Music for Grown-Ups has been praising Fopp ever since the small chain started rolling out its refreshing music retailing concept in England.
Its stores, notably the new flagship in London’s Tottenham Court Rd, are my preferred outlet for buying CDs, DVDs and books. Fopp leaves the competition in its slipstream, thanks to its quirky catalogue, some keen pricing, but mostly because its genre classifications – reflected in innovative display – are just so well thought-out.
Bad news this week, though – Fopp seems to be struggling to survive – a one-day closure of stores last Friday, suspension of online sales, cash only in the stores, and the Music Zone stores – their recent acquisition is a likely major cause of Fopp’s woes – closed, as I found when I went to visit the Welwyn Garden City branch yesterday.
All music retailers are currently struggling against free downloads and aggressive online and supermarket discounting. But if all the major chains went under, Fopp is the one I’d miss most.
Gerry Smith
Friday 29 June 2007
Monday 18 June 2007
Your armchair guide: Glastonbury on TV
Thanks to Mike Ollier
Friday/Saturday/Sunday on BBC2/BBC3/BBC4 at various times
* Glastonbury Festival
Well, glad I'm not there… crack a warm can open (preferably Fosters or some other equally pissy 'beer'), sit in the shower with a gro-bag, invite a burglar into your home, drop an E or two and have some felafel. Watch on TV. Ah, the festival experience in your own home, and a handy, safe toilet. There, I've saved you a few hundred quid and you haven't contracted trench foot.
You'll have to check times yourself, cos it's on all weekend across three channels (and some radio coverage), but on Friday you'd be a fool to miss Arcade Fire. Amy Winehouse is promised and some loud wannabes. Probably. John Fogerty and Iggy Pop are promised on Saturday.
However, you'll also have to put up with a bunch of entirely unnecessary celebrity presenters, who just get in the way of the music. One can only hope that professional good egg Mark Radcliffe is introducing/interviewing the more watchable performers.
Friday/Saturday/Sunday on BBC2/BBC3/BBC4 at various times
* Glastonbury Festival
Well, glad I'm not there… crack a warm can open (preferably Fosters or some other equally pissy 'beer'), sit in the shower with a gro-bag, invite a burglar into your home, drop an E or two and have some felafel. Watch on TV. Ah, the festival experience in your own home, and a handy, safe toilet. There, I've saved you a few hundred quid and you haven't contracted trench foot.
You'll have to check times yourself, cos it's on all weekend across three channels (and some radio coverage), but on Friday you'd be a fool to miss Arcade Fire. Amy Winehouse is promised and some loud wannabes. Probably. John Fogerty and Iggy Pop are promised on Saturday.
However, you'll also have to put up with a bunch of entirely unnecessary celebrity presenters, who just get in the way of the music. One can only hope that professional good egg Mark Radcliffe is introducing/interviewing the more watchable performers.
Tuesday 12 June 2007
Best Of Van Morrison, Volume 3 – impressive duets, disappointing solo material, puzzling timing
The Best Of Van Morrison Volume 3, released yesterday in the UK (and in the USA on 19 June) is a 2CD album with 31 tracks, dating from the early 1990s to mid-Noughties, including previously unreleased collaborations, as well as duets with greats like John Lee Hooker, B.B. King and Ray Charles.
If you don’t have an extensive Van Morrison collection, the new release – available online from £8.95 delivered – is an impressive round-up of Morrison’s multifarious outings with some of the greats of postwar blues and soul music. Highlights? The Junior Wells and Hooker duets – both spellbinders.
But for this formerly heavy duty Van consumer, CD2 (see below) illustrates just how The Man’s art has careered uncontrollably towards pop pastiche/showbiz/showband in the last ten years, jettisoning former hardcoristas like me along the way. You couldn’t give me most of the solo tracks on CD 2: I’d have dropped them all, in favour of more duets.
The timing of the release, a bare four months after At The Movies, the last EMI Catalogue compilation of Morrison tunes, is puzzling, too. Presumably it’s a new contract and the label wants to maximize its return - rapido. They won’t get much help from me - I haven’t bought a new Van M album this Millennium, and Best Of Volume 3 won’t change that.
