Monday, January 09, 2012

Older readers may remember a blog from the early "golden" years of blogging called TWANBOC*. One of its specialties was enormously long posts about particular genres or lineages of music, often listing outstanding records in the area and commenting on them with a uniquely characterful blend of enthusiasm, informativeness, and good humour, and always illustrated with high-quality scans of artwork.

The blog was renamed Woebot at a certain point and went through various incarnations (including a web-TV format) before the owner decided to jack it all in ** and focus his energies on music-making.

Well, guess what: Woebot, also known as Matthew Ingram, has had a writing-relapse. And how! The mother of mega-posts--18 thousand words long, heavily illustrated--can be found not on a new blog but in the form of an e-book.



Long-time record-digger Ingram has lost interest in esoterica, being largely unimpressed by the sort of stuff that the salvage operators have been dredging up in recent years, and has instead directed his attention to music that is "hiding in plain sight": 1970s rock albums that were mostly released on major labels and, in aspiration at least, were mainstream. Some of the names in his Lost list are well-known but are often considered "beneath consideration"; others really have been lost to history despite being the kind of record that might have been promoted with full page adverts in the music papers in its own brief moment.

100 Lost Rock Albums From the 1970s is available from Amazon and Amazon UK at a very modest price. You don't need a Kindle to read it, only the freely downloadable Kindle software, which works on PCs, Macs, smartphones and tablets.

* TWANBOC, if I recall correctly, stood for "That Was A Naughty Bit of Crap", a saying of Matt's father.

** I'm not sure what the status of TWANBOC/Woebot's archives are: they don't seem to be readily accessible, which is a pity.