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

One Band a Month - The Commitments: More Than Mustang Sally You remember the movie. You remember the suits. You remember Joey "The Lips" Fagan. You definitely remember "Mustang Sally." And if you're anything like me, you probably remember shouting along to it. But here's the thing... The Commitments were bloody brilliant. And somewhere along the way, we forgot just how good they were. A Soul Band From Dublin? On paper, it sounds slightly ridiculous. Take a bunch of young Dubliners, throw them together, tell them they're going to bring soul music to Ireland, and let them loose on some of the greatest songs ever written. What could possibly go wrong? Well... Quite a lot, actually. That's part of what makes The Commitments so much fun. But beneath the arguments, egos, romances and general chaos was something rather special. A group of musicians who genuinely understood the music. The story revolves around Jimmy Rabbitte, a music obsessive with a vision....

  Monday Madness: Inside Rock's Most Bizarre Studio Sessions There are recording studios. And then there are places where rock musicians apparently decided that recording an album wasn't difficult enough on its own. Give some of them a few microphones, a ridiculous amount of money, a little artistic freedom and absolutely nobody sensible standing in the doorway saying, “Perhaps we shouldn't do that…” And eventually, somebody is recording in a murder house. Somebody else is living in a two-bedroom house for eight months while being psychologically dismantled by their bandleader. Someone is putting a recording studio on a yacht. And somewhere in England, Black Sabbath is apparently being followed around a castle by a ghost. Welcome to the wonderfully unhinged side of the recording studio. The House Where Rock Went Very, Very Dark Let's start with Nine Inch Nails. For The Downward Spiral, Trent Reznor chose a location with perhaps the least relaxing history imaginable: 100...

Queens Without Crowns Seven women who remind us that rock was never meant to have a dress code There is a strange thing about rock music. We love to talk about rebels. The outsiders. The troublemakers. The people who kicked down doors, turned their amplifiers up too loud and refused to play by somebody else's rules. Yet somewhere along the way, rock history developed a habit of putting a surprisingly small number of women on the guest list. We've all heard the names. We know the obvious pioneers. We know the stadium stars. We know the women who became household names. But what about the women who never quite got their place in the pantheon? The musicians who played the clubs while somebody else got the magazine cover. The bands who toured relentlessly while history remembered somebody else. The women who weren't interested in being rock's token female presence because they had something much more important to do. They wanted to rock. That is what Queens Without Crowns i...

  The World’s Longest Rock Sentence How many songs and bands can you find hiding inside one increasingly ridiculous sentence? We've done quizzes. We've done clues. We've made you identify bands from photographs. So naturally, the next logical step was to make things considerably more complicated. One sentence. Sixty hidden rock references. Every reference is either a song title or a band/artist name, and they are buried in one increasingly ridiculous story. Some you'll spot immediately. Some are hiding in plain sight. And some? Well… that's why we call this Hidden Gems. The rules Read the sentence once without stopping. Then read it again. And again. Every time you recognise a song or artist, write it down. There are 60 in total, appearing in a specific order. And yes, we've thrown in a healthy number of B-sides and deep cuts. Because making this easy would rather defeat the object, wouldn't it? 🤯 The Sentence The Who arrived at Baba O'Riley just as Th...