Disc 1
1. Cry For Home (with Tom Jones) (previously unreleased)
2. Too Long In Exile
3. Gloria (with John Lee Hooker)
4. Help Me with Junior Wells (live)
5. Lonely Avenue / 4 O' Clock In The Morning (with Jimmy Witherspoon, Candy Dulfer & Jim Hunter) (live)
6. Days Like This
7. Ancient Highway
8. Raincheck
9. Moondance
10. Centerpiece (with Georgie Fame & Annie Ross)
11. That's Life (live)
12. Benediction (remix) (with Georgie Fame & Ben Sidran)
13. The Healing Game (re-mix)
14. I Don't Want To Go On Without You (with Jim Hunter)
Disc 2
1. Shenandoah (with The Chieftains)
2. Precious Time
3. Back On Top (remix)
4. When The Leaves Come Falling Down
5. Lost John (with Lonnie Donegan) (live)
6. Tupelo Honey (with Bobby Bland) (previously unreleased)
7. Meet Me In The Indian Summer (orchestral version) (remix)
8. Georgia On My Mind
9. Hey Mr. DJ
10. Steal My Heart Away
11. Crazy Love (with Ray Charles)
12. Once In A Blue Moon
13. Little Village
14. Blue and Green
15. Sitting On Top Of The World (with Carl Perkins)
16. Early In The Morning (with B.B. King)
17. Stranded
Gerry Smith
If you don’t have an extensive Van Morrison collection, the new release – available online from £8.95 delivered – is an impressive round-up of Morrison’s multifarious outings with some of the greats of postwar blues and soul music. Highlights? The Junior Wells and Hooker duets – both spellbinders.
But for this formerly heavy duty Van consumer, CD2 (see below) illustrates just how The Man’s art has careered uncontrollably towards pop pastiche/showbiz/showband in the last ten years, jettisoning former hardcoristas like me along the way. You couldn’t give me most of the solo tracks on CD 2: I’d have dropped them all, in favour of more duets.
The timing of the release, a bare four months after At The Movies, the last EMI Catalogue compilation of Morrison tunes, is puzzling, too. Presumably it’s a new contract and the label wants to maximize its return - rapido. They won’t get much help from me - I haven’t bought a new Van M album this Millennium, and Best Of Volume 3 won’t change that.
Disc 1
1. Cry For Home (with Tom Jones) (previously unreleased)
2. Too Long In Exile
3. Gloria (with John Lee Hooker)
4. Help Me with Junior Wells (live)
5. Lonely Avenue / 4 O' Clock In The Morning (with Jimmy Witherspoon, Candy Dulfer & Jim Hunter) (live)
6. Days Like This
7. Ancient Highway
8. Raincheck
9. Moondance
10. Centerpiece (with Georgie Fame & Annie Ross)
11. That's Life (live)
12. Benediction (remix) (with Georgie Fame & Ben Sidran)
13. The Healing Game (re-mix)
14. I Don't Want To Go On Without You (with Jim Hunter)
Disc 2
1. Shenandoah (with The Chieftains)
2. Precious Time
3. Back On Top (remix)
4. When The Leaves Come Falling Down
5. Lost John (with Lonnie Donegan) (live)
6. Tupelo Honey (with Bobby Bland) (previously unreleased)
7. Meet Me In The Indian Summer (orchestral version) (remix)
8. Georgia On My Mind
9. Hey Mr. DJ
10. Steal My Heart Away
11. Crazy Love (with Ray Charles)
12. Once In A Blue Moon
13. Little Village
14. Blue and Green
15. Sitting On Top Of The World (with Carl Perkins)
16. Early In The Morning (with B.B. King)
17. Stranded
Gerry Smith
Wednesday 6 June 2007
Waterboy Mike Scott interview in new Bowie fanzine
Tirelessly promoting Book Of Lightning, the new album, Mike Scott, Head Waterboy, has been turning up all over the media. But nowhere as surprising as the Bowie Zone Fanzine (www.bowiezone.net), the impressive new unofficial website celebrating the art of the great chameleon art rocker.
Scotty fans will love the interview. Bowie followers will want to check out this lovely new site. Grown-up rockers will get a double buzz.
http://www.bowiezone.net/11343/98901.html
Gerry Smith
Scotty fans will love the interview. Bowie followers will want to check out this lovely new site. Grown-up rockers will get a double buzz.
http://www.bowiezone.net/11343/98901.html
Gerry Smith
Tuesday 5 June 2007
Bob Marley’s Exodus – 30th anniversary CDs, book, film
Exodus, the quintessential Bob Marley album, first released 30 years ago, has been treated with respect by record label Island/Universal.
Having released re-mastered single CD and De Luxe 2CD versions in 2001, Island have just released no fewer than five 30th Anniversary versions of the great album: single CD, CD/DVD, vinyl LP and – here’s the interesting bit – CD/SD memory card version and CD/USB memory stick version.
The CD/DVD combo looks like the pick of the crop.
Exodus: Bob Marley and The Wailers, a new book (ed Richard Williams, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, £25), published on Thursday, gathers together a collection of articles on the seminal album. Looks interesting.
