Category Archives: All Vinyl Apocalypse

1,111 greatest records you probably haven’t already heard

702. Buick MacKane

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“We were arguing recently. Motron and myself. What’s the essential T-Rex album? I was on the side of 1971’s Electric Warrior. He wasn’t budging from the next one, 1972’s Slider. My argument was simple enough. NOTHING could ever top Bang A Gong, heard by these ears a million times and they’re still not tired. He countered with Buick MacKane. ‘Heavy and wild, and a girl named Buick!?!  Did her parents call her that? Or was it a nick-name? And if so, where did it come from? I don’t want to know the real answer. The song is answer enough.’ We stopped arguing, drank more Scotch.” (Philip Random)

T-Rex-1972

 

 

703. Strasse Nach Asien

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It’s 1979. The 1960s are long gone. Get over it. Unless you’re Embryo (German hippies with hot musical chops), in which case, you pile into a bus with a film crew and a load of recording gear and go further, go east, across Persia, Afghanistan, down the sub-continent into India, mix it up with masters and untouchables, deliver the ancient news. There’s even a movie about it.

(image source)

704. reverse lion + downtown samba

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Two tracks that flow together as one in Philip Random‘s mind. “It always bugs me when people call Yello synth-pop. Yeah, they have synths and they’re not afraid to pop, but there’s so much more going on, with their first album Solid Pleasure a solid clue as what it was all about. It was about everything – from drones to sambas to just pure out there techno-pleasures. I had a drummer friend who’d throw side-one onto the turntable and just pound away to it. He said it was all there, everything he could ever want from music. Ten years later, he was a deadhead, but that’s another chapter.” (Philip Random)

yello-1980

705. mea culpa

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“In which David Byrne and Brian Eno step outside of the Talking Heads for a bit and end up changing music forever. No, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts didn’t invent sampling (Holger Czukay was already messing around with disembodied voices inside and out of Can), but it did rather open the floodgates, with Mea Culpa proving ideal for heroic doses of LSD, assuming you were up to it. Which I wasn’t at least once — a gloomy January dusk, a riverbank in the flight path of the local airport, with a church in the distance. I became convinced a plane was going to crash into it. I don’t remember the rest.” (Philip Random)

Eno+Byrne-tea

706. Icarus Ascending

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In which we are reminded that it wasn’t Peter Gabriel’s split from Genesis that condemned them (and us) to the various attainments and atrocities that would come to define them through the 1980s – it was Steve Hackett‘s. Look no further than Please Don’t Touch, Hackett’s first post-Genesis solo excursion (he was still in the band for 1975’s Voyage of the Acolyte), its epic conclusion in particular. And yes, that is Richie Havens (the hippie folk guy that saved the day at Woodstock) laying down the heavy vocal gravity.

steveHackett-1978

707. Alaskan polar bear heater

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In which Severed Heads remind us that there’s joy in repetition, or maybe just madness; and truth in the notion that many of the so-called Industrial artists of the 1980s only got worse as they got better at figuring out their instruments and related technology, got to sounding more and more like normal musicians. In Severed Heads case, that means they’d peaked long before I ever heard them via any number of cassette only releases. But fortunately, that truth eventually found me via Clifford Darling, Please Don’t Live In The Past, a double vinyl compilation full of delightfully strange and, if needs be, antagonistic excursions. Alaskan Polar Bear Heater seems to concern a cocktail.

SeveredHeads-cassette