Marvin Gaye had one of the most beautiful voices soul music ever produced. A tenor that could turn from silk to ache in a single phrase. He was also, by any measure, one of the bravest artists of his era: a man who took the biggest platform Motown could offer and being the first to use it not to produce yet another commercial hit single but arguably one of the most influential Albums ever musically, and perhaps even more importantly, culturally.
But talent and courage rarely arrive alone. Gaye was equally a man of appetite and self-destruction, of a restlessness that no amount of success ever seemed to settle.

His is a story of extraordinary gifts shadowed, always, by extraordinary flaws.

By the mid-sixties, Marvin Gaye was Motown’s most reliable engine of joy. “How Sweet It Is,” “Ain’t That Peculiar,” “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”, hit after hit, Gaye’s voice doing exactly what Berry Gordy’s - The Motown Emperor - assembly line asked of it. He was polished, marketable, a hitmaker in the truest sense.
And yet even inside that machinery, something more interesting was happening: the duets with Tammi Terrell.

Together they made some of the most tender music of the decade. “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” “You’re All I Need to Get By” , and our favourite “Good Lovin’ Ain’t Easy To Come By”( the last 60 secs of that song Marvin’s voice giving goosebumps no matter how many million times you will listen to it…).
A chemistry so incredibly perfect. Then, in 1967, Terrell collapsed in his arms onstage. She would live three more agonizing years, undergoing surgery after surgery for a brain tumor, before dying in 1970 at twenty-four. Gaye was devastated, he stopped touring almost entirely, and something in him that had tolerated the hitmaker role began, quietly, to break.

The Awakening

Grief, alone, doesn’t make an artist. What followed was the realisation that in those troubled times a true Artist needed to start contributing to the public discourse relative to civil rights, senseless wars, inequality.
Gaye returned from Terrell’s death changed, and he found himself newly attuned to the world outside the studio. His brother Frankie’s letters from Vietnam, the Detroit uprising still fresh in his memory, a country that felt, to him, quietly on fire.

Berry Gordy wanted another hit single. Marvin gave him something else entirely.

What’s Going On was, in almost every sense, an act of rebellion. Gaye produced it himself, against Gordy’s objections, and built it not as a collection of singles but as a single continuous suite. One of the first ‘conceptual’ Album ever.
Songs bleeding into one another, street chatter and saxophone drifting through the mix like overheard conversation. Musically it owed less to Motown’s candy pop architecture than to jazz: loose and deep. Thematically it moved through war, poverty, addiction, ecology. Political without ever stepping into a podium, because Gaye sang it all as prayer rather than protest.
It became Motown’s best-selling album to that point. More than that, it proved a Black artist could take total creative control of a major label record and make something that was both commercially undeniable and spiritually whole.

Soul music was never quite the same again after that.

Timeless, still relevant, magical.

Sacred, Sexual, Confessional

If What’s Going On was Gaye dealing with the world complexity, the three albums that followed were Gaye dealing with his own ones.
Let’s Get It On (1973) found him fusing the sacred and the sexual; desire sung with the same reverence he’d once reserved for God. I Want You(1976) pushed further into the sensual, its rhythms looser and more hypnotic, the influence of disco creeping into what was still a deeply soul music Album. With a masterpiece track like “Since I Had You”.

Then came Here, My Dear (1978), the strangest and most nakedly personal record either Motown or Gaye ever released. Ordered by a court to pay ex-wife Anna Gordy a portion of his next album’s royalties as part of their divorce settlement, Gaye responded by making an entire album about the marriage’s collapse.
It sold poorly and confused critics at the time. Decades later it’s rightly regarded as one of the boldest records of his career. An artist turning private disasters into the most honest thing he ever committed to tape.

Exile and the End

By the end of the seventies, the man who’d made Here, My Dear was unraveling. Cocaine had taken hold; the IRS was pursuing him for unpaid taxes; his second marriage had collapsed as publicly as his first. Broke and adrift, Gaye left America altogether, first for Hawaii, then further still, to Ostend, on the Belgian coast, where almost no one knew his face.

It was there, in a rented room above a fish restaurant, walking the promenade each morning against the North Sea wind, that something in him steadied. Ostend gave him distance from the machinery that had built and broken him, and out of that quiet came “Sexual Healing”, a loose, modern, unmistakably alive, a genuine late-career rebirth that returned him to the charts and to himself.

It should have been the beginning of a second act.

Instead, Gaye returned to Los Angeles, moved back into his parents’ house, and on April 1st, 1984, one day before his forty-fifth birthday, was shot and killed by his father during a domestic argument.
The voice that had asked, so gently, what’s going on, was silenced by the person who should have protected it most.

What remains is his art, and the vast influence he left on music. Huge artists ranging from Al Green to Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson. From Prince to D'Angelo, Maxwell, Frank Ocean, The Weeknd, and Kendrick Lamar have all acknowledged, in interviews or simply in the heart of their music, a debt that can never be fully repaid. The thread that connects them is not just sonic. It runs deeper than falsetto or bedroom soul or lush orchestration. It is the example that Marvin gave: to make music that was at the same time political and sensual, spiritual and street-level, confessional and universal. Without apology. Without compromise.
What's Going On, that one extraordinary album recorded against the advice of his label, built from grief and anger and love in equal measure, essentially handed an entire generation of artists a new set of coordinates.
You can trace a direct line from Stevie Wonder's Innervisions, to D'Angelo's Voodoo, to Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly, three albums made across three different decades, all asking the same urgent questions Marvin first put to music in 1971.
And on the other side of the catalogue, Let's Get It On and I Want You cast a shadow so long it effectively invented a template for intimate, sensual soul that Maxwell, Luther Vandross, and The Weeknd have each rebuilt in their own image.

He was, in the end, not just an artist but an entire musical universe.
And we are all, still, living inside it.

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Short story today. About a song. By an iconic woman…..

John Coltrane died in July 1967, liver cancer, at forty. He left behind a widow who was also a pianist and harpist in her own right, a woman who’d played with Terry Gibbs before marrying a Jazz Titan turned into a sort of an unintentional Saint.
And becoming instrumental helping steer his final chapters : A Love Supreme, Meditations, the free-jazz reaches of his last years.

Alice Coltrane didn’t step back from music after his death. She stepped further in.

January 1970, the basement studio in Dix Hills NY. Two years and change since John’s death, and Alice gathers a group of giants :Pharoah Sanders, Joe Henderson, Ron Carter, and Ben Riley to cut the Album Ptah, the El Daoud.

Everything on the record carries the weight of that loss, but nowhere does it sit closer to the surface than on this track : Turiya and Ramakrishna.

In this magnificent composition the horns step aside and it’s just piano, bass, drums, and a woman playing her way through something.

The title fuses a spiritual state and a saint: Turiya, the fourth state of consciousness in Vedantic thought, beyond waking, dreaming, and dreamless sleep.
Pure, undivided awareness, the name she would soon take as her own.
Ramakrishna, the 19th-century Bengali mystic whose ecstatic devotion shaped the Vedanta reaching her through Swami Satchidananda.

To title a tune after both is to name a destination and the one who’d already walked there.

Musically it’s plain to the point of bare. A blues at its core, Carter’s bassline circling and insistent, Coltrane answering in overlapping lines that fold back on themselves rather than resolve. No virtuosity performed for its own sake — just grief, worked through at the keyboard, tape running, in real time.

Set beside the cosmic reach of her following absolute masterpiece Album Journey in Satchidananda a year later, this is a smaller, initial private step into a much larger journey of self discovery.

The moment an artist, a wife, a spiritual companion reaches for the hidden forces of the Universe in order to translate her grief, but also her gratitude, to her now departed life travels companion……

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On the 3rd of July 1971, James Douglas Morrison departed on his last journey from an apartment on Rue Beautreillis, in the Le Marais quarter of Paris, and never came back.
He was 27.
He would not be the first, nor the last, tortured artist to die at that ominous age.

But he would become, unwillingly, the blueprint for the cursed rock frontman, blessed with beauty, charisma, a unique stage presence, a distinctive voice, and a lyrical talent fine-tuned through his devotion to similarly cursed literary heroes: William Blake, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Aldous Huxley.
All of that paired with a voracious appetite for excess and self-destruction.

His short but legendary journey started, as immortalised in Oliver Stone’s biopic, in the summer of 1965, a chance encounter on Venice Beach with his UCLA classmate Ray Manzarek, a fellow student on a cinematography course. As the two got talking about music, Jim began singing verses of what would become one of their signature songs, “Moonlight Drive”.

And with that, The Doors were born.

Jazz-loving drummer John Densmore and guitarist Robbie Krieger joined shortly after, completing a lineup that would prove, in its chemistry and tension, utterly unique.
They began honing their Blues sound, veined with psychedelic influences, playing in a little club on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood — The London Fog — for ten dollars a night. There, and soon after at the more established Whisky a Go Go next door, Jim began to understand how his unconventional, chaotic, experimental stage presence was making converts in the LA underground scene — and drawing the attention of the record companies.

Recording the First Album

The Doors entered Columbia Recording Studio in August 1966 with producer Paul Rothchild and engineer Bruce Botnick, and recorded their debut album in a matter of weeks. The material had been road-tested relentlessly through their Sunset Strip residencies, and it showed: the album sounds like a band that knows exactly who it is, which for a debut is extraordinarily rare. Rothchild later described the sessions as among the most exciting of his career, the band playing almost entirely live in the room with minimal overdubbing. The absence of a bass player, Manzarek covered the bass lines with his left hand on a keyboard bass, gave the record a spare, slightly eerie quality that no other band of the era quite replicated. The tone throughout is somehow hypnotic.
"Break On Through (To the Other Side)" opened the album like a door being kicked off its hinges. “The Christal Ship” a languid lullaby among our 60s favourite tracks. And then there was "Light My Fire", co-written by Krieger, extended to over seven minutes on the album to accommodate Manzarek and Krieger's duelling solos, a track that would eventually be trimmed to single length and spend three weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in the summer of 1967. But the album's most extraordinary moment was its closer: "The End," an eleven-minute Oedipal odyssey that allegedly caused their Whisky a Go Go residency to be terminated the night Morrison first performed it live, the management pulling the plug mid-song.
On record it remains one of the most unsettling things committed to tape in the rock era…..part poem, part ritual.

The Shaman, The Lizard King

The persona didn’t arrive fully formed , it evolved, performance by performance, through a process that seemed less like artistic construction and more like an authentic journey of personal discovery. Morrison had been deeply marked by Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the Dionysian, the ecstatic, irrational, destructive counterpoint to Apollonian order, and by the Native American shamanic traditions he’d encountered through his reading of anthropologist Carlos Castaneda. He came to believe, and said so often enough that people stopped dismissing it, that the soul of a dying Navajo shaman had entered him as a child after witnessing a road accident in the New Mexico desert, an image he returned to repeatedly in his lyrics.
On stage, this translated into something genuinely unpredictable and at times frightening: long silences, improvised spoken-word passages inserted mid-song, his body contorting and pressing against the microphone stand as if wrestling something invisible. He called himself the Lizard King, part irony, part genuine mythologising and began appearing on stage in leather trousers that became as iconic as any costume in rock history. The beauty didn’t hurt: he had the kind of face that cameras loved and audiences projected onto, and for a period in 1967 and 1968 he was as close to a rock god as the era produced. The problem, already apparent to those around him, was that Morrison couldn’t always locate the boundary between performance and reality.
The shaman was becoming the persona, and the persona was swallowing the man.

The Ed Sullivan Show

By September 1967 The Doors were one of the hottest bands in America, “Light My Fire” having spent the summer at the top of the charts. An appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, still the most coveted primetime television slot in the country, the same stage that had launched The Beatles to American audiences three years earlier. Sullivan’s producers had one condition: the line “Girl, we couldn’t get much higher” in “Light My Fire” had to go, replaced with something less overtly drug-referencing. The band agreed. Morrison DID not.
Standing before an audience of millions, he sang the original lyric anyway, cool as you like, as if the conversation backstage had never happened. Sullivan was furious, reportedly storming backstage to confront the band and telling them they would never appear on his show again. He was true to his word. The rest of the band were reportedly livid too, having been promised further appearances on one of television’s most powerful platforms, all of which evaporated in the thirty seconds it took Morrison to deliver one line. Morrison’s response, when asked about it afterward, was characteristically blase’. He said he had simply forgotten. Nobody believed him.

