“Today is not much skilled craftsmen capable of creating a truly awful cover for a vinyl disc. This art, alas, almost lost. When we look to come down to us … Well, I’m sick of this stylized idiocy.” Jaroslav Sviridov went through LP Cover Lover and picked his favourites: 1, 2, 3. (NSFW for deeply unstylish exposed breasts.) This never gets old.
The last song of the last night, “My Pal” by the Drones with Joel Silbersher, on video.
And, of course, the 7:30 Report. Now, I remember Hamish Fitzsimmons as my mate the Perth bass player who I swapped my 6-UVS T-shirt for a Mustang! Beer Makes You Smart shirt … just the man you want on this story.
The ABC in its infinite wisdom has started broadcasting its first run of the BBC’s Seven Ages Of Rock in the Silly Season, with episode one “The Birth Of Rock” shown last week and unfortunately not available on iView. However I was fortunate enough to catch it when broadcast.
Focussing on the explosion of Blues-based Rock from 1963-1970, “The Birth Of Rock” was a rocknerd’s delight, featuring rare performance footage, new and archive interviews with Keith Richards, Roger Daltrey, Ginger Baker etc. and insights from British rock writers including Charles Shaar Murray. I look forward to watching the rest of the series.
From Jeph Jacques of Questionable Content: If bands were dates.
Update: And more.
Royal Mail has issued a stamp set that commemorates ten classic rock album covers ranging from The Rolling Stones Let It Bleed to Coldplay’s A Rush Of Blood To The Head.
The stamps were launched on the 7th of January by Jimmy Page, and Led Zeppelin’s “IV” is included in the ten chosen from thousands by Royal Mail for the imagery of their covers rather than the music on the albums themselves.
PUBLIC ENEMA, The Hit Parade, Thursday (N! News) — James Blunt’s Back To Bedlam was the UK’s biggest-selling album of the 2000s, objectively establishing the final death of pop music after fifty years.
The 2000s were the decade of falling record sales, plummeting profits for the six five four major labels, a number one single requiring only a few thousand downloads as opposed to a hundred thousand physical records twenty-five years earlier and a race to the bottom by the music industry to come up with something, anything, so horrifyingly insipid and stupid as to destroy instantly the mind of anyone exposed to it, like a saccharine Cthulhu, in the quest to find a sufficiently common lowest denominator.
