to talk about Black people was considered correct then but isn't now, so I'll substitute Black for that word: "Before closing we cannot help but call your attention to the greatest [Black] blues singer who has cropped up in recent years, Robert Johnson. Recording them in deepest Mississippi, Vocalion has certainly done right by us and by the tunes "Last Fair Deal Gone Down" and "Terraplane Blues", to name only two of the four sides already released, sung to his own guitar accompaniment. Johnson makes Leadbelly sound like an accomplished poseur" Hammond had tried to get Johnson to perform at the Spirituals to Swing concerts we talked about in the very first episodes of the podcast, but he'd discovered that he'd died shortly before. He got Big Bill Broonzy instead, and played a couple of Johnson's records from a record player on the stage. Hammond introduced those recordings with a speech: "It is tragic that an American audience could not have been found seven or eight years ago for a concert of this kind. Bessie Smith was still at the height of her career and Joe Smith, probably the greatest trumpet player America ever knew, would still have been around to play obbligatos for her...dozens of other artists could have been there in the flesh. But that audience as well as this one would not have been able to hear Robert Johnson sing and play the blues on his guitar, for at that time Johnson was just an unknown hand on a Robinsonville, Mississippi plantation. Robert Johnson was going to be the big surprise of the evening for this audience at Carnegie Hall. I know him only from his Vocalion blues records and from the tall, exciting tales the recording engineers and supervisors used to bring about him from the improvised studios in Dallas and San Antonio. I don't believe Johnson had ever worked as a professional musician anywhere, and it still knocks me over when I think of how lucky it is that a talent like his ever found its way onto phonograph records. We will have to be content with playing two of his records, the old "Walkin' Blues" and the new, unreleased, "Preachin' Blues", because Robert Johnson died last week at the precise moment when Vocalion scouts finally reached him and told him that he was booked to appear at Carnegie Hall on December 23. He was in his middle twenties and nobody seems to know what caused his death." And that was, for the most part, the end of Robert Johnson's impact on the culture for a generation. The Lomaxes went down to Clarksdale, Mississippi a couple of years later -- reports vary as to whether this was to see if they could find Johnson, who they were unaware was dead, or to find information out about him, and they did end up recording a young singer named Muddy Waters for the Library of Congress, including Waters' rendition of "32-20 Blues", Johnson's reworking of Skip James' "Twenty-Two Twenty Blues": [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "32-20 Blues"] But Johnson's records remained unavailable after their initial release until 1959, when the blues scholar Samuel Charters published the book The Country Blues, which was the first book-length treatment ever of Delta blues. Sixteen years later Charters said "I shouldn't have written The Country Blues when I did; since I really didn't know enough, but I felt I couldn't afford to wait. So The Country Blues was two things. It was a romanticization of certain aspects of black life in an effort to force the white society to reconsider some of its racial attitudes, and on the other hand it was a cry for help. I wanted hundreds of people to go out and interview the surviving blues artists. I wanted people to record them and document their lives, their environment, and their music, not only so that their story would be preserved but also so they'd get a little money and a little recognition in their last years." Charters talked about Johnson in the book, as one of the performers who played "minor roles in the story of the blues", and said that almost nothing was known about his life. He talked about how he had been poisoned by his common-law wife, about how his records were recorded in a pool hall, and said "The finest of Robert Johnson's blues have a brooding sense of torment and despair. The blues has become a personified figure of despondency." Along with Charters' book came a compilation album of the same name, and that included the first ever reissue of one of Johnson's tracks, "Preaching Blues": [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Preaching Blues"] Two years later, John Hammond, who had remained an ardent fan of Johnson, had Columbia put out the King of the Delta Blues Singers album. At the time no white blues scholars knew what Johnson looked like and they had no photos of him, so a generic painting of a poor-looking Black man with a guitar was used for the cover. The liner note to King of the Delta Blues Singers talked about how Johnson was seventeen or eighteen when he made his recordings, how he was "dead before he reached his twenty-first birthday, poisoned by a jealous girlfriend", how he had "seldom, if ever, been away from the plantation in Robinsville, Mississippi, where he was born and raised", and how he had had such stage fright that when he was asked to play in front of other musicians, he'd turned to face a wall so he couldn't see them. And that would be all that any of the members of the Powerhouse would know about Johnson. Maybe they'd also heard the rumours that were starting to spread that Johnson had got his guitar-playing skills by selling his soul to the devil at a crossroads at midnight, but that would have been all they knew when they recorded their filler track for Elektra: [Excerpt: The Powerhouse, "Crossroads"] Either way, the Powerhouse lineup only lasted for that one session -- the group eventually decided that a simple trio would be best for the music they wanted to play. Clapton had seen Buddy Guy touring with just a bass player and drummer a year earlier, and had liked the idea of the freedom that gave him as a guitarist. The group soon took on Robert Stigwood as a manager, which caused more arguments between Bruce and Baker. Bruce was convinced that if they were doing an all-for-one one-for-all thing they should also manage themselves, but Baker pointed out that that was a daft idea when they could get one of the biggest managers in the country to look after them. A bigger argument, which almost killed the group before it started, happened when Baker told journalist Chris Welch of the Melody Maker about their plans. In an echo of the way that he and Bruce had been resigned from Blues Incorporated without being consulted, now with no discussion Manfred Mann and John Mayall were reading in the papers that their band members were quitting before those members had bothered to mention it. Mayall was furious, especially since the album Clapton had played on hadn't yet come out. Clapton was supposed to work a month's notice while Mayall found another guitarist, but Mayall spent two weeks begging Peter Green to rejoin the band. Green was less than eager -- after all, he'd been fired pretty much straight away earlier -- but Mayall eventually persuaded him. The second he did, Mayall turned round to Clapton and told him he didn't have to work the rest of his notice -- he'd found another guitar player and Clapton was fired: [Excerpt: John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, "Dust My Blues"] Manfred Mann meanwhile took on the Beatles' friend Klaus Voorman to replace Bruce. Voorman would remain with the band until the end, and like Green was for Mayall, Voorman was in some ways a better fit for Manfred Mann than Bruce was. In particular he could double on flute, as he did for example on their hit version of Bob Dylan's "The Mighty Quinn": [Excerpt: Manfred Mann "The Mighty Quinn"] The new group, The Cream, were of course signed in the UK to Stigwood's Reaction label. Other than the Who, who only stuck around for one album, Reaction was not a very successful label. Its biggest signing was a former keyboard player for Screaming Lord Sutch, who recorded for them under the names Paul Dean and Oscar, but who later became known as Paul Nicholas and had a successful career in musical theatre and sitcom. Nicholas never had any hits for Reaction, but he did release one interesting record, in 1967: [Excerpt: Oscar, "Over the Wall We Go"] That was one of the earliest songwriting attempts by a young man who had recently named himself David Bowie. Now the group were public, they started inviting journalists to their rehearsals, which were mostly spent trying to combine their disparate musical influences --
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