Freddie Heath was born in 1935, a couple of weeks after Elvis, on the other side of the Atlantic, in one of the northern districts of London. When English teenagers were gripped by an epidemic…
Eddy «The Chief» Clearwater & Los Straitjackets –…
One day, a black man in a feathered Indian headdress and four white guys in masks of Mexican wrestlers met... It sounds like the beginning of an unfunny joke or a forbidden fairy tale for…
Billy Fury – Treasure Island. Chapter 2
Liverpool is a port city, and therefore has its own specifics: if you don't work at the docks, you work on a ship. If you don't work here or there, then you're dying. Ronald Wycherly…
British rockabilly of the 1950s: Treasure Island. Chapter…
Few people know that rock appeared in the UK even before the Beatles. In the 1960s, the British would teach Americans how to play American music, but in the 1950s they taught themselves. First, Lonnie…
Willie Nelson – …And Then I Wrote: Redhead…
Whose hippie grandpa is climbing on stage to the colossuses: Cash, Jennings and Kristofferson, laughing into his curly beard? This is Willie Nelson, a tramp, a grass smoker and a regular guy of post-retirement age.…
Chris Isaak – Silvertone: He came to sing…
Eric Jacobsen (Jacobsen is a Scandinavian surname, read it however you want) already had a lot of experience producing the Lovin' Spoonful band when he knocked out some money for the fledgling Silvertone team from…
In memory of Kris Kristofferson. Part III: Mean…
"Don't look back, maybe something follows on your heels." Part I. Part II. A lanky guy in a brown leather jacket is dragging a guitar case, which is getting heavier by the minute, to a…
Hank Garland – Subtle Swing (1960): Doors to…
On whose shoulders are the giants standing? Chuck Berry's accompanists were great: bassist Willie Dixon wrote no less imperishable songs for the blues than Chuck did for rock and roll, and pianist Johnny Johnson composed…
John Fogerty – Blue Moon Swamp: Songs are…
"The Odyssey of Captain Blood" by Rafael Sabatini's fine pen outlined the situation of the Irish in the British Empire. The British used these negligent Celts until the Dutch brought blacks to the New World.…
Dark Jazz and what they wash it down…
Darkness has penetrated jazz for so long that it is no longer clear which of the musicians first turned onto the crooked path. Billie Holiday, in addition to the creepy "Strange Fruit", performed a number…
Songs that defeated Death
Lightning was already blazing in the west. Hitler's Germany, devouring helpless Europe, grew stronger like your pig on free beets. Vasily Ivanovich Lebedev-Kumach, a man of subtle mental attunement, felt the storm coming for a…
Johnny Horton: The Man who Found Alaska’s Gold
When Elvis Presley changed the face of American popular music, many country singers decided to make drastic changes in their work, playing a fresh genre called "rockabilly". Some abandoned the case after a couple of…
Landman (2024): The Nobility of Leeches
We once met a plane with a fuel tanker on a deserted Texas road, and the tanker won, it had more wheels with it. Once a Mexican artel tried to turn the valve of an…
Carl Perkins – Go Cat Go! (1996) when…
Any homo erectus from Earth and the surrounding planetoids appreciates Carl Perkins as a man whose musicality bordered on genius. The agrarian South of the United States remained impoverished even after the Depression, the cotton…
Yee-yee: rolling rock around the Eiffel Tower
While the Franks were godlessly plundering the Gallic population, the bosota were fighting for their lives by consuming plebeian frogs, decadent snails and nihilistic cheese with mold. In the best days, the toad carcass was…
Rock A-Doodle: A troubadour from a poultry farm
With the first cock song, the pigs will grunt, the burenki will mumble, the sheep will bleat, the pannochka will hide. The Chanticleer rooster is responsible for the sunrise with his rockabilly cry, which will…
Femme Fatales: Poison Ivy, Wendy O. Williams, Marianne…
What is a Woman? Kitty, bunny, sunny? Titian's Magdalene or Caravaggio's Medusa? Are the Venus of Willendorf and the Venus of Milo namesakes or the same person? Klara Zetkin - street or Communist? The antique…
Johnny Cash – Solitary Man: The Revelations of…
