“The band is called Python Lee Jackson, but yes that is Rod Stewart singing lead. Who knows what the story is? I’m guessing it was a session Mr. Stewart did back before he was uber-famous. And it just sat on a shelf until he was suddenly too big to ignore, and cool. That’s the hard part. To realize that Rod Stewart was once genuinely cool, hard drinking, hard rocking, always smiling, incapable of contributing to the cause of bad music. But then something horrible happened.” (Philip Random)
“I find I generally don’t have much to say about the Beatles (and they do have quite a few selections on this list) — mainly because so much has already been said. And yet, there’s always someone new coming along who needs to be reminded. They Changed Everything Forever. With a bunch of help from their friends. Western man couldn’t even see in colour until they came along – not with his third eye anyway. I believe Love You To was the first time a sitar graced a Beatles tune. 1966, final seeds being sown for the summer of love about to erupt.” (Philip Random)
“In which Echo + The Bunnymen pay homage to Liverpool local heroes of two decades previous by shambling through an at least half-assed, half-cynical, half-brilliant re-imagining of one of the essential summer of love classics. And the thing is, it f***ing works. At least it did for my psychedelic soul one hot summer day, well into the 1990s. What the hell was I even doing tripping well past my thirty-fifth birthday? Why was I alone in that dank hole of an apartment? What was the fucking point of anything in my life beyond mere survival, which is the ultimate losing game anyway? And so on. I was on a slippery slope, pitching fast into a darkstar. But then there was Echo + his BunnyFriends in the background, from a random mixtape … reminding me. You’re never really alone, never truly beaten, or doomed. All you’ve got to do is find something to give.”
The Boo Radleys didn’t get much notice at the time (certainly not over here in the Americas, and what notice they did get tended to be for the wrong stuff), but if you were in the right place in 1991-92-93, tuned to the right frequencies, you were lucky enough to know a godlike, noisy and powerful pop that could cause actual changes in the weather. Maybe if they’d bothered to put something as gobsmackingly ascendant as At The Sound of Speed on an actual album as opposed to burying it on the b-side of an EP, things might have played out a little differently.
Randophonic 