The new composition of Freedom came in 1972 and recorded his latest album, "more than a word". Along with the true masterpieces of the disk and there are quite weak (compared with the early works) things …
At the time, Press to Play was occasionally promoted as Macca's response to punk – which we all better hope is not true, since that means he was responding ten years after the fact, signaling just how out of touch he was. But McCartney wasn't that disconnected from reality (he did talk about punk in interviews from the late '70s), so a more accurate view of Press to Play is to see it as McCartney trying to reconnect with his classic strengths, from orchestral pop and whimsy to driving rockers and sweet love songs…
Electric guitarist Joel Kipnis – or JK, as the smooth jazz world will know him – is an amazingly unselfish musician, not only including his keyboardist Dinky Bingham and featured vocalist Robyn Springer on the back cover of his Verve Forecast debut What's the Word, but deferring lead parts and solos to them as well as other bandmembers more often than not throughout the disc. Kipnis will establish a theme, then kick around in the background while Bingham sprouts a frenetic bluesy organ solo, Scott Kreitzer sparks some fancy improvisations on sax, and Jim Hynes eases in on trumpet, all in rapid succession. The tag eaming bears the most fruit on the funkiest cut "In the Pocket," where Bingham bubbles under JK's slick lines while Hynes waits for an open door to chime in a measure or two. While JK isn't always the one who stands out most on each cut, give him credit for aiming for solid ensemble vibes The few full-on instrumentals are a blast.
The last word on the JFK assassination by the New York Times best-selling author and JFK historian! Mark Lane tried the only US court case in which the jurors concluded that the CIA plotted the murder of President Kennedy, but there was always a missing piece: How did the CIA control cops and Secret Service agents on the ground in Dealey Plaza? How did federal authorities prevent the House Select Committee on Assassinations from discovering the truth about the complicity of the CIA?
Maybe John Cooper Clarke's brief window of fame passed with the demise of punk. But his poems are every bit as arch and funny now as they were in the '70s. There are sly wordplay, groaning puns, and also plenty of strong social observation. He essentially took the ethos of the Liverpool poets of the '60s, using common language and bringing in lots of humor, but made his mark through speech, not print. This collection, cherry-picked from his major-label work, is an absolute joy. Backed by the relatively all-star Invisible Girls (which included Pete Shelley of the Buzzcocks), the Bard of Salford deadpans his way through the epic "Psycle Sluts (Parts 1 & 2)," "The Day My Pad Went Mad," and the piece that really gave him his first big exposure, "I Married a Monster From Outer Space." But in "Beasley Street" and "Postwar Glamour Girls" there's a more serious undercurrent happening, while "Kung Fu International," for all its lightheartedness, shows that little has changed in English street violence, and "Twat" remains as deliberately outrageous and hilarious as it was on its initial release. Culled from the four albums Cooper Clarke did for Epic, it shows that what was good then is still good. The world needs a Cooper Clarke for the new millennium.