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

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...

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...