Editorial - July 2025

  by Admin

published: 17 / 8 / 2025

intro

Hello and welcome to the July edition of the Pennyblackmusic Magazine. 2025 has already become a horrible year for rock deaths. At the end of January we lost Marianne Faithfull, and since then D

Hello and welcome to the July edition of the Pennyblackmusic Magazine. 2025 has already become a horrible year for rock deaths. At the end of January we lost Marianne Faithfull, and since then David Johansen from The New York Dolls, Brian James from The Damned, Clem Burke from Blondie and Mike Peters from The Alarm have passed away. Now David Thomas of Pere Ubu and Rocket From The Tombs and Brian Wilson are also gone. In this edition we pay tribute to them both. We interviewed the notoriously prickly David Thomas six times over the years, and our long-term writer Mark Rowland conducted four of them. In his article, Mark looks back on those four interviews with Thomas which took place over the phone, and finally meeting him in person after a Pere Ubu gig. We never interviewed Brian Wilson, although we did interview most of the other artists above with the exception of Faithfull and Johansen. In the case of Marianne Faithfull, we have on the site a couple of old archival interviews that our writer Nick Dent-Robinson did for The Sunday Times in 1990 and 1995 and for which he owns the copyright. With Johansen, we spoke to his late New York Dolls’ bandmate Sylvain Sylvain instead. Brian Wilson, with his stunning use of harmonies and sound and great sense of melody, is one of those big figures in music, up there with The Beatles, The Velvet Underground, David Bowie and The Sex Pistols, who have had a massive, life-changing impact on millions of music fans, including several of our writers. Nick Dent-Robinson provides an obituary for Wilson. Lisa Torem, who has a book coming out on The Beach Boys on Sonicbond towards the end of the year, writes of her ten favourite songs by Wilson in ‘Ten Songs That Made Me Love..,’ and Malcolm Carter writes of sixty years as a fan and begins by reflecting how as a boy he used to save up his paper round money to buy Beach Boys’ singles. Thank you to Mark, Nick, Lisa and Malcolm. Thank you to Steev Burgess, Ian Dunn, Dixie Ernill, Dave Goodwin, Zena Greig, Tommy Gunnarsson, Rob Hadley, Cherry Holiday, Fiona Hutchings, Adrian Janes, Steve Kinrade. Richard Lewis, Eoghan Lyng, Nige Nudds, Philamonjaro, Shirley Procter, Mark Roberts, Andrew Twambley, Denzil Watson and Amanda J, Window, all of whom have contributed to this edition. Special thanks to our webmaster Richard Banks, without whom none of this would be possible. Please check out our regular Facebook, Instagram and X updates. Thank you for reading Pennyblackmusic. John Clarkson