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top row: The Division Bell by Pink Floyd; A Rush of Blood to the Head by Coldplay.
bottom row: London Calling by The Clash; Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield.
The Royal Mail follows its series of British Design Classics postage stamps with a series dedicated to what they call “classic” album covers. The design classics in [...]

A photograph of the control room of Battersea Power Station, London, by Michael Collins, one of a series which will shortly be on display at the Royal Institute of British Architects.
The images show Battersea Power Station as what Collins describes as a “twentieth century ruined castle” – a building that was built to last, with [...]

I was a Space Age boy. John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth in Project Mercury’s Friendship 7 a month before I was born, and growing up in the 1960s it was impossible to be unaware of the NASA missions. The first encyclopaedia I was given in 1967 had a whole chapter [...]

For those who’ve been eagerly awaiting Paul Gorman’s Barney Bubbles monograph, here’s the latest. Readers in the UK may also like to know there’s a feature about the book in the current issue of The Word. By coincidence, if you turn the page in the magazine there’s another feature about the Rob Gretton book I [...]

Rick Wright in 1971.
As has been noted nearly everywhere by now, Pink Floyd keyboardist Rick Wright went to the Great Gig in the Sky earlier this week, and I’m sure the inevitability of using the title of his most famous composition in this way wouldn’t have surprised him. I may as well note here [...]

Many sounds have never been heard—by humans: some sound waves you don’t hear—but they reach you. “Storm-stereo” techniques combine singers, instrumentalists and complex electronic sound. The emotional intensity is at a maximum. Sleeve note for An Electric Storm, Island Records, 1969.
An Electric Storm by White Noise is reissued in a remastered edition this week. [...]

Well…new for us. Glo Spot Records have reissued Psyche-Delia’s scarce KPM album, Electrosonic (1972), in an edition that will quickly become as scarce itself: 500 copies on green vinyl.
Order it (or hear clips) from Boomkat.
The great BBC documentary about the Radiophonic Workshop, Alchemists of Sound, can now be found on YouTube. Lots of archive footage [...]

Left: Igor Wakhévitch
and feathered friend.
Continuing the Francophile theme, I felt that now was a good time to plumb the mysteries of the enigmatic Igor Wakhévitch. Who? Well… in 20th century music there’s strange and there’s weird and then there’s off-the-wall unclassifiable which is the place where we have to file Igor’s compositions. After half a [...]

“I went down to the Chelsea Drug Store,”
“To get your prescription filled…”
The Rolling Stones, You Can’t always Get What You Want, 1969
How much Stanley Kubrick trivia can you stand? One of the delights of DVD over VHS tape is the ability to step frame by perfect frame through any given film sequence without the picture [...]