(drums). Devo’s influential electronic music embraced robotic and mechanical elements and is heard at its most potent on the debut album Q: Are We Not Men ? A: We Are Devo! (1978) and at its most daring on their deconstruction of The Rolling Stones’ ‘Satisfaction’. Styles & Forms | Seventies | Rock Personalities | The Doobie Brothers | Seventies | ...
American Steve Morse (guitar), and now play extensively to South American and former Iron Curtain countries, where their popularity endures. Styles & Forms | Seventies | Rock Personalities | Devo | Seventies | Rock ...
Driven by a fierce intelligence, a relentless pursuit of social justice and a wide-ranging taste in sounds and songs, Tom Morello (b. 1964) was the driving force behind the bands Rage Against The Machine and Audioslave. Morello has won Grammys and performed around the world inspiring and uniting people with music. Known for innovative guitar solos and varied, ...
love of 1960s beat with familiar FM rock production, creating hits (‘My Best Friend’s Girl’ and ‘My Sharona’ respectively) that succinctly summed up the times. Another Akron band, Devo, came up with a strange strand of new wave activity, moving from marvellously atonal covers of The Stones’ ‘Satisfaction’ and the baffling concept of de-evolution, to smartly ...
monkey. And he kept asking, “Have you seen any monkeys ?”’ September Money Money 2020 The Network’s gloriously loose album Money Money 2020 was released in September 2003 where Devo were thrown into a mixer with bubblegum rock, a dash of Kraftwerk and all manner of salty lyrical concerns from masturbation (‘Right Hand-O-Rama’) to 24-hour catwalk patrols (‘Supermodel Robots’). ...
before hanging himself in his Macclesfield home. The album was released on 18 July 1980 to universal acclaim and Joy Division passed into legend, inspiring two feature films. August Devo Whip It Up Hailing from Akron, Ohio, America’s rubber capital, Devo was formed by students at Kent State University. Their name referred to the notion that mankind ...
Rotten was getting on with his life. Changing his name back to John Lydon and resisting Virgin Records’ boss Richard Branson’s attempts to team him up with American punk band Devo, Lydon formed a band with his old school mate Jah Wobble, who promised to learn to play bass, and guitarist Keith Levene, who had played in ...
The name ‘player piano’ is a misnomer, indeed the precise opposite of the truth. In fact, this is a playerless piano – a piano that plays itself. Origins of the Player Piano Though almost exclusively associated with the early-twentieth century, the idea of a self-playing piano had been around for centuries. Henry VIII’s self-playing virginals and Clementi’s studded-cylinder ...
The player piano (usually known by one of its manufacturers’ trade names as the ‘pianola’) was a mechanical device for causing the piano to play a fixed composition in a fixed way. The music has been cut into a roll of paper and when this is fed through a mechanism built into the specially designed piano, a bellows system causes ...
In the history of musical instruments, the keyboard is something of a Johnny-come-lately, having first appeared some 2,250 years ago. The earliest instrument of all is the human voice, and some form of rudimentary percussion probably came next. The plucked string – ancestor of the harpsichord family – is likely to have arrived with the firing of ...
Composed: 1836 Premiered: 1836, St Petersburg Libretto by Baron Yegor Fyodorovich Rozen and others Background The years of turmoil following the death of Tsar Fyodor I in 1598 might finally be coming to an end. The revolt of the ‘False Dmitri’ in 1605 has led to Polish intervention. In 1613, after an interregnum of nearly three years, Mikhail ...
Composed: 1844–53 Premiered: 1861, Pest Libretto by Béni Egressy after József Katona’s play Prologue King Endre of Hungary is away at war and his wife Gertrud and her corrupt followers have taken control at court. Act I At Gertrud’s instigation, her brother Otto intends to seduce Bánk’s wife Melinda. Rebels opposed to Gertrud have sent a message to Bánk ...
Composed in 1787 and triumphantly premiered in Prague on 29 October that year, Don Giovanni reworks the old legend of the serial seducer, drawing on the Spanish play by Tirso de Molina (1630) and Molière’s Don Juan (1665). The opera revolves around the tensions of class and sex that were so central to Figaro. Ensembles and propulsive ‘chain’ finales ...
Eugene Onegin was written after the disaster of Tchaikovsky’s marriage in 1877, and was also influenced by his platonic relationship with his admirer and patron Nadezhda von Meck. Tchaikovsky began Eugene Onegin by writing the famous ‘letter scene’ from Act I, in which the heroine Tat’yana spends the night writing to Onegin, telling him of her love for ...
Franz Liszt, the great Hungarian composer whose daughter Cosima married Wagner in 1870, conducted the first performance of the three-act opera Lohengrin at the Court Theatre, Weimar on 28 August 1850. Wagner provided a blueprint for productions of Lohengrin, just as he did for Tannhäuser, and emphasized the duty of the stage manager not to leave ...
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David Bowie
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