Vinyl Release

Awhile back, I entered a vintage store on the outskirts of Indio, California, and happened to spy a vinyl copy of Parallelograms by Linda Perhacs. I lifted it gently down from the shelf. It was a first pressing. On Kapp. Gold-dust! And home it came with me.

Lars Ulrich is not amused. 'Is this the test pressing?' he asks his manager, Peter Mensch. 'No', Mensch answers emphatically. 'That's the jacket, the cover that's going out across the country.'

'I don't wanna talk about that. I just don't know what to say. I respect the fact he's a guy who did what he did and, y'know, he did what he had to do and I don't wanna get any… I prefer to not be involved at all. I certainly don't wanna take advantage of talking about something like that for the interest of somebody else I've never met, and selling myself in a paper in the process. I'd rather you just left it out – it's just distasteful to me.'

Once upon a time there was a country which called itself the United States Of America – a gross misnomer because it couldn't have been more disunited if it tried. It was first largely populated by white people who had landed in ships and stolen the land from its original inhabitants. They then kidnapped and imported boatloads of people from Africa and the like to do all their heavy lifting. These slaves had no wages and no rights.

True story: one recent Sunday afternoon I was hanging out in Just Dropped In, Coventry's finest independent record store, when Alun the owner popped a record on. Within the next 20 minutes or so I counted four customers strolling over to the desk to enquire the genesis of the music we were all enjoying. The four customers were all very different: one was a teenage girl resplendent in Goth array, one was a rockabilly dude, one was a tweedy teacher sort, and one was a gnarly old bloke. Okay, the gnarly old bloke was me.

Maybe I should shoulder some of the blame. It was me, after all, who declared in a Melody Maker review of his previous album, Parade, that Prince was God's gift to music or some such nonsense.

My friends and I, we were suit-and-tie guys...' This is Darryl L Lewis speaking. Don't worry, it's unlikely you'll have heard of Darryl. He's one of the people that musician and record producer Questlove invited into the edit suite when assembling the footage for Summer Of Soul, the film he created in 2021 documenting the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, which took place on six Sundays between June the 29th and August the 24th at Mount Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park) in Harlem, NYC.