Kristen Sinclair

Listening to certain records, it’s sometimes hard to believe that they’re as old as they are. There are the obvious game changers – Sgt. Pepper’s , The Wall , Electric Ladyland , Highway 61 Revisited , Kind of Blue , I Feel Love , Nevermind , Dusty in Memphis , to name a few – but there somewhat less obvious records that have helped to shape modern music. After a lot of narrowing down, I settled with these five as my personal picks. ·          Rapper’s Delight – The Sugar Hill Gang Released in 1979, this ground-breaking hip-hop track sounds like something straight out of the nineties. Nurtured from freestyle created at a hip-hop event in the Bronx in ‘78, it has gone on to be, arguably, the first song to bring rap into the mainstream. The track features a bass line from Chic’s ‘Good Times’ and has influenced huge hits from Blondie’s hip-hop-inspired ‘Rapture’ to essentially Grandmaster Flash’s entire career. Fourteen minutes and thirty-fi...

This piece also featured in The Indiependent  here . Lou Reads! Source: blogspot.com Lou Reed has always been something of a fascination and an enigma to me. The Velvet Underground are one of my favourite bands, and a handful of Lou’s solo albums are among my most treasured. Whilst reading Mick Wall’s hastily penned biography Lou Reed: The Life , the stories behind two of his most famous songs, 'Venus in Furs' (from the Velvet Underground’s 1967 debut The Velvet Underground & Nico ) and 'Walk On the Wild Side' (from Bowie-produced 1972 solo album Transformer ) sparked my interest. Even the band’s name was inspired by a book! I had a lot of reading to do, it seemed. Legend has it that Lou Reed and John Cale found a copy of journalist Michael Leigh’s 1963 paperback Velvet Underground on the streets of New York and liked its title so much they decided to name their band after it. However, it was the book’s title that caught their attention, not so mu...