SAER delivers a deeply affecting blend of indie folk and cinematic singer-songwriter intimacy on The Last Time. Gentle acoustic guitars, delicate piano, and a beautifully expressive falsetto create an atmosphere of quiet reflection, allowing the song’s emotional honesty to unfold with remarkable grace. As the arrangement gradually expands, subtle cinematic textures elevate the track without overshadowing its heartfelt core. Balancing vulnerability with elegant songwriting, The Last Time is a poignant meditation on love, loss, and acceptance that lingers long after the final note.
Rough Boys I Am An Animal And I Moved Let My Love Open The Door Jools And Jim Keep On Working Cat’s In The Cupboard A Little Is Enough Empty Glass Gonna Get Ya
By 1980, punk had not so much swept the country as hoovered and dusted the country and steam-cleaned the seat covers. The Who adjusted to the new wave with Who Are You, but the death of Keith Moon sent the band into a hiatus interrupted only by retrospective projects. Empty Glass was Pete Townshend’s response to all the above.
There are songs about NME writers (Jools And Jim), songs about coping (Keep On Working), songs about love (Let My Love Open The Door) and songs Roger Daltrey wanted for The Who (Rough Boys).
The result is an album full of superb songs that sound modern (lots of synths and skinny-tie snappiness), feminine (the gorgeous And I Moved, a cousin to Angie’s Townshend-written Peppermint Lump) and simultaneously resigned and furious. It’s the best thing any member of The Who did in the 80s, and well worth two of anyone’s ears.
Widely regarded as Townshend’s first debut album proper (1972’s Who Came First being wrapped up in devotion to hisspiritual guru, Meher Baba), the album gave the guitarist his biggest solo success away from The Who. It reached No.11, while the rampaging opener Rough Boys cracked the Top 40.
Every week, Album of the Week Club listens to and discusses the album in question, votes on how good it is, and publishes our findings, with the aim of giving people reliable reviews and the wider rock community the chance to contribute.
“When Townshend sings ‘When everybody seems unkind / I’ll give you a four-leaf clover /Take all the worry out of your mind’, his simple yet naked emotion is sincere, a notion that comes through in his overdubbed, barbershop quartet-style backing vocals and the song’s charming, three-chord arrangement.” (Pop Matters)
“Since this is Townshend, it can be a little artier than it needs to be, as on the pseudo-Gilbert & Sullivan chorus of Keep on Working, but the joy of Empty Glass is that his writing is sharp, his performances lively, his gift for pop hooks as apparent as his wit. (AllMusic)
“On his earlier solo excursions, the casually reflective mood suited his light timbre. Here he’s coming to terms with love, frustration, punk, and other subjects that overtax his capacity for urgency and anger (and understanding). Who fans find the gap between aspiration and achievement touching, even thematic. Nonbelievers find it whiny. And they hate those ostinatos (Robert Christgau)
What you said…
Mike Canoe: I know I’ve listened to Empty Glass a few times over the years but nothing has ever made as much of an impression as Let My Love Open The Door or Rough Boys. The former is one of the most perfect pop songs ever written and the latter is like Quadrophenia boiled down to four angry brawling minutes.
Paying closer attention to Empty Glass than usual this week, I like several more, including rockers Jools and Jim and Cat’s In The Cupboard as well as the more experimental I Am an Animal and Keep on Working. I haven’t really examined the lyrics closely so most of the confessional stuff is lost on me. I start to lose interest hallway through side two as the songs start to get slower and/or longer. Still, a generally enjoyable album by one of the greats.
Adam Ranger: The track A Little is Enough sums up my feelings on this album. Opening track Rough Boys is good, so is the closer Gonna Get Ya. The rest? Not so good. The album suffers from lack of a good vocalist. Some tracks have promising excerpts, but ultimately leave me unimpressed. It seems people really like the track Let My Love Open The Door, but again, I could not get through the whole song. In fact, I cringed a bit. A little is enough for me.
Evan Sanders: Empty Glass was a good listen for Who fans when it came out, during a time when the The Who’s future was unclear and their guitarist and singer still had quite a bit to say. The introspective nature of the songs continues a theme we’d been hearing on The Who By Numbers and Who Are You, letting us connect the dots from However Much I Booze to The Music Must Change to “My life’s a mess … I hold an empty glass“.
