Showing results by author "Mark Wilkerson" in All Categories

Thunderclap Newman stunned the music world in the summer of 1969 with the success of their wonderfully odd debut single "Something In The Air", which ousted none other than the Beatles from the top of the charts. They followed up with an LP described by Nik Cohn as "one of the finest, most truly bizarre albums of the era" before disintegrating just a few months after its release. This is the story of one of the most unlikely combos in popular music history, and of the four disparate characters who formed its core.

Stan Armstrong dedicated his entire life to science. Branded as a maverick and a risk-taker by his colleagues, his unorthodox experiments and outlandish theories of time and space resulted in loss of funding and, ultimately, his termination from tenure at the university where he’d spent his entire career. Stan’s insatiable quest to explore extreme hypotheses and to prove the unproven were matched only by his neurotic lust to peel back the mysterious layers of time and space to expose the hidden secrets of the universe.

The scene that bulldozed the path from prog and glam to punk and new wave, pub rock was a short-lived phenomenon in the U.K., emerging amidst the bloated landscape of prog rock and an increasingly oppressive economic outlook. In the U.K. in the early ‘70s, in response to the glitz of glam and...