Vinyl Release

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Steve Sutherland  |  Jan 15, 2021
As this 1987 LP appears on 180g vinyl Steve Sutherland recalls his interview with Prince back in 1981. Did their meeting influence the singer's signature behaviour?

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.

Steve Sutherland  |  Jan 23, 2020
The sad story of Donny Hathaway's demise is told by Steve Sutherland as he listens to the acclaimed 1972 Atlantic album, recently reissued on 180g vinyl

Did he jump? Did he fall by accident? This we will never know. What's for sure is that late in the evening of the 13th of January 1979 Donny Hathaway's body was found on the sidewalk outside the 44-storey art deco Essex House Hotel at 160 Central Park South in Manhattan, NYC. He had plunged there from his room on the 15th floor. His death was ruled as suicide.

Steve Sutherland  |  Mar 03, 2025  |  First Published: Dec 01, 2024
This genre-straddling, smash-hit debut LP from the British band laid down a template for others to follow. Smooth operator Steve Sutherland hears the 180g reissue

About a year ago the writer, editor and founder of Rolling Stone magazine Jann Wenner was unceremoniously booted off the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame Foundation board of directors. His misdemeanour? In an interview with the New York Times about his new book The Masters, featuring conversations he’d conducted with artists such as John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, etc, he claimed that he’d decided not to include any women or black artists because, ‘none of them were articulate enough on this intellectual level’.

Steve Sutherland  |  Jan 03, 2024
This album showcases the rule-breaking, genre-busting band in their prime, says Steve Sutherland, as he soaks up the sounds of its 20 songs, reissued on 180g vinyl

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.

Steve Sutherland  |  Jun 16, 2023
Under new management, the mod quartet got creative on an album of three-minute pop gems, but struggled when it came to the title. Steve Sutherland listens...

Considering we currently find him being dangled by his ankles off a balcony four floors above the pavement, you could say, without too much exaggeration, that Robert Stigwood is having a bit of a bad day. The bloke dangling him – with the aid of four fierce-looking heavies – is Don Arden, a gentleman who, shall we say, has a bone or two to pick with our Stig.

Steve Sutherland  |  Jun 11, 2019
Part concept album, part concoction of West Coast rock and jazz... Steve Sutherland hears the 180g reissue of an LP from 1970 with lessons we can learn from today

If there's a lazier fellow on the face of God's green earth than Jimmy Page, boy, I'd sure like to meet him. Yes, that Jimmy Page, guvnor of Led Zeppelin and hitherto legendary guitar god – it's the 'hitherto' bit that gets my goat.

Steve Sutherland  |  Apr 07, 2023
Musically accessible, lyrically inscrutable, and buoyed by stellar session work, this 1972 debut ensured Steely Dan weren't buried by Bowie et al, says Steve Sutherland

What's the greatest guitar solo ever? Well, off the top of my head I'd say Jimi Hendrix on his version of Bob Dylan's 'All Along The Watchtower', where he makes a number of miraculous stylistic changes and creates mysterious sounds never heard on this planet before or since. Then I'd go for Frank Zappa just letting rip on his dope-growing satire 'Montana' from Over-Nite Sensation. And thirdly I'd plump for Jimmy Page ascending into the stratosphere on Led Zeppelin IV's 'Stairway To Heaven'.

Steve Sutherland  |  May 18, 2021
Steve Sutherland looks back to the '90s and a group heralded before they'd even released a record. Some thirty years on, their debut LP is reissued on 180g vinyl

It's April 1992 and Suede are the cover stars of the (now defunct) weekly music paper Melody Maker which is running a headline that heralds them as 'The Best New Band In Britain'. This is about to cause quite a hullabaloo, not only because most people have never heard of Suede but also because the band hasn't even released a record so far.

Steve Sutherland  |  May 14, 2020
A song with a kick, but for all the wrong reasons, as Steve Sutherland reassesses a ska album from 1970, which has recently been re-released on 180g vinyl

We could begin with Plato, or even Aristotle, but Oscar Wilde it is. In his 1889 essay, The Decay Of Lying, the great man took umbrage with the Greeks' philosophy of mimesis which said that all true art mimics nature. On the contrary, quoth Oscar, 'Life imitates art' and that is roughly how it felt – very roughly as it happens – one sunny Saturday lunchtime in April, 1972, when I got my head kicked in.

Steve Sutherland  |  Sep 09, 2022
Marc Bolan gave kids of the '70s a new exciting sound with this chart-topping LP, now reissued on 180g vinyl. Steve Sutherland celebrates the 'rock 'n' roll poet'

It might not have been as seismic, say, as Judas dobbing Jesus in to Pontius Pilot, or Bob Dylan hitching his wagon to The Band and suddenly turning electric, but a betrayal's a betrayal, right?

Steve Sutherland  |  Feb 12, 2020
He just couldn't cope, says Steve Sutherland as he counts out the 'aha's and listens to the recent 180g reissue of the Liverpool band's post-punk debut LP

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha…'

Steve Sutherland  |  May 02, 2025  |  First Published: Oct 01, 2024

Although ostensibly a band album, Television’s 1977 debut owes much to the vision of frontman Tom Verlaine. Steve Sutherland tunes in as the 180g reissue drops

There’s a quote attributed to Brian Eno that says: ‘The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band’. Television’s Marquee Moon is a bit like that. Very few people bought it and although it was such a complex curate’s egg that I doubt many bands formed because of it, the album is famous for being one of the most written-about, talked-about and lauded albums of all time.

Steve Sutherland  |  Jul 20, 2020
Steve Sutherland relives the fateful night when four of The Bar-Kays flew with Otis Redding in 1967, the plane diving into icy Lake Monona. The album is on 180g vinyl

The next thing he knew he was floating. Freezing cold and floating. His head hurt. There was blood. He heard a noise. Then another. Cries in the distance. Cries for help. He began to go under and he splashed around, found a seat cushion and desperately clutched it to his chest to help stay afloat – he'd never learned to swim.

Steve Sutherland  |  Feb 07, 2023
Featuring sitar, violins, backwards recordings and some sage words from Peter Fonda, this 1966 album found the Fab Four firing on all cylinders, says Steve Sutherland

I coulda been a contender, but Revolver did me in. There I was, nine-and-a-half years old, living the high life – well, as high as life could get for a small boy in Salisbury, Wiltshire – and in a band called The Little Beatles. I was Ringo, my friend Keith McArdle was John, Kirsteen, his sister, was George, and Robert 'Bo' Parr was Paul. We wore home-made Beatles suits and Beatles wigs and mimed behind toy instruments to Beatles hits.

Steve Sutherland  |  Mar 09, 2025  |  First Published: Feb 01, 2025
The Fab Four reached a new level of musical ambition – and fame – when their third album topped the charts. Sixty years on, Steve Sutherland hears the 180g reissue

Some say it’s a dominant 9th of F in the key of C. Others claim it’s a poly-triad ii7/V in A flat major. Still others insist it’s a G7 with added 9th and suspended 4th or a superimposition of Dm, F, and G.

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