The Golden Age Of American Rock’n'Roll - Special Country Edition
Customer Review: How Country Music lived with Rock n’ Roll.
In the mid ’50s, Country Music was in real danger of going out of business. Its niche markets were overwhelmed by the new raw sounds of Rock n’ Roll demanded by of all things, by teenagers.

The first track on this superb compilation, White Lightnin’ by George Jones captures the way Country Music blended the new sound into a distinct beat, keeping the lyrics distinctly Country. That sound just about kept Country alive long enough for the tunes and melodies to grow back, and the successive tracks are distinctive in that they have something to say, and a memorable sound that could catch the ear on radio or get a quarter into a jukebox.

What the songs said wasn’t new, but it was now more evocative because the songs linked in with things like urbanisation, and the loss of rural roots. Detroit City echoes the loss with its great line “by day I make the cars, and by night I make the Bars”, even El Paso, with it’s Mexican sounds hints of the old lost West.

Also crowding in were songs that spoke of unrequited love or adultery. Heavy stuff. Wrapped up in a great arrangement is the classic Walk on By, not the Dionne Warwick bit of fluff, but the darker Leroy Van Dyke track of adulterous love.

Whatever the theme, and they weave around the usual mix, the arrangement, tempo and delivery matches. Jim Reeves on the telephone with He’ll Have To Go, and the frenetic Flowers On the Wall with the Statlers one step ahead of descending into a nervous breakdown caused by the loss of a woman.

The tracks range from 1956 to 1965, a long time in any music.From Ray Prices classic shuffle Crazy Arms to Roger Millers scat in King of the Road.

Country Music is often portrayed as samey, boring and trite. These songs sold in their hundreds of thousands, tackling issues other genres wouldn’t touch. And they did it in a way that meant as soon as you heard the guitar chords of I Fall To Pieces you stop and remember that it’s Patsy. Country Music can evoke memory and emotion.

This ACE collection is a very worthy entrant in the Golden Age of Rock ‘n’ Roll Series. Buy it now.

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The Kinks - Rock Reflections [2008]

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The Strawberry Bricks Guide To Progressive Prog Rock Music

Amazon.co.uk: Do You Like Rock Music?: British Sea Power: Music

If This Is Rock and Roll I Want My Old Job Back
It was inevitable that someone would emerge from the Irish showband tradition to add rock & roll to the equation. Like all the most profitable ideas though, it only seemed obvious once someone had thought of it. If nothing else, the huge following gained by The Saw Doctors’ debut set illustrated what a wide-ranging thing Irishness is. If This Is Rock And Roll plays to the band’s greatest strength–a talent for rabble-rousing tunes which detail all manner of small town life. Diversity? Well, here’s the occasional lighters-aloft anthem such as “Sing A Powerful Song”. Exotic? How about “N17″–a rollicking offspring to Christy Moore’s emigrant hit “Don’t Forget Your Shovel”? Now add it all together and you’ve got yourself a national institution. As Irish as a pint of Guinness with a potato in it. –Peter Paphides

Customer Review: Show band at full throttle
An Irish five-piece who deliver all the passion and excitement of a showband at full throttle. This is melody and humour with a beat, a 60’s pop sound given a Celtic twist and driven by an unabashed determination to entertain.

This 1991 CD captures much of the excitement of a live band. These guys play with a vivacity which insists you get up and dance … or at least sing along relentlessly strumming your air guitar! There’s no fancy, pretentious superstar posing here - this is entertainment for the listener not a demand for adulation for the performers. It takes you back to a time when music was about boy-meets-girl on the dancefloor … a time when the guys on stage had to be able to play their instruments live and do so in a manner which kept your feet tapping. The Saw Doctors do that in spades!

Their songs look at love and lust and loss, and the economics of having to leave your home and go to another country just to earn a living. It’s an experience with which many Celts can identify. The lyrics allude to the politics of Ireland and the macro-economics of labour mobility. The lyrics allude to teenage emotions and teenage fantasies. The lyrics combine themes of life, love, and earning a living, of departure and loss, of moving on.

Tongue is firmly in cheek in places. The stand-out song is “I useta lover” - funny, irreverent, and a number which must be recognised as a rock classic. “Red cortina” and “N17″ are the other tracks which most gripped me, but a lot of the songs on the album catch your ear when they fit the right mood. Still a fresh, entertaining sound, an album you’ll play again and again.

