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

  Movie Soundtracks That Deserved Their Own Billing There are movie soundtracks. And then there are soundtracks that make you forget you're supposed to be watching a movie. You know the ones. The opening chords hit and suddenly you're transported back to a particular year, a particular pair of headphones, a particular version of yourself. Sometimes the music perfectly captures the film. Sometimes it completely overwhelms it. And occasionally, the soundtrack becomes so good that the movie itself feels like little more than an extended music video. At HiddenGems, we're naturally drawn to the latter. Because buried among the blockbuster soundtracks and the obvious greatest hits are some wonderfully strange, beautifully curated collections of music. Some were groundbreaking. Some were time capsules. Some introduced people to artists they might otherwise never have heard. And some were simply bloody brilliant. So let's dig through the crate. 1. Judgment Night — 1993 The vibe...

  Prost to Rocktoberfest I opened the crate and look what I found. Germany. Not exactly the first place you might expect to find a dusty crate overflowing with rock 'n' roll. But then again, this isn't a crate of oompah bands, beer hall singalongs and someone shouting Ein Prosit every thirty seconds. This is the B-Side Man's crate. And somewhere underneath the familiar names, the obvious hits and the records everybody already knows, there is an entirely different German rock story waiting to be discovered. So grab your stein, turn the lights down, and let's go digging. The ones you thought you knew Let's start with the obvious. Scorpions. You probably know the songs: Rock You Like a Hurricane, Still Loving You, Wind of Change. But go back a little further and the band sounds like something else entirely. Before the stadiums, the power ballads and the MTV years, there was a darker, stranger Scorpions; a band capable of stretching hard rock into psychedelic territ...

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...