(Vocal/instrumental group, 1965–69, 1975–78) After entering the UK Top 20 with 1965’s ‘Whatcha Gonna Do About It’, this pre-eminent mod group – Steve Marriott (vocals, guitar), Jimmy Winston (keyboards), Ronnie Lane (bass, vocals) and Kenney Jones (drums) – suffered a miss with self composed ‘I Got Mine’; they then replaced Winston with Ian McLagan and got back ...
A pioneering guitarist and the principal creative force behind The Who, Pete Townshend was born in Chiswick, London in 1941. The Townshends were a musical family – Pete’s grandfather was a musician, his father a dance-band saxophonist and his mother a singer. Consequently, a career in music seemed natural for Pete, and his parents encouraged him. ...
One of the UK’s finest rock vocalists, Roderick David Stewart was born on 10 January 1945 to Scottish parents. He went to the same school as Ray and Dave Davies of The Kinks and briefly trained as an apprentice footballer before busking around Europe. Many Faces Back in London he started singing with The Hoochie Coochie Men in 1964 alongside ...
The story of Sly Stone (born Sylvester Stewart in Dallas on 15 March 1944) is a classic rock’n’roll tale of ground-breaking success followed by a drug-fuelled downward spiral into unreliability and dissipation. In the 1960s and early 1970s he pioneered a fusion of funk, rock and soul that changed the course of R&B, pop and even jazz. Yet on ...
‘Are you a mod or a rocker ?’ a reporter asked Ringo Starr in A Hard Day’s Night. ‘Uh, no,’ he answered, ‘I’m a mocker.’ The question was a pertinent one. On 18 May 1964, just over three weeks after the film was completed, the English seaside town of Margate saw a violent showdown between ...
The roots of punk lie in rock’n’roll, itself a rebellious spin-off from rhythm and blues. ‘Louie Louie’, written by Richard Berry in 1955 and a US No. 2 hit for The Kingsmen in 1963, is often cited as the first punk song with its raw sound and almost indecipherable lyrics (nonetheless investigated by the FBI for obscenity). The song ...
Punk rock is about attitude more than music. It’s not about how well you can play, it’s about how well you can communicate. Its roots go back to the beginning of rock’n’roll in the 1950s. The rebellious spirit of MC5 and The Stooges in the 1960s helped to define the punk attitude, while Velvet Underground singer Lou Reed and ...
January George Marries Pattie Boyd George Harrison married model Pattie Boyd at Epsom registry office on 21 January. They had been going out together since meeting on the set of A Hard Day’s Night nearly two years earlier. Paul McCartney was the best man. John Lennon and Ringo Starr were both on holiday with their wives, planned as a decoy ...
January/February Nicaragua, Hawaii, New Zealand And Australia Plans to tour the Far East were hampered when Tokyo refused to let convicted drug users Mick and Keith into the country. Performing an Earthquake Relief Benefit concert in Nicaragua as a warm-up show, the group then played two shows in Hawaii. They filled the Tokyo gap by travelling to LA ...
January Kenney Jones Joins The Who The Who without Keith Moon was hard to imagine. No other drummer in the history of rock music had treated the drums so badly and yet played them so well, turning them into a lead instrument. He was surely an impossible act to follow. Daltrey, Townshend and Entwistle thought otherwise, and quickly ...
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 ...
Popular music’s most influential decade saw British and American rock develop in parallel, the creative torch passing across the Atlantic to The Beatles, then returning as the West Coast rock boom reflected the influence of drugs on music. In rock, guitar was now the undisputed focus of the music with ‘axe heroes’ like Clapton, Hendrix, Townshend ...
July Plant’s The Principle Of Moments Following on from Pictures At Eleven’s success, Plant’s second solo album continued down a similar eclectic rock path. Plant refined its predecessor’s style by retaining the strongest elements of Pictures, but giving them a slightly more commercial bent (the single, ‘Big Log’, was a Top 20 hit on both sides of the ...
February Ringo Marries Maureen Cox On 11 February a tonsil-less Ringo married Maureen Cox, the Liverpool girlfriend he’d been ‘going steady’ with since the Cavern Club days, at London’s Caxton Hall Registry Office. The ceremony was attended by Mr and Mrs Lennon and George Harrison who quipped, ‘Two down and two to go’. Paul McCartney was on holiday ...
January Tour Of Australia And New Zealand A promising tour of Australia and New Zealand – with The Small Faces and Paul Jones – turned into a horror trip, as The Who were relentlessly vilified by both press and politicians. Before the band even set foot in the Antipodes, the Fourth Estate was drumming up bile against foreign entertainers ...
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David Bowie
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