Exploring Rock's Hidden Gems - The power of B-Side tracks

They Thought You Might Like It Too Before the algorithm knew what we liked, there was a person. Someone sitting behind a microphone at two in the morning. Someone in a television studio deciding which band deserved three minutes of airtime. Someone hunched over a stack of records, looking for something that hadn't already been played to death. They listened. They took a chance. And then they thought you might like it too. Before the Algorithm We tend to remember the bands. The voices. The guitar riffs. The albums that changed everything. The songs that somehow survived decades of changing fashions. But music doesn't travel by itself. Somebody has to put the record on. Somebody has to tell you about the band you've never heard of. And sometimes, that somebody becomes just as important to the journey as the musicians themselves. There was a time when discovering music meant knowing where to look. You waited for a particular programme. You stayed awake for the late-night show....

  The Blind Squirrel Finds an Acorn: Prog Rock Edition There is an old saying: Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn once in a while. I've always liked it. Not because I'm particularly fond of squirrels. Not because I've spent any meaningful amount of time studying their eyesight. But because, musically speaking, I occasionally prove the saying absolutely correct. You spend years listening to rock music. You dig through albums. You chase B-sides. You follow rabbit holes. You convince yourself that you've heard just about everything worth hearing. And then, completely out of nowhere, you stumble across a song and think: "How the hell did I miss this?" That happened to me recently. The acorn? Van der Graaf Generator – "Man-Erg." And suddenly the squirrel was awake. The Acorn Van der Graaf Generator aren't exactly some obscure band that existed for three weeks in someone's garage. They've been around since the late 1960s. They're one of t...

Rock Was Never Supposed to Work This Way Rock music has always had rules. Not official rules, obviously. There was never a committee sitting in a smoky room deciding exactly how many chords a respectable rock song should contain, how long a guitar solo was allowed to last, or whether a man could appear on stage wearing a jumpsuit without immediately being arrested. But there were rules. Rock was supposed to sound a certain way. And then, sooner or later, somebody came along and broke the rules. That, really, is the story of rock. Not a straight line. Not an orderly evolution. More like a bar fight where every generation picks up whatever the previous generation left lying around and finds a completely different way to use it. It Started With Attitude Chuck Berry didn't invent the electric guitar. He didn't invent rhythm and blues either. What he did was understand that rock 'n' roll wasn't supposed to sit politely in the corner. It was supposed to move. It had swagg...

  What in the World? – Can't Get There From Here and the Strange World of 1985 June 1985. The world was getting smaller. Television was making everything immediate. MTV was turning musicians into visual icons. Compact discs and videocassettes were changing how we consumed entertainment. The Cold War was still very much alive, but something was beginning to shift in Moscow. And somewhere between the optimism of Live Aid, the hysteria surrounding New Coke, and the increasingly polished world of 1980s pop culture, four musicians from Athens, Georgia released a song that sounded like it had wandered in from somewhere else entirely. Can't Get There From Here. It was R.E.M. being decidedly un-R.E.M. And perhaps that was exactly the point. Welcome to 1985 If you wanted to understand the mood of 1985, you could hardly have picked a stranger year. The Cold War was still casting a shadow over everything. But in March, Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union, beginning a perio...