Posts by Schrottrocker

  • Your next gig

    I saw Lola Funkt last night and I was blown away! And the support band "Liner Notes" - never heard of them before - were just as good. Two awesome bands, both only at the beginning of their careers. Don't miss them out!

  • The Book Thread

    Quote from slowdancer

    I can only speak for myself. I listen to prog music and read fantasy novels mostly. I was turned away from so called "good books" at school. We read Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass in our German course, Graham Greene in our English course and Albert Camus in our French course and analyzed the stuff beyond the point of what was bearable. As I always enjoyed reading, I moved over to sci-fi and fantasy, which I enjoyed very much without being forced to analyze the plot. Fantasy is a great genre, if you pick the right authors. There are not so many, who are great. My favourites are Tolkien, Donaldson, Rothfuss, Robin Hobb and Peter Brett. The Dark Tower novels by Stephen King are killer. Almost all his books are killer.


    I combine certain books with certain albums. I got The Lord Of The Rings for christmas in 1979 together with the album Rumours by Fleetwood Mac. I read the whole book in the week after christmas and listened to Rumours constantly while reading. I read the book again exactly one year later and had Making Movies by Dire Straits on the whole time. So every time, I listen to one of these albums today, I get instant memories of certain scenes from the book.

    This reminds me on what Anthony Phillips said about classical music: Being constantly told at school he was listening to the wrong kind of music and he should start listening to "good music" pushed him away from classical music; however, he discovered it on its own later on and regretted his teachers had such a misleading approach.


    Speaking for me, I had my discovery experience with classical literature by sheer coincidence: you know these boxes that people put on streets to give stuff away? I found a book in one of those which is a random collection of classical German literature through a couple centuries, from Luther to Liebknecht as it says; making my way through this I found myself for the first time actually reading and enjoying old literature. I recognized some of the texts from back from school and yes I really found it liberating to not being forced to analyse everything. School seriously spoils some great literature. Also I noticed school tends to pick out those texts in the first place that lend themselves most to exemplifying certain qualities (what rhetoric stylistic devices can you find, what changes of character does the main protagonist go through... X/ ) and blocks out other texts which are not that easy to analyse. All this helps to leave an image of classical literature as dry and over-moralistic. Often times it is nothing but that.

  • Who wrote what

    Quote from DecomposingMan

    "

    The Musical Box (Phillips-Rutherford-Banks-Gabriel)

    Mick Barnard is said to have contributed as well.

    Excuse me, this is one of these myths that shows very nicely what problems we're facing here: if I'm not mistaken, Tony said one singular time in his lifetime in some interview that "Mick Barnard laid out the guitar lines for The Musical Box". Given how vague this statement is and that neither Tony nor anybody else from the band ever mentioned anything close to this ever again I can't understand how this could become such a gospel-like factoid among fans. From all we can know for sure, Mick was only part of the live lineup for a couple months and the song was already worked out when they performed it; if you listen to Ant's "F#" track on his Archive Vol. 1 you can hear he had finished nearly the entire song, all that was missing were some elaborate chord changes in the first half, the vocal lines, the solos and the outro. For whatever Tony was trying to say when he uttered that statement, I doubt we will ever get behind it.

  • Best live version of "Whodunnit"

    Thank you for posting this, I am enjoying that whole show! Interesting how they came up with some unusual medleys and new transitions between songs. Also, it is obvious at this point there was a clear contrast between old and "new" stuff but the "new" songs were far from the later commercial era thing, all the Abacab songs grew a lot in live versions and they're surprisingly edgy.

  • Bands / Artists you used to despise and now love

    Hum, generally speaking I have grown a lot more tolerant towards any music with German lyrics. I used to like only music with English lyrics, I was so used to listen to it, even before I knew any word in English and I had no clue what the heck they were singing about, no matter what it was just normal that every "cool" music was in English. With German I could understand every word and I used to find it so so embarrassing. Now since I had an American girlfriend and later on I got to know more people more other countries, I started seeing my own country through their eyes, and that made me change my views on German music.

  • Songs that were better live

    Quote from raeltheduke

    It is a shame there are many Genesis songs from their catalog that were never played live: The Brazilian, Wot Gorilla?, Inside Out

    There are live versions of all these tracks, you can find them on bootlegs. Wot Gorilla only as part of a medley though.


    Reading through the latest comments, I found a bunch of songs I all prefer in live versions: The Musical Box, The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway (Seconds Out version!), Turn It On Again, and yes by any means Invisible Touch, that last one particularly in the 2007 version.

  • Private Parts & Pieces IX-XI

    Haven't purchased any of the new Esoteric/Cherry Red issues yet, I got the Voiceprint double issues of PP&P 7/8 and 9/10; they are 2 CDs for 1 but they have some 2-second gaps between cohesive tracks that are a little annoying. My copy of City of Dreams just says "Floating World" something.


    I'm very curious about the extra CDs that come with all the box sets, I haven't had the chance to hear anything off those.