Professor Eddy

Unsplash Enjoy some Golden State treasures and affiliated songs that will bring you back to the golden days of the West Coast scene! 😊 Recently, a large number of artists have been severely affected by the terrible fires in Los Angeles. Fortunately, singer/songwriter Stephen Bishop who is on this cloudcast, was spared this fate. He lived in the Hollywood Hills for 48 years, but moved to Colorado not long ago, leaving the L.A. house to get ready for sale. On Facebook he wrote: “We are safe for now, but it’s been a harrowing ordeal trying to move what’s left out of the LA house. My songbooks, guitars, and other important items that hadn’t been moved yet—thankfully, we were able to get them all.” British singer Steve Harley is best known for his 1975 UK number 1 Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me) . In the late 1970s he moved to Los Angeles, after his friend Rod Stewart advised him to do so. He tried to crack the US market, but it did not work out the way he had planned. On his album Hobo...

Unsplash My latest cloudcast is inspired by the music in the John Hughes movies of the 1980s: a mixture of pop, indie and new wave. He made the perfect soundtracks to stories about big and small troubles in the lives of teenagers. Well-known films from this director were The Breakfast Club , Weird Science , Pretty In Pink and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off . One of the tracks I selected, If You Leave by OMD, sounded during the famous prom scene in Pretty In Pink . Steve Harley, who passed away earlier this year, had quite a few hits in the 1970s, but when the decade came to a close his sales dropped dramatically. In 1982, when he tried to pick up his career, he teamed up with Midge Ure, the front man of Ultravox who were very popular at the time. He produced Steve Harley’s single I Can’t Even Touch You and played an amazing guitar part on it (a bit similar to the one on Dancing With Tears In My Eyes , a later hit single by Ultravox). Unfortunately I Can’t Even Touch You was not successf...

Pexels Enjoy this super seventies show on Sunshine Radio ! 😊 Earl Young played the drums on the opening track by The Modulations. To promote their album Groove Machine - The Earl Young Drum Sessions , Ace Records wrote about him on their website: “His ‘four on the floor’ style essentially shaped the sound of dance music as it evolved through the middle of the decade and particularly during the peak years of Disco.” After becoming popular in the United States through touring and occasional airplay on hard rock radio, Scottish band Nazareth finally broke through to pop-chart success with a unique power ballad version of Love Hurts . This track was originally performed by the Everly Brothers, but never became a true hit until Nazareth recorded it in the mid-seventies with the intention of making it a single b-side. Eventually it became their landmark in pop history, thanks to the hard-hitting drum beat, the aching slide-guitar and above all the razor blade vocals from singer D...

Unsplash Enjoy music mostly from and otherwise inspired by the 1980s! The majority of the tracks can be categorized as “sophisti-pop”. Many popular artists of the genre incorporated sweet pop-soul into their sound, which made it fit smooth jazz radio formats. The synthesized sound of sophisti-pop made it a typical product of the 1980s and by the beginning of the next decade, it had largely faded out, leaving us with quite a few really enjoyable songs. Electro pop band The Human League were very successful during the first part of the 1980s, but they seemed to have taken a dead end street in the mid-eighties. To get a fresh sound the record company hired R&B producers Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis who had just finished Janet Jackson’s album Control . The collaboration did not go well, because Jam & Lewis mainly used their own musicians and replaced vocalists Joanne Catherall and Susan Ann Sulley in favour of their studio singer Lisa Keith. The album Crash was based on two ideas t...

Pexels Turn on your nearest stereo equipment, tune in to Sunshine Radio and listen to retro sounds all day long! 😊  The track by The Four Seasons (without Frankie Valli!) is on the upcoming 4CD set Sean Rowley Presents: Guilty Pleasures 20th Anniversary , out on Demon Music Group next Friday: "One-hit wonders and exotic recordings that perfectly soundtracked a sun-kissed ’70s U.S. west coast life style, less so in ’70s Britain." As I wrote earlier, in the mid-seventies British rock band Mud was one of the biggest acts in Europe with quite a few number ones under their belt, but when the decade came to a close, they struggled to survive. On their 1979 album As You Like It frontman and former teen idol Les Gray sang on only 4 tracks, indicating his detachment from the band by then. When the LP and the accompanying single You’ll Like It / Can’t Stop came out, the remaining members had already signed a new record contract and had recruited Margo Buchanan as their lead ...

Pexels Look outside and watch the falling leaves and early sun downs: this is the AOR soundtrack to this year’s autumn by The Smooth Operators (Martijn Soetens and I) 😊 Enjoy some soft rock with a touch of soul! Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel are best known for their UK number one hit (Come Up And See Me) Make Me Smile in 1975. The song came from their album The Best Years Of Our Lives and was co-produced by then relatively unknown engineer Alan Parsons. Their pretty funky track White, White Dove was released a year later as the final single from their next LP Timeless Flight . The track was written and produced by Harley himself.  White, White Dov e was the second single from the album , after Black Or White had failed to chart. White, White Dove came out shortly after Timeless Flight , but despite the album's top 20 success in the UK, the single did not reach the UK top 50 either. However, the same year Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel would return to the UK top 10, ...

As I told earlier, around the mid-70s pirate stations that used the AM dial on the radio, disappeared one by one, due to government decisions. The more sophisticated and technically better FM radio stations were willing to play album tracks and longer songs from bands like Earth, Wind & Fire. Those bands used the improved studio techniques and possibilities to a full extent. Eventually FM radio became the new standard, especially for the AOR sound. To journalists Steve Harley always explains that his UK number one song Make Me Smile is about the disbanding of his band Cockney Rebel. However, when you read the lyrics closely, there is only one line that may refer to that: “You pulled the rebel to the floor”. The rest of the song is clearly about a broken relationship: “Blue eyes, blue eyes, how can you tell so many lies?" In other words, Steve Harley knows how to tell a good story (he used to be a journalist himself), but I believe it was totally made up afterwards. Irresisti...

Let's kick off the summer with the Californian summer edition of ‘ Groovy, sexy and soulful ’! In this mix I try to recreate the Californian feeling between the mid-seventies and mid-eighties, when FM radio played this kind of music all day on the West Coast. I gave it a tiny funky, disco-ish, Professor Eddy twist. For some strange reason the West Coast sound, often called 'yacht rock' or 'blue-eyed-soul', wasn’t popular at all in the Netherlands. The only Dutch representative I could find was The President, who tried to copy Toto’s ‘Africa’. Even mega-selling artists in the US, like Hall & Oates, had marginal sales in the Netherlands. The Dutch were more into new wave artists from the UK. So it’s time to catch up now! Helloloser.com gives this definition of yacht rock: "Yacht Rock is that smooth, mellow music that emanated from Southern California in the late 1970s and early 80s. It has long served as the anthem for the “yuppies” of the 80s, since they ...