Results for “ted”

Where soul and R&B are concerned, Ace’s mostly male A&R team makes make no secret of its total admiration for the music of the fairer sex. We like to release as much of it as we can, as often as we can. If you don’t believe us, take an in depth look at the Ace website or our printed catalogue. You’ll find the titles of dozens of great compilations by some of soul’s foremost females from the past 50 years. That great declaration of admiration made by the Impressions and Jerry Butler almost 50 years ago is as true today as it was in the mid-60s – “The Woman’s Got Soul”.

The women we love recorded up north, down south and from coast to coast – as can be seen from the cross-section of releases just across the page – and always with an excellence to match and often exceed their male counterparts. There are no two ways about it, when it comes to singing about “the good, the bad, the hurt”, women have never been the weaker sex in soul music.

We could probably fill a whole edition of Sure Shots with fantastic packages by our soul girls, and still have plenty left over for the next one. Rather than do that, we’ll tantalise you with a representative selection, and leave the rest of the voyage of discovery to you. It doesn’t matter if you prefer your lady soulsters to sound sweet’n’teeny like Nella Dodds, sassy’n’saucy like Millie Jackson or gritty’n’gospel like Mitty Collier, we definitely have lots to suit you.

Let’s hear it for the girls!

The mod is an important figure in the world of youth cults. Originally emerging from darkened Soho basements of the late 1950s, they have continued to reappear to such an extent that they are now a permanent fixture on the cultural landscape. In 2012 mod culture could claim the winner of the Tour De France and the leading actor in one of the year’s highest profile films. While the music associated with mod is now wide and varied, you have to look back to its roots as a club culture to see where its heart lies.

The original mod protagonists could be found listening to the sharpest late 50s jazzNew York could provide, and we pay tribute to this mythical beast with our “Mod Jazz” series, which now runs to seven volumes, each one full to the brim with a bluesy jazzy mixture heated up with a touch of Latin.

The mods then moved on to American soul and R&B. These sounds were initially brought to them by DJs such as Roger Eagle and Guy Stevens and then by sharp record labels – usually the UK versions of American greats such as Chess or Atlantic, but also Guy Stevens’ British Sue logo.

Mods went away for a few years but their legacy lingered on in Northern Soul and southern clubbing, before a revival based around the Jam and Quadrophenia led to a new generation of mohair-clad lovers of jazz, R&B and soul. It is this legacy that is touched on in compilations such as “Looking Good” and our “New Breed R&B” series.

The selection here would provide you with the backbone of a very good mod collection. 

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Comedy writer Ian Martin stumbles through our back catalogue, making random observations and proposing a toast to Ace Records’ eclectic avenue of dreams.

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What’s a “guilty pleasure”? I’ll tell you what it isn’t. A guilty pleasure is NOT just a really good pop song some dickhead likes.

You know the sort. Pop-up celebrity, crowdsourced personality, cultural smartarse. “My tastes are so eclectic it almost physically hurts me…” he murmurs to himself in some frictionless Sunday supplement profile, making you want to physically hurt him. “Oh I listen to everything, from Run The Jewels to Baroque opera. From cool jazz on my beloved collection of 78s to the really impenetrable bits of Penderecki delivered directly via neural implant into my hippocampus…”

Here he will perhaps allow a coquettish smile to fall like dappled light across his facial ladygarden. “And you know what? It’s cheesy I know but I confess I have a soft spot for Tamla Motown. Especially anything by Marvin Gaye. OK sure, it’s a guilty pleasure. But sometimes you just need something sweet and frothy, right?” Shit off, you snobgoblin.

FACT: guilt is an internalised emotion, pop-pickers. The concept of musical guilty pleasures only makes sense if the person judging you, making you feel guilty, is YOU. In the privacy of your own kitchen, why would you feel guilty if nobody’s there to mock you? Because YOU’RE always there to mock you. Example: Now You loves that old ELO track. Yeah, that awful, peppy knock-off Beatles track which was so comprehensively despised by Then You. Now You distinctly remembers Then You and your Then Mates being pretty nasty about Jeff Lynne And His Mulleted Hommage. Then You sneers at Now You still. Look at him, the little bastard, with his acne and his backcombed hair and his insufferable pretension and by the way terrible clothes. 

Nor should guilty pleasures be confused with musical differences. You should see my wife’s face when she returns unexpectedly to the house to find me alone in it, doing what a lot of blokes do while alone in the house - listening to the Beatles. I love them, she hates them. I suppose there is sort-of guilt. She feels sort-of guilty if I switch off the Beatles, I feel sort-of guilty if she has to listen to them. Oh, and please don’t make that citrus face at me and suggest I “use headphones” either. That’s not how 20th Century People listen to music. We like our music to gush and tumble through several cubic feet of air, painting the floating molecules with sound, thanks very much.

And on the subject of being a 20th Century Person, allow me to suggest that the “guilty pleasure” has been reinvented by 21st Century People as a shaming device. Fifty years ago it was OK for me to like blues music. Like a lot of white boys, I came to Robert Johnson and John Lee Hooker and the rest via rock and roll and white boy R&B. Fleetwood Mac, all that lovely Blue Horizon stuff…

But try telling Twitter you like blues and watch the revisionists recoil in disgust, as if you’d just said you like golliwogs, segregated education and plantation minstrels. Well I’m so sorry, humourless Roundheads of New Puritania, I can’t unlike what I liked then and still like now. I won’t be guilt-tripped into discarding my musical youth as colonialism and misogyny. I’m old now but still white, and I like hip-hop too which infuriatingly may contain racial allusions and bitches and whatnot and I am bored stiff by my own argument so HERE ARE MY RECOMMENDATIONS FROM THE CATALOGUE OF ACE RECORDS MY MOST FAVOURITE RECORD COMPANY EVER. Not really recommendations, actually. I don’t know what you like, do I? But this is what I like.

Almost 50 years later, the seismic rumbles from America’s West Coast 60s renaissance have yet to subside. It was a revolution, a cultural tsunami that had a deep and profound effect upon the rock music of that period, and continues its presence, for better or worse, in music to this day. But for the astute listener, the real magic remains in that mythical five-year span between the arrival of the British on American shores, and the implosion of the counter-cultural dream at the dawn of the cynical 1970s. A considerable tranche of the Big Beat catalogue is devoted to late 1960s “left coast” rock, thanks to both its historical import, and the fact that the era remains an endlessly fascinating and entertaining subject. Oh, and the music is pretty spiffy too. We lean a little more towards the Haight-Ashbury than the Sunset Strip, but all the hues of California’s multi-coloured rock’n’roll rainbow are represented.

The majority of Big Beat releases devoted to chronicling vintage West Coast sunshine fall under a series we began nearly 20 years ago, Nuggets From The Golden State, and it is still going strong. Many are various artist volumes that celebrate different tributaries of the era, whether they be the grass roots rock scenes surveyed in discs such as “The Sound Of Young Sacramento” and “You Got Yours: East Bay Garage 1965-67”, or illuminating and instructive excavations of the alchemical transition from folk-rock to psychedelia heard on “A Pot Of Flowers” and “Someone To Love: Birth Of The San Francisco Sound”. The Nuggets mandate is to shine a light both upon the early movers, shakers and instigators, as much as the cult acts that continue to intrigue. We’ve prised open many a previously locked vault to gather together the historical and the entertaining, for a comprehensive and ongoing overview of this important chapter in popular music history. Whatever your psychedelic predilection, there is plenty to explore. Here are a few highlights.