Buyers Guide
A buyers’ guide to They Might Be Giants
They Might Be Giants are an act who have forged an utterly unique music career over thirty-odd years, from their early days as an act more cabaret than their contemporaries punk rock, via their Dial-a-Song service, sixteen studio albums, eight EPs, another eight live albums (and an additional live promo album) and ten compilations. Riding …
Feature: Shelved albums – a celebration.
The history of popular song is littered with unreleased albums. The explanations for these albums being unreleased can vary from record label apathy, recording facilities just not being up to scratch, or the act simply having a change of heart / musical direction at the eleventh hour. There are of course a number of legendary …
A beginners’ guide to Peter Gabriel
From progressive rock pioneer, to art rocker, to world music conduit, to pop star, to multi-media explorer, Peter Gabriel has covered a tremendous amount of ground in his four and a half decades in the music industry, ensuring him an unarguable place among popular music’s icons. Starting as frontman for Genesis, from 1969 onwards he …
A beginners’ guide to Pink Floyd
With The Beatles having called it a day, Bob Dylan walking in the opposite direction of the psychedleic counter-culture and The Rolling Stones having reached a critical mass they would never exceed, throughout 1970s there was only one band that even vaguely threatened Led Zeppelin’s positiion as the biggest act on the planet. That band …
Feature: Buyers Guide – 70s Live Albums
From the solo acoustic troubador, to the thunderous rock band in full flight, to the electro pioneer peeping above banks of keyboards and oscillator, there’s few things more thrilling than the experience of music being performed live in front of an appreciative audience. The live album has been a part of the musical landscape ever …
A Beginners Guide to Neil Young
From Beatles and Byrds indebted folk rock with Buffalo Springfield, to guitar-slinging misfit, to singer-songwriter intimacy, to professional misery-guts, to increasingly unpredictable rocker, to still moving elder statesman, Neil Young has done it all and for the newcomer his output has been little more than bewildering. When it comes to picking your way through Young’s …
A Beginners Guide to Bob Dylan
Over the last fifteen months we here at Backseat Mafia have been publishing a series of Buyers Guides on a number of musical acts. Sometimes these guides have covered a specific period in an act’s career, sometimes it has been a more general overview. There are some acts though, where an exhaustive overview can be …
A Buyers Guide to Warren Zevon – The Asylum Years
Warren Zevon is one of those songwriters who is unfortunately best remembered for one song which overshadowed the rest of his career. This is a great shame, as Zevon’s output is one of considerable depth which underwent repeated twists and turns in terms of commercial success which lead to a relatively stop-start career punctuated by …
A Buyers Guide to Alice Cooper 1971 – 1975
It’s easy to forget just how consistently impressive Alice Cooper was between 1971 and 1975, both as a group and then morphing into Vincent Furnier’s solo career. From Love It to Death through to Welcome to My Nightmare, Alice Cooper’s output stands comparison to the likes of both Elton John and David Bowie, two other …
A Buyers Guide to Supertramp 1974-1980
Even with the relatively charitable effects of nostalgia, there aren’t many bands less cool than Supertramp. They were briefly kings of FM rock, at a time that Album Orientated Rock shifted huge amounts in America and it is for Breakfast in America and the singles from that album that they are best remembered. Personally I’ve …