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Recent Reviews
Tom Northcott
Sunny Goodge Street / Who Planted Thorns In Miss Alice's Garden - 7"
'Sunny Goodge Street', Donovan's jazz-tinged ode to the magical pleasures of weed, was first issued in October 1965 on his Fairytale LP. The world took note almost immediately. Just a few months later, Dutch singer Boudewijn de Groot had already translated it and sung it on TV. Marianne Faithful and Judy Collins both recorded their own versions of the song the following year. Faithful's came out in April '66 on her North Country Maid LP, while Collins' more upbeat take on it ap...more
Hughie Scott and the Meteors
I Will / Be Bop A Lula - 7"
For years Hughie Scott was the king of the Ottawa Valley country music scene. In fact Scott, who grew up in the nearby hamlet of Riceville, rarely ventured outside the capital region. He started playing the fiddle at age five, and by his mid-teens the young singer was already a fixture on the local circuit, first as a member of Smokey Rand and the Drifters and then fronting his own band, the Meteors.
Scott's Elvis routine and his heady mix of country and early rock 'n' roll...more
The Chosen Few
Footsee / You Can Never Be Wrong - 7"
In the fall of 1974, Russ Winstanley gave an obscure US instrumental 45 a spin at the legendary Wigan Casino. It was a long-forgotten throwaway song called 'Footsie' by a group of Montrealers called the Chosen Few, and it was originally used to promote a skipping toy of the same name that hooked around a child's ankle. It wasn't even a northern soul record, but the reaction on the dance floor was almost instantaneous. "The people who went to the Casino absolutely loved it," Winstanley would ...more
Spacecraft 7
Lonesome Torpedo Redux
Spacecraft 7's Lonesome Torpedo Redux may seem to have dropped from out of nowhere, but the Toronto-based quartet's two guitarists actually go back decades. "Billy J. Coombs and I formed Spacecraft 7 in 1995 in Toronto," Marc Fedak told CM recently. "Before we both moved to Toronto, we were in a Windsor alternative rock band Groundwater in the early 1990s and both of us also were involved with [Windsor alternative radio station] CJAM for several years."
After the usua...more
Fraser MacPherson
Live at the Planetarium
Live at the Planetarium was Fraser MacPherson's first small group album as a leader. It is a trio recording featuring guitarist Oliver Gannon and bassist Wyatt Ruther. The Irish-born Gannon moved to Canada with his family in 1957, and by the 1970s he had become a staple on the Vancouver jazz scene. In 1975, MacPherson invited him to join a trio he was forming that would also include Ruther, an American who moved there around '73 or '74 and who would work extensively with MacPherson.
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