Alan Parsons – "It Was Pure Convenience"

So Alan Parsons tells Jo Kendall, looking back on the opportunity that took him from EMI lab lackey to Abbey Road engineering icon. But his production work with The Beatles, Hollies, Pink Floyd, Pilot, Al Stewart, Ambrosia and more wasn't the end of the story. When Parsons met musician and producer Eric Woolfson, his creativity translated into the enormously successful Alan Parsons Project, and a long-lasting solo career to sit alongside his Art & Science Of Sound Recording educational programme and occasional forays as not just a technical wizard, but a real life one, too. Oh, oh, oh, it's magic, you know...

AUTEUR TO AUTHOR

Luke Haines writes the shuk out of rock'n'roll Cale'n'arty

THE ENGINE ROOM

The unsung heroes who helped forge modern music

UNDER THE RADAR

Artists, bands, and labels meriting more attention

Attack Mode

Nottingham duo broaden their musical horizons without losing their edge on masterful 12th.

Flights Of Fancy

Frenchman's expansive ninth album wistfully yearns for the 20th century.

Of The Highest Disorder

Parenthood and politics interweave with ace pop as a revered talent re-engages.

Memory Lane

Northern Irish icon has a blast reworking the music of his teens.

DAVID QUANTICK LIKES

To write a column for Record Collector. Yay He's gonna dress you up in his love

MACON BLACK

Ian McCann plays old sounds to new ears

MUSIC TO VISIT

Bob Stanley carries pop's baggage everywhere.  In search of the King's forgotten 45s.

Not Forgotten

Tom Verlaine and Lisa Marie Presley are fondly recalled

Diggin' For GOLD

Our regular look at the more arcane corners of record collecting. Includes Label Of Love

VALUE ADDED FACTS

\"RELAXED, IMPROVISED MUSIC, DEFYING CATEGORY\"

The Collector

Retired plumber Stephen George tells us, \"My aunt first encouraged me to collect records 62 years ago and I never stopped.

Flashback

With a 17-album retrospective on the shelves, Daryl Easlea catches up with Leee John, the flamboyant leader of glossy 80s pop-soul act Imagination whose camp aesthetic shouldn't preclude their entry to the post-Chic pantheon.

Living Doll

Sam Brown, the singer-songwriter behind 1989 Top 5 hit (and attendant LP of the same title) Stop!, is back with a new album despite having lost the ability to sing in 2007. She tells Charles Donovan how she managed it.

SNAP!

At the height of The Jam's success, the band commissioned 21-year-old freelance photographer Neil \"Twink\" Tinning to follow them around both in the studio and on the road and take reportage photos. The resulting shots appear in Rick Buckler and Zoe Howe's new book, The Jam 1982, which documents a year when the band were arguably the biggest in Britain, their splenetically intense gigs attended by a fanatical fanbase. Before an autumn tour taking in five Wembley Arena shows in December of that year, Paul Weller, 24, announced the band would split as \"I'd hate us to end up old and embarrassing like so many other groups do\". Here, Rick Buckler (left) takes us through a selection of Twink's best shots from a year when The Jam seemed to rule the Modern World.

Tales Of The Unexpected

Luke Haines' 90s infamy revisited.

Colin MacIntyre – No man is an island

Mull Historical Society mainstay Colin MacIntyre lifts the lid on his vinyl reissues and box set

Iggy Pop – "I Can Take a Punch"

There are die-hard totemic musicians, and there's Iggy Pop, so reflective of rock's primal urges and irrepressible energies he could write the book and supply most of the images. His "ribald ruffian" of a new album, Every Loser, shows an artist still willing to take risks and not succumb, aged 75, to notions of growing old gracefully. Five decades since Raw Power, The World's Greatest Living Rock'N'Roll Star (TM) talks about that feral classic, working with Bowie then and, four years later, in Berlin, his surprise visit from Robert Plant, the nature of addiction, inventing punk, the impermanence of existence, oh, and his beloved cockatoo... "At certain points there are flare-ups," he warns Chris Roberts

Iggy Pop Special: Funtime

Credited to Iggy & The Stooges, Raw Power is, to some ears (usually bleeding), the greatest rock album of the early 70s, sheer sonic violence further enlivened by bids to "search and destroy". More than The Stooges' previous two albums, it captures the puressence of rock'n'roll while setting fire to the rulebook. With a little help from James Williamson, their guitarist, Johnnie Johnstone tells the story of its brief yet volatile making and impact following its release a half-century ago this month. And then, on p88, RC is granted an audience with the mighty Iggy Pop in which he traces his career from the band's 1973 landmark to his new solo album, Every Loser, concluding with a Stooges/Pop discography on p97. All aboard.

Jukebox Heroes

Continuing our ongoing survey of unusual formats, Simon Wright looks at the rise and fall of jukebox EPs and 'Little LPs'

THE WHO, WHAT, WHERE AND HOW OF 'WHY'

The song Why has a significant place in music history because it was one of the tracks the fledgling Beatles recorded with Tony Sheridan in 1961 before making a recording debut in their own right. But few people know of an earlier, 1958 recording of the song made by Sheridan, which recently surfaced on a 10\" acetate. Beatles scholar Hans Olof Gottfridsson tells the story of a song that would later attain immortality by association.

33 1/3 minutes with...Jake Bugg

A prodigious talent, Jake Bugg burst out of Nottingham aged 18 with his self-titled debut album in 2012. Featuring timeless rock’n’roll hits Lightning Bolt and Two Fingers, it saw Bugg championed by Noel Gallagher and starting a fascinating career that has led to albums produced by Rick Rubin and The Black Keys singer Dan Auerbach. After 2021’s poppier Saturday Night Sunday Morning returned Bugg to the Top 3, his debut has recently been reissued as a deluxe set adding demos and a London Royal Albert Hall show. Bugg tells RC of rediscovering teenage demos, hanging out in Rick Rubin’s garden, and getting walloped with indie stars at football.

auteur to author

Luke Haines writes the shuk out of rock'n'roll It's all about the 'tude

david quantick likes

...to write a column for Record Collector. Yay Remake/Remodel - or re-record?

mac on black

Fan or obsessive? Ian McCann long since crossed the divide

music to visit

Bob Stanley carries pop's baggage everywhere Ark of the lost Raiders

Not Forgotten

Keith Levene 1957-2022 - Keith Levene was, in a literal sense, hugely instrumental in the formation of punk and post-punk. As a teenage member of The Clash, he persuaded Joy Strummer to join the band. He taught Viv Albertine of The Slits to play guitar, and alongside Jah Wobble and John Lydon, he was responsible for some of the pinnacles of the post-punk era, defining achievements such as 1979's Metal Box, a jagged, silver monument which still stands, Shardlike, casting its long shadow.