TheCellarTapes

Hello Good Evening and Welcome

I'm Ben and I'm a devotee of the 1960's. No no, don’t leave!, please allow me to explain. I'm not an old man; I’m actually in my mid twenties and have a girlfriend and stuff.

My love affair with the 1960's started strangely enough with a band called Oasis whilst I was at high school. I loved Oasis, all that attitude, proper Mancunian lads making it big time, fresh and very much a band for the now.

But Oasis was and still is 15 years on, very much a band with a retrospective view on music. In 1994 they had 4 bands they kept going on about, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who and The Sex Pistols. Being an impressionable young man I investigated for myself what these bands were about, because if Oasis liked them, they must be good.

I remember with my birthday money buying 6 Beatles albums, going home and playing the first one by date, it was Please Please Me of course, and it was not that good. Then With The Beatles went on, that was not very good either, I've spent 60 quid on this rubbish!! Getting desperate I thought I'd skip doing it in date order and I'd go with the album that I thought had the best front cover, in popped Revolver.......oh my.

What has followed in my life since has been a gradual dependence on the need to discover new music that I have not heard before and in particular from the 1960's. The 1960's was a very exceptional decade, which is pretty much a given, but was it just about The Beatles and The Rolling Stones?

Or was it about the thousands upon thousands of kids from all four corners of the planet getting together to create energy, create something interesting, create something dynamic, create something new. The 1960's were just as much about Sao Paulo with Os Mutantes then it was about Liverpool with The Beatles or San Francisco and its flowers. From the West Coast to The East Coast, from swinging London to the super chicness of Paris, from the Ska coming out of Jamaica to the Tropicalia movement in Brazil, the sixties is now a treasure trove of the under appreciated and the criminally neglected.

With this journal I aim to bring you reviews of the albums from the 1960’s that have left their mark on the music that has followed. My aim is not to reinvent the wheel, there will be some albums that even your Dad has heard of within this thread, but mostly it will be the exciting stuff, the ear openers if you like, which I will tend to focus my time on.

So I hope it’s a good interesting read and that you enjoy the thread.

Thanks

Ben