Customer Review: Just class
Fantastic. Spirited and lively and completely feel good music with easy and catchy lyrics, when you have listened a few times you too will be singing along to the words. Hysterical madness, their inspiration coming from school girls to road signs. I found myself singing along in the car to some wary onlookers, but it is an album to let your hair down to, culchie rock with humour.

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Amazon.co.uk: Do You Like Rock Music?: British Sea Power: Music

The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle: Highlights
Given that punk was supposed to blow away the hegemony of self-appointed “albums” artists, it’s perhaps a little optimistic to expect a classic album by the Sex Pistols. Some would say that Never Mind The Bollocks was indeed such a thing; few though, would make the same claim about this, the accompanying album to the band’s eponymous movie. That’s not, however, to say that The Great Rock’n'Roll Swindle doesn’t yield some top moments: “God Save The Queen” and “Anarchy In The UK” still remain as beautifully nihilistic as pop can get. Alas though, Glen Matlock didn’t stick around long enough to write a few more. What fills the gaps, in his absence, is a slew of occasionally amusing novelty songs (”Who Killed Bambi”, Sid’s “My Way”, “Friggin In The Riggin”), lame covers (”Substitute”, “Johnny B Goode”, the afro-funk Pistols medley “Black Arabs”) and a charming cameo from great train robber Ronnie Biggs on “Belsen Was A Gas”. Perhaps you had to be there. –Peter Paphides

Customer Review: Less is more
I would seriously reccommend the 12-track highlights album as opposed to the 24-track sprawling mess. Firstly when dealing with erratic material like this, the sequencing makes or breaks the album. The highlights album begins with Malcolm McLaren’s voiceover and then crashes into Rock n Roll Swindle - a good start. It includes all the best of the rock n roll songs like Something Else and Lonely Boy but none of the dross like Johnny Be Good and Road Runner where Johnny Rotten struggles to remember any of the words and consequently swears a lot! The Ten Pole Tudor songs are completely insane but seem to fit in better on the 12-track album than on the longer version.

However, the lyrics are still shocking, yet have none of the political oomph of the first pistols album. Perhaps this is the Pistols as Malcolm McLaren would have liked them - a charicature of punk rock with nothing much to say.

Personally, I would prefer a 17-track album with the ‘highlights’ dozen followed by the amusing French style Anarchy in the UK, then the first Belsen was a Gas, Don’t give me no lip, I’m not your stepping stone and the Black Arabs medley as a fittingly daft finisher. With the 24-track album this parody is placed before one of the songs it is parodying (No one is innocent) which seems absurd.

Whereas Johnny Rotten’s ‘Belsen was a gas’ seems to express disgust at the Nazi regime with the repeated ‘Be a man, kill someone’, the Ronnie Biggs’ version seems much too light hearted for the shocking subject matter, but then I suppose it would have been a bit much to expect pathos from one of the great train robbers! As for the dirty rugby song done punk style which concludes the longer album, if nothing has offended you so far, this one might just do it. Thankfully the highlights album omits this! All in all, this album proves just how pivotal Matlock was to the Sex Pistols being a serious band.

Customer Review: It’s A Swindle!
Forget objectivity this album is so obviously an insult to it’s intended audience that it’s beyond a joke.Then why do i find it so incredibly entertaining then? Punk rock always had a sense of the ridiculous.That was often missed by it’s detractors but as it was an antedote to the po faced mush that preceeded it we can understand that.It’s a mixed bag based on a film that was never really a film and contains all kinds of curios that many Pistols purists still find beneath contempt.As a collection of music it is fine, and like it or not, a part of the Pistols legend.

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Rock ‘n’ Roll Gypsies
Customer Review: Air guitars on standby
Great to see this finally being issued on CD, although be warned that the disc appears to have been recorded from a vinyl source. This is more apparent on some tracks than others but, overall, the sound quality is very good. The 4 bonus tracks, which include both sides of the single “Why D’Ya Lie To Me”, are a welcome addition to the original album and it’s great to hear the 11 minute instrumental, “Amazing Grace medley” again. Anyone who attended a Spider gig back in the day will have fond memories of this one!!

I would have awarded it the full 5 stars but for the sound quality, although, to this reviewer, this is a minor gripe.