Strange Days — The Second Album

Released in September 1967, just months after the debut, Strange Days found The Doors doubling down on the psychedelic and the unsettling rather than chasing the mainstream success “Light My Fire” had handed them. Where the debut had been lean and urgent, Strange Days was stranger in texture and more willing to experiment , Rothchild and Botnick layering the production with theremin, cello, and sound effects that gave the record an almost cinematic quality. The title track opened with a carnival-like dissonance that felt genuinely threatening, and “People Are Strange”, one of Morrison’s most compact and perfectly formed lyrics, written during a bout of depression after a walk through the Hollywood Hills, became a top twenty hit on both sides of the Atlantic. “Love Me Two Times” gave the band their most straightforwardly bluesy single, while “When the Music’s Over” anchored the album’s second half with another extended, ritualistic closer in the vein of “The End”, seventeen minutes of crescendo intensity that ended with Morrison screaming “We want the world and we want it — NOW.”
The album reached number three on the Billboard 200, confirming that the debut’s success was no accident, and that The Doors were building something with genuine longevity. What nobody could have predicted was how quickly it would begin to unravel.

The Descent

The rot set in gradually, then all at once. Morrison had always drunk heavily, but by 1968 the drinking had become something darker, a systematic dismantling of the very instrument that had made him extraordinary. He began missing recording sessions, arriving hours late or not at all. On stage, the shamanic intensity that had made early Doors shows genuinely transcendent curdled into something embarrassing and then alarming: long, incoherent spoken-word passages while the band vamped behind him, confrontations with security, nights when he simply turned his back on the audience and refused to perform. The infamous Miami incident of March 1969, during which Morrison allegedly exposed himself on stage, charges he always denied, resulted in a felony conviction, a wave of concert cancellations as venues refused to book them, and what amounted to a slow-motion professional collapse.
The band continued recording, Morrison Hotel (1970) marked a partial return to their raw blues roots, and L.A. Woman (1971), recorded just weeks before Morrison left for Paris, contains some of his finest and most unguarded vocal performances, as if he knew it was farewell.
He had told friends he was going to Paris to write poetry, staying with the love of his life Pamela Courson, to escape the Lizard King persona that had consumed him, to become simply Jim Morrison again.

He was found in the bathtub of the Rue Beautreillis apartment on the 3rd of July.
No autopsy was ever performed.

He was buried in Père Lachaise cemetery, a short walk from the graves of Oscar Wilde and Frédéric Chopin, two artists who burned brilliantly but as briefly at a grave personal cost.

He went to Paris to find himself, and instead found the end he had been writing about all along…..

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June might be gone but it left us 3 gems…..



ED O’BRIEN — Blue Morpho
Alternative

For four decades, Ed O’Brien was Radiohead’s quiet architectural force , the guitarist who supported the space other people stood in. Thom Yorke got the headlines. Jonny Greenwood got the film scores. O’Brien got the atmosphere.
His first solo work appeared under the initials EOB. .
Blue Morpho is the first album issued directly under his own name. A deliberate step out of the shadows.

The record grew out of one of the darkest periods of his life. After the EOB debut , O’Brien found himself in an uncomfortable place for a while. He began a daily practices around long guitar improvisations in his London studio and retreating more and more to the Welsh countryside. Those sessions, no preconceptions, no commercial pressure, slowly became Blue Morpho: seven expansive tracks navigating psych-folk, trip-hop, and luminous stillness.
Producer Paul Epworth (Adele, Rihanna) came on board through a school-gate friendship. The Estonian composer Tõnu Kõrvits arranged the strings, performed by the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra. O’Brien comparing their quality to the strings on Scott Walker records. Shabaka Hutchings contributed flute. Phil Selway plays drums.

It’s a record built by feeling and instinct rather than design. And you can clearly feel it.
It will sound as an hyperbole but this is the best record we heard from any Radiohead members solo efforts outside the group…….

NME called it “the sound of healing, with Ed O’Brien out of his cocoon and in dazzling flight.” That feels right. Incantations opens the record with eight slow, hypnotic minutes — layer upon layer building into a luminescent garden, then stepping quietly into the title track, a stunningly beautiful and enchanting chant, which carries the warmth of someone who’s come through something and knows it.
Obrigado — Portuguese for “thank you” — closes things out in a way that earns its gratitude.

This will be without a doubt one of ’On The Border’s records of the year.
A record about transformation that actually transforms as you listen.

LAKECIA BENJAMIN — We Dream
Jazz

Lakecia Benjamin does not hold any prisoners. The girl goes for the jugular.
The New York alto saxophonist has been building toward this moment across a sequence of increasingly audacious, courageous records.
Pursuance: The Coltranes in 2020, the Grammy-nominated Phoenix in 2023, and now We Dream, her sixth album and Artwork Records debut.
She describes it as a response to the state of the world, the idea of being a bright light in a dark space.
Benjamin doesn’t have time to deal with modesty.

The cast she’s assembled reads like jazz’s own Avengers: Terence Blanchard and Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah on trumpets, Chris Potter on saxophone, Jeff “Tain” Watts and Hiromi among the heavyweights, with Nu-Soul vocalists Bilal and Tarriona “Tank” Ball of Tank and the Bangas adding heat from the R&B and hip-hop world.
But this isn’t a guest-list exercise. Benjamin rarely loses her commanding grip, and the album swings between classicism and modernism without dropping either.

Beyond the Dawn is where to start: a spiritual 3/4 modal landscape elevated by breathtaking solos from Benjamin and Blanchard, with drummer Jonathan Barber driving it forward on mallets. Then there’s Flamekeeper, where Hiromi and Potter collide in something genuinely combustible — eccentric, funky, packed with synthesizer flourishes, reflecting Benjamin’s love for artists who are not standing still.

Already one of the jazz records of the year….and damn, we missed her at the Ronnie Scotts couple of weeks ago !

JALEN NGONDA — Doctrine of Love
R&B/Soul

It wouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s heard Jalen Ngonda’s second album that he claims to listen to almost nothing released after 1972.
Maryland-born, shaped by his father’s Motown records at eleven, then further formed at the Liverpool Institute for the Performing Arts, Ngonda is one of those rare artists for whom vintage soul isn’t a reference point but a native place.
His 2023 debut Come Around and Love Me announced him. Doctrine of Love digs deeper.

Producers Vince Chiarito and Michael Buckley return, pushing past the orchestral sweep of the debut toward something funkier.
Marvin Gaye, Al Green, Curtis Mayfield start popping up behind every note, chord and arrangement but not in a tired referential way. More horns, gospel runs lifting the background vocals. Out on the revered Daptone label, it’s a tight ten-tracker where every note counts.

The title track grew out of a James Brown listening binge, and you can feel that restless momentum , horns punching through the strutting riff, church bells ringing, the whole thing moving like a minor-key sermon that somehow gets you on your feet.

Hang It On The Shelf is the other one to catch: an uptempo cut radiating warmth, Ngonda’s soaring falsetto landing notes that seem technically impossible.

A record that makes you reach for your old Wrangler flares in the wardrobe.
And wonder if perms will ever come back in fashion….

”In TheVault”

Kendrick Lamar - To Pimp a Butterfly
Rap/R&B/Soul/Jazz

Digging back into the archive for our In The Vault section always carries the risk of gravitating toward those decades blessed with an extraordinary concentration of significant music. We have always maintained in this newsletter that great music keeps being created — but the dynamics of how it reaches us have changed, and that shift has arguably altered our perception of what a truly significant album looks like.

In our opinion, no album this century has made a stronger claim to that word than this one - Musically, Lyrically, Culturally.

Kendrick’s ascent in popular culture accelerated rapidly with his 2012 album Good Kid, m.A.A.d City, but it was To Pimp a Butterfly that launched him into the stratosphere.

This is a conceptual album built around the artist’s reckoning with Black exploitation — his struggle to reconcile his own success with the daily reality of friends and family still fighting to survive life in Compton, and the systematic pimping of Black artists by the music industry. All of it delivered with a lyricism that places him squarely in the company of the great modern poets. And beneath those words, a musical sensibility capable of distilling sixty years of Black music into one cohesive, magnificent whole.

A trip to South Africa — to visit not only his spiritual roots but the places and landscapes that shaped Nelson Mandela’s journey to freedom — proved to be the catalyst that unlocked everything. Upon returning to the US, Kendrick scrapped the material he had been working on for two years, rumoured to be enough for two albums (some of those tracks ended up in the 2016 Green ‘Untitled’ Album. Another Masterpiece btw…), gathered a group of avant-garde LA-based jazz musicians — each a legend in their own right — alongside an extraordinary roster of producers, and went in search of the sound that would become the soundtrack to his lyrical masterpiece.

That cast includes producers Sounwave, Terrace Martin, Taz “Tisa” Arnold, Thundercat, Rahki, LoveDragon, Flying Lotus, Pharrell Williams, Boi-1da, and Knxwledge, with executive production from Dr. Dre and Anthony “Top Dawg” Tiffith. The musicians and vocalists read like a who’s who of contemporary jazz and soul: Thundercat, Kamasi Washington, Terrace Martin, Robert Glasper, Ambrose Akinmusire, Bilal, George Clinton, and Snoop Dogg.

Out of that collision of voices, a cast of characters began to materialise in the lyrics — Uncle Sam as the master pimp, Lucy as Lucifer among the darkest — giving the album the weight and architecture of a modern morality play.

Key Tracks

“Wesley’s Theory” opens the album with a George Clinton appearance and a Boris Gardiner soul sample, setting out the exploitation thesis from the first minute. “King Kunta” is the most visceral and immediate track on the record — a funk-drenched assertion of identity built on a James Brown-style groove, referencing the enslaved African hero Kunta Kinte as a symbol of resistance. “Alright” became the album’s emotional and political centrepiece, its chorus adopted as an anthem by the Black Lives Matter movement almost immediately after release. “u” is the album’s darkest moment — Kendrick alone in a hotel room, drinking, delivering a savage self-examination that strips away every layer of the successful rapper persona. “How Much a Dollar Cost,” featuring Ronald Isley and James Fauntleroy, tells the story of a homeless man asking for change outside a petrol station — later named Barack Obama’s favourite song of 2015. “These Walls”, just a magical composition chiselled as one of the best R&B pieces ever written, over a raw & unmerciful poem.
And the closing “Mortal Man” ends with Kendrick conducting an imaginary interview with Tupac Shakur using archival recordings, before the music falls away entirely and leaves only silence — one of the most arresting endings in recent album history.

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“Somewhere, some kind of beauty is waiting to be known.”

Continuing our mission to help our On The Border friends discover new musical gems from eras past and present, across the most diverse genres, today’s story is about some 80s albums that didn’t necessarily sell millions of copies, did not end up on Top Of the Pops but left a legacy of love and wonder with the lucky ones who stumbled upon them.

Joe Jackson — Night and Day (1982)

Joe Jackson emerged in the late 70s alongside Elvis Costello and Graham Parker as part of Britain’s “angry young men” of new wave, making his name with edgy power pop that largely abandoned the piano he’d been trained on. By 1982 he was, in his own words, painted into a corner. Three albums into a sound he no longer believed in. Inspired by the Latin rhythms he was hearing all over New York and his growing love of the Great American Songbook, Jackson rebuilt himself almost overnight.
Night and Day is a tribute to the wit and style of Cole Porter and, indirectly, to New York City itself, and remains Jackson’s only studio album to reach the top five in both the UK and US.
Key tracks: “Steppin’ Out” which earned Grammy nominations for Record of the Year and Best Pop Vocal Performance. The magnificent video, no matter how many times we watch it, capable to transport us back in time.
“Breaking Us in Two”; and “Real Men” a piano ballad that directly addressed sexual identity politics — a subject few mainstream pop songs dared touch in 1982.

