Thanks for your latest bunch of messages, especially the people who said kind things about my David Ackles blog the other day. Good to see more love for Bill Fay, too: we were playing his first album the other day. "Everyone should love David Ackles - just like everyone shoud love Bill Fay," writes Baptiste. "It takes time for writers like them to get some kind of public acknowledgement. I mean: why? Is Bill Fay's "Be Not So Fearful" such a difficult song? Is "Down River" a 30 minutes white noise jam?
Call me speculative, but I don’t think John will be writing about Nick Lowe’s new album, At My Age, on his Wild Mercury Sound blog. It doesn’t, for a start, resemble the battle for Stalingrad reaching a furious climax, like the more deafening parts of the latest Queens Of The Stone Age record he’s been frightening me out of my wits with over the last week or so. I think therefore I might be permitted a few passing words on a particularly fine album without trespassing on John’s turf.
A few nice things arrived in the Uncut office today. One was a big compilation of Finnish psychedelic music from the late '60s and early '70s, which I can't wait to investigate properly. The second was another lavish raid on the Elektra catalogue, this time a 2CD set called "There Is A River" which collects the first three albums (plus outtakes) of David Ackles.
HAPPENINGS TEN YEARS TIME AGO
April 23 to 29, 1997
Aerosmith's record label, Sony, are forced to issue an apology to the American Hindu Anti-Defamation Coalition, after complaints over the artwork for the group's album, Nine Lives. The original sleeve, swiftly replaced, featured a doctored image of Krishna which depicted the Hindu deity with a cat's head and wearing a skirt.
I blogged about the new Richard Thompson album here a couple of weeks ago, but I've still been playing it a lot, not least because I had a quick chat with Thompson on the phone last Friday.
