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 ...

Album Review: Steve Mason - About The Light Double Six Records https://www.stevemasontheartist.com/   http://www.doublesixrecords.com/ Steve Mason's catalog presents an aural document of one man's journey from youthful eccentricity (a double-edged sword), isolation, depression and, ultimately, a joyous recovery. The music throughout is the product of a particular kind of genius possessed of an independent musical vision. The Scottish musician's career began in earnest in 1996 with the formation of The Beta Band (pronounced "Bee-tah) who established themselves with three consecutive critically lauded 4-song EPs. The songs bridged the gaps between pop, electronica and progressive rock with just a smidge of the Bonzos to make it fun. Their self-titled debut full-length went a tad over the top, opening up with a self-indulgent rap (!) about the history of the band. The Beta Band spent their next two albums recovering from this but ceased to exist after the...

Anyone who knew me as a child knows that Star Trek was far and away my favorite television show. Growing up in Pittsburgh the worst punishment my parents could inflict on me was not letting me watch the new episode of Star Trek on Friday night. Clever lad that I was, I was able to catch a grainy version on Saturday from the NBC affiliate in Steubenville that pre-empted it on Friday nights with studio wrestling. As a teenager I ran home from school daily to watch it on afternoon syndication before not doing my homework. The Starship Enterprise felt like my home and its crew, my family. My living room made the perfect bridge of the ship when I played Star Trek with my friends Dan Reading and Neal Feldman. The front window was the view screen, the coffee table was the navigation console, the corner desk, replete with a slide viewer, was perfect as Mr. Spock's science station. I barked orders as Captain Kirk from my dad's easy chair. I broke a stained glass lampshade while...

Album Review Steve Kilbey Sydney Rococo Golden Robot Records  https://goldenrobotrecords.com/golden-robot-records/steve-kilbey/ http://thetimebeing.com/ Like many American music fans around my age I didn't become aware of the Anglo/Australian band The Church until the release of their sixth album Starfish and the hit single "Under The Milky Way." I didn't become a fan of The Church until their follow-up Gold Afternoon Fix. That is the album where I jumped on and many who had discovered the band in the previous year quickly jumped off. I had never heard anything quite like Gold Afternoon Fix , an album that infuriated their label Arista Records and caused a rift that saw the label find clever ways to cheat them and sabotage their career. (One story, told to me by a promotion person at BMG, involved the pressing of 10,000 copies of a promo single, which were immediately destroyed and charged to the band.) Gold Afternoon Fix made me a fan and I set ...

Steve Hackett is one of the most enduring rock artists working today. Despite a long, fruitful solo career. with close to thirty solo albums in his catalog, he is still closely associated with the band he left in 1977. Steve does not avoid, but rather embraces, the association. In addition to releasing a new solo album of original material every two years or so, he has also created modern, sonically superior versions of those classic Genesis songs and goes out of his way to feature them live on massive world tours that would tire a younger man. At the end of January, just weeks before his 69th birthday, Hackett will release a new studio album At The Edge Of Light and embark on a 160 plus date world tour featuring Genesis music, classic solo material and select tracks from the new album. Steve was kind enough to call me late one cold evening from his London home. Here is what we talked about. Eric Sandberg: How are things in London? Steve Hackett: Very cold at the moment. ...