Music Archive (177)

© Words - Nick Churchill


Award-winning folktronica duo Solarference perform their electrifying live soundtrack to John S Robertson’s 1920 silent film of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde on tour this spring.The all-original soundtrack weaves layers of folk song and soundscape as it brings to life the shadowy magic on screen as Robert Louis Stevenson’s story revels in the contradictions of human nature.Described as “one of the most original acts playing English folk music” by fRoots magazine, Solarference – Nick Janaway and Sarah Owen –

They started to play at local venues in St Albans. Paul Arnold, left the group to become a doctor was replaced by Chris White. The lads were all clever and university bound at the end of the summer of 1963. For fun they entered themselves into a local band contest (The Herts Beat Contest) with the first prize a recording deal with British Decca Records. Rod and Chris hoped winning the contest would keep them together.

© Words Barry Cain

It was the summer of ’82. I was lying in the sun on Santa Monica beach watching the girls go by. Bikini-clad girls with Hollywood looks on roller skates whizzing past like angels in the wind, infecting my libido and twisting my melons.
And Tainted Love was all around. I felt it in my fingers… It poured out of radios and ghetto blasters and cafes and big cars full of big men with hot chicks eating hot dogs. It was fucking everywhere. 

Son of a Tennessee sharecropper, Carl Perkins was born in 1932 and the middle son. He grew up picking cotton and got his first guitar aged 7 and it was made by his father from a cigar box, broomstick and baling wire. Carl would practice endlessly behind the chicken house pretending he was singing on Nashville's Grand Ole Opry. His boogie rhythm guitar style developed with lessons from a neighbour. He won a talent contest when he was 13 and had written a song called “Movie Magg," which a decade later would convince Sam Phillips to sign him to his Sun Records label.

© Words Matteo Sedazzari 

The Secret Disco Revolution is an ambitious, well structured, informative and entertaining  documentary made by Toronto born film maker Jamie Kastner.  Kastner has chosen a music genre and movement that in the year 2014 most people take for granted, not in a dismissive way, but the sheer fact that if any famous piece of disco music, such as Thelma Houston’s Don't Leave Me This Way, comes on the radio or at a party,