A past gone mad, part 397

Glenn Gregory subbing 

Named after Bowie's worst single (at least of the 1970s... he surely out-did it in the post-Let's Dance era) 

Marc Almond, Clem Burke (RIP), Glen Matlock, and Gary Kemp have been accomplices in the past.

Reef? Replenish? There's a market for a 30th Anniversary tour?!? Tour, meaning multiple dates around the country!

(I cannot even remember who Reef ever were in the first place)

 

The Gang of 2 celebrate Entertainment!'s 45th anniversary - actually the 46th, but who's counting...

40th Anniversary of what? The Wedding Present's existence?  That silhouette figure composited out of album covers..... 

Rounding out this round-up.... 

Goodness, a mega box set of Swing Out Sister's second phase career, when pop success was quite a long way back in the rear view mirror.... 

SWING OUT SISTER Certain Shades Of Limelight 27 June 2025 8CD

Swing Out Sister Celebrate Their Sophisticated Sound with New 8CD Box Set:  Certain Shades Of Limelight Cherry Red Records proudly announces the release of Certain Shades Of Limelight, a beautifully curated 8CD box set celebrating the vibrant and soulful evolution of iconic British pop sophisticates Swing Out Sister. Spanning the years 1994 to 2004, this definitive collection captures a golden decade of musical exploration, refinement, and reinvention.

A Past Gone Mad(der)

One of the things that spurred me to start thinking about the book that became Retromania was coming across a bunch of ads for concerts and tours in the back of Uncut and being struck by the jumble they made of rock history -  each page a checkerboard of  adverts for reformed bands, legacy acts still staggering on, cults who wouldn't quit, tribute groups.... there were also strange line-ups that united unlikely bedfellows from across rock's history.  All this being a byproduct of rock's longevity, the fact that the culling isn't coming (at least not quick enough), the elderly seeing no reason (or simply can't afford) to shuffle off stage in to a life of dignified reclusion, but persist in treading the boards beyond retirement age. 

I blogged about it under the headline "A Past Gone Mad" (the first in a short series of 2006 posts)

Since then the past has only gotten madder

Here are some tour adverts I saw on a recent trip to the motherland, taken variously from Viz magazine (snapped in the WH Smith at the airport) and from the colour culture supplement to one of the Sunday papers (the Times I think).

 

Now is that some grotesque version of The Sweet that doesn't include any original members - like a man who's had so many organs transplanted there's barely anything left of him?

Battle of the Pink Floyds - the fake one versus the real remnant

All yesterday's party-hard rockers

I imagine a battle royale over who got top billing

a past gone mad (eternal returns)

this lineup of horror for 2021 (promoters hopefully assuming things return to normal on the mass gathering front) flashed me back to those strange jumbles of artists from different eras that I would see in the section of concert / tour / festival ads at the back of Uncut in the mid-2000s

blogged about it in this 2005 post A Past Gone Mad, an early expression of befuddled dismay and atemporal disorientation of a kind that culminated in me doing Retromania a few years later

a decade-and-a-half on, there's even more of a Nineties flavour (in 2005 The Farm, Happy Mondays, a Hacienda renactment represented baggy-nostalgia) but there's also a discernible Noughties-redux ripple running through the hodgepodge

if we're retro-blogging (in both senses) here's a couple more Past Gone Mad blogs from back in the day