The work was hectic as usual in London's Abbey Road studios. A Hard Day´s Night was written over the weekend and in one single week of arranging it a bit a brand new single was out. The BEatles were like a smoothly running machine, the way of working was fast and enthusiastic, with five to six new songs finished and recorded in one long session being no exception. What happened that the efficient machine of The Beatles started to creak and eventually stopped?
We didn’t even have computers. Even though the music was created by synthesisers and sequencers, it was analogue, pre-computer. We got our first home computers after the album was finished, the first Ataris. But no, it wasn’t a warning, it was reality. We were there, even though the album wasn’t made on computers, it was our reality.
Professor Adrian North, who led a psychological study of Heriot-Watt University, addressed 36,000 music fans from all over the world to identify and describe their personalities. Unexpectedly, one of the outcomes that crystallized out of the study was the finding that classical aficionados share virtually identical personality traits with heavy metal fans.
Let's be honest - since rock'n roll and The Beatles there has not been a lot of progress made in rock music. Yes, it has become harder and heavier - Black Sabbath added dense and heavy riffs, Kiss added scary image, Metallice made heavy metal big, but for last 30 years we have only seen variations on the same topic. Until now.
'Enjoy the Silence was originally intended as an introspective song, with only Martin Gore with its keys on it. Also one of the biggest electro-pop albums of all time, Depeche Mode's Violator, should have been a kind of blues-gospel crossover. Then Francois (Kevorkian) decided to make it a dance album. Martin got upset about this idea but that's how a completely new universe has opened to us'. Alan Wilder
They kill children during their shows. They are Nazis. They set stages afire. They spit real blood. They cannot take off their masks as their skin is burnt by make-up. They sing about violence. They are demons. By such formulations Kiss’s medial picture was formed under former communist regime. When the group took the West world by storm, music magazines cut-outs became hot trading item in Eastern block. The fabulous stories became real in the minds of teenagers and the generation of worshippers was firmly established.
Michael Jackson is an icon. From a poor boy he became the King of The Pop, the king of music stardom. He was worshipped by many and damned by some others. His weirdness and naivity made him exposed to manipulators. His sudden death in the middle of his career restart preparations was unexpected and rasied many speculations. There will be no other like him, that's for sure.
On September 25, 2006, to standing ovations of members of the Glenn Gould Society in CBC studio in Toronto, Glenn Gould re-performed the Goldberg Variations. He did the same once again in the evening, this time purely for the sake of a recording session. Exciting but not unusual you say, so what was the point? Gould was long after his death at the time.
The first singl that Elvis recorded in Nashville was Heartbreak Hotel. It is a mono recording - have you ever noticed it? The recorded sound is so pure and dynamic that the fact, that both channels have identical content, is something you notice only after a minute, or so. The vocal and instrumental parts are rich and tangible, much better than most of today's audiophile production. How does it come that the ELV1S 30 #1 HITS compilation is such incredible sounding?
I was sitting at the mixer, prodding and fiddling, and Michael's face appeared and he said [...]: 'Listen to this', and poked this little tape at me. I said, 'What is it?' and he said, 'It's me; it's really really good.'And I believed him, though I thought he was mad. So I said, 'All right, I'll listen to it later, now go away!'
