Category: Music
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Sally Oldfield
The last thing you probably wanted to be in 1978 was a hippy folk singer with a single about love and light complete with Hawaiian chorus. To be fair, Sally Oldfield’s Mirrors stayed in the UK music charts for thirteen weeks, but along with her brother Mike she ended up trampled Bambi-like under the foot…
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Voyage of the Acolyte – Steve Hackett 1975
I have a huge soft spot for Prog Rock, well – to qualify that, I have a soft spot for a handful of Prog Rock albums that I came across when I was first venturing into Science Fiction and Fantasy. Basically I was after anything that looked a bit spacey – or fantasy-esque, with soaring…
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Kate Bush: Before the Dawn.
Spoiler and bad language alert: If you are planning on seeing the concert and you don’t want any of it revealed then read no further. Also Kate Bush swears like a trooper. I planned on writing this straight after seeing the concert but it’s taken me about five days for my thoughts to marshal themselves…
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The King of Elfland’s Daughter – 1977
For years the TV program Top of the Pops and the Sunday Top 40 on Radio One had a stranglehold on popular music in the UK. Bands sank or swam depending on where they were in the charts and how much exposure they got on the BBC on a Thursday evening. Rankings depended entirely on singles…
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Kate Bush
Tickets for Kate Bush’s first live concert in 35 years went on sale this morning and within fifteen minutes all 80,000 had gone. The fact she hasn’t toured for so long (and this isn’t really a tour as it’s just one London venue) only partly explains the frenzy. For some reason she has created a…
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Dead Can Dance
I was introduced to Dead Can Dance by some very cool French friends in Tokyo, and was immediately sold. Their combination of what can only be described as Medieval wailing, Renaissance dance music and Frank Sinatra does Kurt Weill sent shivers down my spine and I immediately bought all their albums, and the DVD…
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Tangerine Dream – Phaedra
I started reading science fiction round about the same time I got into music, and so being a fairly literal minded so-and-so I immediately embarked on a quest to find albums I could read Asimov, Heinlein, and Moorcock, to. Of course there were a few attempts to write directly SF-inspired music. Who can forget The…
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Nemesis the Warlock – Shriekback
In the mid 1980s England was ruled by a right wing conservative government under Margaret Thatcher. Like Cameron’s Tories and New Labour under Blair they espoused the values of liberty and justice while simultaneously suppressing free speech and clamping down on Trade Union rights and minorities. It was the first time in the 20th century…
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Space Ritual
In the mid 1970s New English Library published the magazine Science Fiction Monthly, a huge format magazine which reprinted book covers by the likes of Chris Foss and Bruce Pennington for teenage boys to stick on their bedroom walls. Interspersed with these were short stories and articles, including one about science fiction in music. This was just before…