Animal vs Buddy Rich - Beat It!

VASHTI BUNYAN - Interview

Earlier this year I had the pleasure of interviewing the charming Vashti Bunyan, a wonderous folk singer from the UK whose musical rediscovery makes for a great tale, as you can read here. The interview was conducted for the Cyclic Defrost magazine & site.

Lance Link's Back from the brink.

That chimpanzee Lance Link has been let out of his cage for another attempt at a mix with all hairy arms a' blazin'. It's another blinding selection of some never heard before tunes fueled by a few banana shaked beverages I'm sure. A definite download for those who want to hear a more 'esoteric' set of 60s/70s sunshiney pysch exotica flavoured goodness. You won't be hearing these on the radio anytime soon.

• Download here: Lancelot Link's Back from the Brink 84MBs

Lance Link’s Autumn Rinky Dink

Brandon’s Rusty Organ – RED & THE EYESIGHTS
How To Cook Macaroni & Cheese – NAKATSUKA TAKESHI
Search For Nirvana – GABOR SZABO
Candy Coloured Dragon – BOBBY JAMESON
Mais Cedo Ou Mais Tarde – OSMAR MILITO
Cigarette – ETERNITY’S CHILDREN
Movements Reprise – JOHNNY HARRIS
Webeganhearingthings – HE DID GLASS MUSIC
Twisted Nerve (Vocal Version) – BERNARD HERRMAN
Bayu Bayu – AQUARIANS
Across 110th Street (demo version) – BOBBY WOMACK
Split Personality – JIM NOIR
A New Place To Live – A NEW PLACE TO LIVE
Magico Incontro – ENNIO MORRICONE
To Pegasus With Love – PHILWITT & PEGASUS
The Visit (She Was Here) – THE CYRKLE
Neville Thumbcatch – PETER WYNGARDE
California Montage – DAVE GRUSIN
Indecise – CORALIE CLEMENT
Our Prayer – THE BEACH BOYS
My Autumn’s Done Come – LEE HAZLEWOOD


Click to enlarge downloadable cover.

• Download here: Lance Link’s Autumn Rinky Dink 82MBs/60mins/192kbps

NINO FERRER. The French/Italian James Brown

Another one of those European singers with a crazy history. The son of an Italian mother & a French father he was born Augustino Ferrari in Genoa & the family moved to New Caledonia for a few years, but unfortunately they went back to Europe just after the 2nd world war had broken out in 1939. His death in 1998 was also quite impressive. He met a rather peculiar end by his own hands when he walked to a nearby cornfield & shot himself through the heart a month after his mother had died. He was 64. This was a rather dramatic & very cinematic departure from a career that had him earn the title of the European James Brown. With album titles like Je Veux Erte Noir (I Want to Be Black) & him covering a few James Brown songs like It's A Man''s World it was a justifiable comparison, even though he sounded like a much goofier & very white version at times. He studied Ethnology & Archaeology in his youth, learnt to played several instruments, worked with Manu Dibango, Nancy Holloway, had a relationship with Bridget Bardot, was living in a castle & had a variety show on Italian TV in the early 70s... So the dude had a colourful history & would make a great film if someone ever decided to make one. Alas, he never quite had the cult status of Mr Gainsbourg, probably because he lacked the suaveness & bravado of that particular gallic gentleman.

He was also one of the stars of the rarely seen 1970 Saint Tropez filmed Un été sauvage (A Savage Summer) from director Marcel Camus. Soundtrack was a free jazz score by Marion Brown. Seriously overdue for a DVD release. He featured in a few other films, but it wasn't really his thing, he did go on to host an Italian variety show in the early 70s.

more to come...

• Expanded biography.
• A website dedication. In French.

It's Friday & Everything's Archie

Fickle Fashions

"Little Bobby was grateful for the onset of spring. The daffodils were in bloom, strawberries were coming into season and soon he would no longer have to endure his regular beatings from the Mittens Of Fury gang."

Love it! Mary and Kimberley are two girls running a site called Threadbared, combining a fondness for vintage sewing patterns and a need to be bitchy, mean & cruel by placing captions to bad fashions across the ages as seen here.
Nice one.

Joyride - An Auto Theft

"Classy" 70's educational scare flick starring two hapless teens stealin' a car and getting into trouble - big trouble.

Transportation Futuristics gallery.

Visionary Designs in Transportation Engineering: An amazing online exhibition of yesteryears version of the way we might have travelled. The site was made in conjunction for an exhibition for Berkley university a few years ago. It's an excellent collection of advertisments, illustrations & raw sketches for many machines that never proceeded past the conceptual stages.

Check it out here.

"This exhibit examines some of the efforts to address transportation needs in ways that didn’t quite get off the ground literally or figuratively. Are the designers simply ahead of their time? Are the failures attributable to an infrastructure that never anticipated such a development? Was there ultimately no way to make the new idea work financially?"

Mod Mum - Doin' It For The Kids

It's always great to discover a like minded soul on line, so i was smilin' when I peeped this great site put together by a lady called Mod Mum who lists her interests as mod, modern, futuristic + space-age design, technology, music, books, blogs + adventures. She has a lot of excellent links to open door after door into the worlds of yesterday and tommorrow within the internet vortex! Nice one, Mum!

Movie Title Screen Library

Here's a unique catalog of movies...specifically, screen captures of movie title screens! Some absolute classics in here including some work by Saul Bass for Hitchcock and many more, from the 1920's up to the present day. Some of the simplest ones are the best.
Jump right in...select the first letter to go to that letter's index page.
Taken from the good folks at Shill Pages (a must for the fans of films of the golden ages)

RADIO BASTET: Belly Dance music.

Radio Bastet has been online for a few years now & I give it up to its creator Marissa & her dedication to unearthing secondhand LPs of Belly Dance music. She's currently up to her 70th program & its a great way to hear this type of music that is becoming increasingly difficult to obtain. There's always eBay, but Marissa's show allows you to hear the tracks instead of just looking at the exotic covers thinking about taking a gamble. The shows are MP3 streaming files & while there's an excellent cover gallery you can peruse while listening.

"Marhaba (Welcome)! Remember those old LP's in your parents' record collection - the ones promising "exotic adventures in far-off lands" and featuring sexy harem girls in skimpy costumes entertaining smiling, hooka-smoking sultans? Perhaps you were never able to get past those harem girls... If not, you may be surprised to learn that you missed out on some pretty great music! Of course, if you did get around to actually listening to the records, you already know how great it is! The late 1950's through the mid-1970's were the heyday of popular recordings of Middle Eastern/Oriental dance (that's "belly dance") music."

Also on LiveJournal, Tribe & recently added to Myspace.