Songwriting and Production
So there you have it, for today at least. Taylor insists his time with the Stones was a great experience, with Exile On Main St particularly fresh in the mind. For 2010’s deluxe reissue, he added a new guitar part to one of the bonus songs, Plundered My Soul. “Mick had to construct a vocal…
Read More “Mick Taylor interview: A Rolling Stone in exile” »
You’ve described Fate Of Nations as a turning point. Was that the first time you really felt comfortable as a solo artist? Not really. If it was about being comfortable, there wouldn’t be any point in being creative. I just needed to keep good company and, bit by bit, I made my way into that….
Read More “Robert Plant interview: my life after Led Zeppelin | Louder” »
Richard Branson’s then newly-established Virgin Records set up special stalls to sell it, demand was so great. It was a similar story in the US, though Carole King’s Tapestry kept it off the No.1 spot. It didn’t matter. The airplay generated by Stairway To Heaven ensured the album remained in the Top 40 of the…
Phillips was also born in 1963, though she was raised in Pennsylvania by followers of the controversial Freud disciple Wilhelm Reich, a group that was hands-off in terms of child-rearing. “All about expressing, expressing, and not repressing anything,” she says. “And no rules.” At 15 she left home to “live with a drug dealer,” but…
Powell: It’ll never happen again. For me, doing so would soil our reputation. Holder: The way things are now between Dave and Don [back in February, Hill sacked Powell from the current, post-Holder/Lea line-up of Slade by email], it’ll never happen. I couldn’t do four or five gigs in a row singing like I used…
Read More “The remarkable story of Slade, as told by Noddy, Jim, Dave and Don | Louder” »
“It was an incredible shoot, I think, 36 hours or something,” said Keith Richards in a statement. “I remember not remembering everything towards the end… but it was fun… we went through two audiences… wore one out… it was great!” read it all at Source: Watch The Rolling Stones’ First Live Performance of “Sympathy for…
Imagine: you wake up from a coma in November 2020. You’ve been asleep since Christmas, so you’re entirely unaware of the year’s contents. You don’t know about the virus, or the lockdowns, or that Liverpool are champions and that everything’s been cancelled. You grab your smartphone, and you log into Facebook to check out what’s…
It is not wholly beyond the realms of possibility that you could have become a critic yourself. Could you live with such a horrifying prospect? No. It’s interesting. I was learning the triangular paragraph, and that was it for me. You’re not supposed to have an opinion of the triangular paragraph. So I moved from…
Read More “Interview: Lou Reed on the Velvets, Bowie… and his love of heavy metal | Louder” »
It was all there in 1967, before most of the world had ever heard of her: the northern ice, the fancy clothes and the ache of sadness, the non-triadic melodies, the velvet vocal and painting with words. In her early days, she had written too many songs to take care of, so many of them…
Read More “Joni Mitchell: The Songs She Wrote Before She Released a Record” »
“The Rolling Stones is a big concert band in other decades and other areas when The Beatles never even did an arena tour, Madison Square Garden with a decent sound system” Jagger said. “They broke up before that business started”. Jagger thinks that while they sing the blues, the Stones went on to embrace something…
Read More “Mick Jagger Responds to McCartney Saying Beatles were Better than the Stones” »
Do you think of Goats Head as a particularly druggy album? Druggy? Was it a druggy album? It’s not got a lot of druggy subject material, apart from perhaps “Coming Down Again,” but you’ll have to talk to Keith about that. I mean, my guess is that could be a drug reference. [Laughs.] But the…
“When we released the song as a single, we put ‘Mississippi Queen’ on both sides so DJs couldn’t get creative and play the flipside instead. The single only got to number 21, but I think it could have gone a lot higher. I don’t know how they decide these charts. I mean, radio stations were…
Read More “Leslie West: How I Wrote “Mississippi Queen” | GuitarPlayer” »
The Beatles at a garden party fund-raiser for the Hemophilia Society in Brentwood, 1964. ALAN HAD TO ARRANGE GETTING THE BEATLES THERE, AND CALLED HIS USUAL LIMO SERVICE, FEELING OBLIGED TO TELL THEM WHO THEY WOULD BE TRANSPORTING. THEY TURNED HIM DOWN—THEY DIDN’T WANT TO RISK GETTING THEIR LIMO DAMAGED BY “CRAZY KIDS.” ALAN CALLED…
Read More “How the Beatles Really Ended Up at a Garden Party in Brentwood Los Angeles Magazine” »
Heroes was released as a single in September 1977. It only reached No.24 in the UK, and didn’t chart at all in the US. But the emotional power of the song would continue to resonate, as it became one of Bowie’s theme songs, along with the likes of Space Oddity and Changes. Its most memorable…
Read More “Heroes by David Bowie: The Story Behind The Song | Louder” »
“Freddie’s studio day would start at two in the afternoon. It is pointless calling a singer into a studio before then, anyway, because in the morning the voice hasn’t warmed up yet. With Queen, Freddie would be in the studio and playing around on the piano working on material. In Munich, he had lots of…
Read More ““He Could Do What He Wanted”: Behind Freddie Mercury’s Munich Years” »