1967’s supposed summer of love and its psychedelic, swirling colourful world was never going to last forever. 1968, by contrast, was darker and less flamboyant, a time of unrest. Students rioted in Paris, while the psychedelic pop of yesteryear was beginning to wane in favour of harder stuff. Often abreast of the mood of the pop-culture sphere, we only have to look at The Beatles output from this time to get a brief glimpse of the general changes in attitude. In a short time, they’d gone from lush, complex pop to a starker and altogether colder musical mood, a good chunk of the fourth side of their sprawling double set from 1968 devoted to near-impenetrable tape loops and cut-ups. Hendrix, too, had experimented with denser sounds on ‘Electric Ladyland’ than either of his previous two albums, while The Doors’ general circus of dystopia was at its peak. 1968 was arguably the year when pop begat hard rock. Fitting, then, with a whole arsenal of retro sounds at their disposal, that this trio from Cheshire should choose “1968” as their band name. Their sounds look backwards a time when the blues came with a mass of distortion and the world-changing Black Sabbath were lurking just over the horizon.
Author Archives: Real Gone
RAY GUN – May The Bridges I Burn Light Your Way EP
Sometimes a release appears and instantly achieves the status of cult classic. Such is the case with the UK’s Ray Gun, whose debut cassette is so brilliantly DIY. In fact, had this band been spawned from Brooklyn, this release would surely have been snapped up by the King Pizza label and Ray Gun would be going head to head with The Rizzos and The Fucktons, such is their retro charm and wanton lo-fi discord.
Real Gone’s End of Year Round Up 2015
We’ve reached the end of 2015. It hasn’t been as thrilling a year for new music as 2014 had been, but there has been plenty to entertain. We’re still waiting on the proposed deluxe edition of Prince & The Revolution’s classic ‘Purple Rain’ (we could be waiting a long time) and those promised UB40 deluxe editions. Another year has passed without the arrival of Real Gone favourite Mick Terry’s second album. Lots of people in the UK have been (over)-excited by Steven Wilson’s ‘Hand.Cannot.Erase.’, but most of what’s impressed us the most at Real Gone – as is so often the case – is often just a little more underground.
Here are our year’s top picks…
MOTÖRHEAD – Inferno
In 1991, Motörhead realeased the album ‘1916’, an album on which they sounded more alive than they had in years. The songs were sharper than their late 80s efforts and the band sounded like they’d regained a lot of their spark. There was a surprise too: the title track was a cello backed ballad, where Lemmy crooned about young men joining up to fight for king and country in the First World War. Nobody saw that coming…and they say you can’t teach old dogs new tricks.
Ian Fraser Kilmister (24 December 1945 – 28 December 2015)
“I don’t do regrets. Regrets are pointless. It’s too late for regrets. You’ve already done it, haven’t you? You’ve lived your life. No point wishing you could change it.”
– Lemmy
From his breakthrough with Hawkwind in the late 60s, Lemmy was a man who lived with little to no compromise, reinvented how the bass could be played and gave us music that would endure the ages. While his formative years with Hawkwind would shape him as a musician, it was with his own band Motörhead he would change the face of rock music. Black Sabbath had laid the foundations of metal with heavy monolithic riffs, but Lemmy bought speed and no-nonsense aggression, without which we would never have had any of the 80s thrash or hardcore metal that followed. In Lemmy’s vision, of course, it was all one thing: rock ‘n’ roll. He just played it faster and louder than his heroes and predecessors and set a new benchmark in the process.