Eagerly awaiting a nice old Casino ... an excuse to blog about the guitar.

Epiphone Casinos are electric guitars, but where most electrics are totally solid or have a solid centre block, the Casino is truly hollow like an acoustic guitar. The Casino has P90 pickups which are more edgy sounding than the humbuckers your see on most archtops, so although the sound is refined it also has a certain bite and mojo.

Epiphone Casinos have been prominent in some of the greatest music ever created and are especially synonymous with the Beatles. Paul McCartney was the first Beatle to own a Casino. It had a bigsby trem and, given McCartney was left handed, was played upside down. Although he was technically the bassist, the Beatles could, and did, swap roles regularly. It’s Paul McCartney playing Casino leads on songs like Drive my car, Taxman and Paperback writer.






IMO the guitar tone on these records is amazing, being in that utlra-cool, hard to find place between clean and over driven. It’s not surprising McCartney said his Casino was his favourite lead guitar.

George Harrison owned lots of guitars and pioneered the use of many like the Rickenbacker 360 12 string and the Gibson SG, though he did play a Casino on some of the greatest Beatles albums such as Revolver, Sergeant Pepper, Magical Mystery Tour and Abbey Road.




However, of all the Beatles the Casino was most used by John Lennon who after 1965 played little else. Originally it was sunburst but he later stripped the varnish for the pale yellow colour seen in loads of late Beatles footage. Maybe because the guitar could also be used as a hollow body acoustic, he found himself writing and practising with it in his hotel and living rooms all the time. So he became wedded to it, even though remarkably his Epiphone was a relatively cheap guitar and he could have owned anything.






Other sixties musicians loved their Casinos, notably Dave Davis and Keith Richards.





During the seventies strats, les pauls and expensive Gibson archtops become more popular with famous musicians. Though Epiphones made a comeback with the indie and Britpop scenes being a guitar that was free of associations with cheesy grin twiddlers and blues bores. It also wasn't a punk guitar, being way too elegant to be abused and spat at.

The 12 string version of the Casino (the Epiphone Riviera 12-string) creates the wonderful guitar backdrops to Lush's greatest records



And of course Epiphones are all over early Oasis (and NoWaySis) records...



Sally btw was a Manchester promoter - she even got our old band gigs sometimes.

The band USofA are kind of like the moon landing – a leap in progress that’s not been bettered

The sixties was a time when popular music made quantum leaps from bubble gum pop to high art and experimentation. Sergeant Pepper gets rightly credited with putting popular music into space with its huge leap in redefining the role of the studio. But the credit for the musical moon landing goes to the far lesser known album The United States of America by the band of the same name.
Listening to the USofA you have to pinch yourself to remember it’s from the sixties and not the eighties or nineties. Forget all the stuff about Kraftwerk and Gary Numan pioneering synths – USofA were there first. They also spearheaded the idea that popular music could be a high art form that can be both intriguing and enlightening. Something the likes of the wonderful Yes and King Crimson took further, but only after the USofA.
Anyway, judge for yourself….

'The Cake' overlooked at the time - celebrated in the age of youtube

One of the great things about youtube is that stuff that gets overlooked or forgotten (even in its own time) finds new life and new fans as the curious stumble on old videos.

A fine example is the band ‘The Cake’ – I don’t quite know how I stumbled on this video but there’s something very cool and surprising about it. It begins with one of the girls stumbling and made dizzy by the carousel. She for a short while looks as though she refuses to join in as the others start to sing – though this is how they always performed. As they sing they hap hazardly improvise dances with a demeanour that’s very endearing and so opposite from the more usual slick performers of the time. And like the performance the music is not what you expect, being full of psychedelic strings and an amazing reverberant rhythm. It turns out they themselves were great songwriters and well connected to the emerging British progressive rock movement of the late sixties.

Simon Cowell would have hated them, which is why I and a lot of others on youtube think they're very cool.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cake

More slices of The Cake

This one's kind of funny

Sharing some images from Paul McCartney's Hyde Park gig this Sunday

Sharing some images from Hyde Park this Sunday (click to enlarge)

It started with England getting thrashed to the bluegrass music of Elvis Costello.

Neil Finn cheered us up with Crowded House 

Then Crosby, Stills and Nash - with Stephen Stills on stellar form with the guitar

And then the thrill of a life time Sir Paul McCartney

Seeing Paul McCartney + CSN, Elvis Costello and Crowded house this Sunday

Although it’s going to a long drive to London and back on Sunday we’ve got tickets to see Paul McCartney with support CSN, Elvis Costello and Crowded House at hard rock calling.
Should be an amazing day – whether England win or lose.

Diana Ross's Stuart Pearce impersonation :-D

Beatles fans - check out this little kids guitar playing!