Here is Alice Cooper’s breakthrough hit I’m Eighteen from 1970. Three years later it was the song Johnny Rotten – 18 or 19 at the time – famously mimed to for Malcolm McLaren to get the job of singer with The Sex Pistols.

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RIP Steve Albini – record producer extraordinaire (Nirvana, Pixies, PJ Harvey, Low, Manics, Breeders) and band member (Big Black, Rapeman, Shellac).

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Texan troubadour Vincent Neil Emerson is one of country music’s minority of Native American performers, coming from the Choctaw-Apache tribe.

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RIP Duane Eddy (1938-2024)

Everyone knows the guitar riff that kicks off Duane Eddy’s first hit single Movin’ N’ Groovin’ from back in 1958 – though not necessarily from this record. 

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I love dipping back in to old compilation albums and discovering early efforts by two or three bands who went on to become big names. Stevo’s first compilation, Some Bizzare Album, uncovered this one.

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This week saw the 91st birthday of Willie Nelson, veteran pioneer of Outlaw Country and still turning out two or three albums a year without any notable loss of quality.

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If dance music was​ rock music, then this tune, Waters Of Nazareth by French dance duo Justice, would be its Smoke On The Water.

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Pete Wylie had his finest moment – and biggest hit – when Wah! released The Story Of The Blues at Christmas 1982, and reached No.3 in the charts.

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Charley Crockett is a new name to me, though I feel I ought to have heard of a guy who’s made 14 albums in nine years. His hybrid of country, blues and soul taps into that sound forged at Muscle Shoals in the late Sixties and Seventies, with smouldering horns and searing blues guitar matched to a country twang.

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Blue Cheer was never been anything more than a name to me – a late-Sixties band that I’d never actually heard. Now that I finally have… well, fucking hell!

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