Latest news with #musichistory
Telegraph
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Video reveals air guitar was born in Hampstead, not Woodstock
According to lore, air guitar was invented in 1969 when Joe Cocker played at Woodstock. Cocker plucked an invisible instrument during the opening bars of With A Little Help From My Friends, a performance that has gone down in history. However, a newly unearthed video has revealed the first recorded air guitar performance was given by a little-known band called Rupert's People, in a film taken on Hampstead Heath in 1968. The group had not been asked to bring their instruments – so the director asked them to improvise. The footage has been inspected by Juha Torvinen, the world's most senior air guitar judge, who said: 'This must be the first known recording of a person playing air guitar. This discovery gives a whole new perspective to the phenomenon of air guitar.' Rupert's People were a psychedelic pop band from North London consisting of Rod Lynton on vocals and lead guitar, Ray Beverley on bass, John Tout on keyboards and Steve Brendell on drums. In 1968, they were preparing to release a song titled I Can Show You and met up on the Heath to record a promo. Steve Brendell recalled: 'The director brought along his 16mm camera and a reel-to-reel tape deck to blast out the song to make sure we were in sync. But the plans changed because we didn't bring any of our instruments. We just turned up, dressed in our stage outfits. 'It was all, 'Hey, man,' very laidback in the 1960s. The director said, 'Fine, why don't you just mime in that case?' So we did – and air guitar was born.' The moment was captured in the black and white, two-minute film. Rupert's People never hit the big time, although they didn't leave the music business. Brendell went on to work for the Beatles as a film and tape librarian – on his first day at work in 1969, he doubled for Ringo Starr in the test shoot for the Abbey Road album cover. After the Beatles broke up in 1970, he went on to work as an assistant to John Lennon and Yoko Ono in the UK and New York, accompanying Lennon on anti-Vietnam War demonstrations. Three members of the band played on Lennon's track Imagine. Lynton became an executive with Atlantic Records, working with the Rolling Stones; Beverley became a commercial artist, and worked on George Harrison's All Things Must Pass album cover; and Tout, who died in 2015, joined the band Renaissance. The discovery of the film was made by Scott and Naomi Jones, the husband-and-wife investigative team who tracked down Sir Paul McCartney's missing bass in 2023. Stolen in 1972 from the back of a van belonging to a Wings sound engineer, it was eventually found in a loft in Hastings, East Sussex. In the course of their research they interviewed Brendell and watched the film. Scott Jones said: 'It's a fun discovery but an important one. It gives Rupert's People a place in rock'n'roll history.' Air guitar now has its own world championship, which takes place in Finland each August. The contest began in 1996 and attracts competitors from all over the world, playing their invisible instruments on stage. The organisers say that air guitar promotes world peace, and use the slogan: 'You can't hold a gun while you play the air guitar.' Juha Torvinen, the lead judge, has inspected the Rupert's People footage and confirmed that it is the earliest known recording. As for the band, they are ever hopeful of chart success and are re-releasing I Can Show You on Cherry Red Records. 'We always thought Rupert's People would be world famous one day, and it looks like that day has finally arrived 57 years later,' the band said.
BBC News
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
The Beatles' 1960s ticket stubs set for Lichfield auction
Ticket stubs for 1960s gigs by The Beatles that cost pennies at the time are among a collection expected to fetch up to £500 at 17-stub archive includes two for The Beatles and Roy Orbison at Birmingham Town Hall in June 1963, costing fans eight shillings and Liverpool band was originally second on the bill, but were bumped up to co-headline as Beatlemania grew and ended up closing the Winterton Auctioneers described the "rare and nostalgic collection", which spans performances between 1962 and 1964, as a "wonderful piece of music history". Of the 17 tickets, 16 are for performances in Birmingham and also include The Beatles' first outing at the city's Odeon, on 11 October are additional stubs for The Cliff Richard Show at the Hippodrome, The Searchers at the Odeon, and Brenda Lee at the Town stub reveals the owner snagged a balcony seat for an unnamed performance, at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, for just 7 addition, there is a complete ticket for Jazz 1963 at Birmingham Town Hall, presented by The Musicians' Union and The Labour Party, in October 1963. "Two ticket stubs for The Beatles at the height of Beatlemania are especially evocative – how incredible it must have been to see the Fab Four live in 1963 and 1964," a spokesperson for the auctioneers said."With a host of other iconic names in the collection, this is a wonderful piece of music history."The stubs will go under the hammer on 14 July, at the Lichfield Auction Centre in Fradley Park. Follow BBC Stoke & Staffordshire on Facebook, X and Instagram.
Washington Post
10-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Sly Stone's 10 essential tracks, from ‘Dance to the Music' to ‘Family Affair'
Few artists left so large an imprint on music history in so short a burst of activity like Sly Stone, who died Monday at 82. At his creative peak as the mastermind of Sly and the Family Stone, the bandleader tie-dyed soul, funk and psychedelic rock into a pattern that was often imitated, never replicated and channeled by genre-hopping acts in every generation since.
