The Divinyls' Christina Amphlett is the most dynamic live female performer Australia has ever produced, let alone sent out into the world. With the help of an ever changing Divinyls lineup, Amphlett and guitarist Mark McEntee have created a legacy of powerful pop records.Amphlett's whole life seems to have pointed towards a lifetime in music. After running away from home to follow her favorite group, at 14 Amphlett joined her first band in Melbourne. In 1971 she turned up in Sydney as one of the featured singers in One Ton Gypsy, an ambitious country rock band. At 17 she left Australia to travel alone through Europe, spending some time living on the streets of Paris, and at one point ending up in a Spanish jail for busking.Back in Sydney, Amphlett joined a church choir, purely to develop the upper register of her voice. During one choir performance, her stool fell over and became tangled up in her microphone chord.
Watching her drag the stool across the stage while continuing to sing was Mark McEntee, so enamoured by her performance he decided he had to meet this girl. It was the start of a long and robust professional relationship.In December of 1980 they started performing in the sleazy bars of Sydney with a Divinyls lineup made up of musicians who all had long histories in Australian rock & roll without achieving mainstream success, apart from bassist Jeremy Paul who was in the original lineup of Air Supply. They had only just started performing live when the group was spotted by film director Ken Cameron who was looking for a group to appear in his film Monkey Grip. Cameron was so impressed by Amphlett he invented a small speaking part for her. What he also hadn't imagined was finding a group capable of providing the movie with a soundtrack.The single from the soundtrack mini-album, 'Boys in a Town,' came with an eye-catching video of Christina Amphlett at her provocative best, dressed in a school uniform and fishnet stockings, filmed from below as she performed on top of a metal grill.
It was an image that would stay with the Divinyls for a long time. The single made the Australian Top Ten.
Jeremy Paul left on the eve of the single's release and was replaced by Richard Grossman (later of Hoodoo Gurus).With a one-of deal for Monkey Grip, the Divinyls were in a position to take advantage of the record company offers that flooded their way. With just one hit to their credit the Divinyls were able to sign a worldwide deal with Chrysalis. In a defining moment, Chrysalis offered to fix Christina Amphlett's protruding teeth, and the singer refused. She was what she was. Their debut album, Desperate, was recorded in New York with Australian producer Mark Opitz.While the group toured the world extensively in the years that followed, the lineup kept changing around the Amphlett-McEntee team. As well as musicians, the Divinyls have had a habit of losing managers and record companies. The group's output on record has been hindered by the struggle to get all the pieces together long enough to release albums.
1985's What a Life album took three producers to complete. Frustrating for all those concerned, the wait between releases might also have contributed to the group's longevity.In 1991, the Divinyls stirred up a storm again with the song 'I Touch Myself' and a video with a tied-up Amphlett back in fishnets.
The ensuring controversy helped make the song a huge hit around the world: number one in Australia, Top Ten in America. By now there was no pretence of a 'group' and the Divinyls' duo toured on the back of their hit with the help of session musicians.In recent years Amphlett has also indulged her talent for acting with her starring role in the Australian production of Blood Brothers and her stand-out portrayal of Judy Garland in the Peter Allen-inspired musical The Boy From Oz. The Divinyls were one of the most unfortunately overlooked acts of the 1980s, but the reason they didn't achieve much commercial success could be because an album like What A Life! Is so inconsistent.
The Divinyls' best strengths lie both in Christina Amphlett's unique vocal delivery, and guitarist Mark McEntee's bottom-heavy, grungy, guitar work, and not so much in their songwriting. The Divinyls always manage to come up with a few memorable songs, such as 'Pleasure and Pain' (a thinly-veiled ode to sadomasochism), 'Casual Encounter,' and the ballad 'Sleeping Beauty,' but many of the album tracks are hardly memorable. 'In My Life' is a catchy rocker, but Amphlett's vocals (which are usually the highlight of the band's music) sound banal and unpolished. Likewise, the album's closer, 'Dear Diary,' is a pretentious stab at art that instead sounds very flat and dull. Is a solid album for fans of the band, but there are better places to start for casual listeners.
Pearl Jam went all out and delivered not one but three reissues, all in increasing levels of lavishness. First off is a standard two-CD set, followed by a triple-disc set that adds a DVD of the band's 1992 performance for MTV Unplugged and then there's a gargantuan, frankly ludicrous, collectors edition that has all that plus four slabs of vinyl containing the two mixes of the album plus a 1992 live show, one cassette that replicates the original demo Eddie Vedder turned in as his audition, and assorted memorabilia that retails for $200.00. All this commotion camouflages the really noteworthy aspect of this anniversary edition: Pearl Jam brought in their longtime producer Brendan O'Brien to remix Ten from the ground up, to strip away the studio affectations of producer Rick Parashar and mixer Tim Palmer that made it a bright, shiny anomaly during the dingy heyday of grunge and make the album sound more liked the rest of the band's work (which O'Brien produced, after all).
