The Adverts’ debut single was released by Stiff Records in late April 1977. The top side of the “One Chord Wonders” / “Quick Step” pairing was a dry humoured assessment of the state of play in British punk. It was and is a remarkable record.However, reviews back then were mixed. NME’s Tony Parsons said it was “mundane rock by new wave flotsam and jetsam” and that The Adverts are “almost unbelievably boring.” In contrast, Sounds rated it as Single Of The Week and said “If [singer] TV Smith can keep writing songs like this, The Adverts will be up there with them.” Prescient. Their next single, Read more ...

The strongest element in Tony is the performance that Antonio Banderas gives as ‘Chef’, the owner of a seafood restaurant in the holiday resort of Provincetown in the late Seventies. It’s a subtle, nuanced delivery despite a script which doesn't give the actor much to work with.  He could have just drifted into playing a saintly mentor, but somehow Banderas finds complexity in the role.If only the same could be said of Dominic Sessa, who repurposes his debut performance as  a surly youth, a cocktail of ego and insecurity, from The Holdovers. It’s easy to see why Sessa would be Read more ...

“She said her life was like a motorway… dull, grey, and long.” The lyrics of “Like a Motorway,” from Saint Etienne’s February 1994 album Tiger Bay see the titular highway negatively, signifying a life defined by a prolonged drabness.Saint Etienne released their final album, International, last September. By that point, Bob Stanley, one third of the band, was already bedded-in as an author. He has also been behind a series of concept compilations. Rather than being devoted to a genre or style – maybe acid folk or Belgian popcorn – they aim to bring to mind a situation, a setting, particular Read more ...

The reappearance of Gloria Mundi’s I, Individual is a surprise. Most of what related to UK punk – however tangentially – over 1977 and 1978 has been reissued, and has often been around the houses multiple times. But, until now, Gloria Mundi have escaped the attention of those recycling this aspect of the past.I, Individual was Gloria Mundi's first album, originally issued on 7 July 1978. The band were live circuit regulars from late 1976 and split in 1980 after a second, very different, album which came out in October 1979. Image What’s on Read more ...

Reviewing The Clash’s 27 October 1976 appearance at Birmingham’s Barbarella’s, UK music weekly Sounds detected a particular, unique, characteristic of the band. Jonh (sic) Ingham identified “a Clash trick of everything dropping out except for Mick Jones' guitar, dropping back in two bars later behind a thundering crack from Terry Chimes' baseball bat sized drumsticks.”The drop-out was a feature of dub, the form of studio-created reggae which emerged in the early Seventies. Music historian David Katz has pointed to “Ivan Itler the Conqueror,” a 1970 single side credited to Bunny Lee Allstars, Read more ...

“Rimbaud, I guess. W.C. Fields. The family, you know, the trapeze family in the circus. Smokey Robinson. Allen Ginsberg. Charlie Rich, he's a good poet.”It’s 3 December 1965. Bob Dylan is in San Francisco to play the city’s Masonic Auditorium before setting off on other dates around California. He’s sitting down in front of journalists and TV cameras for a press conference. The response above was prompted by being asked “What poets do you dig?” Image What he’s just said is not followed up. Instead, the next question is about the nature of Read more ...

VINYL OF THE MONTHEd O’Brien Blue Morpho (Transgressive) Image The last thing theartsdesk on Vinyl thought it needed was a solo album from Radiohead’s guitarist but Blue Morpho, Ed O’Brien’s second album, spikes expectations. The opening “Incantations” is fab, a low-rolling, bongo-tastic thing hazed in mysticism, like a particularly stoned offcut from Plant & Page’s No Quarter project. The album was, apparently, a healing exercise for O’Brien, who was having brain doldrums. It feels that way, lightness touched with sadness, like that Read more ...

“Keys to Your Heart,” the only single by Joe Strummer’s pre-Clash band The 101’ers, was released on 27 June 1976 – 50 years ago this week.Fantastic and still vital, “Keys to Your Heart” is a driving pop-rocker with a Sixties feel. It edges towards powerpop. But the urgency of delivery and its raggedness mark it out as broadly telegraphing what was around the corner with British punk rock. And its mid section, with Strummer's testifying, presages a fundamental element of the make-up of The Clash. An important single.The anniversary is neat prompt to consider the band’s musical legacy: what Read more ...

For many years Paul Weller had a conflicted relationship with the oldest parts of his back catalogue. It was rare to hear more than one of his pre-1990 songs in concert. Then he started slipping them in, but only a couple. Tonight, he’s clearly at peace with the whole of his long and varied career, playing seven songs by The Jam and four by the Style Council in a set well over two hours long. It’s a joy to hear these gems scattered with vital precision among the eclectic smorgasbord of what came after.Weller has always been a lean, urgent presence and he remains so. Chewing gum, iron-grey of Read more ...

As I started to write this review, I found that Tucker Zimmerman died in January this year. This was news to me, sad news, made worse by the fact he died in a house fire at his home in Belgium, alongside his wife of more than five decades, Marie-Claire. I’d no idea and, as a fan taken by unhappy surprise, it likely affects my writing and perspective on this, his final album. At 84, Zimmerman was not young, and had decades of sporadically released, underheard music behind him, starting with his Tony Visconti-produced 1968 debut, Ten Songs (which David Bowie listed in Vanity Fair in 2003 Read more ...

Maybe because we are aware now of too many cases of a paranoid schizophrenic suddenly unleashing violence on an innocent stranger, the teenager under treatment in Peter Schaffer’s 1973 play, who has blinded six horses, is no longer a character we feel that conflicted about.Unlike Martin Dysart (Toby Stephens), the psychiatrist whose encounter with just such a lad upends his thinking about almost everything, especially his own motives for pursuing his career. While Alan (Noah Valentine) struggles with his desire for someone to inspire his life and settles on the divine presence he senses in Read more ...

Really Into Somethin' - Brit Girl Sounds and Styles 1962-1970 is an explicitly titled 89-track, three-CD clamshell box set. Take one of its terrific tracks at random: Adrienne Poster’s “The Way You do the Things You do.” A February 1965 B-side, it’s a cover version of the Temptations’ US hit. Recognisably a British production it, at this remove, sounds like a UK chart certainty. There had, though, already been a British adaptation issued a month earlier by Elkie Brooks, hence the B-side status for Poster’s version. Neither single was a best seller. Image Read more ...