In 1996, while most major British bands were blowing their royalties on cocaine, light aircraft, Patsy Kensit and Hampstead piles, Radiohead did something quite different. They spent a big chunk of what they’d earned on building an entirely new studio and filled it with a variety of exotic types of pricey, abstract and futuristic noise-making […]
The Beatles are commonly considered to be the most important musical group of the 20th century, but even regardless of their historical significance, their original output is endlessly listenable. Within a span of only eight years in the 1960s, the Fab Four released a string of 11 studio LPs — more if you count the soundtrack […]
The world is not lacking monuments to Bruce Springsteen. His work has been exhaustively parsed, reissued, celebrated, annotated, and admired. At present, it is wildly difficult to find a reasonable person willing to decry his oeuvre as insignificant or inadequate. In the nineteen-sixties, after Woody Guthrie got sick, Bob Dylan seemed primed to become the […]
Avant-garde composer John Cage started out as a disciple of Arnold Schoenberg. He greatly looked up to the exiled Austrian as a model of how a true artist ought to live. Cage, in turn, inspired generations of artists and composers both through his work – which incorporated elements of chance into his music – and […]
‘The Dark Side Of The Moon’ (1973). The concept of this cover, according the artist Storm Thorgerson, was to try and connect with Pink Floyd’s live shows; “famous for their lighting, ambition and madness… hence the prism, the triangle and the pyramids. It all connects, somehow, somewhere.” ‘Wish You Were Here’ (1975). Designer Storm Thorgerson […]
I love the Beatles, and like many Beatles fans, I think The White Album is one of their great masterpieces. And one of the best songs on The White Album is, without question, “Dear Prudence.” But did you know that the song was influenced by the music of the Gypsies, Transcendental Meditation, and the daughter […]
Sometime around 2011, Keith Richards was ready to retire from his life in rock ’n’ roll. Approaching half a century with the Rolling Stones, he had done it all. “I know what luck is. I’ve had a lot,” he reflected in an interview this month. He’s the archetypal rock guitarist: the genius wastrel, the unimpeachable […]
As an album, it was not a revelation. Unlike its predecessor, it did not herald an unprecedented songwriting style that music fans found to be unbelievably ambitious, audacious, mad, rad. Gone were the lyrics that sounded like Chuck Berry had been secretly collaborating with Jack Kerouac. And jeez, you could scour the whole record and […]