Record Collector Magazine A Dream Is All We Know Initially pitched in some quarters as harbingers of yet another glam-rock revival, Hicksville NY’s Lemon Twigs, centred around the fraternal duo of former child actors Brian and Michael D’Addario, turned out to be something subtly different: shamelessly nostalgic purveyors of sun-dappled 70s AM radio pop, with a gorgeously gooey, ice-creamy production and a sentimental, philanthropic streak a mile wide. Their fifth album contains traces of Todd Rundgren, Squeeze, Ben Folds and, above all, The Beach Boys, most notably on In The Eyes Of The Girl ..read more

Record Collector Magazine One Deep River None of the 10 solo studio albums Mark Knopfler’s made have equalled the impact former band Dire Straits made in their 80s heyday, a period in which his band were one of the biggest selling acts on the planet. Yet still he stubbornly ploughs his furrow – and while One Deep River is unlikely to make many new converts, it will more than satisfy his loyal army of fans. His observational themes have not really changed: Ahead Of The Game is a loping, countrified first cousin of Sultans Of Swing, substituting Nashville for South London, while the title track ..read more

Record Collector Magazine Loophole When Michael Head And The Red Elastic Band’s previous album Dear Scott reached No 6 in 2022, it finally put to rest NME’s classic front cover from 1999 claiming that Head was “our greatest songwriter” who nobody recognised. It had taken 10 albums across nearly 40 years, but with Dear Scott the mainstream had belatedly woken up to Head’s genius. This being Michael Head, chart success would traditionally have led him to a grandiose act of career self-sabotage, or at the very least a disappearing act for a few years. Instead, Loophole is the joyous result of a ..read more

Record Collector Magazine Lives Outgrown Thirty years have passed since Portishead’s Dummy, but perhaps even more remarkably, 22 since Out Of Season, Beth Gibbons’ visionary autumnal collaboration with Talk Talk’s Paul Webb (aka Rustin Man). So, what’s she been up to? It would be tempting to guess very little. The only music that has surfaced since 2002 was a typically bleak interpretation of Henryk Gorecki’s Symphony No.3, made with Polish film composer Krzysztof Penderecki in 2019. However, the emotional weight in these grooves would suggest she has been preoccupied with more weighty concern ..read more

Record Collector Magazine High Above Harlesden 1978-2023 From their north west London perch, Creation Rebel, with a young Adrian Sherwood on the mixing desk, helped map out the foundations not just of future dub but post-punk, the craters, the reverb, the sense of deep space. It is hard to credit these sounds were made over 40 years ago. Released in 1978, Dub From Creation featured Dennis Bovell on engineering duties, a double whammy of mixing genius alongside Sherwood. Close Encounters Of The Third World, a vinyl rarity, was mixed by Prince Jammy. Starship Africa, from 1980, is the group’s ma ..read more

Record Collector Magazine A Life With Brian Arguably even more than contemporaries the Happy Mondays, Camden’s Flowered Up unwittingly became shorthand for the hedonism of the late 80s/early 90s rave scene. Much of the mythology grew up around their single Weekender and its accompanying 12-minute promotional film, but this, their sole long-player, is more than just a footnote to their story. Hearing A Life With Brian again some three decades and more later, the impression is of a series of snapshots of London’s pubs, clubs and grimy streets, a kind of kitchen sink odyssey with a dance groove ..read more

Record Collector Magazine 33.1.3rd | Robin Gutrie Robin Guthrie, Cocteau Twins’ guitarist and custodian, is a master songwriter, producer, musician and sonic architect, one of the pioneers of shoegaze/dreampop. The eight Cocteau Twins albums that Guthrie, vocalist Liz Fraser and bassists Will Heggie and Simon Raymonde recorded between 1979 and 1997 eschew conventional routes to beauty for a new advanced form of studio sorcery. Guthrie, now 61, lives in rural France with his family, adding regularly to a large store of solo releases via Bandcamp and collaborating on Cocteau Twins reissues as th ..read more

Record Collector Magazine David Quantick The other day I was listening to some Art Garfunkel – as you do – when, in among the choice covers (I Believe When I Fall In Love, Disney Girls) and total Ibiza rave anthem bangers (Bright Eyes, I Only Have Eyes For You, and some other songs about eyes), there arrived a sudden clutch of doomy piano notes, not unlike the intro to Seven Nation Army, but doomier and more piano-laden. It was the intro to My Little Town, the song that Paul Simon wrote for Art in the mid-70s, which became a one-off reunion record for Simon & Garfunkel (and as such appeare ..read more

Record Collector Magazine Machine Head: Super Deluxe Edition There’s a fascination around Deep Purple that doesn’t linger around any other band from their specific 70s demographic. Uriah Heep have it to an extent, but they were always smaller, weirder, more “big in Eastern Europe” than Purple. Maybe it’s because Purple are the last of the original three heavy rock acts, Led Zeppelin having called it a day over 40 years ago and Black Sabbath executing a managed exit in 2017. Whatever its source, this fascination is obvious in the fact that Purple are still going strong, and not just phoning in ..read more

Record Collector Magazine Spell Blanket – Collected Demos 2006-2009 Transition, transmission. Between the late 90s and their last full studio album, 2005’s Tender Buttons, Broadcast finessed an enigmatic mix of electronica, 60s psychedelic tropes and often eerie samples, earning them an obligatory mention every time somebody discussed hauntology. Which for a brief while everybody did. Hauntology involved retrofuturism – an uncertain sense of a half-lost past and a sporadically glimpsed future. Broadcast’s best music still haunts, whether on 2003’s Ha Ha Sound or the soundtrack for the 2012 fil ..read more