Brian Eno, Roger Eno & Daniel Lanois — Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks (1983)

After leaving Roxy Music, by the early 80s Brian Eno had already invented ambient music as a genre, but Apollo found him handing the reins to collaborators for the first time. The music was written and performed jointly with his brother Roger Eno and Canadian producer Daniel Lanois, the man who’d go on to shape U2’s sound. Originally composed for a documentary about the Apollo space program that wouldn’t actually be released until 1989, the album sits as the most accessible entry in Eno’s ambient catalogue.
More atmospheric and groovier than his earlier ambient works, and strikingly modernistic, presaging the sound of 90s electronic music. A decade earlier…..
Key tracks: “An Ending (Ascent),” one of Eno’s best-known and strikingly beautiful compositions, still a fixture on film soundtracks decades later; and “Deep Blue Day” and “Silver Morning,” a strangely electro-country ambient pieces built around Lanois’s pedal steel guitar, designed, in Eno’s words, to conjure the impression of weightless space.
Trust us. Press Play, and with this Album you will be floating weightless to the sound of next century Music.

David Sylvian — Secrets of the Beehive (1987)

As frontman of Japan, David Sylvian had already pivoted from glam-influenced new wave toward something more austere and art-pop by the early 80s. Secrets of the Beehive, his third solo album, pushed that introspection to its logical extreme: a deeply introspective work of slow, electronic art rock built around an extraordinary supporting cast including Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Ryuichi Sakamoto, electronic composer Mark Isham, and Pentangle’s Danny Thompson on double bass.
Recorded in just two and a half months, the Album represented the pinnacle of Sylvian’s maturity as an Artist. Harmonically beautiful compositions, perfectly arranged, sounding fresh and authentic without any hint of a redundant post-production.
Key tracks: “Orpheus,” widely considered his finest single composition, flowing with a gentle, almost religious majesty; and “When Poets Dreamed of Angels,” built on shimmering acoustic guitar and Sylvian’s velvet baritone.
Stunning Album by a significantly underrated Artist….

Living Colour — Vivid (1988)

Guitarist Vernon Reid and singer Corey Glover formed Living Colour with the express purpose of marrying heavy-metal-informed jazz fusion with the anti-racism politics of the Black Rock Coalition he’d co-founded in 1985. A direct challenge to a rock landscape that had largely written Black musicians out of its own genre. Vivid arrived with an improbable champion: Mick Jagger produced their demo tape and personally pushed Epic Records to sign them after seeing them at the CBGB legendary venue. The album eventually sold two million copies and earned the band Best New Artist at the 1989 MTV Video Music Awards, yet Living Colour remain criminally undersold relative to the door they kicked open . Tom Morello credited “Cult of Personality” with directly inspiring him to form Rage Against the Machine.
Key tracks: “Cult of Personality,” which won the Grammy for Best Hard Rock Performance and built its political charge around sampled speeches from JFK, Malcolm X, and FDR, and the vibrantly vivid “Open Letter(To a Landlord)”, denouncing the starting of Manhattan’s gentrification, and “Memories Can’t Wait”.

Prefab Sprout — Steve McQueen (1985)

Paddy McAloon had been writing songs obsessively since childhood in rural County Durham, stockpiling lyrics on scraps of paper in his bedroom for years before Prefab Sprout’s debut Album, Swoon, arrived. Largely dismissed as the unfinished article. Steve McQueen found the missing ingredient: producer Thomas Dolby, who McAloon has generously called the real architect of the record. The result was hailed by Pitchfork as the defining record of 1985 Art-Pop( also known with the terrible name Sophisti Pop !) , and despite underperforming on the charts on first release, has gone on to feature in numerous “greatest albums of all time” polls and the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.
Their unique sound and delicately witty lyrics, in our humble opinion, making Prefab Sprout the closest thing to the Smiths in terms of originality.
Key tracks: “When Love Breaks Down,” the album’s emotional centrepiece dealing with infidelity and heartbreak; and “Appetite,” whose synth intro blossoms into a gorgeous, sparkling wall of sound.

Grace Jones — Nightclubbing (1981)

By 1981 Grace Jones had spent the disco years as a striking cover artist and model rather than a singing voice. Nightclubbing, recorded at Compass Point Studios with the legendary rhythm section Sly and Robbie, was the record where that changed.
A complete reinvention through a charismatic assertion of her own identity that fused reggae, dub, funk and new wave into something that sounded genuinely without precedent. What we would call today a ‘groundbreaking’ record.

And while the 80s often saw an artist's visual identity become the dominant element — sometimes to the detriment of the music itself — in Grace's case it only amplified the sense of something groundbreaking. Her physical presence was astounding: a type of beauty unlike anything seen before, or since.

The album was named the best album of the year by NME and made Jones a genuine mainstream star, with a connection to one of our earlier stories too: lead single “Demolition Man” was written by Sting, who would re-record a more uptempo version with The Police six months later on Ghost in the Machine.
Key tracks: “Pull Up to the Bumper,” a Top Ten US hit built on liquid bass and double-entendre that became an anthem of New York’s Paradise Garage scene. The hypnotic “Nightclubbing” and that splendidly fusion of reggae & dub of “I’ve Seen That Face Before (Libertango).”

Talk Talk — Spirit of Eden (1988)

We know. We cover this marvellous Band and this specific Album in one of our previous stories but if today we are talking about some potentially undiscovered 80’s jewels, a few lines on this record were going to be a must.
Talk Talk began the decade as synth-pop also-rans, scoring hits with “It’s My Life” and “Such a Shame” before 1986’s The Colour of Spring pushed them toward something richer. Nothing prepared anyone for what came next. Given carte blanche by EMI after Colour’s success, Mark Hollis used it to deliver a six-track album with no song under five minutes, recorded through improvised sessions in total darkness, later edited and rearranged from hours of tape. EMI dropped the band within three months of release, but the record’s reputation has only grown — now widely credited as the founding document of post-rock, paving the way for bands & Artists like Sigur Rós, Mogwai, Bon Iver, James Blake and latter-period Radiohead.
Key tracks: ….sorry. No Key Tracks. The Whole Album.

The Waterboys — Fisherman’s Blues (1988)

Mike Scott had spent the early 80s chasing what he called “the big music” — widescreen, anthemic rock built for arenas. Then he moved to Dublin in 1986, and immersed himself in traditional Irish and Scottish music, deliberately walking away from the sound that was starting to win the band real attention. Scott wanted to escape the mainstream sounds of 80s rock production, and the results show: this was a record built on songs played live in the room with only minimal overdubbing, letting the musicians breathe and play off one another rather than the layered, Spector-esque “wall of sound” approach of earlier Waterboys albums. The sessions were sprawling almost beyond belief. Recording stretched across Dublin, San Francisco, and Scott’s rented home at Spiddal House in Galway over more than two years, with Scott later admitting the album could easily have been a double or even a triple, since the ten songs released were only a sliver of what the band had recorded.
Result….one of our favourite Albums of that decade. Absolute masterpiece.
Put it on and you are immediately transported into a low ceiling Pub in County Galway with a “Guiness and Black” waiting for you…….
Key tracks: the title track itself, cut in a single take on the very first day of sessions, its rolling rhythm borrowed from the chugging meter of a W.H. Auden poem Scott remembered from school, “And a Bang on the Ear,” wrapped around Scott’s rolling piano and a flute figure from soon-to-be full-time member Colin Blakey and finally the magnificent cover of that genius of Van Morrison’s “Sweet Thing” !

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You are the leader of a truly successful, influential, in some ways revolutionary band.
The Gods gifted you talent, charisma, and good looks. Fans adore you. Critics respect you. Peers look at you as someone with integrity, and quietly envy your success.

And then one morning you wake up, and decide to burn it all down and start again from zero.

No contract dispute. No bitter falling out splashed across the music press. No band imploding under the weight of its own excess. Just a decision - this isn’t enough anymore - and the courage to act on it, while everyone else thinks you’ve lost your mind.

That is pretty much what the three artists we’re talking about today did.

Gordon “Sting” Sumner walked away from The Police at the exact moment they became one of the biggest bands on the planet. Paul Weller dismantled The Jam , a band that was the voice of a generation, to chase jazz and soul in smoking jackets. Peter Gabriel left Genesis with his masks and concept albums to become, eventually, one of the most innovative and radical pop artists of his era.

Three different bands. Three different sounds. Three men with absolutely nothing left to prove and everything to lose. And all three chose the harder road anyway.

This is the lost art of reinventing yourself.

By 1983, The Police weren't just successful, they were one of the biggest bands on Earth. Synchronicity marked a significant shift in the band's sound, blending elements of rock, new wave and world music, and no one could have forecast that this album would be the finale to a trio at the absolute peak of worldwide domination. "Every Breath You Take" spent eight weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and became one of the most iconic songs of the era, while the album topped both the Billboard 200 and the UK Albums Chart, even displacing Michael Jackson's Thriller from the top spot in the US. The tour climaxed with a sold-out night at Shea Stadium. And then, with the band sitting on the single biggest commercial achievement of their career, Sting walked. As one retrospective put it, to leave a band at the height of their success is at once a masterstroke and a huge gamble.
Rather than chase more of the reggae-tinged new wave that had made him a household name, Sting assembled a backing band of young American jazz musicians , Branford Marsalis, Kenny Kirkland, Omar Hakim and Darryl Jones, and pursued a more jazz-oriented direction for his solo debut. The result, The Dream of the Blue Turtles (1985), reached number three on the UK chart and number two on the Billboard 200, proving that whatever Sting had lost in band chemistry, he'd gained in freedom. The songwriting was sharper, more political, and unmistakably his own.

The Jam were, by common consent, the biggest and most beloved band to emerge from the British punk scene. Musically influenced by the Sex Pistols and The Clash as well as a plethora of sixties legends, Weller came to articulate the frustrations, anger and hopes of working-class people across the country, and by 1982 the band were untouchable: their most recent album, The Gift, hit number one, as did its lead single, the Motown homage "Town Called Malice." So when Weller split The Jam at their peak in October 1982, it looked to some like an act of wilful self-sabotage.
The band's farewell single, "Beat Surrender" went straight to number one, and their final tour included five sell-out nights at Wembley Arena. Weller didn't care. Following the Jam's dissolution, he formed The Style Council with Mick Talbot, exploring pop, jazz, soul, hip hop, folk and classical. A complete inversion of everything The Jam had stood for. Debut album Café Bleu (1984) confused as many fans as it converted: jazz was everywhere on the record, from Talbot's frisky piano work to languid, jazz-indebted ballads, alongside detours into electro-funk and even an early attempt at hip-hop. Follow-up Our Favourite Shop (1985) sharpened the politics rather than the jazz, taking aim at racism and consumerism in Maggie’s Britain, all wrapped in an overarching sense of hope. And it gave the Style Council their height of popularity in the UK, entering the album chart at number one.

Another day we will cover Paul’s follow up journey to The Style Council.
A solo career that made him pretty much a British Institution worth of a statue in Trafalgar Square one day…

And if you are interested in that story that started in Woking :

Dancing Through the Fire

Peter Gabriel's reinvention is really two reinventions stacked on top of each other.
As Genesis's lead vocalist and principal lyricist, known for his theatrical performances and elaborate stage costumes, he helped define progressive rock through albums like Foxtrot and Selling England by the Pound. Then, with relations with his bandmates strained around the concept album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, left the band in 1975 following the world tour, at a moment when, by some accounts, Genesis was enjoying its greatest success to date.
The first reinvention was about getting rid of the masks and an over-elaborated concept music, replaced by something more personal and direct across four self-titled albums tracking the distance he covered between leaving Genesis and arriving at his masterpiece Album So.
Along the way came the anti-apartheid anthem "Biko," and hits like "Games Without Frontiers" and "Shock the Monkey." The second reinvention was the opposite move in a way. Taking those experimental instincts and finally letting them meet the mainstream. So, released in May 1986, reached number one in the UK and number two in the US, becoming Gabriel's best-selling album with over five million copies sold in the US alone. Lead single "Sledgehammer" went to number one, Gabriel's only single ever to top that chart, and in doing so knocked "Invisible Touch" by Genesis, his former band, out of the top spot, which was also their only US number one.
A piece of poetic justice that would have been harder to script…….

