The Subways

Not sure how I missed these guys.

You all need to look in the mirror and ask yourselves if you’re providing me sufficient exposure to all the good bands I need.

Forgotten Gem

Probably my favorite EJ song.  It’s the second half of a medley that opens Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.  It (along with the opening song, the instrumental Funeral For a Friend) got quite a bit of airplay on FM radio when the album was released.  This was the glory days of FM, when stations played deep tracks.  You never heard it on AM, which stuck to singles.  It gets left out of “best of” compilations, and many EJ fans don’t know it.  I don’t get why.  This song has everything going for it, including a killer bass line.  It’s one of the songs I used to teach myself bass when I got one in 10th grade.

Don’t Ask Me What I Want It For

I know it’s probably verging on blasphemy for some when I say I’m really digging Giles Martin’s new stereo mix of Revolver. Thinking very seriously of grabbing it on vinyl.

Pistols Ephemera Up For Auction At Sotheby’s

Check out all this cool stuff! By the way, that’s an Animation City single-cel composite for The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle, c. 1978 (Estimate: 1,500 – 2,000 GBP).

From The Guardian

If Pistol, Danny Boyle’s recent TV series, was the story of a rock band, then this collection is the story of an idea: a collaborative multimedia art project in which Reid and McLaren, who met at Croydon art school, were at least as significant as Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious. “They all brought their own unique visions and the Sex Pistols was the pot that everyone threw everything into,” Stolper says. Many of the images, ostensibly created to promote gigs and records, hold up as artworks in their own right. You could see them without having heard a note of the Sex Pistols’ music and know that they represented a radically significant moment in British youth culture. “This is all at the service of something else,” Wilson says, “and working out what that something else is is the intriguing part of it.”

Bidding opens October 10.

20 Years


Hard to believe, but Up The Bracket turns twenty this year. If a better album’s come out since, I haven’t heard it.

There’s No Way This Will Be Good

Will I still watch it? Morbid curiosity compels me to check out the first episode.

Best YouTube comment …

I’m getting “Vyvyan from the Young Ones” vibes from this – and not in a good way.

Someone else made the astute observation that Rotten was always more sardonic than angry. The tone is all wrong.

Broadcast

Any of you bastards heard of them?  Someone put me onto them last night.  They were active from late 90’s to around 2011, when their singer passed away after catching H1N1 on tour.  This song’s from their first album, The Noise Made By Peoplewhich is good.  If you took Forever Changes, removed the Hispanic influence, added some delightfully creepy synths, and brought in a fifteen-year-old Nico to sing, then you might have something like this album.  Or not.

Update from the rabbit hole: this one, from second album, sounds like Silver Apples, but with a far better singer.