Subsequently, Duran Duran struggled to escape the teen idol image and gain respect among critics with more complex music. The new serious image was not accepted at first and their popularity began to wane. Rolling Stone said, “In their search for musical maturity, the surviving Durans have lost a good…
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Formed in Dayton, Ohio , in the early 1980s, Guided by Voices began their career as a bar band working the local scene. As lineups and day-jobs shifted, however, Pollard moved the band towards a studio-only orientation. Guided by Voices’ recording career began with a stream of self-financed, independent releases…
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By 1980, the band was performing regularly in Minneapolis-St. Paul , and their music evolved into a fast, ferocious, primal sound, making them one of the original hardcore punk bands of the Midwest. Through heavy touring, they soon caught the attention of punk trailblazers including Black Flag and Dead Kennedys…
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Prior to forming Everclear, frontman Art Alexakis struggled through a number of hardships that would later shape the course of the band and its music. As a child, Alexakis recounted that he suffered child abuse and child abandonment from his father at the age of five, struggled with drug addiction…
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During the 1980s, APB was one of the most popular underground alternative bands in the New York Tri-State area. Thanks to constant radio play on WLIR 92.7 FM on Long Island and New York college radio, the Scottish band made its mark with funky bass.
As a high school student in 1980, Sweet wrote songs and recorded them on four-track cassettes. He joined the band The Specs and released his first recording on a battle of bands LP produced by a local radio station, and fronted his own local band called The Dialtones. After graduating,…
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The band features in the book Postcards from Scotland detailing the 1980s and 1990s independent music scene in Scotland.
Despite the critical praise for Live Through This , rumors circulated insinuating that Cobain had actually written the majority of the album, though the band vehemently denies this. The band’s drummer Patty Schemel, who had been friends with Cobain since the late 1980s, said: “There’s that myth that Kurt [Cobain]…
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Lead singer Gwen Stefani began work on her 1980s-inspired new wave and dance-pop side project in 2003, which eventually evolved into the full-fledged solo album Love. Angel. Music. Baby. , released on November 23, 2004. The album reached multi-platinum status in several countries, including a quintuple platinum certification in Canada…
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In January 1980, Peter Buck met Michael Stipe in Wuxtry Records , the Athens record store where Buck worked. The pair discovered that they shared similar tastes in music, particularly in punk rock and proto-punk artists like Patti Smith , Television , and the Velvet Underground . Stipe said, “It…
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