Amy Winehouse 14 September 1983 – 23 July 2011

A huge loss, one of the most talented artists this generation will see!! ...another member joins the Legends of the 27club!!

He's in love with rock'n'roll !!!

Dioni Tabbers ( 10/10 Perfect )

We love to boogie on a saturday night.........

I get violent when I'm fucked up
I get silent when I'm drugged up
want excitement, don't get none, I go wild!!

The Clash - Cheat

Jessica Harrison

Jessica Harrison graduated with a Master in Fine Arts from Edinburgh University in 2005 and later received a Master of Fine Arts from Edinburgh College of Art in 2007. In her works on paper, she draws on a style of representation that is reminiscent of editions being produced in previous centuries. This style combined with a use of contemporary imagery lends her work a gravitas and, simultaneously, a sense of playfulness. Fear dominates the work: its creation, its pervasive nature and its manipulation. Fear is the main focus of her research, her motivation to make work and a personal obsession that generates the surreal, sinister and sometimes comical juxtapositions in her drawings and sculpture. She is quoted as having this to say about her works:

"I would describe my work as focusing on the division between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the interior and the exterior, and the fearful and the feared ending in a xenotransplantation of parts and a narrative of monstrosity. Portraits of fear, dislocated from the body – the work is the result of a guilty surveillance, an observation of that which is private, a peep show of anxiety."

Another great talent of artist Jessica Harrison is how she undermines and perverts the kitschy sentimentality of porcelain figurines by “breaking” them, casting a macabre twist on the familiar decorative art form. 19th-century ladies with vacantly blithe expressions hold their own severed, gory-edged head in their lap, gaily dangle their bloody eyeballs above them, and with fleshless, skeletal face recline daintily on a chaise longue. I would love to have these doll-sculptures in my home, they are such clever miniature subversions of prim and happy porcelain figurines, having a dimension of interest that the traditional harmlessly sweet figurines never possess.

www.jessicaharrison.co.uk

Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy
Ludwig Von Beethoven

Out of Focus

Out of Focus were contemporaries of the commune living Amon Duul and created their own entry in the Krautrock annals with three albums in the early 70’s. They borrowed massively from the San Francisco psychedelic bands and added in the political nous of British bands like The Edgar Broughton Band and the result is never less than interesting and often bloody marvellous.

They seem to combine a lot of different elements in common with a lot of the Kuckuck bands but they don’t come over as dilettantes; rather they use the different strands of Jazz, Rock, psych and even folk to fit the statement they want to make. On a number like ‘God Save The Queen Cried Jesus’ the lead instruments are heavily fizzed guitars and flute along with Moran Neumuller’s harsh and descending tones on vocals a lot of similarities to Jethro Tull but the surreal politics of the number and the wigged-out guitar solo are pure Krautrock and this is followed by ‘Hey John’, very dark and very powerful and over nearly 10 minutes it really mesmerises and gets deep into your brain.

Their second album was the originally titled ‘Out of Focus’ and they kick off with a bizarre little number a version of the Stones ‘Street Fighting Man’ with a keyboard blast straight out of Santana Abraxas and a section in the middle that could be from ‘The Pink Panther’ weird but fabulous, you can’t help but love it. Track 2 is a delicate ballad ‘Its Your Life’ with a plaintive and ultimately very downbeat tone but at other times the music has an almost religious quality if monks were tripping at the sacrament.

The third album ‘4 Letter Monday Afternoon’ is an altogether more confident and jazzy affair starting with a huge blast from the new horn section and showing the pacy and strident side of their progression. A double album it has tinges of Coliseum or Ian Carr’s Nucleus and while it is a great slab of brilliant jazz rock they have lost some of the madness and joy to the efficiency and power.

You takes your choice with these guys if you want my opinion the second album is the best of the three but the first and third both have a great deal to offer.

    

Fucking Love the Stones

MICK ROCK

I love photography. When I try to scan my head for the images by one photographer that ring most deeply within me many artists names come to mind. But, I think the one photographer who most grabbed my imagination is Mick Rock.Often referred to as The Man Who Shot the Seventies, legendary rock and roll photographer.

