Copper
Mark Hollis
On February 25th of this year, the music world lost one of its most influential, mercurial, obstinate, and singular voices. Mark Hollis, of the band Talk Talk, has made some of the...
Any Way You Want It
Arite…let’s get it out of the way, shall we? Journey is friggin’ AWESOME! That’s where we are going to start with this session of Hand Picked. If you think differently, then it...
Paradise by the Dashboard Light
It was his High School football coach who christened Marvin Lee Aday “Meat Loaf” due to his weight and general physical attributes. Little did his coach know, he had created...
Piano Man
By 1972, William Martin Joel’s career was, pretty much, over. He had released his debut album, Cold Spring Harbor, to a crushing silence. The record had been mastered at the wrong speed, which...
It’s the End of the World As We Know It
Athens, Georgia has always had a very specific musical sound. The colleges in that area were a breeding ground for tangential thought and musical insurrection. R.E.M. came to exist from...
Killing In The Name
At this point, you might be forgiven for thinking that I am picking bands for my piece JUST to piss off our Editor. Nothing could be further from the truth, it just...
Stand Back
January 29th is not JUST my Mum’s birthday, it’s also the day, in 1983, that Stevie Nicks and then husband Kim Anderson were making their way up the PCH to...
Take On Me
If you grew up in the 80’s, as I did, then you remember this song being IMPOSSIBLE to escape. “Take On Me” from Norway’s a-ha was EVERYWHERE. If it wasn’t...
Sabotage
Okay…so, in this edition’s piece, I am going to go out on a bit of a limb. I am fairly confident that most of you will have, at best, a...
In A Big Country
ARITE!! This is one of my favorite songs of ALL TIME!! Big Country’s “In A Big Country” is one of them jams that will immediately whisk you back to the...
The Boys Are Back in Town
If you have ever been to Dublin, Ireland, then you know that Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy casts a long shadow over the city. There is a statue in his...
Free Bird!
On October 20th, 1977, a Convair CV-240 carrying the members of Lynyrd Skynyrd and their touring party went down just outside Gillsburg, Miss. The crash took the lives of the...
Tom Sawyer
There are few bands in the World that will divide an audience’s opinion as quickly as Rush. I am fairly sure that this is a fact, although I may have...
Who Are You?
HELLO! In this installment of “Hand Picked” we’re going to do a little bit of the ol’ “Cross-Promotion.” Over on her “Off The Charts” column this issue, Anne E. will be discussing some...
Tubular Bells
When I was a wee lad, back in the U.K., my Dad would, on occasion, sit me down in the living room and place his yellow-spongey-ear-foam’d Sennheiser headphones on my...
Rosanna
If you have spent even the briefest of times on the Interwebs in the past 6 months then you are fully aware of the rarefied place that Toto’s “Africa” has...
Go Your Own Way
Feb 4th 1977 was the day that saw, amongst a BUNCH of other stuff I’m SURE, the release of Fleetwood Mac‘s 11th studio album Rumours. Little did anyone know that it was going...
Hollywood Nights
[And now for something completely different: at the heart of each and every one of Christian’s columns will be audio from his radio show in which he dissects and analyzes...