Showing results by author "Mark Wilkerson" in All Categories

In the U.K. in the early '70s, in response to the glitz of glam and the excess of prog there emerged a DIY, back to basics scene known as pub rock: No-fuss, grass roots rock'n'roll bands playing in tight, sweaty rooms to packed throngs in the Victorian pubs of north London. Pub rock was a relative flash in the pan, lasting only a handful of years, but it produced a seismic shift, bridging the gap between rock's Baroque period and the ensuing punk and new wave scene, and crucially, restoring the visceral connection between artist and audience.

Stan Armstrong dedicated his entire life to science. Branded as a maverick and a risk-taker by his colleagues, his unorthodox experiments and outlandish theories of time and space resulted in loss of funding and, ultimately, his termination from tenure at the university where he’d spent his entire career. Stan’s insatiable quest to explore extreme hypotheses and to prove the unproven were matched only by his neurotic lust to peel back the mysterious layers of time and space to expose the hidden secrets of the universe.

Thunderclap Newman stunned the music world in the summer of 1969 with the success of their wonderfully odd debut single "Something In The Air", which ousted none other than the Beatles from the top of the charts. They followed up with an LP described by Nik Cohn as "one of the finest, most truly bizarre albums of the era" before disintegrating just a few months after its release. This is the story of one of the most unlikely combos in popular music history, and of the four disparate characters who formed its core.