In that incredible Album two other absolute jewels, both among the best tracks of the 80s, “Red Rain” and the unforgettable duet with the magnificent Kate Bush’s
“Don’t Give up”, written about the devastation of unemployment under Thatcher, with Bush taking the role of comforter, singing lines of reassurance against Gabriel's narrative of a man stripped of his pride and identity.
It was the emotional core of the record, proof that even at his most commercial, Gabriel hadn't lost the conscience that defined his solo work in the first place.

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"The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band."
Brian Eno

We could not find a better intro to today’s story in order to give you a sense of how influential The Velvet Underground have been in modern music.
That kind of influence that doesn't announce itself screaming. It doesn't sell out arenas or collects multi platinum Albums. It spreads underground, passing between the right hands at the right moment, multiplying quietly until one day, even after nearly 60 years, you look around and realise it was everywhere.

You could hear them in the primal howl of Iggy & the Stooges, who took the Velvets’ dark energy and set it on fire. In the art-school glamour of Bowie and Roxy Music, who borrowed their cool detachment and dressed it up in sequins. In the gothic corridors of The Cure or Depeche Mode, the bleak poetry of a Ian Curtis’s Joy Division, Morrissey or Nick Cave and his Bad Seeds.
Moving closer to our days you could say The Strokes were essentially a VU cover band who’d swapped heroin for hangovers. From that feedback scrape of a Radiohead or Nirvana’s guitar to the dark, hypnotic chant of The National.

As we said. Everywhere.

The Velvet Underground were, from the very beginning, an unlikely collision of worlds. Lou Reed grew up in suburban Long Island, a working-class kid who wrote rock and roll but dreamed of literature , and who had, as a teenager, been subjected to electroshock therapy by his parents in an attempt to cure his anxiety, depression and bisexuality. It was a trauma that would shadow his entire life and bleed into his songwriting with a rawness few artists ever matched. John Cale arrived from a different universe entirely. A classically trained Welsh prodigy who had studied under avant-garde composer La Monte Young in New York, bringing a viola and dissonance into what might otherwise have been a conventional rock band. Sterling Morrison was the quiet one, a rock-solid guitarist and Reed’s old college friend, the one who kept the whole thing from flying apart. And then there was Moe Tucker, drumming standing up, a minimalist pulse that sounded like nothing else in rock and roll.

Into this world stepped Andy Warhol. By 1965 he was the most famous artist in America, and he adopted the Velvet Underground as his house band, his living art project, his proof that the underground could be both dangerous and glamorous simultaneously. He gave them a rehearsal space, a stage, the infamous Exploding Plastic Inevitable multimedia shows. And most consequentially, he gave them Nico. The German model and actress, icily beautiful and with a unique voice, was installed as a vocalist over Reed’s barely concealed resentment.
Warhol’s patronage opened doors but also cast a long shadow. Many dismissed the band as another of Warhol’s products, a piece of pop art rather than a serious musical force.

He also gave them one of the most iconic album covers in rock history. The debut record, officially self-titled but known to the world simply as The Velvet Underground & Nico, arrived in 1967 with a plain yellow banana on its sleeve, Warhol’s signature the only other marking. No band name. No tracklist.
Just the instruction, on some early pressings, to “Peel slowly and see.”

It was provocative, minimal, and completely ahead of its time.

And then you pressed play. From the opening notes it was clear this was not music that played by anyone’s rules. I’m Waiting for the Man dropped the listener onto a street corner in Harlem, Lou Reed counting out $26 for a heroin fix.
No glamour, no guilt, just the transaction.
Venus in Furs went somewhere even darker, a slow meditation on sadomasochism, Cale’s viola scraping against Reed’s deadpan delivery like fingernails on silk. All Tomorrow’s Parties gave Nico her finest moment. That sepulchral voice intoning a portrait of a woman trapped in an endless cycle of performance and expectation, beautiful and utterly bleak. And then there was Femme Fatale, Reed’s cool, almost affectionate sketch of a dangerous woman, written, reportedly, about Edie Sedgwick, Warhol’s doomed It Girl, which gave it a real-world tragedy the melody alone could never quite carry.

It would take some time for history to correct the mistake of dismissing them at first. And when you listen to those artists mentioned above, remember…they would probably have sounded different without The Velvets.

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Britain in the summer of 1976 was a country on the verge of collapse. The pound was sinking, the economy tanking, Harold Wilson had abruptly quit couple of months earlier. Three years of stagflation, rolling strikes, power cuts.
In December of that year the ultimate shame of a bailout by the IMF.
The British Empire turning into a South American Banana Republic.

The swinging 60s a distant memory. Nobody had a word for what came next.

The heatwave arrived as the country seemed to be approaching an economic and political abyss. The grass turned yellow. Reservoirs cracked. Britons were advised to bath with a friend.

Within that landscape, on a Friday night in early June, approximately forty people filed into the Lesser Free Trade Hall on Peter Street, Manchester. The venue was a second-floor room attached to the great Free Trade Hall itself. The support act was a Bolton group called Solstice. Nobody much remembers Solstice.

What came next, they would not forget.

The Sex Pistols had barely played any shows at this point. Their first gig with John Lydon as frontman had been at St Martin’s College of Art in London, November 1975. They played around 15 minutes in front of 20 people. By June, they had assembled a few London dates — the Marquee, the 100 Club — and a reputation that was already getting ahead of their music.

The set lasted maybe fifteen minutes. Possibly twenty. Nobody is quite sure. Johnny Lydon later claimed he couldn’t even remember it. What he left behind in that half-empty room was a different matter entirely.

Peter Hook was in the audience. He went home and bought a bass guitar the next day. He and his friend Bernard Sumner, also present, went on to form Joy Division with Ian Curtis , who made it to the second Lesser Free Trade Hall show in July , and later New Order. Also in the room: a seventeen-year-old from Stretford named Steven Morrissey, who wrote a letter to the NME about the experience. He described the Pistols’ “discordant music and barely audible lyrics,” but conceded he would “love to see them make it.” Members of The Fall were there too.

Future architects of post-punk, gothic rock, indie , the whole Manchester lineage that would eventually define the next decade of British(..and not only) music , assembled in one room.

The gig has since become widely accredited as year zero in the history of rock.
The Velvet Underground comparison is irresistible and has been made many times: everyone who was there started a band. But there’s something even stranger about the Lesser Free Trade Hall. The Velvets seduced people into art. The Pistols gave people permission to be furious. In a country being squeezed from every direction economically, politically, socially.
And a Rock scene by then tired, pompous and not being able anymore to represent the wrath and the fury boiling up in that new generation.

Britain in June 1976 didn’t know it was at an ending. But in a side room in Manchester, on a Friday night, with forty people and a set that didn’t even last half an hour , something did deflagrate.
The punk atom, regardless if you were in love or not with that genre, did initiate a chain reaction destined to change the sound & look of the future Rock and Indie music.

That Interview……..

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This week brought us Blue Morpho — Ed O’Brien’s second solo album, released on May 22nd, and a truly impressive, atmospheric record that will get the full treatment in our usual end-of-month new releases edition. But reading about it reminded us of : Radiohead’s last album came out in 2016.

A decade is a long time, even by their standards. And while the band’s members have hardly been idle - Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood with solo records and film scores, the two of them together with The Smile, Colin Greenwood becoming something of an honorary member of Nick Cave’s Bad Seed, Philip Selway with his own albums and a string of prestigious collaborations - the absence of new Radiohead material is still genuinely felt.

So, to fill that space a little, today’s post does something simple: one favourite track from each of their albums. Trying to avoid the most obvious ones.
Perhaps you will discover some new jewels for your personal soundtrack…

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Youth, Beauty & Talent. The temptation to fly too close to the Sun. And at the same time that curiosity to surrender to a darker instinct. And not being able to re-emerge in time before paying the price.
How many times in Music & Arts have we seen the Myths of Icarus or Orpheus dramatically mirrored in the life of a gifted Artist ?

In the early 1950s, Chet Baker emerged as one of the most compelling talent of the Cool Jazz movement. Playing alongside Gerry Mulligan in a radical new quartet, just trumpet, baritone sax, bass, and drums. No Piano.
Baker helped creating a sound built on space and melodic intimacy. His trumpet playing was unlike anything before it: tender, conversational, almost fragile. His rendition of “My Funny Valentine” became iconic, and when he added his voice to the mix, a generation fell completely under his spell.

He was a God. Equal parts James Dean and Jack Kerouac: impossibly beautiful and dangerous.

The tragic fall that follow was steep and prolonged. His Heroin addiction, a plague in those years in the world of Jazz, created a cascade of legal problems. He served time in prison in Italy, and was later expelled from both West Germany and England for drug-related offences. Then came the incident that nearly ended everything.
In 1966, drug dealers outside a San Francisco nightclub shattered his jaw and broke his teeth, making trumpet playing and vocals impossible for months. Even after healing, Baker had to relearn how to play his instrument.

For a while he worked at a petrol station. The golden boy of West Coast Jazz was pumping gas.

What followed was one of music’s more unlikely second acts. Towards the end of the 70s and in the 80s he returned to Europe, where audiences viewed him as a fragile and delicate soul rather than simply a junkie , and that generosity of spirit seemed to revive something in him. He played small clubs and festivals across Italy, France, and the Netherlands, recording some quietly devastating late-career albums.

It was at some point during this fragile renaissance that cult photographer and filmmaker Bruce Weber, a lifelong admirer, caught up with him.

Isabella Rossellini & Viggo Mortensen 1987

Let’s Get Lost (1988) drifts dreamily between past and present, travelling across archival footage of Baker as an impossibly beautiful icon of the 1950s with the tragically weathered figure he had become. Shot in an impossibly cool noir black and white by cinematographer Jeff Preiss, the film is less a conventional biography than what we would call now a ‘mood piece’ . Weber strings together rare performance footage, clips from Italian B movies Baker appeared in, and candid interviews with musicians, friends, battling ex-wives, and his children, all circling around a man who remained, to the last, fundamentally elusive.

The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and won the Italian Critics’ Prize at the Venice Film Festival.

Baker died four months before its release, falling from a hotel window in Amsterdam in May 1988.

The camera, somehow, knew it was saying goodbye.

This weekend hide that phone. Get a glass of wine. And savour this unforgettable film documenting without any fake romanticism the many lives of this incredibly talented human being.

Chet’s cameo with beautiful Italian singer Mina!

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Miners broken by Maggie. Hooligans running riot across European stadiums. The City’s ‘Big Bang’ promising easy money …. for a very, very few.
And Live Aid reminding the rest of the world that people were still dying of hunger while we watched from our sofas.

It was into this chaos that one of the most influential bands ever retreated to a terrace house in Greater Manchester to write the pinnacle of their short but legendary journey.

This is a short story of The Smiths’ The Queen is Dead exactly forty years on.

Following their first two albums , the incendiary self-titled debut and the raw, righteous Meat is Murder, which launched and immediately established the band at the very top of the indie landscape, Morrissey and Johnny Marr - together with the irreplaceable Andy Rourke on Bass (who left us far too soon) and Mike Joyce on Drums - escaped London and the growing tensions with their label, Rough Trade.

By then, it was already clear that The Smiths possessed those rare, almost alchemical elements that separate the great bands from the truly legendary ones.
Steven Patrick Morrissey’s lyrical genius - razor-sharp, literary, and laced with a wit as dark as a Manchester November - married to Johnny Marr's melodic brilliance: guitar lines so luminous, so deceptively complex, they seemed to arrive fully formed from somewhere beyond the ordinary world. Without forgetting the importance of Rourke and Joyce rhythmic section.