Customer Review: TAKES ME RIGHT BACK
This band knew how to work an audience. One of the most hardworking outfits on the scene at the time. Never stopped touring. No frills. No airs and graces, just no nonsense rock & roll. Great stuff.

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Official, rock music is too loud | The Sun |News

Rock music - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Goodbye Nashville Hello Camden Town: a Pub Rock Anthology
Customer Review: Worth it for Unicorn
I saw a lot of those bands at Dingwalls in the seventies and the one that sticks in my mind the most is Unicorn.They had that American thing off really well but with quirky British lyrics.Some very good musicians in those bands,I wonder how many are Postmen,Couriers,Librarians and of course there’s one born again every minute.Deserves to be listened to,preferably in the state that you were in when you first heard them.Don’t try to get into those cheese cloth shirts though,without first having liposuction or at least wearing a training bra.

Customer Review: Goodbye Prog Rock, Hello Pub Rock
`Goodbye Nashville, Hello Camden Town’ is the most comprehensive attempt to create a Pub Rock Anthology to press. The Pub Rock scene was borne of frustration of the excesses of the seventies music scene and specifically prog rock creating rock theatre so isolating its self from its own audience. And so a grass roots movement of musicians playing in pubs re-energised the London music scene and led up to the birth of punk which itself then subverted most of the Pub Rock musicians into becoming `New Wave’ which somehow perfectly described their retro sixties styles.

Originally playing the sort of Country Music today referred to as Americana originally developed by Gram Parson’s era Byrds and The Band crawling out of Dylan’s window. The Pub Rock sound eventually evolved into the tight r’n'b famously peddled by Dr Feelgood. This anthology focuses more on the initial early country sound which would appear to be a commercial decision based on the cost of licensing the later more well known tracks, that Dr Feelgood would have only one track on this is criminal particularly when taking into account of how many times their name is used on the art work and extensive liner notes.

That said it is still a great anthology spot lighting Brinsley Schwarz whose Bassist, Nick Lowe, and manager, Dave Robson, along with Chilli Willi manager, Jake Riviera and a five hundred pound load from Dr Feelgood would start the Stiff record label. Other highlights are the Ian Dury led Kilburn and the Highroads, Punk prototypes Eddie and the Hot Rods and a pre-snooker loopy self parody Chas and Dave.

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Chicago Rock Music Find Live Rock Music in Chicago, Live shows …

Rock Follies
Customer Review: Rock Follies
I can recall now crowding around the telly as a young kid to watch The Rock follies long before Girl Power there was The Follie’s Power a group of three women trying to make their way in what was and perhaps right up until the eighties (when we had left school and staretd to fight the power) a very male dominated world of music - you can’t help but cringe as you remember the fashion, the misery of a pre-thatacher britain where apathy ruled the day - and don’t you ever for get it. The Follies was the best thing on telly in the late 70’s - there was nothing like it and in a world now of Pop Idol and X factor (what did we all do before the talented Kelly Clarkson and Will Young!!) Follies music and the politics of the shows along with the fact that these women are from such different social class makes it ”must see tv” to understand where Music has not only come from today but exactly where things were back then. I understand Julie Conington turned her back on the whole fame game shortly after making this series…… But even so through Rula and Charlotte remind us all to say ” step back Suzi Quartro ” These Wimmin Rock” and the actng for the time and was just brilliant. I remain a fan of the show and the music until my dying day

Customer Review: TV’s First Girl Group
As we approach the Queen’s Golden jubilee, here is a welcome re-release of a show from the year of her Silver jubilee - the sequel to the 1975 series “Rock Follies”, neither of which have ever been repeated since (but why?). The story of the rise and rapid fall of a girl group during the year dominated by punk rock, if you never saw the series, then don’t worry , the main plot is told by the songs - “Follies of 77″ tells the story-so-far, “Round 1″, “The Hype” and “The Things You have to Do” are about life in a record deal, whilst the “Wolf at the Door” and the terribly sad “Real Life” tell the listener how it all ends. The album features the groups real-life hit single “O.K.” (plus its b-side “B-side” as a bonus track) - words and music being composed once again by Howard Schumann and Andy Mackay (of Roxy Music fame). More than nostalgia - a postcard of its time, now someone show the programme again, or at least get it out on video/DVD!

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