Rick Wakeman (wearer of shimmering capes, keyboard master from prog rock superheroes Yes) never played a bum note, which unfortunately didn’t guarantee a brilliant solo career. Except occasionally, as with White Rock which was required listening whenever the parents were out and you could finally crank the stereo as the gods intended, put those woofers to test. Found on the soundtrack from a movie of the same name concerning the 1976 Winter Olympics that nobody ever saw.
The word debacle applies to Emerson Lake + Palmer’s 1977. While the cool world went punk and the party world went disco, they released a dubious double album and invested big in taking a full symphony orchestra on a world tour with them. It failed. Meanwhile, a wigged out sort of post-meltdown boogie like Tiger in a Spotlight got buried on a secondary album of various odds and sods, suggesting a whole other possible history for mankind … until you do little research and discover it had been sitting on a shelf since 1973. That ship had already sailed, and probably sank.
Way back when in 1968, T-Rex was still known as Tyrannosaurus Rex and Mark Bolan was pretty much a complete unknown prone to spilling his cosmic hippie soul (and related poetry) all over the place, which made for some great records even if, sadly, Debora probably wasn’t even listening.
This one (from Pop Will Eat Itself’s 1989 mega-brain-exploder of a masterpiece, This is the Day … This is the Hour … This is This) concerns the legal problems of James Brown whose beats everyone was happily stealing at the time. 1989 being one of those years in which EVERYTHING seemed to be happening all at once, mainly because hip-hop was finally, officially here to stay, and with it sampling (everything ever recorded really) setting folks free in ways they could never have imagined possible. At least until the lawyers got involved.
“”Back in the day, I generally thought of The Cure as more of a pop band than anything else, and a damned good one. Which perhaps explains why I didn’t listen to Disintegration that much. My loss, because it’s a solid album all the way through. Though to this day, the track I keep coming back to is Lullaby which, it turns out, was their biggest ever hit in the UK. Though not so much here in the Americas, thankfully, because I’m not sick of it. Reminds me of spiders for some reason. In a good way. I mean, they’re our friends, aren’t they?” (Philip Random)
The so-called sound art project known as Nocturnal Emissions take a few bland self-help samples, lay down a simple groove and deliver an anthem of sorts on the theme of healing. Because by the time 1985 hit, everyone who had even half a brain knew we were all in serious shit as regards the long term survival of the species. And then there was that big disease with a little name (as Prince put it). We all knew someone who had it, even if we didn’t actually know they had it yet. Such was the AIDS crisis of the mid-80s — a death sentence all the way. And yet we’re human, so we never give up. Some of us anyway.
Randophonic 
