DJTees Blog

Given our general disinterest in Xmas. I really don’t understand the manic attitude about receiving a t-shirt or anything else before the 25th. Occasionally this reaches hysterical proportions and you can tell people have forgotten that there is a time after Xmas and none of this really, truly matters. Not our regulars of course, who tend to be more calm and keep things in perspective. Being sick this time last year after having a stroke and being in hospital for over 3 months gives you a perspective on the festive season. Thankfully I’m home this year, and though quite disabled...

One of the things I love about doing this is the degree of sharing of recommendations and experiences that get shared. I have so many people writing to me with their suggestions for great records I might have missed and others asking for tips on great largely overlooked records. It’s heart-warming in a world that so often lacks positivity and kindness. So in that spirit I thought I should suggest 12 records that have sometimes escaped general acclaim which perhaps you haven’t heard at all or for a long time because I know I value such guidance. There’s so many...

When I poured over album sleeves, I always craved photos of the guitarists to see what equipment they were using. It often defined the band. For example Thin Lizzy were defined by those twin Les Paul’s. Deep Purple by Blackmore’s Stratocaster.It was fascinating, especially when you considered how crucial to the music was the guitar. When I was young I didn’t really appreciate that what I liked about, say, Rory Gallagher, was the way the guitar sounded as much as how he played it. It was the same with Johnny Winter. That cutting trebly tone was so distinctive and of...

I don’t know when I acquired this particular instinct but I think I’ve had it since I was about 16. Perhaps you acquired it too. I still have it, even though I know it’s silly. What is it? The belief that if an album has a long song it will be good. I must have picked this up early but if a record had a 15-minute suite I had to have it. The first time this affliction reared its head was on that copy of Meddle and Echoes. A whole side! I suppose I thought it gave me something different...

I have to be honest, we’re at that time of year when I wish Xmas was all over along with its awkward cousin, New Year. It gets in the way of normal life and frankly, I don’t even know what it is. Who or what is Santa? How does buying cheap aftershave or socks for someone you barely know or like have anything to do with Jesus? And how did it become a national materialistic orgasm that lasts a month? Haven’t we done this before? Can’t we recall previous disappointments? Do we have to do it all again while looking...

Someone asked me a great question the other day. They asked which obscure proggy albums from my collection would I heartily recommend? Straight away I countered that one person’s obscurity is another's mainstream and it was hard to know what was obscure and what wasn’t. I’m sure knowledgeable rock people such as yourselves would find things less obscure than most.But that being said, I knew what they were pushing at.I can go very obscure but I don’t think people are looking for a Cyrkle record or one by Grapefruit, which would be hard to get. What they were really asking...

I don’t know if you’ve seen the Beatles Get Back documentary, but there’s a point at which Paul crafts Get Back out of the ether. He’s just strumming some ideas, one minute it’s not there, the next, like a ghost manifesting itself in ectoplasm, it has appeared as the riff we know so well. It is art appearing before our eyes and is quite remarkable to witness.As familiar as some music is, it’s worth remembering there was a time when it didn’t exist and it needed birthing. This was the case when I was watching Brian May talking about Bohemian...

Popular unpopular bands. I am always interested in those second division bands whose name you’d see in the music press twice a year, who toured all the time but never enjoyed big enough sales for chart success, but it was a guaranteed great gig.One such band was Ace, Paul Carrack's band. They were actually the very first band I saw live. It was at Middlesbrough Town Hall, though I can barely remember it. I recall I was a bit intimidated by being out at night in the adult world. Of course they had one big hit single in ‘How Long’...

I was listening to an unofficial French double album of Camel’s live performances from 1972 and 1974 and I absolutely loved it. Sometimes I forget how good a band is, especially one that I listened a lot to a long time ago.Anyway, I was thinking while listening to ‘Homage To The God Of Light’ which was recorded live at the Marquee in October 1974 that, my God, this is 50 years old. 50... I don’t know about you but I couldn’t have conceived of 2024 when I was 13. It seemed impossibly distant. But here we are. It’s a very...

If you had to, could you name all the members of any rock band of the last 30 years? We can all name people here and there but rarely can name everyone in a group like we could with Led Zeppelin for example, back in the 1970s.Somehow, things got more anonymous and in the process we lost so much. I was thinking about this the other day when listening to Wings Over America which features Jimmy McCullogh, who played guitar. I like his sound and of course, he played on the final Stone The Crows album, as well as being...

I live on the west coast of Scotland, have lived in Scotland on and off for nearly 25 years and am very fond of it. If you look into Scotland’s contribution to rock, it’s much bigger than you might imagine for a small country.There’s greats like Sensational Alex Harvey Band, of course and Dunfermiline’s Nazareth. Jimmy Dewar was Glaswegian, as is Maggie Bell and Stone The Crows. Brian Robertson, formerly of Thin Lizzy, is from Renfrewshire as is blues master Miller Anderson.The idiosyncratic Ivor Cutler was from Govan which isn’t far from Maryhill which is where Donovan actually hails. Mark...

This week I was watching Rick Beato interviewing Alan Parsons who is now in his 70s. A remarkable man who must be one of the few producers to go on to have hit records as an artist. Though he was beaten to it by Norman ‘Hurricane’ Smith, who was also a Pink Floyd producer, like Alan.His insights were fascinating, having engineered at Abbey Road and worked with The Beatles and Pink Floyd, being the engineer on Dark Side Of The Moon and others, like Ambrosia, an American prog band, and Al Stewart’s Year Of The Cat.But it’s his time with...

If you are from an area of the country that has a distinct identity, back in the day and even now, to a degree in these more homogeneous days, there was much reflected pleasure when someone from your area became famous or, perhaps more pertinently, became renowned. I know this was the case in the UK, but I’m sure it was in other countries.Being from the northeast of England, which 50 years ago was still a place of hard, polluting industry with its own character defined by its bonhomie and its fondness for a good time, it felt like anyone from...

One of our most popular categories of shirts is guitarists. It’s no surprise, I suppose, if my passion for guitar music is anything to judge by. I don’t completely know where this comes from really. These days, kids have their parents and grandparents’ record collection to mine and explore to inspire them but my generation didn’t. We did have mid-60s Beatles albums before they got what my mother declared to be ‘too weirdy’ after that the only guitar I was exposed to was Big Jim Sullivan on Tom Jones live album from Caesars' Palace. Little did I know that a...

Posters for old gigs are fascinating; a glimpse into our collective cultural past. And in this digital age, they seem romantically analogue. Imagine spending hours of time creating a detailed glorious piece of art as an advert for a gig, who’s on and where it is and how much a ticket costs and where to buy it from. This for something which is designed to be disposable and apparently irrelevant after the show. But that's what happened with artists like Rick Griffin.Posters and handbills became an important expression of the counterculture. They were very much an American thing, but we...