Knock and Knowall

By 1981 Trevor Horn had accomplished a lot as a musician. while playing bass in Tina Charles backing band, Horn recruited two of its members, Geoff Downes and Bruce Wooley, to do a 'Toto' and form a studio band called Buggles to record their own songs.  After they wrote the song "Video Killed The Radio Star" together, Wooley left to form The Camera Club with, then unknowns, Thomas Dolby and Matthew Seligman and recorded his own version of the song. Of course the slickly produced version by Buggles was an international hit, the video for which launched MTV almost two years later. Then, in one of the oddest career left-turns ever documented, Buggles were tapped to replace the departed Jon Anderson and Rick Wakeman in Yes. This lineup recorded Drama , a strange album that mixed heavy metal with new wave, electronica and progressive rock. Trevor Horn (foreground) and Geoff Downes in their Buggles days A world tour followed which was successful in America but...

Richard Thompson plays a Gibson SG on a rousing cover of The Sorrows' "Take A Heart" I like Richard Thompson when he's angry...at least angry when he's writing songs and ripping guitar solos on a new record. Thompson's most recent album 13 Rivers was written and recorded amid the end of his second marriage and could well have been titled Shoot Out The Lights II .  Each of the albums thirteen songs is sung in the first person - the lyrics, personal, often harrowing, occasionally spiritual. The guitar playing throughout sports a ferocity not heard on a Richard Thompson record in a while. If the Richard Thompson who appeared on the Teragram Ballroom stage Sunday night with his "very large trio" was angry, you wouldn't know it. But who can really tell? Thompson is a consummate showman who leaves his dark side in the dressing room. I wouldn't say he was warm but he was certainly jovial and partook in the kind of banter only Englishmen ...

  L-R: John Leventhal, Rosanne Cash, Matt Beck, Sam Phillips, Dan Reiser, Zev Katz, (Photo from Mrs Lev's Instagram) Rosanne Cash is an American original. It's not often that one can bestow such a label upon the offspring of an icon ("Julian Lennon is a British original" wrote no one ever), but in a long career as a singer, songwriter and author Cash has earned it. She was born a Memphis girl, raised a Valley girl and adults as a New York City sophisticate. Eight years after helping inaugurate it, Rosanne Cash and her band, led by husband/bandleader/guitarist John Leventhal, returned to the Younes & Soraya Nazarian Center For The Performing Arts (nestled in the campus of Cal State Northridge) to perform a mesmerizing set of numbers from her excellent new album She Remembers Everything, along with a selection songs from her Grammy winning trio of Americana albums, The River and the Thread , The List , and Black Cadillac . The beautiful and multi-tiered ...