"The man that hath no music in himself, nor is not moved by concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils; the motions of his spirit are dull as night, and his affections dark as Erebus. Let no such man be trusted."  Shakespeare, from "The Merchant of Venice"

Kate Moss ( 10/10 Perfect )

 

There she goes, a little heartache  !!

Jeff Buckley (November 17 1966 – May 29, 1997)

On the Ning Nang Nong

On the Ning Nang Nong
Where the Cows go Bong!
and the monkeys all say BOO!
There's a Nong Nang Ning
Where the trees go Ping!
And the tea pots jibber jabber joo.
On the Nong Ning Nang
All the mice go Clang
And you just can't catch 'em when they do!
So its Ning Nang Nong
Cows go Bong!
Nong Nang Ning
Trees go ping
Nong Ning Nang
The mice go Clang
What a noisy place to belong
is the Ning Nang Ning Nang Nong!! 

Spike Milligan

The Books of Albion

The Books of Albion,  Peter’s personal diaries

Pete Doherty reveals himself and the sources of his inspiration as never before in this collection of personal journals from his early days in London. The journals are reproduced just as he wrote them, in his own handwriting, complete with poems, drawings, photo-collages, and song lyrics. In sharp distinction to his tabloid image, this is the candid self-portrait of a young poet with serious artistic ambitions...soon to rise to international fame with his acclaimed bands The Libertines and Babyshambles.  A real must have for a mad fan like me....!!!

"The hardest thing you'll ever learn, Is just to love and be loved in return!"

"One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain." Bob Marley

Surreal link between Dali and Lennon

SALVADOR DALI Meets the Beatles was the last exhibition held at Liverpool's Mathew Street Gallery. The exhibition by renowned British photographer Robert Whitaker, best known internationally for his many photographs of The Beatles, taken between 1964 and 1966.

But did the Beatles ever meet the Spanish surrealist artist Salvador Dali in real life? Just one did.

"I introduced Dali to Pete Brown in Paris," explains Whitaker,, in Liverpool for the Saturday opening of his exhibition. Brown, also part of the Epstein team, later took Dali to meet John Lennon in his New York apartment.It seems Dali was a big Lennon fan. "He kept a photograph of John hanging from a coat hanger on his wall," says Whitaker.

His Beatles photographs were taken over a three year period at the request of Epstein. His Dali photographs came about through a more personal invitation.

At the age of 16 he had been given a book by his parents, cut it up to make a collage, and sent the result to Dali. An amused Dali suggested he drop by if he was ever in Spain.

But it was eight years before he made the trip and that through art historian Douglas Cooper who was planning a book on Dali. The first thing Dali said to Whitaker was, "You've been ill". He was right, Whitaker had been unwell. But the photographer caught Dali's attention by promising to photograph the inside of his head. "How are you going to do that?" asked Dali. "By photographing every part of you, your ears, nostrils, eyes ..." explained Whitaker. 

Dali was game for it and many of the close-ups of the Dali physiognomy can be seen in the new exhibition.

His wide open mouth is featured often along with a shot up his nose, one ear and his hands - "People never photograph an artist's hands," says Whitaker.

His subject often suggested poses and Whitaker found him an easy man to photograph. "He told me he was a whore for the camera."

Whitaker, who took most of his photographs at Dali's Spanish home between 1967 and 1972, found the artist a delightful companion, mostly because Whitaker as a photographer was interested in art and enjoyed Dali's sometimes bizarre conversation.

Dali once told him he could photograph God by using a special pole and a copper plate camera. Alas, the photograph was never achieved but Whitaker says Dali made sense of the idea.

Whitaker was not above being a little bizarre himself, once cutting up his photographs and sending them out to sea in a box.

Richards, Turner, and Bowie...... Great or greatest party ever?

Miles Kane

best known as the co-frontman of The Last Shadow Puppets and former frontman of The Rascals. After his last tour with The Rascals, in early 2009, Miles Kane has left the band to focus on a solo career. He then signed with Columbia Records and began recording his solo album working with Gruff Rhys and Dan The Automator.Kane's solo album is due out on the 25th April 2011 and is entitled Colour Of The Trap.  