Bob Marley’s Exodus, Sunday’s Arena programme on BBC2, was disappointing. It made the schoolboy error of playing the album tracks under a series of ill-chosen, unrelated contemporary news clips. And compounded the error by inserting an endless series of inconsequential comments on the album by anonymous wo/men in the street.
The leitmotif of clips from a ceremony dedicating a plaque on a block of flats off London’s Tottenham Court Rd., where Marley briefly lived, was the most squirm-inducing bit of TV I’ve seen for ages.
The Arena documentary was nowhere near as good as three earlier Marley TV documentaries I have on VHS tape: largely unwatchable; a missed opportunity.
Gerry Smith
Having released re-mastered single CD and De Luxe 2CD versions in 2001, Island have just released no fewer than five 30th Anniversary versions of the great album: single CD, CD/DVD, vinyl LP and – here’s the interesting bit – CD/SD memory card version and CD/USB memory stick version.
The CD/DVD combo looks like the pick of the crop.
Exodus: Bob Marley and The Wailers, a new book (ed Richard Williams, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, £25), published on Thursday, gathers together a collection of articles on the seminal album. Looks interesting.
Bob Marley’s Exodus, Sunday’s Arena programme on BBC2, was disappointing. It made the schoolboy error of playing the album tracks under a series of ill-chosen, unrelated contemporary news clips. And compounded the error by inserting an endless series of inconsequential comments on the album by anonymous wo/men in the street.
The leitmotif of clips from a ceremony dedicating a plaque on a block of flats off London’s Tottenham Court Rd., where Marley briefly lived, was the most squirm-inducing bit of TV I’ve seen for ages.
The Arena documentary was nowhere near as good as three earlier Marley TV documentaries I have on VHS tape: largely unwatchable; a missed opportunity.
Gerry Smith
Monday 4 June 2007
Major new Paul Weller photo exhibition
Birmingham’s Snap Galleries is notching up some top rock photography exhibitions. Following a top quality Doors show, they’re about to host first major exhibition of Paul Weller photographs, by Lawrence Watson.
Thanks to Guy White, Gallery Director, for details:
Modern Rock ‘n’ Roll - Paul Weller - The Solo Years: The photographs of Lawrence Watson. Saturday 7 July 2007 to 8 September 2007
Lawrence Watson’s first major Paul Weller exhibition to be held in Birmingham
Snap Galleries, a gallery specialising in rock ‘n’ roll photographs, will host a major exhibition of photographs from Lawrence Watson’s renowned Paul Weller archive starting on Saturday 7 July 2007. Snap Galleries is based in a 2,000 sq ft space in Fort Dunlop, one of England’s most recognisable buildings, just outside Birmingham.
The exhibition focuses on Paul Weller’s entire sixteen year (and counting) solo career, a period photographed in its entirety by Lawrence. He first photographed Paul Weller in the last days of The Style Council, and is still photographing him today.
In January 2007 he flew to New York to shoot the three consecutive concerts Paul held play songs from The Jam, The Style Council and his solo period.
Lawrence’s photographic credits do the talking - his work appears on most of Paul Weller’s albums and singles, and his photographs documenting the first few years of Paul Weller’s solo career were published in the 1995 book ‘Days Lose Their Names And Time Slips Away’.
Perhaps Lawrence’s most instantly recognizable image is the silhouette of Paul Weller strumming his guitar in a doorway with a dappled summer scene in the background, used on the cover of 1993’s ‘Wild Wood’. The exhibition features this and a feast of other work, none of which has been exhibited before.
As a video director, Watson also made the acclaimed ‘As Is Now’ DVD documentary, which will be screened regularly throughout the exhibition.
A Thousand Things: the exhibition coincides with the publication of ‘A Thousand Things’, the forthcoming luxury limited edition book by Genesis publications, which covers Paul Weller’s career from The Jam to the present day, and features Lawrence’s photographs alongside images by many other photographers. The book will be available to purchase at the gallery throughout the exhibition.
Snap Galleries Limited, Fort Dunlop, Fort Parkway, Birmingham B24 9FD
www.snapgalleries.com; email: info@snapgalleries.com
Opening Hours: Tuesday to Friday 10.30am-6.00pm, Saturday 11.00-5.00pm
Further background on Lawrence Watson
Lawrence Watson was 17 when he hustled a freelance job at the NME. His first commission was a portrait of a group called Southern Death Cult, who later became The Cult, and whose singer, Ian Astbury, replaced Jim Morrison when The Doors reformed.
He was soon shooting covers on a regular basis. His first was not a musician but a comedian-turned-film star - Eddie Murphy was in town to promote Beverly Hills Cop when Lawrence persuaded him to leave his hotel suite and travel to Bow Street police station, where he posed him beside a pair of London bobbies. For NME he shot, amongst others, The Smiths, David Bowie, KLF, BB King, INXS, Madness and Neneh Cherry.
