This week’s Guardian Guide has a cover feature on how 1989 was a momentous year for music. Granted, the vast majority of the population was buying records by Jive Bunny and Jason Donovan, but, for those of us who were less easily pleased, 1989 offered a host of fantastic albums that can be looked back upon 20 years later as true classics.

The Stone Roses, Technique by New Order, Reading, Writing and Arithmetic by The Sundays, Doolittle by The Pixies, Bizarro by The Wedding Present, Paul’s Boutique by Beastie Boys, Three Feet High and Rising by De La Soul… The list goes on. Read more…

Music, Technology

Steven Patrick Morrissey is 50 today. Does that make you feel old? He’s no longer the wispy young lad in unbuttoned floral shirt and NHS specs, hearing aid in one ear, and gladioli in his back pocket. He’s a much ‘sturdier’ figure now, greying quiff, Italian styling, LA tan, but still unmistakably Morrissey, still Britain’s most fascinating pop star.

I remember clearly the day I first discovered The Smiths. I was about 12 years old, and in a music lesson at school. Music lessons back then consisted of a lazy teacher sticking a tape of classical music into a cassette deck and making us sit still for 45 minutes listening to it.

Fed up with this arrangement, one of the lads in my class secretly swapped the teacher’s classical tape for the Smiths album The Queen Is Dead. The lesson began, the teacher played the tape, and a curious sound emerged… Read more…

Music

Broken Records
The Cluny, Newcastle

A promise of free Jack Daniels, and a five-star live review in the Guardian, found us in the back room of the Cluny to see Scotland’s most hotly-tipped musical act since that woman off Britain’s Got Talent.

Tonight’s festivities are being filmed for the JD Set, a TV show that airs on Channel 4 at the wrong side of midnight somewhere between a Hill Street Blues rerun and the See Hear edition of Hollyoaks. Support bands Odd-Shaped Head and White Belt Yellow Tag are local lads, and the audience seems to be made up entirely of friends and family. Oh, and only the David Gedge out of the Wedding Present. He’s standing in front of us, and then he’s onstage compering, and knocking out a version of Dalliance with WBYT. Read more…

Music

Last week’s announcement that the Beatles’ back catalogue will be made available on remastered CD failed to satisfy all Fab Four fans. Fifteen remastered albums will be released on 9 September, as will The Beatles: Rock Band videogame. But there is still no news on when the band’s catalogue will be made available online. Frustratingly for digital music fans, the Beatles and a handful of other high-profile acts continue to occupy a small but significant gap in the online catalogues of the likes of iTunes and Spotify, preventing listeners from downloading and streaming some of the world’s biggest artists. This “Beatles Gap” has been a bone of contention ever since iTunes launched five years ago.

Read the full story at The Guardian

Music, Technology Guardian