Divinyls Album
Get It At Cast's All Change serves as the perfect antidote to the inner rage fueling much American alternative rock - it would be hard to imagine a more gloriously upbeat backbeat of a guitar pop record, one that appeals to the eternal adolescent in each of us. The group's pedigree derives from good stock, founder John Power having served time with another fine Mersey combo the La's. But Cast transcends the hackneyed expectations of its environment, structure, and genetics through sheer, relentless quality of songcraft and performance. No sooner has one wide-eyed, hook-infested injection stormed the synapses demanding total capitulation than another of equal potency lines up to take its place. Cast vocals recall Small Faces-era Steve Marriott fused, in places, to Suede's Brett Anderson. There's a soft-psych feel to several tracks (try ' Sandstorm ') that calls to mind 'Pictures of Matchstick Men'-era Status Quo; Cast has clearly assimilated several volumes of Bam Caruso's Rubble and A.I.P.' S Electric Sugarcube Flashbacks series, without sacrificing its power-Mod backbone.
Production is brittle and uncluttered. On the lyrics front, all is positively cheery, anthemic stuff about truth, honor, living well, having fun and getting the girl, delivered exuberantly enough to strip away several coats of accumulated cynicism and almost make you believe it's possible.
Two favorites are the shifting falsetto angst anthem ' Tell It Like Is ' and the ballad ' Walk Away ' - a clue to how Mott the Hoople's 'Roll Away the Stone' would have come out recorded in 1967. Get It At By the time Ocean Colour Scene released their debut album in 1992, they were already considered has-beens. The band had formed during the height of Madchester, but they never released their first album until the scene was already dead, which left them without a following. But between their debut and their second album, 1996's Moseley Shoals, a strange thing happened - the band was taken under the wings of two of Britain's biggest pop stars, Paul Weller and Noel Gallagher. The band suddenly catapulted back into the spotlight because of its superstar connections, but the music actually deserved the attention. Ocean Colour Scene had spent the time between their two albums improving their sound. On Moseley Shoals, they are looser, funkier, and have a strong, organic R&B vibe that was inherited from the Small Faces and Weller's solo recordings.
They sprinkle Beatlesque and Stonesy flourishes throughout the album, as well as the odd prog rock flair, adding an even more eclectic flavor to their traditionalist pop/rock. Ocean Colour Scene are still developing their songwriting skills - the sound is more impressive than the songs throughout Moseley Shoals - but their second album is an unexpectedly enjoyable record.
Get It At Paul Weller deservedly regained his status as the Modfather with his second solo album, Wild Wood. Actually, the album is only tangentially related to mod, since Weller picks up on the classicism of his debut, adding heavy elements of pastoral British folk and Traffic-styled trippiness. Add to that a yearning introspection and a clean production that nevertheless feels a little rustic, even homemade, and the result is his first true masterwork since ending the Jam. The great irony of the record is that many of the songs - ' Has My Fire Really Gone Out?,' 'Can You Heal Us (Holy Man) ' - question his motivation and, as is apparent in his spirited performances, he reawakened his music by writing these searching songs. Though this isn't as adventurous as the Style Council, it succeeds on its own terms, and winds up being a great testament from an artist entering middle age. And, it helped kick off the trad rock that dominated British music during the '90s. Get It At The Charlatans made a surprising comeback in 1995, turning in an eponymous album that earned them their best reviews and sales ever.
Tellin' Stories, the follow-up to The Charlatans, should have been triumphant, but tragedy struck midway through its recording, when keyboardist Rob Collins was killed in a car accident. Collins was an integral part of the band's lineup, creating a distinctive, swirling, neo-psychedelic sound, and it seemed unlikely that the band could carry on without him, much less record a record as earthy and warm as Tellin' Stories.
Primal Scream's Martin Duffy volunteered to help the band complete the album, which was basically written before Collins' death, and that might explain why there are no overt references to his absence anywhere on the album. Instead, Tellin' Stories is another collection of classicist rock & roll spiked with dance beats, much like any other Charlatans album. Where its predecessor was more informed by mechanized beats, the rhythms are more organic, which perfectly suits the rolling ' North Country Boy,' the sweeping ' One to Another,' and the heart-tugging ' How Can You Leave Us?' And, like any other Charlatans album, it doesn't quite hold together, falling apart with instrumentals and ill-conceived songs toward the end.
On the whole, however, Tellin' Stories is more consistent than their earlier records, and the best songs showcase the band at its strongest, which is quite an achievement considering the traumas the Charlatans underwent during its recording. More than anything, that's a fitting salute to Collins. Get It At Routinely named as the greatest British album of the past 20 years in British music mag polls, sometimes rivaling such sacred cows as Revolver whenever those publications decide to do a Greatest Albums Ever list, The Stone Roses remains one of those classic albums that somehow defies translation across the pond. To be sure, it's not that the British overrate the Stone Roses. Rather, it's that the U.S., apart from some Anglophiles and Gen-Xers, missed the golden moment when the Stone Roses were the best band in the world, capturing a crystalline moment where nostalgia for the Summer of Love refracted through the prism of burgeoning acid house.