Tonight we're going to talk about men's music. Let's talk about possibly Johnny Cash's greatest album. "Solitary Man" became the third in the American Recordings series and the penultimate lifetime album for the artist. If…
Rock and Roll Valentine’s Day – the best…
Rock'n'roll can be cheerful and assertive, like a young man at the prom, hiding behind his bravado the fear of inviting a school sweetheart to dance. Rock'n'roll can be sarcastically aggressive, like a pack of…
JD McPherson – Nite Owls (2024): Owls are…
In 1917, the Yankees entered the First World War, in connection with which New Orleans was declared a "strategic port", and all the entertainment venues of the most musical city in the United States were…
David Lynch & Chrysta Bell – Cellophane Memories:…
David Lynch compared the ideas to fish: a minnow and a bream frolic in shallow river water, but they will have to dive into the depths of the ocean for unique specimens. Fished out into…
Ringo Starr – Look Up (2025): Cowboys and…
Keith Moon was an outrageous buffoon, Charlie Watts was a jazz dandy, John Bonham was the idol of the wolverines, and Ringo... Ringo was just Ringo. And it continues to be so when others have…
Elvis Presley – Pot Luck: The Pot Cooks
On the 90th anniversary of the King! Returning home on March 2, 1960, Elvis discovered how the face of show business was distorted in a leering grin. All the stars of rock and roll were…
Dance of the Vampires: A Bite on a…
In the film "Once upon a Time in Hollywood," Quentin Tarantino, in a peculiar buffoonish manner, confesses his love for the Dream Factory, but his second attempt after Inglourious Basterds to play in the glade…
Five Albums for Cinderella: A Christmas Story
Catholics, Lutherans and other schismatics have the custom of celebrating Christmas on the night of December 24 to December 25 according to the Julian calendar (the Russian Orthodox Church celebrates Christmas on the same days,…
Cactus Blossoms – Every Time I Think About…
They appeared in a town called Twin Peaks a quarter of a century after the mysterious disappearance of FBI agent Dale Cooper. They were previously spotted in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was there that they got…
Nick Lowe & Los Straightjackets – Indoor Safari:…
Nick Lowe, born in the English county of Surrey in 1949, began his musical career in 1967, organizing a group with a school friend Brinsley Schwartz with the unmemorable name Kippington Lodge. The hippie Era,…
Fallout (2024): From the great to the ridiculous,…
"The war... War never changes." - Ron Perlman groans eerily off-screen. In the frame, someone who has tightened his face with a gas mask is statically threatening with a militaristic helmet. The game in the…
Kassi Valazza – Knows Nothing: The Arizona Looking…
The desperate prehistoric girl Taffamai Metallumai invented the first alphabet, according to Rudyard Kipling. According to Lewis Carroll, the desperate Victorian girl Alice crawled into a rabbit hole without soap, where she gorged on mushrooms.…
Hellboy. Curse of the Hunchback: Down the Crooked…
A freight train at full speed goes off the rails to the raucous rockabilly Knees Shakin' Don Terry. A bald devil, an Asian woman, and a giant demon-possessed arachnid fly out of the carriage. A…
In memory of Kris Kristofferson. Part II: To…
"Blame the Stones for everything," Kris Kristofferson sarcastically sings, opening his first album with a mocking march (Part I about Chris). He almost quotes The Rolling Stones, mentioning, among other vices of society, the bored…
The Penguin (2024): Laying Low in Gotham
There is an eternal holiday in the city of Gotham. People here make up regularly and with imagination, and they come up with witty costumes for themselves. Because this holiday is Halloween. It would be…
Hillbilly Moon Explosion – Back In Time (2024)…
Switzerland is a compact, cozy and relatively neutral country. Multilingual Helvetians leisurely mold their leaky cheese and rivet their precise watches. And in the case of a spiritual impulse, they climb to the top and…
In memory of Kris Kristofferson. Part I. Me…
"I went to jail that night. And I dreamed of all the wines and all the single girls of this best of all possible worlds," sings Kris Kristofferson on his debut album, intertwining Voltaire's mockery…
