VIA PRESS RELEASE | The Go-Betweens are one of the most beloved and influential Australian groups of all-time and were the quintessential cult band. Throughout their hugely acclaimed career they sustained an unparalleled artistic consistency which year by year matched the very best of their contemporaries.

We are pleased to announce that their three Beggars Banquet albums will be made available individually on vinyl for the first time in over 30 years. The records were remastered in 2019 for the second volume of Domino’s G Stands For Go-Betweens Anthology, and will also be available on CD.

The albums were recorded in what could be called the band’s “London Years”—when they lived and recorded in the city. Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express (1986) and Tallulah (1987) are studio albums, while Fountains Of Youth, catches the group in imperious form at the Town and Country Club in May 1987.

Many of the songs for 16 Lovers Lane (1988) were written at this time, before the band returned to Sydney to record the album. The majestic sun-filled “Streets Of Your Town” was the first single off the record.

Formed in Brisbane in 1978, Grant McLennan and Robert Forster were two Queensland University students with a passion for films, mid-Sixties Bob Dylan, and the New York punk scene. They both sang, played guitar, and wrote songs. The set up of the band with two independent singer-songwriters at the helm was an unusual one, but in this case, it worked beautifully. Robert’s edgy, dark romantic compositions were perfectly balanced by Grant’s highly melodic, pop poetic contributions.

Read More »

Celebrating Ian Anderson on his 79th birthday. —Ed.

Sometimes you amaze yourself. Or perhaps I should say stupefy, dumbfound, perplex, befuddle, mystify, outrage, and downright disgust yourself. Such was the case when I recently ran over a “little person” in an abortive attempt to pass the DC driver’s test. I never saw him; in my defense, he was a very little person. More like a half-little person. And such was also the case when I decided to review Jethro Tull’s Stand Up, solely as a joke and a chance to pan defenseless Englishman Ian Anderson, who, for some inexplicable reason, stands poised on one leg while playing the flute, like a hippie flamingo.

Only to discover, horror of horrors, I actually like the damn thing. Who was it that said, “He came to mock but remained to pray”? Because I’ve always considered Jethro Tull, despite a handful of songs I truly like, ridiculous, due largely to Anderson’s flute, an instrument (in my humble opinion) suitable only for tossing out the window. What’s more, Jethro Tull always struck me as fairly dim. I clearly remember thinking, when they put out 1972’s Thick as a Brick, that it wasn’t the brightest move, touting one’s low IQ on one’s own album cover.

I picked 1969’s Stand Up for the historical reason that it includes the song “Fat Man.” A Facebook friend gave me the idea, and I fully intend to unfriend her. A short history: Jethro Tull (they filched their name from a pioneer of the English Agricultural Revolution) was formed in 1967 as a blues-rock outfit in Luton, Bedfordshire, a town once famed for hat-making. The concrete hat was invented there, and the resulting epidemic of neck injuries very quickly put an end to hat-making in Luton.

Read More »

VIA PRESS RELEASE | Thirty years after Butthole Surfers crashed into the mainstream with their landmark 1996 album Electriclarryland, Capitol Record Club commemorates the anniversary with a definitive new collector’s edition celebrating one of alternative rock’s most daring and influential releases.

Available August 28, this exclusive Capitol Record Club edition presents Electriclarryland as a newly remastered 2LP 45 RPM set, mastered for vinyl by Levi Seitz, giving the album’s explosive dynamics, dense sonic textures, and production greater depth and clarity. The album is now available for pre-order.

Released in the summer of 1996, Electriclarryland introduced a broader audience to the Butthole Surfers’ singular universe while refusing to compromise its gloriously unhinged identity.

Anchored by the unlikely alternative radio smash “Pepper,” the album remains one of the defining alternative albums of the 1990s and a testament to the fearless creativity that made the band one of underground music’s most influential acts.

The expanded 30th-anniversary edition gathers four rare recordings from the Electriclarryland era. Included are “Hybrid,” originally released as a non-album track on international editions of the “Pepper” single; soundtrack contributions “Pottery” and “Whatever (I Had a Dream)”; and the previously unreleased “Valuable Charcoal,” making this the most comprehensive vinyl edition of the album to date.

Read More »

You know what’s harder to find than the ghost of Lord Haw-Haw chatting up Harry Styles in a brawler pub in green and pleasant mugger-happy Croydon? A good British noise rock band. Names get batted about—Fudge Tunnel, Vile Imbeciles, Jockstrap, Wales’ Mandy, Indiana—but none of them sound like noise rock to me. Frankly, they sound like ponces.

But seek, and ye shall find, and there is an authentic noise rock band in the UK, and they hail from Cardiff, Wales. Mclusky (Andy Falkous on vocals and guitar, Jonathan Chapple on bass and vocals, and Matthew Harding on drums) are my idea of a noise rock band, insofar as they sound like the Midwestern bands (Cows, Killdozer, Scratch Acid/the Jesus Lizard and Big Black, although Steve Albini’s drum machine fetish always put me off) that changed my life during noise rock’s Golden Age, which dates from the early eighties to the late nineties, or up the present day if you include Pissed Jeans and Mclusky. Flipper and early No Trend are honorary members.