In addition to the lyrics, the album is strong musically, and this group has pointed out the keyboard-forward songs, which also were the case on Who Are You and would be the case on The Who’s Face Dances a year later. Some people didn’t care for the pop melodies on Let My Love Open The Door and A Little Is Enough, and I respectfully disagree, seeing these as good songs that just wouldn’t work with Roger Daltrey singing lead.
Thinking of how The Who turned into almost a tribute band in later years, I wonder about an alternate universe where they would have taken a page from Led Zeppelin and retired the band’s name after Keith Moon’s death. Empty Glass would have stood out as Pete Townshend’s farewell to his band, while setting the stage for his solo career. 7 or 8 out of 10.
Mark Veitch: Average.
Paul Cropper: Very good album. Better than the contemporaneous Who albums. Rough Boys is a great song. Love the video too. Think Daltrey said Rough Boys would have been a great Who song but Townshend disagreed.
Neil McCormack: And I Moved is one of Pete’s finest, most beautiful compositions.
Greg Schwepe: This album was played heavily on the FM station where I grew up and was another “senior year album” that gets recalled when remembering albums that were released during my final year of high school. And back then since there was no internet, your musical knowledge of how many and what were the names of the albums someone released was based on what you might have seen in the racks in the record store. And I was sadly mistaken back then when I thought Empty Glass was the first solo album released by Pete Townshend. Wrong!
This started a successful string of 80’s solo albums that I purchased at some point. I mean, Townshend wrote, what, maybe 90% of The Who’s songs? So, his solo stuff should be just as good, right? And you have a little irony with the title as Townshend had a little alcohol problem at this time and has been noted that some of the songs may have been somewhat autobiographical.
The slashing guitar of Rough Boys kicks this one off, but what you may notice here and through the rest of the album, is the great use of interesting keyboard pieces and textures. Townshend may be a guitar smashing guitar hero, but that’s not the only instrument that’s prominent here. Guess that’s not surprising considering how keyboard heavy Who Are You was.
The cascading, repeating piano intro of And I Moved is an excellent example of these keyboards. And that continues with Let My Love Open The Door, another radio regular in my neck of the woods.
Jools And Jim is evidently a dig at journalists who had some not so nice things to say about Keith Moon after his death.
The vinyl started side two with Keep On Working, probably my least favorite song on the album. But it does have a bit of mini-opera feel to it like A Quick One, While He’s Away.
The keyboard-strong songs continue with A Little Is Enough. Maybe my favourite of the songs that were not prominent on the radio. Gonna Get Ya finishes the album with more slashing guitar, you can envision Pete windmilling through this one.
8 out of of 10 on this one. I followed his solo career closely after this, buying the first two solo albums I initially was not aware of, and even all the Scoop series with outtakes, demos, and the like. A very prolific and talented artist that kept busy away from his day job.
Michael J. Culver: I really consider this his first solo album and it is glorious. Rough Boys is about the Sex Pistols, which is also very cool.
Brian Hart: Pete Townshend’s Empty Glass is a little outside my wheelhouse but I’m always open to discovering new music. I’ve always been a fan of The Who but I’m more of a greatest hits fan.
I wasn’t completely unaware of the music on Empty Glass. I grew up hearing Rough Boys and Let My Love Open the Door. These songs are still bangers today. I also really enjoyed Cats In The Cupboard. Everything else on the album is OK but still listenable. A few people have posted that had this album been worked on by the rest of The Who, it probably would’ve been taken to a higher level. I can’t say I disagree, but who knows?
What I can say is that Pete Townsend is a talented musician and songwriter who certainly knows how to craft a song. Even though I probably won’t give Empty Glass another spin, Rough Boys and Let My Love Open the Door will definitely be added to the Spotify list. I give this album 5 out of 10.
Philip Qvist: This is not a bad album at all, and I guess it shouldn’t be considering that Pete Townshend was the primary songwriter for The Who. Many have considered Empty Glass to be the best Who album never recorded by the band, and I concur.
