In which New York based sonic warriors Vanilla Fudge (discovered and managed by a reputed associate of the Lucchese crime family) take on Lee Hazelwood’s Some Velvet Morning with equal parts subtlety and a sledgehammer lack thereof. Not as good as the original and yet a journey worth taking regardless, because sometimes you just need to go further.
“Nobody was paying much attention anymore to the Steve Miller Band come the 1980s, which means the spaced out analog synthetic bliss of 1981’s side long Macho City got mostly overlooked. Which is a pity. Because there has never been enough spaced out groove music, particularly during the 1980s. Ronald Reagan’s War On Drugs in full effect, the marijuana getting stronger and stronger. Something weird was going down. I’m still trying to figure out what.” (Philip Random)
In which Jim Carroll (former teenage heroin poet eventually made famous by Leonardo DiCaprio) forms a band and makes good on an album of raw urban angst best exemplified by this epic chunk of dark glory. Because we’ve all been there with the daylight fading, the shadows laying their claim. Let the strange times roll.
“As the story goes, when Keith Levene split Public Image Ltd, he had a few recent master recordings under his arm. Which is a good thing. Else we probably would never have heard the likes of Blue Water, which first showed up as a b-side in 1983. Deep and weird and exactly the kind of thing you wanted cranked to the nines on your ghetto blaster when the drugs were all kicking in and you had an abandoned industrial zone to explore, with a fog moving in from the harbour and twilight looming.” (Philip Random)
The Stone Roses hit like a fresh breeze in 1989 with a self-titled debut album which they’d never come close to matching. The lyrics may have worked a dark edge but the sound was all cool light, a powerful pop that was also ethereal, expansive, exploding with the sort of complex colours that the decade in question had mostly forgotten even existed. The future looked vibrant, maybe even good.
The actor (aka David Bowie, David Jones, Ziggy Stardust) is starting to crack here. We all were in retrospect. Even if you were a thickheaded suburban kid barely into puberty – the whole 60s thing just wasn’t playing out as anticipated. Revolution in our time? Maybe. But by 1973, it was clear it wouldn’t be an old-fashioned political revolution. No, it was all going to be much weirder than that.
Randophonic 