The Millions – Hot! Hot! Hot! You can’t…
This is not New Orleans, playing the saxophone in the St. Petersburg courtyard requires more courage than fiddling in the courtyard of Odessa. The first five years are especially difficult, until you manage to blow…
Alex & The Rainshots – Time Is Nigh:…
Seventy years have passed since the change of epochs and the beginning of the decline of the Soviet Russian Empire. An absurd little man in an embroidered shirt rhythmically taps his shoe on the podium,…
Dion Dimucci: A cat on a slippery roof.…
The Dutch ousted the Algonquins in order to lose themselves in the tsunami of Catholics and Jews. Take a look at the map: The Bronx is the testicles of Manhattan, a piece of land bounded…
The Karovas Milkshake – Now It Was Said…
Linguist and novelist Anthony Burgess wrote his knizhonka "Clockwork Orange" in 1962, after visiting Leningrad. Andy Warhol, famous for his coloring books, first seized on the violent pseudo-dystopia, but Stanley Kubrick turned the story into…
The Maple Blues Band – Let’s Go: Maple…
Old people don't belong here. This is a place for mature gentlemen who know their business. Canada is a province torn between two hegemons: the British Crown has formal power over it, and the United…
Marlowe: Gentlemen preferred blondes
The craft of a private investigator disposes to adventures: here and the search for pets, and the observation of spouses on the slippery path of adultery, and the development of a film with evidence of…
VIA Raznosoli – The first covid: Our hangout…
In the house on the corner of Deribasovskaya-Richelevskaya, grandmother's ghost is still clacking with an ectoplasmic jaw. If the invaders do not come, their weighty relics will beat the wolves of the Circumpolar region. Having…
Elvis Presley – Spinout: Diamonds for Hollywood’s Dictatorship
What happened to Elvis after 1977 is described in the films "People in Black" and Bubba Ho-Tep, which is why it is not an example of a more talented story than about his life before…
Dominic Halpin – Shade Of Blue: Plush rockabilly…
The Milky Way galaxy is rich in rock'n'roll for every taste. People with fine taste, young men with broken hearts, and director David Lynch like Roy Orbison. Perverts, psychopaths and Wednesday Addams experience sweet convulsions…
Paul Fenech – Demon Seed Rising (2022): You…
And there will be a night when the rubber scarecrows of cheap horror movies will come to life and the ketchup will turn to blood. And the screenwriters, brilliant in their stupidity, will crawl out…
Elvis (2022): The Confessions of Karabas
It's a quiet Nevada night. A rare coyote will run to the middle of the Mojave. Only in the distance there are golden flashes, and then it's not lightning, then the city of Las Vegas…
Ghost Radio – Something Better For You: Ashes,…
There are ghosts with a motor, and ghosts with affectionate names settle in the old radio. Verunchik walks along the streets, squeezed by gloomy Chelyabinsk high-rise buildings, and even the winds part before her. The…
Sea Sea Rider (2022) Surf Tribute To The…
There is no surfing on Lake Shartash. Only stupid peasants dip their ill-fated larvae into the ice hole. There is surfing off the coast of California. There, boys who do not know sheepskin coats dip…
Diddley Dogs – Dawg Days Are Here (2022):…
Covering the work of friends is a hell of a complicated business. It is necessary to maintain a balance between outright flattery and undisguised malice. I'll try to be objective, despite my infernal sense of…
Dave Alvin – Eleven Eleven: Eleven Lives on…
Dave Alvin, born on 11/11/1955, recorded his eleventh solo album with the characteristic name Eleven Eleven in 2011. In numerology, the prime number 11 is considered very powerful, but we will leave such interpretations to…
Billie Holiday – Graphic Novel: Beautiful and Bitter…
There is a video recording of the song Strange Fruit, made in 1959. There, Billie Holiday, standing at the threshold of Death, as if Her faithful messenger, plunges the receptive viewer/listener into the inky darkness…
Why Women Kill, Season 2: Plump Devils of…
The elite of society is most successful at pretending to be the elite of society. While husbands with dignified gestures drop cigar ash on the weak of this world, wives are busy with other important…