That’s not very many bands, and the reason is that I’m a noise rock purist. To my way of thinking, a great noise rock band must include the following: 1) a rumbling bass that makes you feel like a claw hammer is removing your tonsils, but in a good way. 2) Impossibly loud guitars that stretch the limits of feedback and bad attitude. 3) Vocalists who are either hilariously foghorn loud lyrics geniuses (Killdozer’s Michael Gerald), criminally insane bugle blasters (Cows’ Shannon Selberg), or not quite as criminally insane live show menaces (the Jesus Lizards’ David Yow).

Read More »

We’ve closed TVD’s HQ for our annual summer break. While we’re away, why not fire up our Record Store Locator app and visit one of your local indie record stores?

Perhaps there’s an interview, review, or feature you might have missed? Catch up, and we’ll see you back here Monday, 8/10.

VIA PRESS RELEASE | Sony Music Vision is proud to announce that Queen Budapest, the first Western stadium rock show to take place behind the Iron Curtain, and the final filmed Queen live performance, will be presented in cinemas and IMAX worldwide beginning October 7 through Trafalgar Releasing.

Queen Budapest will be released to mark the 40th anniversary of this pivotal moment in the band’s history, and the film has been meticulously restored in 4K from the original filmed 35mm footage by Sir Peter Jackson’s Park Road Post Production facility in New Zealand, with newly remixed audio from the original multitrack recordings to deliver the most immersive presentation of the performance to date.

Captured on July 27, 1986, at Budapest’s Népstadion, during the band’s “The Magic Tour,” the concert was a groundbreaking moment, as Queen became the first Western rock band to perform behind the Iron Curtain during a period of profound cultural and political change. In addition to 80,000 tickets selling out, an estimated 45,000 people listened to the group outside, and some fans had travelled from as far away as Russia and Poland to see the concert.

The show was professionally filmed on 35 mm movie film by 17 of Hungary’s best cameramen. The gear employed included 17 cameras and 25 miles of film, which was all that was available in the country, and the Hungarian government approved the entire operation, which was a first for a Communist State.

Read More »

VIA PRESS RELEASE | Soon has been a long time coming. The new album from Scott Fagan has been some 55 years in the making. Its songs, all drawn from the 1971 Broadway rock opera of the same name that Fagan conceived and wrote with songwriting partner Joe Kookoolis, were originally intended as the follow-up to his classic 1968 debut, South Atlantic Blues, but fate intervened.

A radical call-to-arms against the complacency of the modern world, and a tone poem about art, radicalism, commerce, and corruption, the rock opera told an age-old story of an artist forced to make a devil’s bargain between their principles and success. It drew on Fagan’s own experiences in the music industry, and featured him in the lead role, alongside Richard Gere, Barry Bostwick (later the lead in Grease and The Rocky Horror Show), Joe Butler (of Lovin’ Spoonful), Vicki Sue Robinson, and Peter Allen.

The original Broadway production, subject to creative meddling that compromised its creators’ vision, closed the day after its opening. A year later, it was restaged in Los Angeles for a brief two-week run. Then Fagan’s opus was lost to time. The album was shelved, never to be recorded or heard. Until now.

Recorded over seven days in July 2025 at Sam Phillips Recording Service in Memphis, a hallowed studio that has hosted Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Alex Chilton, and The Cramps among others, the sessions found the now 80-year-old singer-songwriter working with a crack Memphis rhythm section—drummer Terence Clark (Brandi Carlisle, Keith Urban), guitarist Steve Selvidge (The Hold Steady, North Mississippi All Stars) and keyboardist Rick Steff (Cat Power, Dexy’s Midnight Runners, Lucero).

Read More »

Celebrating Kenny Burrell on his 95th birthday. —Ed.

In March of 1958 producer and Prestige Records owner Bob Weinstock organized a session with two up-and-comers in a very fertile scene. Kenny Burrell & John Coltrane was the result, pairing one of the most consistent guitarists in Modern Jazz with the now long renowned tenor saxophonist. It took over five years for those recordings to hit the retail racks via the Prestige subsidiary New Jazz, but the contents have been reissued numerous times since, reinforcing the high level of play. 

Kenny Burrell & John Coltrane is certainly a notable album. While Coltrane had played with guitarists before, this set is the only studio album to feature him leading (in this instance, co-leading) a band with that instrument (Wes Montgomery did join Coltrane’s sextet featuring Eric Dolphy for some West Coat live dates in 1961, even playing the Monterey Jazz Festival, but any tapes of those performances have yet to surface).

That this album sat in the vaults for half a decade will understandably lead some to assume it’s a lesser recording, but Weinstock had amassed quite a bit of Coltrane studio material while he had him under contract, sessions methodically issued as the saxophonist’s star continued to rise, often with Coltrane posthumously designated as leader.

To expand a bit, Coltrane and Burrell do play together in a sextet for three tracks on The Cats, a 1957 recording released in ’59. Issued as a leaderless date (sometimes credited to the Prestige All Stars), it sure sounds like it was conceived as a Tommy Flanagan session; the other two tracks feature the pianist in trio with bassist Doug Watkins and drummer Louis Hayes (trumpeter Idrees Sulieman completes the sextet).

Read More »