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A Ducal setting
Groups of figures — men in dinner jackets, women in floaty dresses — moving across terraced lawns on a warm midsummer afternoon, carrying picnic baskets and champagne in coolers. An auditorium built...
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Chapel of love
This September it will be 70 years since Roebuck Staples took his daughters Cleotha and Mavis and his son Pervis into a studio in Chicago where, accompanied by his guitar and the piano of Evelyn Gay,...
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Under the same sky
It’s 10 years since the veteran countercultural insurrectionist Mick Farren died. In 1976, in a celebrated polemic for the NME headlined “The Titanic sails at dawn”, he asked: “Has rock and roll...
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Coltrane & Dolphy on the record
When Uncut magazine invited me to review the newly discovered tapes of John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy at the Village Gate in the summer of 1961, which are released today on vinyl and CD, I went and dug...
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Northern Soul at the Albert Hall
The spirits of Tobi Legend, Tony Clarke, Sandi Sheldon, Eddie Holman, Bobby Paris, Judy Street, Shane Martin, Dana Valery and other heroes of Northern Soul inhabited the Royal Albert Hall last night....
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Adieu, Jane B.
The obituaries of Jane Birkin in this morning’s British newspapers mentioned all the obvious stuff — the BBC ban, the handbags — while neglecting to record two salient features of her career in the...
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Climate change
On an unseasonably cold, rainy late-July evening in East London, the trio known as Decoy — Alexander Hawkins on Hammond organ, John Edwards on double bass and Steve Noble on drums — and their regular...
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RIP Sinéad O’Connor
Document handed out to journalists covering the Bob Dylan 30th anniversary concert at Madison Square Garden, New York City, on 16 October 1992.
View ArticleRandy Meisner 1946-2023
The first time I noticed Randy Meisner’s name was when Rick Nelson released his first album with the Stone Canyon Band, recorded live at the Troubadour in LA in 1969 and released the following year....
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