(Singer-songwriter b. 1957) Nick Cave (vocals) began his fascinating career in Boys Next Door, who became The Birthday Party: Mick Harvey (guitar), Tracy Pew (bass), Phil Calvert (drums). A gothic, blues punk band of fearsome intensity, showcasing Cave’s brutal, Captain Beefheart-style lyrics, they released three albums, 1981’s Prayers On Fire being the pick. 1982’s Junkyard ...
The acoustic guitarist and singer-songwriter Nick Drake (1948–74) was a tragic figure in the English folk-rock community. His beautiful if bleak songs became fully appreciated only after decades had passed since he succumbed to an overdose of anti-depressant medication. Born Nicholas Rodney Drake, he spent his childhood in Burma and on his parents’ estate in Warwickshire. A bright youth and ...
Alex Skolnick (b. 1968) is best known as a metal guitarist with thrash pioneers Testament, but metal is just one facet of the talented guitarist’s abilities. Skolnick was born in Berkeley, California. At the age of nine, he discovered Kiss and subsequently decided to learn guitar. He was later inspired by the highly technical work of Eddie Van ...
(Vocal/instrumental group, 1989–present) Nickel Creek gave a youthful jolt to the bluegrass scene when the charismatic, virtuosic group released its Alison Krauss-produced, eponymous 2000 debut album before half the quartet had turned 20. The band formed in 1989 when Chris Thile (vocals, mandolin, b. 1981) met the siblings Sara Watkins (vocals, fiddle, b. 1981) ...
(Guitar, singer-songwriter, 1948–74) Although he only produced three albums before his untimely death from a drug overdose, posthumously he has become one of the most beautifully introspective and melancholic artists to come out of the 1970s. Signed to Island records at just 20, there was high hopes for the talented singer-songwriter. Whilst he was still studying at ...
(Vocal/instrumental group, 1995–present) Canadians Nickelback – Chad Kroeger (vocals), Ryan Peake (guitar), Mike Kroeger (bass) and Daniel Adair (drums) – came to prominence in their home country via a law that stated a certain percentage of the radio play must be homegrown. This coupled with Kroeger’s distinctively gravelly vocal style lead to massive exposure and a snowballing interest in the ...
(Guitar, singer-songwriter, b. 1969) Hailing from the UK’s ‘West Country’, P.J. Harvey is now eight albums into her career. Trading in a primeval, highly feminine strain of blues rock, Polly Jean Harvey has moved from stripped-down rock to sophisticated acoustic ballads before a stomping brand of indie that is incendiary when caught live. She has influenced ...
(Vocal/instrumental group, 1976–88) Songwriter Ric Ocasek (vocals, guitar) joined original members Benjamin Orr (bass), Elliot Easton (guitar) and Greg Hawkes (keyboards) to form a powerful unit. They drove The Cars up the charts on both sides of the Atlantic with their self-titled 1978 debut. The band cleverly mixed classic rock melody with a smattering of new wave edge. The ...
Early ’76 The Sex Pistols’ First Gigs The Sex Pistols played their first gig at London’s St Martin’s School of Art in November 1975, racing through a batch of Faces and Who numbers plus some of their own, including ‘Pretty Vacant’ and ‘Did You No Wrong’, while Rotten sneered at the audience, calling them ‘f***ing boring’. The pattern ...
January The Sex Pistols Get The Bullet On 6 January 1977 EMI Records terminated its contract with The Sex Pistols, saying it was unable to promote the group’s records ‘in view of the adverse publicity generated over the past two months’. The media furore over the Pistols’ TV appearance six weeks earlier had barely abated and now politicians were weighing ...
The Chapman Stick is a large instrument with a wide fretboard and eight, 10 or 12 strings. It is played by tapping (or ‘hammering-on’) a string at the desired fret with the finger and holding it down with the sustain of the note. Since only a single finger of one hand is needed to sound each note, the accomplished ...
The world’s first synthesizer was the American RCA Mk I, made in 1951, whose bulk occupied a laboratory. To play it, composers such as Babbitt had to tap in punched-tape instructions – there was no keyboard. In 1964, Robert Moog (1934–2005) developed the first commercially successful synthesizer. It was capable of generating a wide range of sounds ...
Bagpipe Somewhere, perhaps in Mesopotamia, about 7,000 years ago, a shepherd may well have looked at a goat skin and some hollow bones and had an idea for a new musical instrument: the bagpipe. In the early Christian era, the instrument spread from the Middle East eastward into India and westward to Europe. By the seventeenth ...
As the worldwide success of artists such as Shakira, Björk and Baha Men proves, world music is not antithetical to pop music, or to dance music, or to any other music form. For artists like India’s Ravi Shankar, the music of their world is classical music; for many Latin musicians, it is jazz; for others ...
‘Ariadne on Naxos’ Strauss may not have been the out-and-out modernist many have wanted him to be, but neither was he one to sit back and reproduce carbon copies of past successes. Strauss and Hofmannsthal decided to follow up Der Rosenkavalier with an altogether different proposition. Ariadne auf Naxos, in its original version, is a curious amalgam of ...
AUTHORITATIVE
An extensive music information resource, bringing together the talents and expertise of a wide range of editors and musicologists, including Stanley Sadie, Charles Wilson, Paul Du Noyer, Tony Byworth, Bob Allen, Howard Mandel, Cliff Douse, William Schafer, John Wilson...
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Classical, Rock, Blues, Jazz, Country and more. Flame Tree has been making encyclopaedias and guides about music for over 20 years. Now Flame Tree Pro brings together a huge canon of carefully curated information on genres, styles, artists and instruments. It's a perfect tool for study, and entertaining too, a great companion to our music books.
David Bowie
Fantastic new, unofficial biography covers
his life, music, art and movies, with a
sweep of incredible photographs.