The Guardian
02-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Yes, there was a riot, but it was great': Cabaret Voltaire on violent gigs, nuclear noise – and returning to mark 50 years
Fifty years ago, Cabaret Voltaire shocked the people of Sheffield into revolt. A promoter screamed for the band to get off stage, while an audience baying for blood had to be held back with a clarinet being swung around for protection. All of which was taking place over the deafening recording of a looped steamhammer being used in place of a drummer, as a cacophony of strange, furious noises drove the crowd into a frenzy. 'We turned up, made a complete racket, and then got attacked,' recalls Stephen Mallinder. 'Yes, there was a bit of a riot, and I ended up in hospital, but it was great. That gig was the start of something because nothing like that had taken place in Sheffield before. It was ground zero.' Mallinder and his Cabaret Voltaire co-founder Chris Watson are sitting together again in Sheffield, looking back on that lift-off moment ahead of a handful of shows to commemorate the milestone. 'It is astonishing,' says Watson. 'Half a century. It really makes you stop, think and realise the significance.' The death in 2021 of third founding member Richard H Kirk was a trigger for thinking about ending things with finality. 'It'll be nice if we can use these shows to remind people what we did,' says Mallinder. 'To acknowledge the music, as well as get closure.' It's impossible to overstate how ahead of their time 'the Cabs' were. Regularly crowned the godfathers of the Sheffield scene, inspiring a wave of late 1970s groups such as the Human League and Clock DVA, they were making music in Watson's attic as early as 1973. Their primitive explorations with tape loops, heavily treated vocals and instruments, along with home-built oscillators and synthesisers, laid the foundations for a singular career that would span experimental music, post-punk, industrial funk, electro, house and techno. 'There was nothing happening in Sheffield that we could relate to,' says Mallinder. 'We had nothing to conform to. We didn't give a fuck. We just enjoyed annoying people, to be honest.' Inspired by dadaism, they would set up speakers in cafes and public toilets, or strap them to a van and drive around Sheffield blasting out their groaning, hissing and droning in an attempt to spook and confuse people. 'It did feel a bit violent and hostile at times, but more than anything we just ruined people's nights,' laughs Mallinder, with Watson recalling a memory from their very first gig: 'The organiser said to me after, 'You've completely ruined our reputation.' That was the best news we could have hoped for.' Insular and incendiary, the tight-knit trio had their own language, says Mallinder. 'We talked in a cipher only we understood – we had our own jargon and syntax.' When I interviewed Kirk years before his death, he went even further. 'We were like a terrorist cell,' he told me. 'If we hadn't ended up doing music and the arts, we might have ended up going around blowing up buildings as frustrated people wanting to express their disgust at society.' Instead they channelled that disgust into a type of sonic warfare – be it the blistering noise and head-butt attack of their landmark electro-punk track Nag Nag Nag, or the haunting yet celestial Red Mecca, an album rooted in political tensions and religious fundamentalism that throbs with a paranoid pulse. Watson left the group in 1981 to pursue a career in sound recording for TV. Mallinder and Kirk invested in technology, moving away from the industrial sci-fi clangs of their early period into grinding yet glistening electro-funk. As the second summer of love blazed in the UK in 1988, they headed to Chicago instead – to make Groovy, Laidback and Nasty with house legend Marshall Jefferson. 'We got slagged off for working with Marshall,' recalls Mallinder. 'People were going, 'England has got its own dance scene. Why aren't you working with Paul Oakenfold?' But we're not the fucking Happy Mondays. We'd already been doing that shit for years. We wanted to acknowledge our connection to where we'd come from: Black American music.' This major label era for the group produced moderate commercial success before they wound things down in the mid-1990s. But in the years since, everyone from New Order to Trent Reznor has cited the group's influence. Mallinder continued to make electronic music via groups such as Wrangler and Creep Show, the latter in collaboration with John Grant, a Cabs uber-fan. Watson says leaving the group was 'probably the most difficult decision I've ever made' but he has gone on to have an illustrious career, winning Baftas for his recording work with David Attenborough on shows such as Frozen Planet. He recalls 'the most dangerous journey I've ever made' being flown in a dinky helicopter that was akin to a 'washing machine with a rotor blade' by drunk Russian pilots in order to reach a camp on the north pole. On 2003 album Weather Report, Watson harnessed his globetrotting field recording adventures with stunning effect, turning long, hot wildlife recording sessions in Kenya surrounded by buzzing mosquitoes, or the intense booming cracks of colossal glaciers in Iceland, into a work of immersive musical beauty. When he was at the Ignalina nuclear power plant in Lithuania with Oscar-winning composer Hildur Guðnadóttir, recording sounds for the score to the 2019 TV series Chernobyl, he couldn't help but draw parallels to his Cabs days. 'It was horrific but really astonishing – such a tense, volatile, hostile environment,' he says. 'But it really got me thinking about working with those sounds again, their musicality and how it goes back to where I started.' Sign up to Sleeve Notes Get music news, bold reviews and unexpected extras. Every genre, every era, every week after newsletter promotion Mallinder views Watson's work as a Trojan horse for carrying radical sounds into ordinary households. 