Imelda May – 11 Past The Hour (2021):…
Ireland is an island green with the magic of the Hill People, full of the manuscripts of great writers. The island of the first slaves of the British Empire, the explosions in Ulster and Catholic…
Rusty Sharks – Sexy Demons (2021): Dr. Caligari’s…
The leaden waters of the Baltic Sea are washed ashore by sprats in cans, the Peipsi tribes by ferries. The Peipsi tribes embark on ruinous raids on the "glass houses" and pubs of the nearest…
In memory of Dusty Hill
This story is as old as a turtle in a New York sewer: in the sixties, walking with long hair in Texas meant learning a cartoon ostrich run from local coyotes. Contrary to the opinion…
Perry Mason (2020): In the Service of a…
In the 1930s, the grass was greener and the air cleaner, for objective reasons. On both sides of the Pacific Ocean, the USSR and the USA built, in their own way, colossal powers. Prohibition and…
Jimbo Mathus & Andrew Bird – These 13:…
Sometimes they come back. A little Corsican sets sail from Elba to bring his Old Guard to ruin. The Ouroboros, imagining himself to be a puppy, grabs his own tail with his teeth. Rotted corpses…
Tom Jones – Surrounded By Time (2021): Sir…
A working-class town in south Wales is a great place to have a decaliter in the pub after a hard day, another local beer parody for the return of King Arthur. A place where Kruner's…
The Meteors – Skull’n’bones (2021): In the terrible…
The children of Perestroika learned the horror of impending capitalism thanks to pay-cable television, which broadcast cartoons about an echid mouse, an anarcho-syndicalist rabbit gnawing carrots and a tired basset hound. Those who had done…
Tami Nielson – Chikaboom Deluxe (2021): The Booming…
"A bootleg full of surprises" is what you can call this boot-shaped island state in Oceania, although some prefer the traditional New Zealand. Maori dance brutally here, Kiwis sneak mercilessly at the worm in the…
Ratched (Ratched Sister): Sisters are not what they…
The old profurset, which was drunk back in the days of Prohibition, contains a motel where moths with cameras flew through the left wing. Sensation: a special copy will soon arrive at a fashionable hotel…
Vivita & The Sufferings – Seven Nails In…
It's not easy to find a good witch. In the old days, even the coals did not have time to cool down, as the venerable crowd dragged a fresh charmer, suspected of eating toad broth…
Trust (2018) – Take care of your ears…
Sardonically bright sun, sarcastically Pinkfloyd's "Mopeu" - the scenery of an ancient tragedy, where the pagan rascality of the rich and hangers-on in a Californian villa turns into a nightmarish farce: Gordon, the manager and…
The Shakers – Romantic Fools (2020): Captain Vrungel…
Who is this guy with the Clarkkent glasses? What kind of cheeky trio is with him? The guitarist shows that smile that hangs in the air for a long time after his departure, the implacable…
The Swamp Shakers – Don’t Wanna Miss (2019)…
And let the British think that the greatest detective lived in London, at 221b Baker Street, any thoughtful viewer has long known that the best Holmes in the world lives at 22 Yauniela Street in…
Alex & Diamond Hands – Flyin’ Up (2020)…
The children of the space power dreamed of flying into space. Not because it was rich and prestigious - the children wanted to see the moon up close, they firmly knew that Solaris was only…
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel: something is broken in…
Shhh... 1958. Now you know the PIN code of my bank card. What do Odessa of the Ukrainian SSR and New York of the USA have in common? The Jews. And, although Aunt Faya from…
3 Legends of Cycobilly – Strychnine, Ghouls, Graveyard…
The night wind mercilessly throws raindrops through the black windows, the branches dance in a frenzy, trying to bare themselves, throwing off the disgusting dresses of foliage. It's like they can hear some other kind…
Dion – Blues With Friends (2020): one hundred…
Paul McCartney is dead. That's what Tim Harper said in 1969. And even Paul found it difficult to get away with it: there are dozens of proofs of this on the cover of Sergeant Pepper.…
Dave Alvin – The Third Mind (2020): Lysergic…
