(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 ...
(Vocals, b. 1938) Born James Smith, Proby’s career began on a Houston radio station in 1949, but by the early 1960s, he was an also-ran, taping demos for the similar-sounding Elvis Presley. However, on uprooting to Britain, a mannered vocal style, picaresque image and scandalous trouser-splitting publicity assisted the passages of ‘Hold Me’, ...
(Vocals, b. 1984) Scottish DJ Harris (real name Adam Wiles) made a big wave in British disco in the latter half of the Noughties, filling club dancefloors with tracks like ‘Acceptable In The 80s’ and ‘Dance Wiv Me’ – his collaboration with Dizzee Rascal. He courts controversy, voicing his opinions via social network site Twitter, but his ...
(Singer-songwriter, piano b. 1958) Catherine ‘Kate’ Bush CBE was the first female singer to top the UK charts with a self-penned song (‘Wuthering Heights’, 1978). She is a versatile and sometimes surreal songwriter whose work involves adventurous sound experimentation. The subject matter of her songs has embraced everything from Emily Brontë’s characters to controversial psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (‘Cloudbusting’, 1985). Often ...
(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 ...
April Page & Plant’s Walking Into Clarksdale Co-produced by 1990s rock-producer extraordinaire Steve Albini (whose work includes production for Pixies, P.J. Harvey, Nirvana and The Stooges’ March 2007 studio-album comeback), Page & Plant’s Walking Into Clarksdale wasn’t quite the follow-up to No Quarter that everybody had hoped for. If No Quarter was an understandably cautious collaboration, relying ...
The word ‘Baroque’ is derived from the Portuguese barrocco, a term for a misshapen pearl, and it was still with this sense of something twisted that it was first applied – to the period between about 1600 and 1750 – in the nineteenth century. In 1768, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote: ‘a Baroque music is that in which the harmony ...
Broadly speaking, empiricism, from the Greek empeiria (‘experience’), is a philosophical tradition that accepts as fact only what can be verified by observation, or experience, through the use of the five senses. Galileo Galilei’s support of Copernican theory was a result of his observation of the planet Venus through a telescope. His insistence that what he saw ...
When the great Mississippi musician Riley King left the cotton fields to seek his fortune in Memphis in 1946, he had $2.50 in his pocket and a battered guitar in his hand. Today, his name is synonymous with blues music itself, yet his ascendance to the zenith of the blues world never altered his friendly, downhome ...
(Vocals, banjo, 1892–1931) A textile-mill worker and banjo player, Poole led one of the finest of old-time bands, The North Carolina Ramblers, with guitarist Roy Harvey (1892–1958) and a succession of fiddlers headed by Posey Rorer. Their first release, ‘Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down Blues’ and ‘Can I Sleep In Your Barn Tonight, ...
(Vocal group, 1992–97, 2006–present) Named after their Walthamstow postal district, Tony Mortimer, Brian Harvey, John Hendy and Terry Coldwell were a ‘bad’ boy vocal band who took style and attitude from America. Musically they racked up an impressive number of Top 40 hits between 1992 and 1997 – mostly penned by Mortimer – ranging from dance ...
(Vocals, b. 1938) Los Angeles-born Jamesetta Hawkins was discovered by Johnny Otis, who helped her write her first US R&B hit (and four-week chart-topper), 1955’s ‘The Wallflower’, an ‘answer record’ to Hank Ballard’s ‘Work With Me Annie’. Her 1960 breakthrough came with four US Hot 100 singles, including two duets with Harvey Fuqua of The Moonglows. Crossover R&B ...
Lee Ritenour (b. 1952) began his career as a session player at 16 and grew into an internationally respected guitarist, composer and producer. He has appeared on over 3,000 sessions and recorded 40 solo and collaboration albums. He had a worldwide hit with ‘Is It You’ in 1981. As for his guitar playing, his nickname, Captain Fingers ...
(Vocal group, 1952–60, 1972–present) Formed in 1952 in Cleveland, Ohio, this doo-wop outfit comprised Harvey Fuqua, Bobby Lester, Alexander ‘Pete’ Graves, Prentiss Barnes and guitarist Billy Johnson. Originally called The Crazy Sounds, they changed their name at Alan Freed’s suggestion. After several minor singles, they signed with Chess Records in 1954, ...
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 ...
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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.