Stealers Wheel's much-loved Ferguslie Park remains one of the great albums of the 1970s
A LEADING Scottish music historian has published a remarkable new encyclopedia of pop and rock after 12 years of painstaking, full-time research.
As Matt Berninger remembers it, a gig in a Dublin venue 19 years ago was something of a turning-point in the story of The National.
LIVE albums come and live albums go but, more than half a century after its release, Deep Purple’s Made in Japan remains an undisputed classic of the genre.
Stealers Wheel, released three albums during their brief lifespan - Stealers Wheel (1972), Ferguslie Park (1973), and Right or Wrong (1975). Despite the often sublime songwriting on display, the albums’ UK chart placings were modest, even if the first album peaked at number 50 in the US Billboard charts. The duo of Gerry Rafferty and Joe Egan, however, also released three singles that charted on both sides of the Atlantic: Stuck in The Middle With You, Everything Will Turn Out Fine, and the gorgeous, Egan-penned Star. The band appeared on TV’s Old Grey Whistle Test and recorded a number of sessions for Radio 1 DJ John Peel.
A S the clock ticked over from Thursday into Friday, that November of 1969, viewers in parts of England – those willing to stay up past midnight, at least - were able to watch, on BBC1, a recording of a Petula Clark concert.
When a “Scots re-imagining” of the classic Joni Mitchell album, Hejira, was being put together for the 2016 Celtic Connections, the singer Rod Paterson was swiftly identified as one of the musicians who simply had to be involved.
Even his own biographer acknowledges that Keir Starmer’s public image tends towards the grey and opaque. And if there’s a phrase that that Starmer himself has over-used during the election, doing little to burnish that image, it’s the one about his childhood home being a pebble-dashed semi and that his father was a toolmaker.
TEN years after his death at the age of 71, interest in the renowned singer and multi-instrumentalist, Jack Bruce, remains as high as ever.
The advent of the package holiday and affordable air travel, back in the Sixties, was an exotic temptation for tens of thousands of sun-starved Scots. All sorts of people ventured to Spain for a week or a fortnight’s break, lured by the beaches and the promise of endless sun. Among them was one Tony Blair.