“Come Closer” on of the singles off the album has the same 60’s inspired sound of The Last Shadow Puppets but it maintains aggressiveness of his guitar from his Rascals days. His sound has mellowed a bit with catchy pop hooks and he really runs with the retro sound, embellishing it with doo wop back up vocalists.It seems that this 60’s inspired rock sound that began with The Last Shadow Puppets is a continuing thread in his music and I love that.

                

Elliott Smith (August 6, 1969 – October 21, 2003)

Thu 5th May O2 Academy Bristol ....Can't wait !!

You are the music while the music lasts.
 T. S. Eliot

Life by Keith Richards

For me and legions of Rolling Stones fans, Keith Richards is not only the heart and soul of the world's greatest rock 'n' roll band, he's also the very avatar of rebellion: the desperado, the buccaneer, the poète maudit, the soul survivor and main offender,the torn and frayed outlaw, and the coolest fucking dude on the planet

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Halfway through his electrifying new memoir, Life, Keith Richards writes about fame: the nearly complete loss of privacy and the weirdness of being mythologised by fans as a folk-hero renegade. "I can't untie the threads of how much I played up to the part that was written for me," he says. "I mean the skull ring and the broken tooth and the kohl. Is it half and half? I think in a way your persona, your image, as it used to be known, is like a ball and chain. People think I'm still a goddamn junkie. It's 30 years since I gave up the dope! Image is like a long shadow. Even when the sun goes down, you can see it."

By turns earnest and wicked, sweet and sarcastic and unsparing, Richards, now 66, writes with uncommon candour and immediacy. He gives us a time-capsule feel for the madness that was life on the road with the Stones in the years before and after Altamont; harrowing accounts of his many close shaves and narrow escapes (from the police, prison time, drug hell); and a heap of sharp-edged snapshots of friends and colleagues – most notably, his longtime musical partner and sometime bête noire, Mick Jagger. But Life – written with the veteran journalist James Fox – is way more than a revealing showbiz memoir. It is also a high-velocity portrait of the era when rock 'n' roll came of age, a raw report from deep inside the counterculture maelstrom of how that music swept like a tsunami over Britain and the US.

Little Walter (May 1, 1930 – February 15, 1968)

Pete Doherty pictured as a young Marlon Brando... awesome photos to feed my unhealthy obsession with Doherty .

"Without music, life would be a mistake." - Friedrich Nietzsche

Beady Eye

You all know the story well enough by now. After 18 years of noise and confusion, Oasis came to a shambolic, messy, demise backstage at a gig in Paris in 2009. Following Noel Gallagher‘s departure it came as no surprise that brother Liam and the remaining members of the band decided to carry on without him. Despite being on the wrong side of 30, Liam remains ‘mad for it’ and has not wasted much time in rounding up his comrades to bash out an album under their new name Beady Eye. ‘Different Gear, Still Speeding‘ is the debut LP, but does it live up to its telling title and the expectation Liam has bestowed upon it?
Any clued up fan of Liam Gallagher will know that much of his grandiose warblings in the press are to be taken with not so much a pinch of salt, but rather a truckload of the stuff, the particular quote in question on this occasion is his description of Beady Eye’s album being “better than ‘Definitely Maybe‘”, which somewhat unsurprisingly it is not. Beady Eye’s debut album should be judged on its own merits, however unavoidable the Oasis comparisons are. It’s a solid effort that may surprise as many as it disappoints. Either way it is going to make people take notice and dig it out to make their own minds up on how Liam fairs up without his older brother.
The album opens with ‘Four Letter Word‘ – a kick in the balls, volcanic explosion of menacing confidence and sneering brilliance. Its earth shattering, dramatic synths of Kasabian-esque proportions make this the album’s perfect statement of intent. Laden with hooks and lyrics that only Liam can deliver with such attitude, this track sets the bar and is surprisingly one of the albums few heavier moments. “Nothing ever lasts forever” stands out as a particularly poignant lyric, regardless of who or what the song is about.