Great divorce albums, Powerpop snobs and dark tales of 1999

Various items set off the alarm in the rock and roll bag-check this week and were hauled back for closer inspection, among them …

… when did records first try to sound like the past?

… why Karl Wallinger and Robbie Williams fell out over She’s the One.

... how Marillion and Chuck D changed the digital landscape.

… the only word for the sound of Free is “lascivious”.

… Blood on the Tracks, Here My Dear, Shoot Out The Lights, Tapestry, Tunnel of Love and other accounts of marital fracture.  

… proof the mainstream no longer exists: Glastonbury headliner SZA has had 1.7b streams yet people claim they’ve never heard of her.

… the poignancy commercial failure lends to pop music.

… the Wire’s ‘100 Records That Set the World On Fire (While No-One was Listening)’.

… how Marvin Gaye married a woman 17 years older than him and left her for a 17 year-old.

… Eamonn Forde - in bed! - talking about his new book ‘1999: The Year the Record Industry Lost Control’, the people who knew the digital revolution was coming and the ones who didn’t believe it.

… Big Star, Dwight Twilley, the Raspberries, World Party and why Powerpop appeals to music snobs like us.

… “a Golden Age is when things behaved in such a way that you believed they’d behave that way forever”.

… plus Frank Sinatra, Ava Gardner, Andy Fraser, Steve Winwood and the days when “music down a phoneline” felt like science fiction.

Order Eamonn Forde’s 1999: The Year the Record Industry Lost Control here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/1999-Year-Record-Industry-Control/dp/1913172775

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