He shot Lenny Kravitz in Bar Italia, Michael Jordan in his San Antonio dressing room, Snoop Doggy Dogg in a California police cell, and Bobby Womack in what looks like Berwick Street fruit-and-veg market.
More recently Lawrence worked with the artist Peter Blake to photograph the ‘Stop the Clocks’ album cover for Oasis. Lawrence had shot the cover for their album ‘Don’t Believe the Truth’, and accompanied Noel Gallagher on his warm-up gig in Moscow for the Teenager Cancer Trust concerts.
As a video director he has worked with Cast, Echo and the Bunnymen, One Dove, Ian Brown, Travis and, of course, Paul Weller.
For further background on Paul Weller: www.paulweller.com
Background on ‘A thousand things’, the forthcoming limited edition book by Genesis Publications: www.genesis-publications.com
Thanks to Guy White, Gallery Director, for details:
Modern Rock ‘n’ Roll - Paul Weller - The Solo Years: The photographs of Lawrence Watson. Saturday 7 July 2007 to 8 September 2007
Lawrence Watson’s first major Paul Weller exhibition to be held in Birmingham
Snap Galleries, a gallery specialising in rock ‘n’ roll photographs, will host a major exhibition of photographs from Lawrence Watson’s renowned Paul Weller archive starting on Saturday 7 July 2007. Snap Galleries is based in a 2,000 sq ft space in Fort Dunlop, one of England’s most recognisable buildings, just outside Birmingham.
The exhibition focuses on Paul Weller’s entire sixteen year (and counting) solo career, a period photographed in its entirety by Lawrence. He first photographed Paul Weller in the last days of The Style Council, and is still photographing him today.
In January 2007 he flew to New York to shoot the three consecutive concerts Paul held play songs from The Jam, The Style Council and his solo period.
Lawrence’s photographic credits do the talking - his work appears on most of Paul Weller’s albums and singles, and his photographs documenting the first few years of Paul Weller’s solo career were published in the 1995 book ‘Days Lose Their Names And Time Slips Away’.
Perhaps Lawrence’s most instantly recognizable image is the silhouette of Paul Weller strumming his guitar in a doorway with a dappled summer scene in the background, used on the cover of 1993’s ‘Wild Wood’. The exhibition features this and a feast of other work, none of which has been exhibited before.
As a video director, Watson also made the acclaimed ‘As Is Now’ DVD documentary, which will be screened regularly throughout the exhibition.
A Thousand Things: the exhibition coincides with the publication of ‘A Thousand Things’, the forthcoming luxury limited edition book by Genesis publications, which covers Paul Weller’s career from The Jam to the present day, and features Lawrence’s photographs alongside images by many other photographers. The book will be available to purchase at the gallery throughout the exhibition.
Snap Galleries Limited, Fort Dunlop, Fort Parkway, Birmingham B24 9FD
www.snapgalleries.com; email: info@snapgalleries.com
Opening Hours: Tuesday to Friday 10.30am-6.00pm, Saturday 11.00-5.00pm
Further background on Lawrence Watson
Lawrence Watson was 17 when he hustled a freelance job at the NME. His first commission was a portrait of a group called Southern Death Cult, who later became The Cult, and whose singer, Ian Astbury, replaced Jim Morrison when The Doors reformed.
He was soon shooting covers on a regular basis. His first was not a musician but a comedian-turned-film star - Eddie Murphy was in town to promote Beverly Hills Cop when Lawrence persuaded him to leave his hotel suite and travel to Bow Street police station, where he posed him beside a pair of London bobbies. For NME he shot, amongst others, The Smiths, David Bowie, KLF, BB King, INXS, Madness and Neneh Cherry.
He shot Lenny Kravitz in Bar Italia, Michael Jordan in his San Antonio dressing room, Snoop Doggy Dogg in a California police cell, and Bobby Womack in what looks like Berwick Street fruit-and-veg market.
More recently Lawrence worked with the artist Peter Blake to photograph the ‘Stop the Clocks’ album cover for Oasis. Lawrence had shot the cover for their album ‘Don’t Believe the Truth’, and accompanied Noel Gallagher on his warm-up gig in Moscow for the Teenager Cancer Trust concerts.
As a video director he has worked with Cast, Echo and the Bunnymen, One Dove, Ian Brown, Travis and, of course, Paul Weller.
For further background on Paul Weller: www.paulweller.com
Background on ‘A thousand things’, the forthcoming limited edition book by Genesis Publications: www.genesis-publications.com
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