'The Cabs may have changed people's lives but Chris is personally responsible for how millions of people listen to the world,' he says, with clear pride. 'And one of the things that helped make that happen was the fact that he was in the Cabs, so through that lens he opened up people's ears.' Watson agrees, saying Cabaret Voltaire 'informed everything I've ever done'. Watson's field recordings will play a part in the upcoming shows: he'll rework 2013 project Inside the Circle of Fire, in which he recorded Sheffield itself, from its wildlife to its steel industry via football terraces and sewers. 'It's hopefully not the cliched industrial sounds of Sheffield,' he says, 'but my take on the signature sounds of the city.' These will be interwoven with a set Mallinder is working on with his Wrangler bandmate Ben 'Benge' Edwards as well as longtime friend and Cabs collaborator Eric Random. 'We've built 16 tracks up from scratch to play live,' says Mallinder. 'With material spanning from the first EP' – 1978's Extended Play – 'through to Groovy …' Mallinder says this process has been 'a bit traumatic – a very intense period of being immersed in my past and the memories that it brought, particularly of Richard. This isn't something you can do without emotion.' Mallinder and Kirk were not really speaking in the years leading up to his death, with Kirk operating under the Cabaret Voltaire name himself. 'Richard was withdrawn and didn't speak to many people,' says Mallinder. 'And I was one of those people. He wanted to be in his own world. It was difficult because I missed him and there was a lot of history, but I accepted it.' There will be no new music being made as Cabaret Voltaire because, they stress, tsuch a thing cannot exist without Kirk. Instead, it's a brief victory lap for the pair, a tribute to their late friend, as they sign off on a pioneering legacy with maybe one last chance for a riot. 'Richard would probably hate us doing this but it's done with massive respect,' Mallinder says. 'I'm sad he's not here but there's such love for the Cabs that I want to give people the opportunity to acknowledge what we did. You can't deny the music we made is important – and this is a way to celebrate that.' Cabaret Voltaire play a Forge Warehouse, Sheffield, 25 October, then tour the UK from 17 to 21 November. Tickets on sale 10am 6 June
Forbes
01-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
‘Becoming Led Zeppelin' Documentary Arrives On Netflix This Week
"Becoming Led Zeppelin" partial poster image featuring Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, Jimmy Page and ... More John Bonham. Becoming Led Zeppelin — a rock documentary featuring Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and John Bonham — debuts on Netflix this week. Directed by Bernard MacMahon and Allison McGourty, Becoming Led Zeppelin debuted on IMAX screens on Feb. 7 and expanded to regular theaters on Feb. 14 before pivoting to digital streaming on April 4. The official summary from the film's studio Sony Pictures Classics reads, 'Becoming Led Zeppelin explores the origins of this iconic group and their meteoric rise in just one year against all the odds.' Led Zeppelin, featuring Plant on lead vocals, Page on guitar, Jones on bass and Bonham on drums, formed in 1968 and disbanded in 1980 following the tragic death of Bonham at age 32. During Led Zeppelin's 12-year run, the band released eight albums of original material and in 1982, issued a final album, Coda, which consisted of unreleased rejected tracks, outtakes and live recordings. The band released several classic songs from 1968-1980, including 'Black Dog,' 'Immigrant Song,' 'Rock and Roll,' 'Whole Lotta Love,' 'Stairway to Heaven,' 'The Ocean,' 'In the Evening,' 'Kashmir,' 'Ramble On' and 'Houses of the Holy.' According to Netflix, Becoming Led Zeppelin will arrive on the streaming service on Saturday, June 7. For viewers who don't subscribe to the platform, Netflix offers an ad-based package for $7.99 per month for two supported devices, an ad-free package for $17.99 per month for two supported devices and an ad-free package for $24.99 for four supported devices with 4K Ultra HD programming. Becoming Led Zeppelin marks the first time a documentary about the classic rock group has been authorized by the band. As such, Robert Plant, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones granted all-new interviews to directors Bernard MacMahon and Allison McGourty, while the filmmakers tracked down never-before-heard and seen footage featuring John Bonham. During an interview with Hey U Guys alongside MacMahon and McGourtry,' Page explained why he finally said yes to a documentary about the group. 'All the documentaries that I'd seen up to this up to this one were really, really very, very lightweight,' Page told HeyUGuys. 'They didn't actually give any sort of perspective on what was actually happening with the music and why the music was what it was, why there was improvisation every night and that made us very different to everybody else. No, they missed all of it.' Page added that prior attempts by people attempting to document the career of Led Zeppelin 'could put in the figures of how many albums we sold, but it's like, 'Yeah, but you're forgetting why those albums are selling.'' 'So, I didn't have very much uh patience with those sort of things,' Page explained to HeyUGuys. 'I had a lot of patience with Bernard and Allison when they were when they were presenting the idea of what they wanted to do because it was so in line with the way that I thought about it, too … I'm so thrilled to be here now that they manifested exactly what they said they would do.' Becoming Led Zeppelin begins streaming on Saturday, June 7, on Netflix.
