TEARDROP EXPLODES - REWARD
Teardrop Explodes
JULIAN COPE
OGWT
(November 8th 1980)
Happy birthday to Julian Cope, born in Deri, Glamorgan on this day in 1957.
Wednesday, October 21, 2026
The Brothers Comatose : “When Someone Wants To Leave” [ Dolly Parton ] with AJ Lee and Blue Summit
✨ Had an amazing time playing this tune with AJ Lee & Blue Summit yesterday!
just a clip unfortunately
Remembering the great Steve Cropper (October 21, 1941 – December 3, 2025) | Don's Tunes
Cropper played on just about every record made at Stax in the 1960s, his guitar licks adding sinew and grit to a body of songs that created the template for Southern soul music and which continue to influence generations of musicians to this day.“We didn’t really have music when I was growing up because there was no electricity,” he said. “All you’d hear on the radio was stuff like (How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window? But when we moved to Memphis, I found a gospel station on the radio and never looked back. I ended up playing soul and R&B. But it’s that same rhythm. It just makes you move.”More than a brilliant guitarist, Cropper acted as engineer, producer, songwriter and A&R man responsible for finding new talent. Among his discoveries was Otis Redding, who turned up at Stax one day in 1962 working as a chauffeur for the blues artist Johnny Jenkins.Cropper went on not only to produce or play on all of Redding’s greatest recordings but co-write several of his best-known songs, including Mr Pitiful and (Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay.Known among his fellow musicians as “the Colonel” — he claimed he never knew why, although he had served as a captain in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps — he was named by the music magazine Mojo in 1996 as the world’s second greatest guitarist after Jimi Hendrix.
Source: The Times
Image credit: Will Ireland
Don's Tunes
Tucker Zimmerman - profile and tracks here | Sonic Archaeology
In 2003, David Bowie picked 25 of his all time favourite records. It’s a great list (easily found online) that includes names you might expect - Velvet Underground and Nico and Madcap Laughs for example - and then a few that you might find surprising. In the latter camp for me was Tucker Zimmerman….but it was cool to see it there.Zimmerman studied music composition in San Francisco in the mid 60s. He won a Fulbright Scholarship to continue his songwriting in Italy. He gigged around there for a couple of years before relocating to London where he met fellow American Tony Visconti. Zimmerman reportedly wrote more than 100 songs while in the UK. Regal Zonophone offered him a record contract and he made his debut for them in 1969 with Visconti playing bass and handling production. Of course Visconti was also beginning to work with Bowie on Space Oddity around this time too and no doubt he helped connect the two.In making his favourites list decades later he pulled out the Zimmerman album and recalled how he had been enthralled by the songwriting on it. It’s certainly an interesting listen….it recalls electric era Dylan at times, at others, more gentle folk or blues stylings. Definitely worth picking up if you’re lucky enough to happen on a copy.Sadly, Tucker Zimmerman and his wife both died in January this year in a house fire.
Tucker Zimmerman playlist here . . .
Tucker Zimmerman Face That Hasn’t Sold Out full track here
Tucker Zimmerman - Nobody Knows (Live at The Lexington)
'Nobody Knows' taken from 'Dance Of Love' out now via 4AD.
Performed live at The Lexington, 5th November 2024
Tuesday, October 20, 2026
Noah Gundersen - Send The Rain (To Everyone) - Cardinal Sessions
. . .well its pretty much rained all day here and after being AFK again for yet another hospital appointment[!]this reflected my mood . . . . . I am beside angry as the pouring rain didn’t let up all day and I seemingly foolishly relied upon public transport (Stagecoach buses! V poor effort!) so my transport to take me 20+ miles to a specialist hospital appointment just didn't show up so that I didn’t make it to my appointment and missed a hospital date for the first time ever in my life - they were TBF really kind and considerate and have rescheduled but I stood in the pouring rain for nearly an hour when I realised if it did turn up finally I would miss my appointment anyway! Soaked through to the skin and miserable I just trudged back home to phone and let them know . . . .I am rarely speechless and not often this angry to be fair but haven’t been able to post anything for hours now and just went back to bed to try and warm up! You have one job and your route is relied upon to take local folk to a hospital in nearby Banbury and just don’t bother turning up! Very poor . . . . .send the rain to everyone indeed but especially Stageoach buses and coach company
Noah Gundersen - Send The Rain (To Everyone) - Cardinal Sessions
The Handsome Family - Far From Any Road
The clip of Matthew McConaughey reminded me and where did we first hear this wonderful song from te very fine Handsome Family . . . we haven’t featured enough of them . . . might go try n dig out more . . . . .
