I am a retired raver who has started to get cravings for some repetitive beats in my life again. As I'll never see 30 again, I'm quite taken with this
balearic/cosmic craze that I keep hearing about, but don't want to make a fool of myself in my local record emporium. Who should I be buying
and, more importantly, dancing to?
Wroteforluck
Well, Wroteforluck, as anyone who has heard their remixes of Grace Jones's William's Blood and Friendly Fires' Paris will attest, the Belgium-based Aeroplane (Stephen Fasano and Vito Deluca) are the darlings of the psychedelic disco scene. Their own productions are released on Eskimo which, quite frankly, can do little wrong: witness Lindstrom and Prins Thomas's II, a mish-mash of prog rock, disco and Krautrock, and Daniele Baldelli's Cosmic Disco?! Cosmic Rock!, which explores space-age house music's 80s roots. Look out, finally, for Smith & Mudd, whose new album, Le Suivant, is suitably sun-kissed.
My dad keeps buying insipid blues CDs and playing them at full volume on long car journeys. I bought him a Seasick Steve album for Christmas, which he loved. Can you point me in the direction of some authentic bluesmen?
KittyCommando
Bluesmen don't come any more authentic than Robert Johnson and Blind Willie Johnson. The former's King of the Delta Blues Singers, first released in 1961, includes such tracks as Hell Hound on My Trail, on which he alludes to being hounded by the devil in an otherworldly howl. Insipid it is not. As for Blind Willie, beg, borrow or steal his Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground, a wordless cry that reverberates down the years and which Ry Cooder once described as "the most soulful, transcendental piece in all American music". Overblown? Possibly – but you can see his point.
I need some more power pop in my life. I love the usual suspects – Big Star, Badfinger, the Raspberries and Cheap Trick. But I'd like some more recommendations. I'd also like to know more about boozy rock artists from the 70s and 80s, such as Graham Parker and Green on Red.
RobertChorlton
No one can have too much power pop in their life, particularly when it's as potent as the Posies' 1990 album Dear 23 – which is pitched somewhere between Big Star and the Hollies – and Matthew Sweet's Girlfriend from 1991. Booze rock-wise, track down the Long Ryders – who recently reunited after a two-decade-long break – Joe Strummer's former band the 101'ers, Nick Lowe's Brinsley Schwarz and the Green on Red-like Richmond Fontaine, whose new album, We Used to Think the Freeway Sounded Like a River, is the aural equivalent of a Raymond Carver book.
I recently watched the excellent documentary Heartworn Highways featuring Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark. I'd like to explore these two artists further. Where should I start and which other artists should I also investigate. No modern stuff please. Anything after 1984 is rubbish.
ClarenceBeeks
The 1968-73 period is generally regarded as Van Zandt's most productive, and Our Mother the Mountain, from 1969, is probably the best introduction to the man once described by an acolyte, Steve Earle, as "the best songwriter in the world". Fellow outlaw country pioneer Guy Clark peaked, arguably, with Old No 1, his 1975 debut for Sugar Hill, on which he referenced drifters, drunks and the infirm. Check out, too, John Stewart's California Bloodlines, a touchstone of Americana.