A sound that was at once fiercely British and timeless. Unique. Too distinctive to be replicable.

There are albums that define a moment. And then there are albums that define something much larger, a feeling, a generation, a way of seeing the world.
The Queen is Dead, released in June 1986, belongs firmly and permanently in that second, far rarer category.

Starting with that cover picturing a young, and at his most beautiful, Alain Delon in the 1964 film L’Insoumis ( The Unvanquished )

To understand why this record hit with such seismic force, you have to go back to that terrace house in Bowdon, Cheshire, and imagine what it felt like to be young, Northern, working class, and angry in Thatcher’s Britain.
Not the nihilistic anger of punk. Something more literary, more wickedly funny. Viciously refined.
Morrissey had been sharpening that voice for years, filling notebooks in his bedroom in Stretford, dreaming of something bigger. By 1986, with Marr’s extraordinary melodic gift alongside him, it all finally exploded into something close to perfect.

The album opens with its title track, and it remains one of the most thrilling opening in rock history. Morrissey hammering viciously every corner of the establishment over Marr, for once, acid and distorted guitar and Rourke/Joyce dark, relentless rhythm.
The Crown, Church, the whole rotting edifice of English deference , with a sneer and a swagger that feels genuinely iconoclastic even now. But what makes it great, what makes it Smiths, is that it is also absolutely hilarious. The image of breaking into the palace, finding the Queen drunk and the Prince Charles talking to plants, it is satire of the sharpest, most English kind.

For a generation of young people who felt invisible to those in power, that was electrifying.

If the title track is the album’s fist, then There is a Light That Never Goes Out is its broken, beautiful heart. One of the greatest 80s songs. Full stop.

What Morrissey does here is almost perverse in its genius. He takes the most desperate scenario imaginable , a lonely young man begging to be taken anywhere, anywhere, just to feel less alone , and transforms it into something strangely euphoric.
The famous bit about being hit by a double-decker bus and dying by the side of someone you love is not ….morbid. It is the most romantically defiant statement you will ever hear. It says that belonging, even for a moment, even catastrophically, is worth everything. Marr’s guitar caressing underneath it all like light through a dirty window, and together they created something that generations of outsiders, dreamers, and the desperately lonely have claimed as entirely their own.

Bigmouth Strikes Again shows the other side of Morrissey. Self-deprecating, gleefully theatrical, willing to mock his own reputation before anyone else gets the chance. It’s a reminder that beneath all the gladioli and Oscar Wilde quotes, there was a sharp, funny, deeply self-aware man who never took himself quite as seriously as his critics assumed. The Boy With the Thorn in His Side, meanwhile, is Marr at his most melodically devastating, a cascading, joyful guitar figure wrapped around a lyric about artistic frustration and the refusal to be silenced.
It is the sound of a band who knew exactly what they were and refused to apologise for any of it.

And those lyrics. Written before our once Dear Morrissey got consumed by a dark resentment and anger in his life later stage. They stay in the Phanteon of Modern Music, with the likes of Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Bowie, Kendrick Lamar, Leonard Cohen….

To attempt to list every artist, band, or songwriter that The Queen is Dead influenced would take longer than the album itself. But let’s try to feel the scale of it.

Britpop would simply not exist without this record. Suede, Pulp, Blur, early Oasis, Stone Roses all of them were working in a space The Smiths had cleared and cultivated.
Jarvis Cocker’s ability to find poetry in the mundane and the marginal is Morrissey’s direct inheritance. Noel Gallagher has never been shy about the debt he owes to Marr’s guitar work. And then there is Radiohead, a band who took the emotional intensity and the refusal to compromise that The Smiths possessed, and pushed it into entirely new sonic territory. Thom Yorke has spoken openly about Morrissey's influence on his approach to vulnerability in songwriting, and you can hear Marr's melodic restlessness echoing in Jonny Greenwood's early guitar work before Radiohead found their own extraordinary voice.

The Queen is Dead showed that guitar music could be at the same time literary and direct, intellectual and emotionally raw, politically engaged and deeply personal.
It raised the bar for what a rock record could aspire to be.

And forty years later, that bar has still not been cleared.

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The Lemon Twigs - Look for your Mind !
Pop

Bad night sleep ? Not looking forward to those armpits on the Tube/Train ? Orange MF talking BS in the News as usual ? We do have a quick remedy for you…
Loose yourself into the latest Brian & Michael D’Addario’s Bros - AKA Lemon Twigs - glorious new Album.

Following the 70s soft-rock sound of Everything Harmony (2023) and somehow less focussed A Dream is All We know (2024), our brothers went all-in Beatles, Beach Boys and The Byrds. The result ? Their best album and very likely one of the Albums you will find everywhere in the Best of 2026 recaps.

Power-Pop that is Lush, Fun with sparkling arrangements and produced splendidly by themselves . With backing on some tracks from Lemon Twigs touring members Danny Ayala and Reza Matin, as well as Tchotchke bassist Eva Chambers (who also designed the album's cover art, a gloriously cool retro 60s… ), the overall sound crispier and fresher than ever.

The list of our fav tracks long. The opening title track and Nothing’ But You transport you immediately in The Byrds 60’s California. I Just Can’t Get Over Losing You sounds, smells and look Fab Four all over. Then we start surfing with Brian Wilsonesque tracks like Mean to Me, Bring you Down.
Then the glorious double punch of My Heart Is in Your Hands Tonight - that Rickenbaker Guitar… and the lysergic finale Your True Enemy.

Fab Album. Well done Bros…

Weird Nightmare - Hoopla
Indie Rock

Maybe is the hot weather. Or perhaps the longer days. Whatever might be the reason encountering this Album has been a bless. One of those Albums to listen in the car with the windows down, volume triggering your smart-watch alert for risking deafness.
Hoopla is the sound of a man letting go. And loving it.

Weird Nightmare is none other than the fictional Band of Mr Alex Edkins from Punk Band METZ. This is a joyous blast of melodic Indie Rock brining to the surface from the first beat memories of The Replacement, Lemonheads and Teenage FanClub.
We actually get also a hint of early R.E.M at their most exuberant.

The kind of Album reminding you what a Guitar and a couple of smart chords is truly for. Headful of Rain starts the proceeding fantastically. Never in Style & If You Should Turn Away make you think how The Byrds might have sounded in 2026.
Both awesome. Pay No Mind brings echoes of Knack’s My Sharona.

And Forever Elsewhere will be undoubtedly one of the tracks of the year here at On The Border…….

Aldous Harding - Train on the Island
Indie

Aldous Harding is the stage name of Hannah Saker, a New Zealand singer-songwriter born in 1989 in Lyttelton, near Christchurch. She grew up in a musical family , her mother is New Zealand folk singer Lorina Harding, from whom she took her stage surname. She began performing in her teens, initially in the New Zealand folk and indie scene.
This is her 5th Studio Album, following the 2022 ‘Warm Chris’ which was well received by critics and did put her on the radar of a wider audience.
Produced again by John Parish, the English producer and songwriter. His longtime partnership with PJ Harvey being auspicious for Aldous’s future songwriting evolution.

This is definitely her strongest production. Difficult somehow to label or categorize.
Echoes of Jony Mitchell, Kate Bush, Fiona Apple & St Vincent ( at her most reflective..) breeze through those delicate melodies, blending modern Folk with Chamber-Pop over strangely cryptic lyrics.

Our favourite tracks One Stop, Train on the Island, the splendid Venus in the Zinnia ( with H Hawkline..) & Coats.

Definitely an interesting and welcome discovery. Ideal for those early summer chilling-out longer evenings…

”In The Vault”

For this month In The Vault section a 90s Album we deeply, DEEPLY loved, popped up in our radar following the reviews of Lemon Twigs and Weird Nightmare’s releases. Same vibe. Same lush harmonies and sunny arrangements.
An Album that at that time immediately transported us in 60s California…in spite of having being recorder under…Glasgow’s Grey Skies !

Released in 1997, Teenage Fanclub’s sixth album is one of those records that arrives without fanfare and then quietly refuses to leave. Norman Blake, Raymond McGinley and Gerard Love, three distinct songwriting voices bound together by harmonies so natural they sound almost accidental, created something that felt unfashionable in the Britpop moment surrounding it and sounds, paradoxically, more essential with every passing year.

The Byrds’ Rickenbacker shimmer is here. The Beach Boys’ harmonic ambition is here. Big Star’s bittersweet emotional directness is here. But Songs From Northern Britain is nobody’s tribute act. It is something wholly its own — Glasgow’s grey skies filtered through California’s eternal sunshine, emerging as something warmer, more generous and more quietly devastating than either. Ain’t That Enough remains one of the great singles of its decade. Start Again is the sound of a band fully, joyfully inhabiting their own universe. I Don’t Want Control of You is Gerard Love at his most tender and disarming. Home will break your heart on a Tuesday morning and you will thank it for doing so. Take the Long Way Round makes you want to board a time-machine and get out in San Francisco in 1967 and, finally, Your Love is the Place where I Come From is the Song you wish you would be able to sing to whoever shares your journey on this rock with you….

What Teenage Fanclub understood , and what the best melodic guitar music has always understood, is that simplicity is not the absence of sophistication.
It is its highest expression.
To write a song that sounds like it always existed, that feels immediately familiar yet completely surprising, is an achievement that no amount of studio artistry or conceptual ambition can replicate.

Some records teach you things. Some records remind you of things you already knew but had temporarily forgotten.
Songs From Northern Britain is the second kind, and those, in the end, are the ones that stay forever.

Apple Music Playlist



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Following last week’s stories on David Bowie, as we began researching the next post, an incredible coincidence stopped us in our tracks . The realisation of just what anniversary May 26th 2026 carried.

Here at On The Border, when thinking about Modern Music — Rock, Soul, R&B, Pop, Indie, Rap and Jazz — there are two artists who represent the true benchmark for what it means to be genuinely groundbreaking, uniquely influential, and truly immortal. Not in any narrow genre sense, but across the entire landscape of what popular music became in the twentieth century and beyond.

One was Bowie.

The other was born a century ago today.

Miles Davis

It has been a struggle , we must admit, thinking how to tell a compelling story to our community here. Let’s face it. Not many will be overly familiar with his art.
And there is nothing wrong with that.
Again, our main goal here is try to get our friends to discover music that hopefully will resonate and become part of your life’s soundtrack. Hence today we will try our best - and we know already we will fail miserably to a certain extent - to distillate Miles’s GIGANTIC production, and many artistic lives over more or less 45 Years, with the goal to extract the absolute jewels we would love for you to discover.

Born in Illinois from a prosperous Black family, his father a Dentist, his mother a music teacher. He landed in New York to study at Juilliard - one of the country most prestigious conservatory - but found instead Charlie ‘The Bird’ Parker. Dropped out from school and immersed himself into the Jazz BeBop revolution.
And immediately starting dismantling what he learned with the release of Birth of Cool in 1957 (even though recorded in 1949/50). Against the savage, fierce BeBop velocity - imaging that as the Punk scene of the 50s. Actually 70’s Punks compared to Parker & Co probably will be considered a bunch of softies - Miles proposed something cooler, more spacious.

The Gil Evans collaboration that followed - Miles Ahead (1957), Porgy and Bess (1958), Sketches of Spain (1960) - represents one of the great creative partnerships in American music. Evans was a white Canadian arranger of otherworldly imagination; Miles was the soloist who could make a single phrase feel like a panting masterpiece. On Sketches of Spain, built around Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez, the two of them produced something that barely fits inside any category — orchestral music, yes, but also deeply felt, majestically lyrical.

But it was Milestones (1958) that pointed toward the future. Here, for the first time, Miles structured improvisation around modes rather than chord changes. It sounds like a technical distinction. The effect was revolutionary: the music opens up, breathes differently, finds a new kind of freedom.

