Vancouver

Led Zeppelin’s Lunchtime Concert

/ Fiona McQuarrie / Leave a comment

I recently saw the documentary Becoming Led Zeppelin. Throughout it there were montages of ticket stubs, concert posters, and the like, to illustrate how much the band toured – and every time I glimpsed something that mentioned “Vancouver” it made me laugh. Not because I saw any of those shows – although I think half of my high school was at one or both of the Led Zeppelin shows here in 1975 – but because I was half-hoping there would be a mention of one of Vancouver’s greatest urban legends: Led Zeppelin’s lunchtime concert.

This is the story. Led Zeppelin were booked to play here in spring 1970. Allegedly, upon arriving in this fair city, they decided that Continue reading →

Ambient

/ Fiona McQuarrie / 1 Comment

A few months ago, I had never heard of William Basinski, and had never heard any of his music. But lately I’ve been getting into ambient music, because I like listening to it at work – it’s calming but it also helps me be productive. I wanted to explore the genre beyond its best known artists, i.e. Brian Eno and his collaborators, so I looked online for recommendations of other ambient albums. A Reddit thread on the topic of “best ambient album ever” had more than a few mentions of Basinski’s Disintegration Loops albums, so I found those on YouTube and started playing them.

The Disintegration Loops are astounding. The title is literal; Basinski took old analog tapes that he recorded decades ago, looped them into a reel-to-reel tape machine, and played them until the tapes physically fell apart. It sounds bizarre, but it’s fascinating to listen to, as the sounds on the loops gradually devolve and deconstruct.

Since this is not exactly mainstream commercial music, imagine my surprise when this year’s Vancouver International Film Festival program was released, and one of the scheduled events was a live performance by Basinski. From not even being aware of him to suddenly encountering his work and being enraptured by it, and now he was coming to play live in my city? I know when the universe is trying to tell me something. So I bought a ticket, and went to the show this week.

Being something of a newbie to this whole ambient scene, I had no idea whether there would be lots of people at the show, or embarrassingly few (which has happened at a few VIFF events I’ve attended). When I got to the theatre, Continue reading →

The Night I Didn’t Meet David Bowie

/ Fiona McQuarrie / 1 Comment

During the first part of my music writing career, which lasted from the late ‘70s to the mid-‘80s, I worked at two different daily newspapers, and wrote a lot of concert reviews on deadline. This usually meant writing the review the same night as the show, sometimes while I was still at the concert venue, and getting the review to the newspaper’s editorial offices so it could go into the next day’s newspaper.

At that time, there were no cellphones and no portable computers, which meant that filing a concert review from outside the office was always an adventure. To illustrate what this was like, I would like to share with you a story of one such adventure: the night I didn’t meet David Bowie.

To set the scene for this story, Continue reading →

Tom Harrison

/ Fiona McQuarrie / 1 Comment

This is a blog post that I didn’t think I’d be writing.

On December 27, my friend Tom Harrison passed away at the age of 70. We were friends for more than 40 years – a number which astounded me when I calculated it. We met in the late 1970s when he was the music writer for The Province newspaper and I was the music writer for The Vancouver Sun, but it honestly doesn’t feel like that long ago.

I knew who Tom was long before I actually met him. Any music lover in Vancouver in the 1970s knew who Tom was, from his writing in the Georgia Straight weekly paper and also from the pioneering music video show Soundproof that he co-hosted on cable TV. But a lot of people didn’t know that Continue reading →