Books, TV and Films, October 2020
1 October The Romantics and Us is the latest TV series from Simon Schama, who is perhaps best known to non-historians for his A History of Britain TV series at the turn of the millennium. Watching this is part of ongoing efforts to broaden…
Radio Blah Blah: Records and Record Buying in 1977
Giving away my record collection about ten years ago — all bar a couple of rarities — was an easy decision to make. Vinyl might once again (in 2020) be the cool way to listen to music, but not a decade ago, a time…
London 1980: Genesis Bootlegs
Genesis, 1980 — and this time it’s personal. By the time I was discovering rock music as a young lad in the late-‘70s, the ‘classic’ era was already over and its surviving big beasts were fast mutating into something altogether cuddlier and more house-trained….
Dijon 1978: Genesis Bootlegs
Follow You Follow Me, released in February 1978, was the lead-off single for the And Then There Were Three album. The song was essentially a quick and spontaneous studio creation. There are no references to mallet-wielding schoolboys and rampaging hogweed or to ‘Slippermen’ and…
Dallas 1977: Genesis Bootlegs
Our Genesis history continues. Join us in Dallas 1977 on the Wind and Wuthering tour. This is Genesis at their absolute peak. A wonderful bootleg of a wonderful show.
Montreal 1974: Genesis Bootlegs
It is 1974. In Britain and parts of Europe, notably Italy — though not yet North America — Genesis have broken through to the big time: top-ten albums, decent-sized venues such as the London Rainbow, front-cover status in Melody Maker. This bootleg — an…
Calling All Stations: Not the Worst Genesis Album
Setting to one side From Genesis to Revelation, essentially a pre-Genesis album written and recorded by schoolboys — literally so: they were still pupils at Charterhouse when the first demos were put down — Calling All Stations is almost certainly most fans’ least favourite…
Queen On Fire — Live at the Bowl: Reviewing the Review
I was interested to see what, if anything, had changed — my Queen knowledge, my thoughts and opinions, other contextual information — in the fifteen years since I wrote my review of the Queen On Fire – Live at the Bowl DVD. At the…
Seconds Out — The Greatest Live Album?
Reflections on Seconds Out and Genesis live on the 1977 Wind and Wuthering tour.
Queen Songs Ranked Overview
Intrigued and inspired by a blog I came across on Twitter in late-October 2018 — annoyingly, I can’t find the link, but there are plenty like it — I began drawing up a complete list of Queen songs, ranked from ‘worst’ to ‘best’. Obviously…