Kind of Blue (1959) is where that freedom became perfection. With a band that included absolute giants like John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley on saxophones, Bill Evans and Wynton Kelly sharing piano duties, Paul Chambers on bass and Jimmy Cobb on drums, Miles recorded the best-selling jazz album of all time in two sessions, largely without rehearsal, from sketches he’d written that morning.
The musicians arrived, were shown the papers and played.
What they created , “So What,” “Freddie Freeloader,” “Blue in Green,” “All Blues,” “Flamenco Sketches”, has never been bettered.
If you wish to start somewhere. Start from here……And with this Album you will encounter one of the most important cornerstones of Music. Not just Jazz. Music.

And then Miles departed again for his next journey….

By Mid 60s he dissolved his previous group and assembled what would become known as his second great quintet. Enters another bunch of absolute titans:
Herbie Hancock on piano, Wayne Shorter on tenor sax, Ron Carter on Bass and the teenage Tony Williams on drums.
Music sounded like a conversation between equals rather than a leader and his group. In fact quite a few of the tracks contained in those Albums were written by those stellar companions.
Albums like E.S.P (1965), Miles Smiles(1966), Sorcerer( our favourite…) and Nefertiti(1967) rewrote Jazz vocabulary. Tracks like Nefertiti, Footprints, E.S.P. and Masqualero will hopefully give you a sense of the pinnacle reached during this period.

But it was time to erase everything, as usual, going back to the laboratory and ‘invent’ the next thing.

In 1969, Miles Davis walked into a studio, surrounded himself with electric instruments, and made a record that almost nobody understood. He didn’t care.
He never did.

In a Silent Way was the quiet revolution — two long pieces built from loops and fragments, electric keyboards as Persian carpets beneath Miles’s trumpet, the whole thing edited by producer Teo Macero into something that felt less like jazz and more like….something new. It is the most beautiful of the electric records, and the easiest way in if you’re curious.

Bitches Brew (1970) is where the revolution went loud. A double album, recorded with multiple drummers, electric basses, exotic percussion and a cast of musicians who would go on to define jazz-rock — Chick Corea, John McLaughlin, Joe Zawinul, Jack DeJohnette, Dave Holland. The music is dense, disorienting, occasionally overwhelming, and completely unlike anything that existed before it. It sold 400,000 copies in its first year, an almost unthinkable number for music this uncompromising. Miles had found a young rock audience willing to follow him somewhere genuinely strange.

Jack Johnson (1971) is the hardest and most visceral. Together with In A Silent Way our favourite one of this era. A tribute to the first Black heavyweight champion of the world, all raw guitar and a relentless ‘take no prisoners’ groove.

On the Corner (1972) remains the most radical and divisive thing he ever made. Sly Stone, James Brown and Stockhausen thrown into the same room and recorded in fragments, re-put it together, the funk so thick it’s almost abstract. Critics hated it. It sounds more contemporary now than almost anything from its era.

The silence that followed On the Corner was not peaceful. By 1975 Miles had withdrawn completely , from music, from public life, from almost everything except cocaine, alcohol and a darkness that had been gathering for years. He was in chronic pain from a deteriorating hip, the legacy of a car crash. He slept through days, binged through nights. Friends stopped calling. The curtains stayed closed.

It was a collapse that surprised no one who knew him well. Miles had always been a man of violent contradictions. Physically beautiful . he was acutely conscious of how he looked, immaculately dressed even at his most dissolute, and capable of genuine tenderness, but also brutal in ways that are impossible to romanticise. His relationships with women were often catastrophic. His first great love, the dancer and actress Frances Taylor, has spoken of his possessiveness turning to violence. She helped transform Davis from a heroin-ravaged sideman, overshadowed commercially by the photogenic Chet Baker, into a figure of elegance and control. Then the wild Betty Davis. She was the one introducing Miles to Sly Stone and Jimy Hendrix. Finally Cicely Tyson, who would eventually become his second wife, helped pull him back from the abyss in the early 1980s. Her patience and discipline a counterweight to his self-destruction.

And then the final chapter. Two Albums that in spite of some criticism of ‘selling out’ we both loved. Tutu(1986) and Amandla(1989). Both produced by Marcus Miller.
The first one sleek, cinematic and deliberately provocative, Tutu announced that Miles had no interest in nostalgia. Built almost entirely by Marcus Miller layering synthesizers, electric bass and drum machines, it was a radical departure. Miles’s trumpet floating above a landscape that was closer to Prince than standard Jazz.
Named after Archbishop Desmond Tutu, it carried a quiet political tone for probably the first time in Davis’s career.

If Tutu was the blueprint, Amandla was the refinement. The title means “power” in Zulu and Xhosa, a deliberate nod to the anti-apartheid movement at its peak.
It would prove to be Miles’s last studio album of entirely new material before his death in 1991 — and remarkably, it sounds like a man still reaching forward, not a legend making peace with his past.

A century on, Miles’s music still breathes. Still confounds. Still moves us.
Still influences. Still remains ahead of its time.
Some stars don't fade. They just keep pulling you toward them.

To our young friends here. Check this out…….

Apple Music Playlist

PS- Yesterday a Jazz giant left us. Sonny Rollins died at 95. A…Saxophone Colossus.

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In our previous story this week we explored Bowie’s triumphant arrival on the music scene. From a tin can floating above the world to the glitter and wreckage of glam via inventing a brand new Alter-Ego. All of it in five intense, revolutionary, magnificent years.
As one of the most chameleonic, restless, fearless artists ever, new unique chapters to his story were inevitable….


Young Americans (1975)

Recorded in Philadelphia with a crack team of soul and funk musicians, Young Americans was Bowie’s full immersion into Black American music . Plastic soul, he called it himself, with characteristic self-deprecation that somewhat undersold what he had actually achieved. The album is warm, sensual and radiantly alive in a way that none of his previous work had been, and Fame , co-written with John Lennon and built on a Carlos Alomar riff that could stop traffic , gave him his first American number one. And the title track enriched by one of the most infectious chorus ever created. Chorus created as a joke by the great Luther Vandross and picked up immediately by the ever magical Bowie’s intuition.
It was the sound of an artist refusing the safety of what had already worked, and winning magnificently.

…with a young Luther Vandross on vocals !


Station to Station (1976)

Perhaps the most mysterious and commanding of all his records. Recorded in Los Angeles during the height of his cocaine years and the full possession of the Thin White Duke persona, Station to Station exists in a category of its own . A ten-minute krautrock-influenced epics sitting alongside sleek, cold soul, the whole record suffused with occultism, alienation and a kind of cold grandeur that remains genuinely difficult to explain. Bowie himself claimed to have little memory of making it. Yet the title track, Golden Years and Word on a Wing sound like transmissions from a mind operating at frequencies the rest of us can barely detect.
With Wild is the Wind testing himself with a version of a track made famous by another absolute giant like Nina Simone. The additional hallucinatory element of the lyrics, as in the following Berlin’s Albums, deriving from Bowie borrowing from the cult Beat Generation writer William Burroughs’s ‘Cut-Up’ technique.
Literally slicing up written words and phrases and reassembling them at random. Breaking the ‘Language’ as a sort of control system as an act of…further artistic liberation.
It is an album that demands attention. A currency greatly devalued nowadays……

10 mins well spent. The Thin White Duke at his most mesmerising.

Bowie and Burroughs in 1974



The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)

As if the music alone wasn’t enough, 1976 also gave us Bowie’s most significant acting moment. Nicolas Roeg’s extraordinary The Man Who Fell to Earth, shot across the landscapes of New Mexico in 1975. Bowie played Thomas Jerome Newton, an alien stranded on a planet he cannot understand and cannot escape, a role that required almost no acting at all, so precisely did it mirror where he actually was: isolated, chemically ravaged, and utterly disconnected from the world around him.
The film is cold, beautiful and deeply strange, a perfect visual companion to the music of that period. Together, Station to Station and The Man Who Fell to Earth form perhaps the most unsettling portrait of an artist simultaneously at his most brilliant and most dangerously lost.

Low (1977)

The first of the Berlin Trilogy , though much of it was recorded in France , Low was the record that announced Bowie’s most radical reinvention yet. Collaborating with Brian Eno and producer Tony Visconti, he split the album cleanly in two: fractured, clipped pop songs on side one, and long, wordless ambient instrumentals on side two. The music industry was bewildered. Critics were divided. History, as it so often does, proved Bowie right. Low remains one of the most prescient and quietly revolutionary records ever made, anticipating ambient music, post-punk and electronic minimalism with an ease that suggests he had simply heard the future and decided to share it with us common mortals.

Heroes (1977)

If Low was the sound of withdrawal, Heroes was the sound of something breaking open again. Recorded at the Hansa studio in West Berlin, with Robert Fripp’s towering guitar walls, the title track remaining one of the most emotionally devastating songs in music history. An act of defiant, born from a city physically divided by ideology and concrete. The album cover, Bowie shot in stark black and white by the photographer Masayoshi Sukita, his hand raised in a pose borrowed from Erich Heckel’s expressionist painting Roquairol , became one of the great rock portraits, austere and magnetic in equal measure.
And when the Berlin Wall finally fell in November 1989, it was Heroes that filled the air. Bowie had performed the song just yards from the Wall in 1987, telling the crowd that he dedicated it to all his friends on the other side. Those who were there said people on the Eastern side could hear it.
Two years later, they were free.
The album is full of energy and strange beauty, and it confirmed that the Berlin period was not a retreat but an advance — music that was both of its moment and completely outside of time.

Lodger (1979)

The most restless and arguably most under appreciated chapter of the Berlin Trilogy, Lodger was the sound of a nomad, built from travel and a growing fascination with world music that would quietly influence everything from post-punk to the art-pop of the following decade. Less enigmatic than Low, less majestic than Heroes, it was nonetheless full of groundbreaking ideas: Boys Keep Swinging, DJ, Look Back in Anger each pointed somewhere different and vital. Lodger is an album that rewards patience, revealing itself slowly as one of the most quietly inventive records Bowie ever made, the final proof that even at the end of an extraordinary decade, he still had more roads left to travel than most artists manage in an entire career.

There are artists who leave a body of work. And then there is David Bowie, who left an entire universe . And kept expanding it until the very last moment.
What we have traced across these two posts this week is only a part of that story.

His final chapter, perhaps the most extraordinary and heartbreaking of all, is waiting.
We will get there at some point. We promise…..

Apple Music Playlist


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Here at On The Border, we always knew that closing this first trilogy of stories, devoted to those artists who, in a breathtakingly short window of time, gifted us with music that still lights up our days , was going to be an emotional one.
After Elton and Stevie, there was only one place left to go. One artist whose shadow stretches across everything that came after him.

David Robert Jones. The forever and still sorely missed David Bowie.

This is not, and could never be, his full story. To condense into this short space such a blinding and incandescent journey would be impossible. Offensive.
For those who want to dig deeper into his genius there is no better companion than the extraordinary Far Above the World by Paul Morley, one of the most compelling, complete and heartfelt accounts of his time on this planet.

What follows across this week’s posts are two small, devoted tributes, a handful of chapters from an impossibly rich book.
Today: the arrival. Space Oddity and the five albums that changed everything.
Friday: the American chapter. Delirious, inspired and at times dangerously dark.
And the Berlin rebirth that no one saw coming, and no one has forgotten since.

All of that hopefully a reminder to our friends of how, in the space of a few intense and sometimes deeply troubled years, David Bowie became perhaps the most singular and influential artist music has ever produced.
And how, against all odds, he just kept becoming someone new.

Space Oddity / David Bowie (1969)

Before Ziggy, before the Thin White Duke, before Berlin , there was Major Tom, drifting alone in a tin can above the world. Space Oddity, released as a single in 1969, it was the song that announced a genuinely different kind of artist had arrived.
Quietly cinematic, it described outer space not as adventure but as existential journey. A metaphor so perfectly constructed it has never aged a single day. The album around it was still finding its footing, but the song itself was already fully formed: a complete world in under five minutes, and a fire starter for everything that followed.

