A young woman resting by a tree, the small cluster of multicoloured tents in the clearing behind her appearing every bit like those erected by wayfaring medieval nomads....
“I hate so called ‘surfin’ music,” Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys told 16 Magazine in September 1965. “It’s a name that people slap on any sound from...
“A slice of surprising history, history some people hope will never be repeated again,” narrates a suitably plum-voiced commentator, a bus painted in vivid colours sitting in the...
The very first single to reach the number one position in the U.K charts in 1972 was a re-recording of a jingle penned to sell Coca Cola. ‘I'd...
They do love their divinity lessons. “We were into nasty things happening in nasty places, deep in the dark green forest,” recalls David Costa of Trees, the cult...
“The whole pop scene is obviously a cyclical thing,” John Peel said in April 1971, “where you get these great spurts of action, then it dies down again,...
Everybody knows the Vietnam War had a soundtrack. Call it collective memory or call it Hollywood, but the sounds and images are all too familiar. The thwap-thwap of...
As 1967 drew exhaustedly to a giddy close, it became gradually apparent that the childlike optimism of the Summer of Love had dissipated, never to return. It was...
The mode of the music changed, the walls of the cities shook, rooms hummed harder, ceilings flew away. In his 1965 poem, ‘Who Be Kind To?’, the preeminent...
In this digital age, the phenomenon of the ‘b-side’ is an endangered one. All too often, the recordings which comprised the flip side of even the best selling...