If you’ve been in or around London lately, there’s a chance you’ve seen Sir Paul McCartney out in public. Just a few weeks ago, Macca and comedian/late night host James Corden took a fun musical tour of Liverpool, and for his next act Sir Paul returned to another iconic spot: Abbey Road. Before playing a […]
The Beach Boys‘ immense song catalog is already filled with rich melodies, timeless classics and songwriting perfection — so adding in the accompaniment of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra makes for quite a treat. Today, a new album was released by Capitol/UMG that features the Beach Boys’ songs with newly arranged orchestral accompaniments. It’s very enjoyable […]
On June 9, a special new release pairing several classic Beach Boys songs with the pristine arrangements of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra will be released. Titled, simply, The Beach Boys with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, this new studio compilation features the Beach Boys’ original vocal recordings with new symphonic touches recorded by the Orchestra at […]
Don’t you – think of Simple Minds as a heritage act. Unlike other bands that formed in the late ‘70s, this Glasgow alt-rock group doesn’t do nostalgia package tours. It releases new studio albums semi-regularly and still retains the original creative core of singer Jim Kerr and guitarist Charlie Burchill. “I’ve never criticized anyone for […]
“Lab coats? Yeah, I suppose there were people in lab coats. Engineers,” Roger Waters says after I hand him a set of coasters with images of equipment from Abbey Road Studios in the 1960s that I’d spied sitting on a coffee table while waiting for him to arrive at a Manhattan recording studio for our […]
Long before Fleetwood Mac owned the Billboard record charts for years in the mid to late ’70s with a string of mega-selling albums/singles culled from the albums Fleetwood Mac, Rumours and Tusk, their formative sound was rooted in something altogether different. Fleetwood Mac mark 1 drew from a heavy blues-rock sound that stood in diametric opposition to their reputation as traditional pop […]
“The world is naturally averse to all truth it sees or hears but swallows nonsense and a lie with greediness and gluttony.” – Samuel Butler Fans of songs with silly titles like In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo and Sookie Sookie, you’ve come to the right place. Nonsense songs Be-Bop-A-Lula and Bama Lama Bama Loo […]
Is the ‘album’ dead? If so, who killed it? Did it die of natural causes? Should we mourn its demise? I ask this question because, recently, I was with a young friend who loves music from the 60s and 70s. He was listening to The Beatles’ Abbey Road … on shuffle! I asked ‘why?’, he replied […]
Since the dawn of rock, hit singles have always been about three minutes in length. Radio stations, hoping to play as many songs as possible, routinely refused to play any record that approached four minutes or more. Artists and record companies, hungry for a hit single, went along with the unwritten rule. And fans, with […]
With Chasing Yesterday out next month, Rock Cellar Magazine revisits Noel Gallagher’s first solo outing. “The great incentive for me is that when you’re working in LA, everybody in England is asleep,” Noel Gallagher tells me during one of our two interviews during the promotion of his first solo album, Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds, […]
