Get your Vaccines here on 180g black vinyl (sorry, we couldn't resist), as Steve Sutherland sets out the background story to this UK indie/rock debut album
Remember Joe Lean & The Jing Jang Jong? Of course you don't. No reason why you should. They didn't amount to a hill of beans. To elucidate: they were one of those thousands of bands heaped on the steaming pile of what was rather cruelly described in the mid-'90s as Landfill Indie.
In 1968 the band's road manager proposed putting a control room in a van, so creating the world's first independent mobile recording studio. Steve Sutherland hitches a ride...
We all came out to Montreux/On the Lake Geneva shoreline/To make records with a mobile/We didn't have much time/ We ended up at the Grand Hotel/It was empty cold and bare/But with the Rolling truck Stones thing just outside/Making our music there...'
This month's 180g album reissue takes Steve Sutherland back to the '70s when, after a Knebworth concert, he'd become a Buckley fan and was passing the message on
Who else had a halcyon summer? Mine was in 1974. I'd just left school and was waiting to go to Uni. A few mates clubbed together and bought an old banger and we were off – three months of hi-jinx down to Cornwall and back bookended by a couple of legendary gigs: The Grateful Dead at Alexandra Palace in September; and the first Knebworth Festival, the Bucolic Frolic, in July. For a bunch of lads raised in Wilts in total awe of West Coast Rock, these were not mere gigs, they were pilgrimages, the Knebworth lineup akin to finding the holy grail.
Part record label, studio and direct-to-disc recording facility, the home of Third Man in Nashville also houses a Voice-O-Graph recording booth. Steve Sutherland explains...
Ithink I was born in the wrong generation. I probably should have been around in the 1800s, or 1930s. I am a lost soul in this time period, with the Internet, with digital technology and so on. This is not my place to be.'
Steve Sutherland listens to the 1980 live album by the American rock singer/songwriter, now in a deluxe vinyl set with extras, and recalls some of its cadaverous lyrics
Enjoy every sandwich.' It was certainly weird as pay-off lines go, but somehow perfect. Famous last words, or advice from the knowingly soon-to-be deceased, are usually offered up with at least a modicum of deep philosophical profundity – sometimes religious, sometimes self-pitying, sometimes peaceful and sometimes panicked, but invariably they are long premeditated and polished for posterity.
Clutching his personally signed sleeve of this 1970 album, Steve Sutherland nonetheless welcomes the 180g vinyl reissue – it's a work of real genius, he says
'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.'
Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis... Steve Sutherland tells the tale of a studio housed in an old auto glass repair shop that is now called the birthplace of rock 'n' roll
Surely the most charming argument in the whole of cinema history is the one between the two impossibly stylish Japanese teenagers in the opening segment of Jim Jarmusch's 1989 indie triptych Mystery Train. The lovers are on a pilgrimage from their home town Yokohama to Memphis. Youki Kudoh's Mitsuko is obsessed with Elvis Presley and insists they visit Graceland as soon as their train arrives.
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.
Talk about a room with a view... This radical recording studio is unusual with its control and live areas occupying the same space. Steve Sutherland tells the story of its genesis
What's the worst album ever made by a great band? I used to think it was Thank You, the cover versions LP released in 1995 by Duran Duran which, somewhat hilariously, found them stumbling through cack-handed versions of Melle Mel's 'White Lines (Don't Do It)' and Public Enemy's '911 Is A Joke' among its many abominations.
Steve Sutherland recalls a riotous night at the Tacoma Dome, resolved into a thrilling musical event, as the group's 1984 compilation album makes its vinyl debut
The cop to our left is on his radio, talking to back-up: 'I thought Vietnam was bad – you should see the casualty room. They're piled up in there. Piled up man!'
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