Top Topham Passed Away

January 25, 2023

It seemed so extremely appropriate that Top Topham, known outside of music world as Anthony or Sanderson Topham, THE YARDBIRDS’ original guitarist, was an avid birdwatcher: that same attention to detail had made him such a respected blues artist. Top, who passed away a few days ago at the age of 75, may not be mentioned in the same breath as his more prominent successors in the band, including the recently deceased Jeff Beck, yet it was Topham who, together with Jim McCarty and Paul Samwell-Smith, set the ball rolling.

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Peter Gee Scores A Theological Allegory

January 24, 2023

John Bunyan’s 1678’s classic “The Pilgrim’s Progress” has served as a basis for quite a few music albums but, perhaps, nobody’s more entitled to record its definitive sonic version than Peter Gee, a bass player with PENDRAGON, if only for the reason that both his band’s name and his new platter’s title, as well as the name of his chosen genre, contain the veteran’s initials.

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Tony Valentino Puts A Spin On THE STANDELLS Past

January 22, 2023

It was 60 years ago, in 1963, when the world first saw the name THE STANDELLS and first heard them provide incidenral music for Connie Francis film “Follow the Boys” before this Los Angeles ensemble exposed America to their dirty garage rock and a rather unkempt looks. Not that all these got in the way of the band’s singles grabbing teenagers’ attention, with “Dirty Water” hitting Top 10 in 1965 – owing quite a large part of the song’s success to the sound of Tony Valentino‘s guitar. Still leading his version of the group, he decided to reconnect to their roots now, and releases “Dirty Water Revisited” on May 26th.

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WISHBONE ASH Celebrate The “Argus” Anniversary With A Box Set

January 20, 2023

It may seem to be a deferral of the “Argus” 50th Anniversary – given that this album first saw the light of day in April 1972 – yet WISHBONE ASH dedicated the entire year which followed to promoting the platter and touring the world in the classic’s wake. So there’s a perfect logic in boxing up the record in a super deluxe edition and issuing the sonic bonanza on April 14th – the same can’t be said, though, about the logic of packing together vinyl and CDs with identical content and, thus, reducing the buyers’ base due to the set’s high price.

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Jon Anderson Finishes Musical About Marc Chagall

January 19, 2023

“My favorite [project]! I want to do it with projection and animation and talking about my life with [Marc] Chagall, thoughts about what I did with him, and the songs that I wrote for him,” Jon Anderson told me many years ago when talking about the opus he had been working on, on and off, since 1982. “I became friends with him in the south of France for five years, that’s why I wrote this music. Initially, I wrote a dance piece with two songs and sang it to him, and then I wanted to make it into a big musical. Which I did.” Only the musical wasn’t made public then, sentenced to a bootleg existence, but a workshop which will take place in San Francisco on January 22nd is about to change this.

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