"Because ignorance of your culture is considered uncool"
June 8, 1972 – NET – Black Journal – Interview with Melvin van Peebles – Gordon Skene Sound Collection – This is one of those instances where time travel would be the preferred method of understanding social and cultural phenomena. Starting in the mid-1960s and proceeding all the way into...
The Clash – in concert at Rettel Festival in France – recorded on June 14, 1980. As something of a direct contrast in genres, between my post last night by Hanoi Rocks in 1984 and today’s post of The Clash, in concert at the Rettel Festival in 1980 – you...
July 19, 1977 – CBS World News Roundup – Gordon Skene Sound Collection – July 19, 1977 – the heatwave which had gripped most of the East Coast and was in other parts of the country was continuing on this day. As New York was slowly recovering from its worst...
Another tribute this week. Word came out last night of the death of co-founder and Punk pioneer Alan Vega, the driving force behind Suicide and a noted visual artist, had died at the age of 78. Together with Martin Rev, Alan Vega established Suicide as one of the seminal projects...
The Bill Evans Trio this weekend. Recorded at Casale Monferrato, Italy on November 30, 1979 and broadcast by RAI Radio 3. No doubt about it, we are living in fractured, nervous times – and anything we can do to calm the situation and the stirrings in our racing out-of-control minds...
Mott The Hoople tonight. From a concert recorded at the BBC’s Paris Theatre in London in 1971. In case you didn’t know, Mott The Hoople had been around since 1968 and had recorded a string of high-energy hard-rock albums which firmly established them as one of the bands spearheading the...
Youth and Police in America, circa 1971. If there was one thing the 60s made glowingly apparent, that most decades previously didn’t, it was the notion to question authority. Sparked by the Vietnam War and set ablaze by the Youth explosion, there were more teenagers running around America’s streets than...
The Lurkers – in session for John Peel – January 24, 1979 – BBC Radio 1 – The Lurkers tonight – one of the first Punk bands to appear on the scene and the very first band to be signed by the then-fledgling Beggars Banquet Records. Formed in 1976 and...
Camel in session at Electric Ladyland Studios – November 19, 1974 – Camel was one of the first of the Progressive bands to become a bigger hit in the U.S. than they were in their native UK. By 1974, the band had already released their second album, Mirage via their...
When news surfaced, some three years ago, that Kevin Ayers had died, it was one of those shocking and sad occasions that instantly recalled all those contributions he had made over the decades and how much had gone unnoticed. Ayers was a founding member of the iconic Soft Machine, whose...
