Professor Eddy

Pixabay In short, this was the kind of music that was mostly played on the radio in the late sixties and early seventies. In the mid-sxities rock ‘n’ roll was already history and new exciting music was breaking through on AM radio, catapulted by The Beatles. Adventurous dj’s on offshore radio stations knew what was going on musically and so-called "pirate radio" was immensely popular. Ten years later the musical landscape had changed in many ways. Disco music that could be heard in clubs became leading, and radio was no longer dominant in discovering fresh sounds. In the meantime FM radio had replaced AM radio as the most popular dial and offshore stations disappeared, but at the end of this era (1965-1974), pop music was shaped as we know it today. In Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story Of Modern Pop , Bob Stanley wrote about God Only Knows by the Beach Boys: “It’s impossible to exaggerate how beautiful this song is.” In the same book Stanley sums up the history of the Mamas & th...

Unsplash This exclusive cloudcast refers to the so called 'beach music' of the late fifties, sixties and early seventies. This type of uplifting soul dominated the jukeboxes at the beaches of both Carolinas in the US. It has some similarities with (more Motown based) northern soul in the UK. Beach music goes back to the doo wop of the fifties and has some rock ‘n’ roll traces as well. It vanished in the mid-seventies when disco music, played at large discotheques, became the most popular kind of dance music and wiped out (to quote the Surfaris) beach music at small venues. Around the same time AM pop, which was best played on transistor radios,  disappeared to be replaced by FM radio pop.  'Calypso King' The Mighty Sparrow (Slinger Francisco) originally released Only A Fool in 1969. The song was written by Shelly Coburn and Norman Bergen and first recorded as the flipside of Open Up Your Heart by Arthur Prysock in 1965. Slinger Francisco's name was mistakenly list...

Unsplash Come sail with me, to quote Buttering Trio! The track by Lonette McKee is for “its first ever re-release” on The Ladies of Too Slow to Disco Volume 2 , which is out on June 19th. Richard Powell’s World Of Ecstasy is from the new compilation album Whispers Lounge , which contains 14 so-called "lounge originals", a genre that was called "easy listening" at the time: "A spent matchbook’s worth of crooners, bossa nobodies, seafood jazzers, and Donca-Matic enthusiasts all in search of their ticket out of a red leather booth hell.” ( The Numero Group ) The sub-genre is officially called ‘folk funk’, but I think ‘soulful folk’ would be a better term, because there is no funk in this kind of music at all. As the 1960s melted into the 1970s in a colourful swirl of musical possibilities, bands and singer-songwriters were experimenting with newfound freedoms. Rock would meet jazz. Soul was mixed with psychedelia. On this fertile soil folk funk would a...