Old Fire is the project of Texas based musician and programmer John Mark Lapham, once of The Earlies and 4AD band The Late Cord. Admittedly, neither name mean anything to me so I approach this album with no preconceptions. I…
View More Old Fire – Songs From The Haunted South
Camden People’s Theatre, London 20th November 2016 Are you sitting comfortably? Then let us begin… It all started with a scout for U.K. TV musical talent show The Voice turning up in deepest Devon on the trail of much-travelled musical…
View More Billy Bottle & The Multiple
A name almost as unknown in their Louisville, Kentucky backyard as over here in Blighty, Mike Sary’s French TV have been ploughing their own furrow, making albums and occasionally gigging since 1983. Ambassadors of Good Health and Clean Living is…
View More French TV – Ambassadors of Good Health and Clean Living
St.Helens band Gravy Train were one of hundreds on the undercard of the nascent progressive rock scene at the turn of the ’60s into the ’70s, and they made their first two LPs for Philips’ underground subsidiary Vertigo. Their first…
View More Gravy Train – Second Birth & Staircase To The Day
Bush Hall, London Monday, 14th November 2016 Tim Bowness by Roger Trenwith A completely seamless journey from our doorsteps out in the sticks, down to Euston, and on to Shepherd’s Bush Market tube station saw us arrive at the oddly…
View More Iamthemorning & Tim Bowness
The marvellous cross-genre Leicester band Family had a U.K. hit earlier in the same year Looking On was released called Strange Band, which certainly applied to them, but could also have been just as easily a theme tune for The…
View More The Move – Looking On
Back after an eight-year hiatus, previously long running Italian progressive rock band Deus Ex Machina return refreshed, and with their batteries charged to the max release all that pent up energy in an album of joyously celebratory, and needless to…
View More Deus Ex Machina – Devoto
Dwiki Dharmawan is a fantastic pianist and another Indonesian treasure unearthed by MoonJune Records’ unending exploration of that country’s vast music scene. It should come as no surprise that in a country with a population of approximately 250 million, albeit…
View More Dwiki Dharmawan – Pasar Klewer
When Colosseum played their final gig on 28th February 2015 at Shepherd’s Bush Empire they brought to a close the career of one of the first and most influential U.K. jazz rock bands. Fittingly, the line up that played the…
View More Colosseum – Live
Marvellously expressive, this is an album where the music almost becomes secondary to the swirling and gentle atmosphere it weaves around itself. An intriguing mixture of electronics and guitars in open and other odd tunings, one imagines Nick Drake would…
View More Sphelm – These Roots Know No Boundaries