Category Archive: Modern Music
Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink
(By Elvis Costello) (2015) We’ve been admiring EC from afar and occasionally up close, for a very long time. So we come to his autobiography with relish and trepidation. It is not as good as Speak Memory, the greatest autobiography ever penned, but it is hugely impressive – more a dense memory-book than a straight auto-biog, and much more concerned with music and music people than his own ego. He is obviously and rather charmingly challenged by autobiography, preferring the more oblique method of song lyrics and anecdotes, and saying of the process: “I don’t much care for the subject.”…
Continue Reading →One More For the Road
(Frank Sinatra, December 12, 1915 – May 14, 1998) Francis Albert Sinatra, of Hoboken, New Jersey, is 100 today. Fly him (who created the American songbook) to the moon! His presentation of torch songs was stoic but sad. (Imagine a gambler whose girlfriend – Ava Gardner, say – has walked out on him). He’d come on and spill his heart over the stage, then pick himself up and get back in the race, as if to say ‘That’s life – rise above it.’ For example, at “The Sands”, with Count Basie on piano, he has a full-to-bursting room silent and rapt with a drunk…
Continue Reading →The Gandhi of Rock
(Pete in Toronto, 1974 - photo by Jean-Luc Ourlin)
Peter Gabriel (b. 13 February 1950) Gabes grew up in public. Precocious and vulnerable, his relatively privileged upbringing (he schooled at Charterhouse) inured him from fear of failure. This gave him, for a time, freedom to make Genesis a really innovative group, who came up with several interesting albums before they morphed into a somewhat blander supergroup. He left Genesis just as it began to take-off, with a gnostic note to the world that said “I had a dream, eye’s dream. Then I had another dream with body and soul of a rock star. When it didn’t feel good I packed it in…” And…
Continue Reading →What Stevie Wore in Adelaide
"Oh, I'm getting older too" (Photo courtesy of Flickr)
Dear Annabels, our beloved Stevie Nicks stomps a bit now and she really shouldn’t turn side-on to the audience but she is pretty as and still rocks it just fabulously. At Fleetwood Mac’s October 2015 concert, I was close enough to see up Stevie’s two (not one or three) nostrils and so I took careful note of what the lady wore. I don’t think I need to say that it was (almost) all black, but Stevie wore:- A skirt of (perhaps) microfiber, layered and good for lifting out at the sides A fitted long-sleeved velvet vest with points at the…
Continue Reading →Fleetwood Mac
(Billboard magazine, 1977)
[Adelaide, 28 October 2015] The Varnished Culture saw Fleetwood Mac last night, at Hindmarsh Stadium aka Cooper’s Stadium*. These ancient rockers sound magnificent and look marvellous, although the ravages of time, travel, art and their relationships show, especially if you are lucky enough, as we were, to have tickets that get you stalker-close to the stage. The by-play between them, borne of decades of love, hate, and indifference, gave joy to the dedicated audience, some of whom have been party to these shenanigans for their whole lives. We had seen the group a few years ago but this was our first time with the original line-up,…
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