by Ed Biggs With their ninth album, Pink Floyd faced the conundrum that all truly massive artists have to confront when they’ve ridden the initial wave of their success – how to follow it up. To repeat oneself will usually attract critical fire and garners only a fraction of the sales; to do something radically different is to let down one’s fans or commit commercial suicide; in short, both critics and
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by Ed Biggs It seems difficult to believe it forty glorious years later, but in 1975 Bruce Springsteen’s career hung in the balance. His first two albums – Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. and The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle, both from 1973 – had earned him critical respect but had not made him a star, falling far below Columbia’s expectations in the charts. So, under record label
by Ed Biggs For anybody looking for an entry point into Bob Dylan’s vast and varied back catalogue, there’s an awful lot to recommend Blood On The Tracks, yet in some ways it’s unsuitable. While it’s arguably his most famous album, and certainly his biggest seller, it’s something of an anomaly in Dylan’s story. While his imperial phase is generally held to be the mid-‘60s, a sequence of six records
