Blog Posts by Barney Hoskyns

Here's to Disco: unfairly reviled, always deserving of reinvestigation. A potted history of a Seventies phenomenon, plus a guide to the music's greatest hits...

Saturday night fever was nothing new -- it went all the way back to the "dancing madness" of the Middle Ages. Le discothèque, on the other hand, was only born in the 1950s, when a bunch of sailors cavorted one night in a Marseille waterfront bar to a box of 78s they'd hauled over the ocean from America. When they left the records behind, the bar owners established a "disc-o-thèque" -- literally, a "record library" -- and the idea swiftly spread to Paris, London and New York (where Oleg Cassini opened Le Club in the early '60s).

Minorities -- racial, sexual -- had always sweated the night away in airless lofts and subterranean caverns: the Twist was just one of many dances that originated in New York's black and Latino gay communities. If rock inflicted major damage on Sixties dance culture, rhythm returned at the turn of the

Alex Chilton's Big Star were a southern-rock anomaly: a Memphis band playing druggy power pop when everything around them seemed to stem from the Allman Brothers. Chilton's untimely death in his adopted New Orleans robs us of a major cult figure, a man as exasperating as he was beloved.--Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

If everyone who heard the Velvet Underground in the Sixties formed a band--so the joke goes--then everyone who heard Big Star in the Seventies became a rock critic. Big Star were the ultimate critics' darlings, a band garlanded with superlatives that never translated into sales but kept their flame alight long enough for the group to become a key influence on the post-punk music of the Eighties and Nineties.

"They served as a Rosetta Stone for a whole generation," said Peter Buck of R.E.M., the most celebrated of the many bands to fall under the spell of #1 Record (1972), Radio City (1973) and Big Star Third (recorded in 1974 but only released in

On Saturday night my dreams came true: long-neglected genius Todd Rundgren came to London to play A Wizard, A True Star, the greatest album of all time. And it was nothing short of awesome.--Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

Out into the damp chill of a February night we came, the scattered legions of Toddheads--crossing fingers for transcendence, willing to settle for a brief nostalgic glow.

It is nearly 35 years since your correspondent came as a not-so-sweet 16-year-old to the (former) Hammersmith Odeon to let Todd Rundgren's Utopia take him on a glam-prog psychedelic soul Big Dipper trip that confirmed TR as his American cult hero of choice. And now here he is with the long-lost brothers he's never met, the outcast nerdballs who glommed on to Todd as their pop messiah, come to see the man--backed by some of the same henchmen who were there in Oct '75--play his greatest-ever work, the dazzling and dizzying A Wizard, A True Star, a title that sounds like a

Whilst conceding that we are all "listed out" after a solid decade of anniversary-fixated lists, we at RBP nonetheless thought it our bounden duty to poll our august circle of writers and collate their best albums of the past 10 years. Over a hundred of RBP's finest scribes--from Rolling Stone veterans to blogging young guns--responded and nominated their favorite records from that period. The criteria for inclusion on our final list was simple: We've included every album that received more than one vote. Feel free to start howling with indignation now!--Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

[THIRTY VOTES: RBP'S ALBUM OF THE DECADE]

AMY WINEHOUSE: Back To Black (2006) "This little slip of a Jewish street princess comes over 100% credible, customizing her soul and ska influences to fit her f**ked-up persona. Someone said Winehouse's lyrics read like pages from a drunken teenager's diary, but they're more than that: they're piercingly believable, achingly sharp, rid of all

To celebrate Tom Waits' 60th birthday (December 9), I hereby offer the coda to my biography Lowside of the Road. An account of seeing the great man live in Edinburgh last summer--a show that produced two of the tracks on the album--it also marks the release of Waits' new Glitter and Doom Live.--Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

I left London in a heatwave, pulling out of King's Cross on a packed lunchtime train. Ten hours later I'm standing in the midnight mist of Edinburgh, waiting for Tom Waits at the rear of the city's venerable old Playhouse Theatre.

He has just concluded a two-and-a-half-hour show, the second of two nights in bonnie Scotland, and a surprisingly small clutch of admirers hovers beside a pair of tour buses that idle near the theatre's stage door. I am one of their number, feeling more than a little self-conscious as I come to the end of the long journey that is my Waits biography. Is this the moment when I finally turn into Nick Broomfield--or

The shocking and wholly unexpected death of Brendan Mullen after a massive stroke at the age of 60 prompted me to pull out this Village Voice review of We Got the Neutron Bomb, the great 2001 oral history of L.A.'s punk scene that he co-authored with Marc Spitz. Mullen's club the Masque--celebrated in a subsequent photographic collection published in 2007--was a key breeding ground for bands such as X and the Weirdos. The fiery Scotsman and adoptive Angeleno was a West Coast legend and will be deeply missed.--Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

No one in 1977 accepted that Los Angeles could produce a valid, viable "punk" scene. L.A. suffered then from the noses-in-the-air disdain of Manhattan's junkie Rimbauds and it may still suffer now. Not even Kurt Cobain's late Eighties endorsements of the Germs and Black Flag fundamentally altered the anti-Kalifornia belief that tanned Seventies brats in the perma-sun had no business yelping and screeching about alienation over

A new 4-DVD, 2-Blu-Ray set, Woodstock: 3 Days Of Peace And Music, comprises Michael Wadleigh's original film of the 1969 rockfest-to-end-'em-all, throwing in two new hours of footage plus a new 50-minute documentary about its making. Here are some retrospective reflections on the feeding (or not!) of the 400,000 in the little town of Bethel, New York.--Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

It was too big," says one old local shopkeeper of the festival that turned his town upside down in August 1969. "Too big for this world..."

The question now is: is Woodstock still too big for the world to comprehend and contextualize? It remains the defining assembly of rock's half-century lifespan, an unprecedented gathering of at least 300,000 young, longhaired, raggedly-clad Americans "going up the country" in New York's Catskill's mountains, searching for answers, hoping for transcendence... and finding what, exactly?

The most famous song about Woodstock was, of course, written

Tom Wilkes, legendary poster and album cover designer (Monterey Pop, the Rolling Stones' original Beggars Banquet, Neil Young's Harvest, Janis Joplin' Pearl, George Harrison's All Things Must Pass et al), has died at his home in Pioneertown, California. I was fortunate enough to interview Tom on 25 October, 2003 — the following is a transcript of what he told me about the Monterey Pop festival and about Neil Young, Gram Parsons, A&M Records and more.--Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

"I was always an artist. I put myself through college doing flame jobs--pinstriping on custom cars. And then from that I opened an ad agency in Long Beach when I was in my early twenties. And then I met David Wheeler, who was a drug dealer to the stars, and he brought me into LA and asked if I wanted to do album covers and I said yeah. So I started working with a guy named Guy Webster--Mamas and the Papas, Flowers for the Stones. And then I did the Monterey Pop Festival, and then I was