Hunky Dory (1971)

If Space Oddity was the signal, Hunky Dory was the full transmission. Released in December 1971, while living with his colourful court that included his creative first wife Angie in Haddon Hall in Beckenham, it remains one of the most astonishing creative leaps in rock history. An album of melodic generosity and literary depth that sounded like nothing that had come before it. From the glam manifesto of Changes to the tender, devastating Life on Mars?, Bowie moved between piano ballads, art-rock experiments and hymns to his heroes — Lou Reed, Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan — with the ease of someone who had already mapped the territory. It is an album of astonishing confidence from an artist who had only just found himself.
To this day a major masterpiece in the history of modern music.

The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972)

Few albums in history have arrived with such a fully realised mythology.
Ziggy Stardust wasn’t just a record. It was the birth of a character, a theatrical event that rewired how rock music could be conceived and consumed. Bowie created a doomed alien messiah, dressed him in Kansai Yamamoto and kabuki, and sent him out to play arenas with Mick Ronson’s scorching guitar as his weapon of choice. Songs like Starman, Suffragette City and Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide didn’t merely capture the imagination. They literally transformed modern music vocabulary.
The album invented glam rock as a serious art form and, in doing so, gave permission to generations of outsiders to be gloriously, defiantly strange.
It is not an exaggeration stating his appearance on Top of The Pops in that July of 1972 literally changed the life and inspired an enormous number of kids to abandon their way of life and start an artistic career. It is said to be 'the day that invented the 80’s’ as so many musicians who went on to be household names saw the performance and it changed their lives. Those watching that night included U2’s Bono, The Cure’s Robert Smith, Boy George, Adam Ant, Mick Jones of the Clash, Gary Kemp of Spandau Ballet, Morrissey and Johnny Marr of the Smiths, Siouxsie Sioux, Toyah Willcox, John Taylor and Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran, Dave Gahan of Depeche Mode and many more. …

And if you want to have a look at where the iconic pic on the Album Cover was shot, head over Heddon Street, a pedestrianised side road just off Regent Street !

Aladdin Sane (1973)

Often described as Ziggy Stardust discovering America, Aladdin Sane was in truth something darker and more fractured. The sound of an artist beginning to feel the weight of the persona he had created. Recorded partly on tour and infused with the a feverish and dislocated energy of life on the road, it was full of distortion, paranoia and scattered delirious brilliance. Mike Garson’s extraordinary free-jazz piano on the title track alone made it an outlier among rock records of its era.
The album cover, captured by the legendary English Photographer Brian Duffy, became one of the defining images of the twentieth century. Often referred to as the "Mona Lisa of Pop", the iconic image features Bowie with a striking red-and-blue painted lightning flash across his face and a teardrop on his collarbone. The makeup was designed by Pierre La Roche, and the image itself holds the auction record for the most expensive piece of album artwork ever sold, fetching nearly half a million dollars.

Pin Ups (1973)

A deliberate pause. A breath between reinventions. Released just months after Aladdin Sane, Pin Ups was Bowie’s affectionate survey of the mid-sixties London scene that had shaped him, covers of The Who (see video below! ), The Kinks, Them, Pink Floyd, delivered with characteristic intelligence and style. It was not an album of ambition but of love.
What it reveals, in retrospect, is an artist self-aware and generous enough to shine a light on the musicians who had lit his path.
And with that another Album cover to remember. The model on the Pin Ups cover is Twiggy, the iconic British model and actress, one of the defining faces of the 1960s London scene that the album itself was celebrating. The photograph was shot by the great Justin de Villeneuve, who was also Twiggy’s manager and partner at the time.

And so ends the first act. From a tin can floating above the world to the glitter and wreckage of glam. All of it in five relentless, magnificent years.

On Friday’s post, we board the plane with him. America is waiting.
And after America, that so nearly consumed him and risked to end this magnificent artistic journey too soon, to Berlin where he saved himself….

..kick-ass version of Cracked Actor from Aladdin Sane ( or shall we say A Lad Insane…) !!

Not to be missed !!!
David Bowie: You are not alone - Exhibition at the Lighthouse



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Last post, we found ourselves lost in admiration for the extraordinary creative velocity of Elton Hercules John — six albums of astonishing quality in just over three years, a run that redefined what popular music could achieve in such a short period of time. Today we remain in that same territory of the almost-impossible, but we shift the mood, the geography and the soul of the music entirely.
Because if Elton’s run was remarkable, what Stevie Wonder achieved between 1972 and 1976 exists in a category so rarefied it barely has a name. This is the story of five albums in five years that didn’t just top the charts , they expanded the very definition of what a Black artist could do in popular music, what a studio could become in the hands of a true visionary, and what a human being, blind since infancy, could extract from the universe simply by listening to it more carefully than the rest of us ever will.

Stevland Hardaway Morris , Stevie Wonder to you and I, had been a Motown child prodigy since the age of eleven, churning out hits with the reliability of a one-man hit factory. But as he approached his twenty-first birthday in 1971, something shifted, profoundly and permanently. He renegotiated his Motown contract, captured creative control from the label’s notoriously tight grip, taught himself to play virtually every instrument in the studio, and embarked on what musicologists, critics and fellow artists still struggle to adequately describe.
What followed was just rarified pure beauty. In our opinion here at On The Border never achieved again in the history of popular music, with the possible exception of those four guys from Liverpool a few years earlier.
Five albums that moved effortlessly between funk, soul, jazz, rock, gospel and classical, tied together by an out of this world musical intelligence and a warmth of spirit that remains, to this day, a sublime …wonder to listen to.

The Five Albums — 1972 to 1976

Music of My Mind (March 1972) The opening declaration of independence, and what a statement it made. Recorded almost entirely by Stevie alone, playing keyboards, harmonica, drums and synthesiser, it was the first time the world heard what happened when this particular mind was left completely to its own devices. Looser, more experimental and more personal, following somehow the example the magnificent Marvin Gaye was able to create with What’s Going On in 1971.
It announced a new Stevie — freer, bolder, and only just getting started.
The revolution had begun, quietly and without fanfare.
Tracks like SuperWoman, I Love Every Little Thing About You, Happier Than the Morning Sun, Keep on Running opening a window on a new majestic landscape for Soul Music.

Talking Book (November 1972) Where Music of My Mind was the manifesto, Talking Book was the first great triumph. Superstition and You Are the Sunshine of My Life arriving on the same album — two songs that could not be more different in temperature and yet feel entirely of a piece — is the kind of songwriting witchcraft that simply cannot be taught or manufactured. Funk, tenderness, rock guitar courtesy of a young Jeff Beck, and Stevie’s voice at the height of its extraordinary powers. A landmark record by any measure.

Innervisions (August 1973) Perhaps the most politically charged and emotionally complex record of the entire run. Stevie’s gaze turns outward here — to inequality, corruption, addiction, the chaos of American life in the early 70s — and what he sees he renders not with rage but with a kind of aching, clear-eyed sorrow that cuts far deeper. Living for the City remains one of the most visceral pieces of social commentary ever committed to tape. Higher Ground is pure transcendence.
Don’t You Worry Bout a Thing, Golden Lady, He’s Mistral Know-It-All. No words needed to describe those masterpieces.
Released just three weeks before a near-fatal car accident that left Stevie in a coma for four days, it feels, in retrospect, like a man reckoning with the world before the world nearly took him from it.
Between you and us. Our personal favourite one. One of our top 3 Albums Ever…..

Fulfillingness’ First Finale (July 1974) Recorded in the long shadow of that accident, and it shows — but in the most beautiful way. Quieter, more introspective, more spiritually tender, this is Stevie in a more vulnerable register, and all the more devastating for it. Boogie On Reggae Woman provides the requisite joy and groove, but it is the album’s more reflective moments — its prayers and its silences — that linger longest. It won the Grammy for Album of the Year. It deserved every word of the praise.

Songs in the Key of Life (September 1976) And then, the summit. The double album — plus a bonus EP, because why not, when you are Stevie Wonder in 1976 — that stopped the music world in its tracks and has never fully released its grip. Twenty-one tracks spanning joy, grief, celebration, protest, lullaby and everything in between, Songs in the Key of Life is one of those rare records that does not merely reflect the human experience but somehow contains it. Sir Duke, Isn’t She Lovely, As, Love’s in Need of Love Today — each one a small universe. It debuted at number one in America without the release of a prior single, which tells you everything about where Stevie stood in the culture at that precise moment. Frank Sinatra called it the greatest album ever made.
And you better not arguing with Frank…...

Five albums. Four years. And a legacy so deep it still has not been fully excavated.
Our Stevie. Peace and Love.

Apple Music Playlist


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Today’s post marks the first of a new series dedicated to those Artists and Bands who, at some point in their creative adventure, often right at the very beginning, were quite literally touched by grace. Call it divine intervention, a perfect alignment of talent and circumstance, or simply the universe conspiring in their favour: whatever it was, it compelled them to produce art so significant, so vital, often so revolutionary, in such a compressed window of time that it leaves us in a state of genuine awe. All the more remarkable when you consider we live in an era where, while great music is still very much being made, the pace of creation has slowed to something altogether more cautious and deliberate.

We begin with a legend. Born Reginald Kenneth Dwight, known to the world — and to history — as Elton Hercules John. And it’s a particularly interesting story from our perspective here at On The Border, because growing up in the late 70s and 80s, if we’re being completely honest with you all, Elton was not exactly front and centre in our musical universe. We were of course aware of a handful of his most celebrated songs — you couldn’t really avoid them — but he was perceived, perhaps a little unfairly, as a colourful and eccentric relic from a not-so-distant past.
Beloved, certainly. But not quite ours.

And yet. This is precisely where the majestic, endlessly humbling beauty of Music reveals itself. If you never stop being curious , if you remain genuinely committed to seeking out the undiscovered jewels still waiting patiently along the road, which is after all the entire spirit of this small newsletter , then occasionally, almost without warning, you stumble upon a realisation of just how little you actually knew about an artist, a genre, an era. And with that realisation comes one of the great pleasures this life has to offer: the joy of a truly beautiful discovery, made late, but no less breathtaking for it.

That is precisely what happened to us when we began listening , really listening, to the six astonishing albums Elton John recorded between April 1970 and October 1973.

42 months. 1,277 days.

Most of which, it should be noted, were spent by our dear Elton either somewhere gloriously high above the clouds, or, in one of rock and roll’s more theatrical moments, throwing himself into his swimming pool in Los Angeles in a dramatically operatic suicide attempt, just two days before completing one of the most triumphant runs of sold-out shows Dodger Stadium had ever seen, in 1975.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

The Six Albums — April 1970 to October 1973

Elton John (April 1970) The debut that announced everything. Lush, orchestral and emotionally raw, it introduced the world to a songwriter of quite remarkable depth and sensitivity. Bernie Taupin’s lyrics painting vivid, almost literary pictures while Elton’s melodies soared beneath Paul Buckmaster’s sweeping string arrangements. Your Song alone would have been enough. But this was just the opening statement.

Tumbleweed Connection (October 1970) A cinematic journey through an imagined American West , all dust, railroads and frontier mythology, conjured by two young English lads who had never even set foot in the United States. Rootsy, warm and utterly unhurried, it remains perhaps the most quietly underrated record of the entire run. A beautiful, peculiar masterpiece.

Madman Across the Water (November 1971) Darker, grander, more brooding. The orchestration here reaches genuine cinematic sweep and the mood throughout is one of restless, almost gothic intensity. Tiny Dancer and the towering title track alone place this among the great albums of the era. Not the easiest listen, but one of the most rewarding.

Honky Château (May 1972) The moment everything clicked into a looser, warmer, more joyful gear. Recorded at the Château d’Hérouville outside Paris, it captures a band utterly at ease with its own brilliance. Rocket Man emerges here almost casually, as if great songs were simply falling out of the walls. Irresistible from start to finish.

Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player (January 1973) Playful and deceptively effortless, this is Elton in full pop command. Crocodile Rock and Daniel sitting side by side as evidence of a songwriter who could now do virtually anything. Perhaps the least celebrated of the six, but in any other career it would be considered a career highlight without question.

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (October 1973) The summit in terms of critical reviews and sales, over 31 million copies. A sprawling double album of breathtaking ambition and range, from glam stomp to tender balladry to genuine rock fury, all tied together by songwriting that had by now reached a kind of effortless peak.
Elton and Taupin at the absolute top of their powers, delivering a record that four decades on still sounds like nothing else.
The extraordinary culmination of one of the most remarkable creative run in 1970s rock.

The numbers alone tell a story that borders on the surreal. At the peak of his powers in the mid-70s, Elton's record sales were estimated to account for a staggering 2% of all records sold worldwide.
It had all begun just a few years earlier, in August 1970, with a legendary six-night sold-out run at West Hollywood's Troubadour, a 300-seat club packed with industry notables including Quincy Jones, Leon Russell and the Beach Boys' Mike Love, from which the Los Angeles Times declared the following morning that rock had found its next great star. Five years later, across an autumn weekend in 1975, Elton performed two sell-out concerts at Dodger Stadium, the first musical act to perform there since the Beatles nine years earlier, drawing over 100,000 fans across the two nights, arriving on stage in a sequined Dodgers uniform, baseball bat raised to the sky.
All of this, naturally, fuelled a lifestyle of such magnificent, bewildering excess that it deserves its own series. There was the phone call to his record company from a London hotel, demanding they do something about the wind outside — "Stop the wind! I was serious," he later recalled, with the kind of serene self-awareness only sobriety can bring. And then, most gloriously of all, the time he accidentally purchased an entire tram — which, as his memoir confirms, ended up in his garden, where it remains to this day, repurposed as an office.

But beneath the sequins, the platform boots and the gloriously camp sunglasses , there was always something altogether more serious and tender at work. Since founding the Elton John AIDS Foundation in 1992, he has quietly become one of the most significant philanthropists in the fight against the disease, raising hundreds of millions of dollars globally — a reminder that the most outrageous characters sometimes carry the biggest hearts.

Our dear Elton. Never knowingly underdone.

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Me by Elton John - His absolutely brilliant, incredibly funny, poignant autobiography. One of the best and most entertaining we have ever read !!



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That opening Bassline — the one that kicks Massive Attack’s Blue Lines into life in 1991 — didn’t arrive from nowhere. It was the sound of something that had been slowly, quietly building in the back rooms and sound systems of Bristol since the mid-80s, finally stepping into the light.

At the centre of it all was the Wild Bunch Sound System, a brilliantly eclectic collective of DJs, MCs and producers who were doing something nobody else in Britain was quite doing: pulling hip hop, reggae, dub, soul and electronic music into the same room and seeing what happened when they collided. What happened, it turned out, was something genuinely new. From that Wild Bunch nucleus emerged the three acts that would define a movement — Massive Attack, Portishead and Tricky — each taking the same raw ingredients and filtering them through an entirely different emotional lens.

As so often happens when a scene catches fire, someone reached for a label. Trip Hop — a term coined by the music press in the mid-90s — was never particularly welcomed by the artists it was meant to describe. And you can understand why. Labels, by their nature, draw borders around things that were never meant to have them, and this was music made by people whose whole instinct was to dissolve borders, not erect new ones. The music was too restless to sit comfortably inside any single category.

But here we are, thirty years on, and the music has long since outlasted the argument about what to call it.

Today’s post is simply a love letter — from us here at On The Border — to the artists and albums that soundtracked a particular moment, and that have somehow only grown in stature with time. Some of those Albums not even being categorised with that scene at that time but you know us, we like to challenge things a bit !

Music that sounded unlike anything before it, and that still, today, sounds unlike anything that came after.

Massive Attack — Blue Lines (1991) The album that started everything. Tracks like Unfinished Sympathy and Safe from Harm moved with a heaviness and emotional intelligence that hip hop hadn’t quite found before. Soulful, cinematic and deeply sensual, Blue Lines didn’t just launch a scene. It rewrote the rulebook on what a sample-based record could feel like.

Portishead — Dummy (1994) If Blue Lines built the foundation, Dummy furnished the rooms with additional depth, vibe, emotions. Beth Gibbons’ voice , fragile, aching, always on the verge of breaking, floated over Geoff Barrow’s dusty, noir-drenched production like smoke over still water. It won the Mercury Prize and sold millions, yet somehow never lost its feeling of being a private, 3am secret affair.

One of the most beautiful song of the 90s. And Beth’s cigarette….



Tricky — Maxinquaye (1995) The darkest corner of the genre . Claustrophobic, paranoid, unsettling. Where Massive Attack were cinematic and Portishead melancholic, Tricky turned inward, creating a suffocating world of whispered vocals, distorted loops and barely contained tension. Named after his late mother, Maxinquaye remains one of the most intensely personal debut albums in British music history.

DJ Shadow — Endtroducing..... (1996) Built entirely from samples this was a man alone in a record shop basement, turning crate-digging into a spiritual practice. Endtroducing proved that the turntable was a legitimate instrument and that hip hop’s past contained infinite futures. Thirty years on, not a single second sounds dated.

Guru — Jazzmatazz Vol. 1 (1993) Slightly outside the Bristol orbit but impossible to leave off the list. Gang Starr’s Guru brought jazz musicians — Donald Byrd, Branford Marsalis, N’Dea Davenport — into the studio to play live alongside hip hop beats, creating something warm, sophisticated and groundbreaking. Where others sampled jazz from a distance, Guru pulled it into the same room and let it breathe.

Björk — Post (1995) Strictly speaking, Björk inhabited a universe entirely her own — but Post orbited the Trip Hop world closely enough to feel like a fellow traveller. Produced partly by Nellee Hooper of the Wild Bunch collective, it shared the scene's restless eclecticism and its refusal to be categorised. Tracks like Army of Me or Hyperballad treated a genre not as a home but as a launching pad.

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When I first came out to L.A. [in 1968], my friend [photographer] Joel Bernstein found an old book in a flea market that said: Ask anyone in America where the craziest people live and they’ll tell you California. Ask anyone in California where the craziest people live and they’ll say Los Angeles. Ask anyone in Los Angeles where the craziest people live and they’ll tell you Hollywood. Ask anyone in Hollywood where the craziest people live and they’ll say Laurel Canyon. And ask anyone in Laurel Canyon where the craziest people live and they’ll say Lookout Mountain. So I bought a house on Lookout Mountain. —Joni Mitchell

We borrowed that intro from a Joni Mitchell interview because there was simply no better way to paint the picture for our friends here at On The Border.
This was the place where an extraordinarily talented community of young songwriters came together to write the soundtrack of a generation.

Legend has it that it all began with that one-of-a-kind freak-genius named Frank Zappa, who became the first musician to plant his flag in this woody corner of the Hollywood Hills. Through its heart runs Laurel Canyon Boulevard, threading the neighbourhood between the more urban sprawl of Los Angeles to the north and south. With its unpaved roads and hilltop views, traditional timber houses, large-windowed and full of light, and green, fragrant gardens heavy with eucalyptus, it offered something rare and precious to young musicians: peace, space to think, and room to write.
And yet it was never truly remote — just a short drive from those legendary stages, the Whisky a Go Go and the Troubadour, where careers were made on any given Tuesday night.
After dark, the hills gave back their own kind of music. The cry of coyotes, the call of owls, and somewhere always, the quiet strum of an acoustic guitar beneath a sky thick with stars. (Yes, we may have added the Stars here for a bit of mystique…)

The canyon began building its tribe early. Members of the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield and the Doors quietly settled into its hillside cottages, and Jim Morrison is said to have written Love Street while living just steps behind the Laurel Canyon Country Store, watching the neighbourhood’s cast of characters drift past.
But the scene truly crystallised around one address: the home of Cass Elliot of The Mamas & The Papas, on Woodrow Wilson Drive. Mama Cass turned her house into something between an open court and a living salon, where neighbours Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Joni Mitchell, Roger McGuinn, Carole King, Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, Little Feat and the Eagles would drop by as regulars, and where on the right night you might find yourself in the same room as Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles, or Eric Clapton.

Mama Cass Elliot reclines at home in Laurel Canyon, 1968.

Frank Zappa swinging in his yard….

CSNY—David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Greg Reeves (foreground), Graham Nash (standing), Neil Young, and Dallas Taylor—Los Angeles, July 1969.

They made music together the way other people made conversation. Acoustic guitars passed from hand to hand through all-night sessions in sitting rooms warmed by open fires, in cottages with stained-glass windows and candlelight. They formed bands, dissolved them, and formed new ones from the pieces. They fell in and out of love, in and out of each other’s lives, and sometimes in and out of each other’s beds. The music they made got lazily labelled “soft rock” or “folk rock” — particularly by East Coast critics who dismissed it as granola-fuelled hippie music, too mellow, too sun-bleached, too Californian. They missed the point entirely. What was being forged in those canyon living rooms was something genuinely new: a rich amalgam of blues, rock and roll, jazz, Latin, country, psychedelia, bluegrass and folk, woven together so naturally it barely announced itself. In many ways, it was the true forerunner of what we now call Americana.

And where great music gathered, great ambition was never far behind. The canyon wasn’t only a magnet for musicians, it drew the sharpest minds in the business too.
In 1971, the legendary David Geffen and Elliot Roberts founded Asylum Records, and within their first year had signed Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, Joni Mitchell and Glenn Frey. The music of the hills was about to reach the rest of the world.

Final Chapter — When the Dream Began to End:

But even paradise has a shadow side. And by the turn of the decade, the canyon’s golden story had begun to acquire some darker edges.

Success, when it arrived, arrived fast and without mercy. The same intimacy that had made the scene so fertile - the trust, the late nights and open doors - became harder to sustain as the stakes grew higher and the record deals got bigger. Egos that had once been kept in check by campfire modesty now had tour buses, managers and Rolling Stone covers to contend with. Creative partnerships that had flourished in the easy democracy of a living-room jam session buckled under the weight of commercial expectation. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young , perhaps the canyon’s most famous constellation , became as famous for their internal warfare as for their gentle harmonies.
The dream of community, it turned out, was fragile in proportion to its beauty.

And then there were the drugs. What had begun, for many, as part of the canyon’s spirit of exploration , had by the early seventies hardened into something far less romantic. Heroin quietly took up residence in the canyon. Cocaine arrived with the money. Several of the scene’s most gifted voices began a long, slow disappearance into addiction, and the casualty list , Gram Parsons, Tim Buckley, others circling the edge , served as a reminder of how thin the line was between fame and destruction.

The darkness had announced itself with shocking violence even before the decade turned. The summer of 1969 , the same summer that put a man on the moon and half a million people in a field in Woodstock, also delivered two events that struck at the heart of the canyon community and the famed counterculture it represented.
In August, Charles Manson’s followers carried out the Tate-LaBianca murders, and the horror hit close to home: Manson himself had been a peripheral figure on the canyon music scene, auditioning for record deals and drifting through the same parties that had seemed, only months before, like the safest and most hopeful places on earth.

Then, in December, came Altamont. The Rolling Stones’ free concert at the Altamont Speedway, conceived as a sort of a West Coast follow up to Woodstock, descended into chaos and ended with four deaths, one of them a stabbing carried out in front of the stage by the Hells Angels hired as security.

By the early 1970s the canyon was still producing extraordinary music , Court and Spark, Tapestry, Desperado were all yet to come , but the scene’s particular alchemy had quietly dissolved. The musicians moved to bigger houses, to Malibu, to the canyons of the music industry itself.
The dirt roads and the stained-glass windows and the all-night sessions remained, but the magic had moved on, the way magic always does, without saying goodbye properly……

Jim Morrison, standing outside his Laurel Canyon home. Paul Ferrara photo

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