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What In the World

  What in the World? – “You're Gonna Miss Me” and the Strange World of 1966 January 1966. The world was in turmoil. War was escalating in Vietnam, the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in a technological battle for supremacy, and Chairman Mao was preparing to unleash a political upheaval that would shake China to its foundations. Meanwhile, popular culture was beginning to crack open. The Beatles were pushing beyond the boundaries of conventional pop. Young people were questioning authority, experimenting with new sounds, and searching for something beyond the comfortable certainties of their parents' generation. And from Austin, Texas, came a band with a name that sounded like a warning from the future. The 13th Floor Elevators. Their song? “You're Gonna Miss Me.” It was raw, wild, slightly unhinged, and unlike almost anything else on the radio. Driven by a ferocious vocal performance from Roky Erickson, a relentless garage-rock rhythm and the bizarre, bubblin...
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The Octopus and Mother Earth

  The Octopus’s Garden Came to Mother Earth A ridiculous look through the kaleidoscope of rock history There are moments in rock history that make perfect sense.  And then there are moments when an octopus leaves its garden, climbs into a time machine, bumps into Mother Earth, and decides that history needs a little more psychedelic nonsense. This is one of those stories. No historians were consulted. No timeline was respected. Nobody knows who pressed the button. We simply climbed aboard the machine, turned the dial to Rock, and hoped for the best. The first thing we heard was a voice from somewhere outside time. Then the universe started spinning. --- ACT I — The Machine Wakes The time machine didn't look like a time machine. It looked more like a battered amplifier that had been left in a basement since 1967. There were three buttons. PAST. FUTURE. And one labelled simply: DON'T. Naturally, we pressed DON'T. The machine coughed. The walls disappeared. Suddenly we were no...
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Under Cover

Under Cover - Eight obscure cover versions from around the world.  There are cover songs everyone knows. Someone takes a famous song, puts their own spin on it, and suddenly we're having the same conversation about which version is better. That isn't what we're doing here. This is about the covers that slipped through the cracks. The songs that travelled across borders, languages and musical cultures, sometimes landing thousands of kilometres from where they began. Some are faithful. Some are completely transformed. And some make you wonder how on earth somebody in a rehearsal room in Beijing, Tokyo or Kyiv decided, “Yep. Let's do that one.” Just eight seriously interesting cover versions. 1. Cobra — White Riot Let's start in Japan, with Cobra, one of the country's early punk bands. Their version of The Clash's “White Riot” comes from a very different musical world, but the connection makes perfect sense. The Clash were already internationalists, pulling reg...
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The Soundtrack Had a Movie

  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...
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Prost to Rocktoberfest

  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...
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