Unlike the Happy Mondays, the Stone Roses weren't really immersed in the pulsating E-underworld of raves, but their music was certainly informed by this new thumping psychedelia as much as it was by the '60s jangle, which is why the Stone Roses can feel somewhat out of time even as it thoroughly, undeniably is about its moment.That timelessness is one of the chief reasons The Stone Roses endures as a modern classic and why it's been given this spectacular 20th Anniversary reissue. There are multiple editions, all of interest: a basic remastered single-disc, an extensive two-disc/one-DVD set that pairs the original album with a 'Lost Demos' CD and video of a live show from Blackpool Empress Ballroom, then finally, a gargantuan set that has all this, plus another disc that rounds up the non-LP singles and B-sides as well as more extensive liner notes, art prints, and a USB disc with unreleased backwards tracks, music videos, and other collector's treats.
All this is a fanatics treasure, and there is quite a bit of musical worth here too, especially on the B-sides, which may have already been reissued on Made of Stone but is nice to have paired here. Still, the main revelation of the 'Lost Demos' is how perfect John Leckie's production of The Stone Roses is. On these demos, the songs are firmly intact but the colors are muted, and Ian Brown's notoriously wobbly vocals are quite shaky; they are clearly a blueprint, not a final product.
Listening to the full album after the demos, The Stone Roses seems even more wondrous: Leckie coaxed the right performances out of all four members, letting Mani and Reni lock into a muscular, fluid groove, encouraging John Squire to paint as vividly with his guitar as he did in his artwork, finding a way for Ian Brown to seem swaggering and spectral simultaneously, a resurrection whose adoration was an inevitability. For longtime fans, this is reason enough to dig into this deluxe anniversary edition, and for those who have never known, there's no better place to get enchanted. Get It At If Definitely Maybe was an unintentional concept album about wanting to be a rock & roll star, (What's the Story) Morning Glory? Is what happens after the dreams come true. Oasis turns in a relatively introspective second record, filled with big, gorgeous ballads instead of ripping rockers. Unlike Definitely Maybe, the production on Morning Glory is varied enough to handle the range in emotions; instead of drowning everything with amplifiers turned up to 12, there are strings, keyboards, and harmonicas. This expanded production helps give Noel Gallagher's sweeping melodies an emotional resonance that he occasionally can't convey lyrically.
However, that is far from a fatal flaw; Gallagher's lyrics work best in fragments, where the images catch in your mind and grow, thanks to the music. Gallagher may be guilty of some borrowing, or even plagiarism, but he uses the familiar riffs as building blocks. This is where his genius lies: He's a thief and doesn't have many original thoughts, but as a pop/rock melodicist he's pretty much without peer. Likewise, as musicians, Oasis are hardly innovators, yet they have a majestic grandeur in their sound that makes ballads like 'Wonderwall' or rockers like 'Some Might Say' positively transcendent. Alan White does add authority to the rhythm section, but the most noticeable change is in Liam Gallagher. His voice sneered throughout Definitely Maybe, but on Morning Glory his singing has become more textured and skillful.
He gives the lyric in the raging title track a hint of regret, is sympathetic on ' Wonderwall,' defiant on ' Some Might Say,' and humorous on 'She's Electric,' a bawdy rewrite of 'Digsy's Diner.' It might not have the immediate impact of Definitely Maybe, but Morning Glory is just as exciting and compulsively listenable. In 2014, just a year shy of its 20th anniversary, (What's The Story) Morning Glory? Received a super-deluxe reissue weighing in at three CDs.
The first of the CDs features a remastered version of the original album, while the second CD rounds up nearly all the non-LP B-sides (a live 1995 'Live Forever' is missing), plus 'Bonehead's Bank Holiday' - a delightful, ragged novelty which was originally released only on the vinyl edition of Morning Glory - and a cover of 'You've Got to Hide Your Love Away,' which appeared only on the Japanese 'Some Might Say' single. This collection of flipsides is nearly as good as the proper album, and some of the songs should've made the proper album: 'Talk Tonight' is Noel Gallagher's best ballad, 'Acquiesce' crystallizes the tension of the brothers Gallagher, 'Step Out' is a wild reinvention of Stevie Wonder's 'Uptight (Everything Is Alright)' (which is why it was cut from the record at the last minute), 'Round Are Way' belongs to the Ian Dury/Madness tradition - and it'd be enough to justify a re-purchase of the album, particularly for anybody who loves Morning Glory but never had the accompanying singles. Nevertheless, the third disc is the real treat for hardcore fans, as it has unheard demos of 'Some Might Say,' 'She's Electric,' 'Rockin' Chair,' and 'Hey Now,' along with live performances highlighted by an MTV Unplugged take on 'Round Are Way' featuring Noel on vocals.
Apart from an excised verse of a demo of 'Bonehead's Bank Holiday,' there are no great revelations but each cut is excellent, offering confirmation that Oasis were indeed in their imperial phase during Morning Glory.