I was quite familiar with opening track Rough Boys and Let My Love Open The Door as both got decent coverage down here in South Africa, while my other picks are Am I Moved, A Little Is Enough, Empty Glass and Gonna Get Ya, with a decent support cast from the likes of Tony Butler, Rabbit Bundrick and Simon Phillips.
If I do have a small quibble then it is over the fact that I reckon Roger Daltrey would have taken a few of the songs on this album to the next level, especially Rough Boys and Empty Glass. But that is a relatively minor issue as this is a good album that deserves a few spins.
Nigel Mawdsley: I bought some of Pete Townshend’s solo work after seeing the superb Let My Love Open The Door on television many years ago.
I seem to remember that the music papers I was reading when Empty Glass was released gave the album mediocre reviews. Okay, Pete Townshend hasn’t got the same vocal chops as Roger Daltrey, but there are some great songs on here.
Rough Boys, Gonna Get You and Empty Glass wouldn’t have been out of place on a Who album, whereas Keep On Working sounds like The Kinks. (I read in an interview, again many years ago, when Pete Townshend stated that Ray Davies was a better songwriter than him, a very humble statement.)
Another track I really like is the Peter Gabriel-esque A Little Is Enough which deserves repeat plays.
As stated, Pete Townshend’s voice is an acquired taste and although some of his solo material ‘melds into one’ for me there are still some truly excellent songs from his solo catalogue. 7 out of 10 for Empty Glass.
John Davidson: I dont think I’ve ever heard this before.
Who Are You was a huge hit and The Who seemed to embrace the challenge of punk. They morphed from mods to hard rockers and, despite producing rock operas, managed to avoid being labelled as prog, so they had plenty experience in navigating the fickle, changing nature of music and youth culture. But then Keith Moon got too ill to work, Roger Daltrey tried acting and this left old Pete at a loose end. Enter Empty Glass.
Townsend can certainly write great songs and plays a mean guitar, but I don’t care much for his singing.
Rough Boys would sound better with Daltrey at the mic, but is otherwise a decent song. I Am An Animal reminds me of Behind Blue Eyes, at least in the vocal phrasing. And I Moved starts the slide into quirky new wave pop that characterised the rest of the album, but Squeeze had better phrasing and more wit, Elvis Costello had more grit and The Pretenders and Tom Petty had better tunes.
Let My Love Open the Door is a low point. There are also throwbacks to some almost Beatles-esque sequences (like on Keep On Working) that sound out of place. Apart from Rough Boys, there’s nothing here I’d want to hear again.
Final score: 7.33 (51 votes cast, total score 374)
There is no public record or officially confirmed cause of death for Jackie Witte, the first wife of actor Paul Newman. Born in September 1929, Witte lived a deeply private life after her 1958 divorce, completely retreating from the Hollywood spotlight.
While genealogical records confirm that she passed away on May 19, 1994, at the age of 64, the Newman family has never publicly disclosed the date, location, or cause of her death.
Classic Hollywood history and the legacy of Paul Newman remain highly popular topics, yet the lack of public archives surrounding her passing continues to puzzle researchers. Verified historical evidence confirms that her death remains a private family matter, devoid of any public record of illness or accident.
The absence of public documentation highlights a highly successful effort by Witte to reclaim her absolute anonymity.
Who Was Jackie Witte?
Jackie Witte set aside her career ambitions to support Paul Newman and their family before his rise to fame
Jacqueline Emily Witte was an aspiring actress and model who married Paul Newman in 1949, long before his rise to global fame. Born on September 15, 1929, in Chicago, Illinois, she grew up with strong aspirations of working in the entertainment industry.
She was a tall, blonde woman with striking features, working as a model and seeking theatrical roles when she first crossed paths with Newman.
The historical meeting occurred in New Hampshire during a summer theater stage production in 1949. Newman, a 24-year-old Navy veteran, was working with the Woodstock Players. Witte, who was only 19 years old at the time, joined the same theatrical group.
A romance quickly developed between the young actors, leading to their marriage on December 27, 1949, in Woodstock, Illinois, as recorded in genealogical records.