By 1969, psychedelics began to lose ground, succumbing to the onslaught of heavy rock and heavy drugs. Tim Leary, the main prophet and consumer of acid, is running for governor of California with Irish zeal…
Bloodshot Bill – Get Loose Or Get Lost…
Chew! What kind of wild sounds are shaking the old barn on this stuffy night? Did old man Ebenezer's lawn mower finally get to the owner? Or did the Texas Friendship chainsaw run over the…
Project Blue Book: The X-Files before the X-Files
No, it's not the moon... Not a reflection of a light bulb in a dark window... Sometimes it resembles a saucer from my grandmother's tea set, sometimes it resembles Comrade Fidel's cigar. This Is An…
Hair High – Hair High (2004): School secrets…
Night is a great time to rummage in the dump of consciousness. Last year's delirious delirium, images of a three-day binge, unspoken idiotic jokes - there is a use for everything, you just have to…
The Sparks Boys – Upside Down (2019): Rock-upside-down-roll
The night capital... Magomayev sings inaudibly in the ever-fading sky. Leviathans of socialist realism, golems of Zurab Rkatsiteli, temples risen from decay scratch the clouds. Tiny clubs, pubs and eateries bravely lean against the footsteps…
Messer Chups – Don’t Say Cheese (2020): from…
In those alien seas where the rays of heaven cannot penetrate the shroud of sargasso, monsters live in the obsidian-black depths. From the muddy Neva River through the strong "Baltic" they go to these waters…
Billy Don Burns – The Country Blues (2020):…
Bad things happen at night west of the Rio Grande. Descendants of the Aztecs are trudging across the sands of Sonora to Arizona, happy yuppies are returning from their Mexican holidays with "powdered" noses, and…
Miller’s Crossing (1990): It’s not in the hat
The night calls and repels, cradles and scares. How many shades of darkness will the mortal eye discern? How much darkness will his heart contain? In the very heart of this darkness live ugly greedy…
Colter Wall – Songs Of The Plains (2018):…
There are a lot of holes in the black tent of the old woman of the Night. Whose greedy little eyes are watching through these gaps for a homeless flock of wagons huddled around a…
Nick Waterhouse (2019): The Canzones of the Caribbean…
It's just cold-and sometimes such cold nights happen... Sleet rushes to warm up, hiding under the collar, but more often, with a cry of "the Russians are coming!", it dies on the sidewalk. The dim…
Hey Good Lookin’ (1982) – if only Salvador…
The full moon is a time of strange, cozy nightmares, sometimes taking on cinematic forms. Animation is the freest and craziest of these forms. I would call Ralph Bakshi one of the craziest and most…
Unrealizable Grease Dream, rockabilly from the USSR (1987-1992)
The cold wind brings back memories, ruffles the fur on the back of his neck. He whispers terrible spells: glasnost-perestroyka. It's 1987 outside the Delorean window, Teddy Bear is just preparing a sledgehammer for the…
Moscow Beatballs – Jazz Deformation: some information about…
Dark is the best time for dangerous dancing, Moon Dogs! This is what a journalist from a black-and-white film tells you, stubble, gallons of coffee and smoke add weight to his words. Artie Shaw's "Nightmare"…
Mondo Harp: Harp’s Adventures in the Bermuda Triangle
The warm Darkness outside the window gently reminds of baths with virgin blood, dried toads and other pleasant things... Today we have Messer Chups with us, (in the past) people with refined taste and... certain…
Red Hot (1993): Youth, Love, Rock and Roll,…
Good midnight, Moon Dogs! It's time to howl at the stars and about the cinema! Since the Cold War, Hollywood movie companies have been pelting their viewers with images of "evil Russians" like monkeys with…
Zippers – Would You Love Me (2019), rockabilly…
Sultry blizzard night, Moon Dogs! Prepare the undercoat, today we will go to the Arctic. Norilsk... A city besieged by the stupid walkers of General Zugunder... The strings of the balalaika snap in the cold,…
Ghost Radio – No Time For Fun (2019),…
Good midnight, Moon Dogs! Somewhere south of my domain, but north of the Rio Grande, Chelyabinsk, the city of revived pipes, lurks. This is where the Ghost Radio, Ghost Radio, a rockabilly band unique to…