The Handsome Family - Far From Any Road
wasn’t the soundtrack curated by T Bone Walker?
if not it should have been
Nobody knows Dark Americana like T Bone!
Ry Cooder - Houston in Two Seconds (Paris Texas) | jt1674
might start winding down for the day here . . . . .
Ger O Donnell (feat. Trevor Sexton) - Galway To Graceland [ Richard Thompson cover ]
Ger says:
From the writing of the amazing Richard Thompson - RT here’s Galway to Graceland with Trevor Sexton. Was great to hear Richard do this live at last year’s Galway Arts Fest!
DANGEROUS MINDS: ‘This is Hardcore’: How porn inspired Pulp’s most divisive album in 1998 | WILL HOWARD
Credit: Far Out / Album Cover / Alexander Krivitskiy
‘This is Hardcore’: How porn inspired Pulp’s most divisive album in 1998
Anyone who knows the slightest thing about Pulp beyond the ‘Common People’ dance knows that they were one of the most weirdly horny bands in 1990s rock.
It wasn’t something that came to light by putting two and two together by comparing interview asides with specific lyrics of B-side tracks and looking at their music videos in the right light. Pulp, and frontman Jarvis Cocker in particular, were fascinated by sex. Both in terms of it being a look into the most vulnerable and most private parts of everyone’s personality, and also because, y’know, British people are obsessed with it. Ooh-err matron and all that.
So, perhaps it shouldn’t have been such a surprise when Pulp released an album that was seemingly about porn in 1998 in the form of This is Hardcore, their sixth album.
Now, to those who had followed the band for even half of the two decades they’d spent together by 1998, this was an album completely in their wheelhouse. In fact, the strange thing about it for fans would have been the album’s sound, which saw the group suddenly become a dark, trip-hop enfused lounge band. That wouldn’t have been a problem for fans, though; the new duds suited them well.
As is pretty much always the case, it was the British public that was the problem.
You see, despite being catapulted to astronomical levels of fame with their legendary Glastonbury set, the issue with Pulp was that they were never meant to be famous. Especially in the 1990s, when Cool Britannia and Britpop had sanded down the edges of British culture for mainstream consumption.
While more eyes were on the band than ever, those eyes really did only know the band for the ‘Common People’ dance alone, so when the title track of the album dropped and the first words Cocker muttered as one of the most famous people in the country was “You are hardcore / you make me hard”, people freaked out.
The backlash was strong and swift. Even the album’s cover art was banned from being advertised on the London underground. The album was called weird, exploitative, gross and sold just over half what their previous record Different Class had sold in its first week. Even the critics were a little unsure of what to make of it, but perhaps that was because they could look a little closer at the album and see the real, bleak darkness at its heart.
Because yes, the album was inspired by the mild porn addiction Jarvis Cocker freely admitted to developing while on tour. There was little else to do back at a hotel at the time, apparently. Yet Cocker is nothing if not a very smart man, and he felt a kinship with the people he saw in the content he was watching. In an interview promoting the album, he said, “It’s the way that people get used up in it. You’d see the same people in films, and they’d seem to be quite alive, and then you’d see a film from a year later and there’s something gone in their eyes. You can see it, that they’ve done it all and there’s nowhere else to go.”
He said the entertainment industry does the same thing to people. Pulp had been genuinely famous for three years, riding a wave led by the likes of Blur and Oasis, so Cocker wasn’t just talking about the way he felt treated by the industry. Everywhere he looked, he saw people sucked dry by the demands of play-acting something real and genuine to the cameras, trapped in this cycle that they’re never dreaming of getting out of because of how many people tell them it’s what they’ve always wanted.
It’s interesting to compare This is Hardcore to an album that could have gone down similarly from the following year. Another band at odds with Britpop who followed up their breakthrough masterpiece with a challenging, deeply depressing record that spat venomous bile at not only the very concept of fame, but also the fans who propped them up enough to keep them trapped within it. But Radiohead’s OK Computer was also as sexual as a bowl of cornflakes with no milk, so it was a smash hit hailed as one of the best albums of the decade.
This is Hardcore was hated for all the reasons that it’s a masterpiece. I’m reminded of a sample from another milestone of bleak rock music that was far too much for Britpop from four years before its release. The Manic Street Preachers’ The Holy Bible includes a sample of JG Ballard talking about why he wrote his horrifying masterwork, Crash. In it, I see what Pulp were doing by taking the seedy, grim and dehumanising world of porn and analysing modern fame and modern culture through it.
“I wanted to rub the human face in its own vomit and then force it to look in the mirror.”
Turns out, people don’t like that much. It’s why albums like This is Hardcore are so necessary nearly 30 years after its release.
THIS IS HARDCORE - PULP
[adult version available at Dangerous Minds]
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