Mummy 1999

Quiet Sun was Phil Manzanera's pre-Roxy Music band, with Bill MacCormick (Matching Mole / Random Hold), Charles Hayward (This Heat) and Dave Jarrett. A stunning, Psychedelically inclined Progressive Jazz Rock album, Mainstream was recorded 4 years after the band's break-up during the night-shift sessions for Manzanera's debut solo album, Diamond Head. Occasionally echoing the styles of early Soft Machine, Pink Floyd and King Crimson, and hinting at the ambition of the 801 project to come, Mainstream is the only remaining legacy of this great 'lost' British band.

The Litter's debut album was disappointing in the sense that there are only a couple of songs that were not covers. However, they were one of the few garage bands to invest enough energy and imagination into their interpretations to make a cover-heavy LP worth hearing. "Action Woman" is here, and they go about tackling, and sometimes dismantling, numbers like the Small Faces' "Whatcha Gonna Do About It" and the Who's "A Legal Matter" (both of which were barely known in the U.S. at this point, incidentally). "I'm a Man," though based on the Yardbirds' version, gets into some pretty incredible feedback/distortion swirls in the closing rave-up section. Distortions has been reissued a few times, but the 1999 CD on Arf! Arf! is the one to get, as it includes two outtakes ("Hey Joe" and the 25-second, hardly worth noting "Harpsichord Sonata #1") and seven songs, mostly previously unreleased, recorded live at Chicago's Electric Theatre in August 1968. This was the music that the band played while filming a scene in Haskell Wexler's film Medium Cool (although none of the music was used in the movie), and it's in a heavier, bluesier hard rock direction than their 1967 recordings, but still retains some of the punky spirit of the Distortions era

According to the history books, civilization began with the ancient Egyptians. But in this intriguing three-part series, iconoclastic anthropologist Richard Rudgley, author of the provocative "Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age", argues that it began earlier — much earlier. We view our distant ancestors as nothing more than cave-dwelling savages but 100,000 years ago there were people who walked the earth every bit as gifted as us, who looked and thought just as we do today…
In SECRETS OF THE STONE AGE, anthropologist Richard Rudgley offers a lively account of his journey across the continents in search of the lost legacy of prehistoric man.