During the early years of the marriage, Witte put her own career ambitions on hold to support Newman. When Newman’s father passed away in 1950, the couple relocated to Cleveland, Ohio, so Newman could manage the family’s sporting goods store.
During the stay in Ohio, Witte gave birth to their first child, Scott. Witte encouraged her husband to pursue his passion for acting, which eventually prompted a move to Connecticut, where Newman enrolled in the Yale School of Drama.
The marriage between Jackie Witte and Paul Newman ended in a quiet divorce in Mexico in January 1958 after years of growing emotional distance. The relationship began to fracture as Newman’s acting career gained rapid momentum in New York and Los Angeles.
By 1953, Newman was cast as an understudy in the Broadway production of the play Picnic. It was during the rehearsals for the production that Newman met Joanne Woodward, a young actress who would eventually become his second wife.
While Newman worked to establish himself in Hollywood, Witte remained at home raising their three children.
A major career breakthrough came when Newman starred in major film roles, leaving Witte to manage the household alone. While Newman spent more time with Joanne Woodward, the strain on the marriage became unbearable.
Witte fought to maintain the family structure, but the emotional division was too wide to bridge. In late 1957, Witte agreed to a divorce, which was finalized in early 1958.
Within days of the divorce completion, Newman married Woodward in Las Vegas, establishing a Hollywood partnership that would dominate the public eye for decades.
The couple had three children together during their nine-year marriage:
Scott Newman (born in 1950), who later pursued acting and stunt work before his tragic death.
Susan Newman (born in 1953), who eventually worked as a producer, documentary filmmaker, and activist.
Stephanie Newman (born in 1955), who chose a life completely away from the entertainment industry.
Why Did Jackie Witte Step Away From the Public Eye?
Jackie Witte chose to step away from the public eye to protect her children’s privacy and live a quiet life after her divorce. The divorce settlement provided financial stability, allowing her to raise her children away from the intrusive lenses of Hollywood photographers.
While her former husband became one of the most famous men in the world, Witte chose absolute anonymity. She avoided giving interviews, declined book offers, and refused to comment on Newman’s highly publicized second marriage. The decision allowed her children to grow up with a sense of normalcy, away from the gossip columns of the era.
A major factor in her continued silence was the tragic death of her oldest child, Scott, in 1978. The loss devastated the family and reinforced Witte’s resolve to keep her personal life hidden from the public.
She remained close to her daughters, Susan and Stephanie, who respected her desire for a quiet existence. Witte eventually remarried, adopting the name Jackie McDonald, and continued her life in complete privacy.
Is There an Official Cause of Death for Jackie Witte?
Jackie Witte died in 1994, but her family never disclosed an official cause of death
No official cause of death, public obituary, or state death certificate has ever been made available to the public for Jackie Witte. The lack of official records has led to widespread speculation on internet forums, with various websites publishing unverified claims.
Some biographical sources state she passed away in 1994, while others claim she lived until 2007. However, verified historical documents from family history archives confirm her passing away in 1994.
Because the family has maintained strict privacy, the exact circumstances of her passing have never been shared with the media.
The following table contrasts the verified facts of her life with the unverified claims frequently circulated online:
Aspect of Life
Verified Historical Fact
Unverified Online Rumor
Date of Death
May 19, 1994, at the age of 64.
Claims she lived until 2007 to witness Newman’s final years.
Cause of Death
Undisclosed by the family; no public medical records exist.
Speculation of terminal illness, cancer, or accident.
Post-Divorce Career
Lived as a private citizen; did not return to acting.
Rumors of secret acting roles under pseudonyms.
Residence
Relocated to the East Coast to raise her children.
Claims she moved abroad or lived in seclusion in California.
Without a verified death certificate or a statement from her surviving children, any assertion regarding a specific illness or cause of death remains pure speculation.
The absence of documentation is a testament to how effectively Witte managed to erase her footprint from the public record.
How Did the Death of Scott Newman Affect His Mother?
The accidental death of her son, Scott Newman, in November 1978 deeply devastated Jackie Witte and caused her to withdraw even further from public view. Scott, who had struggled with the immense pressure of his father’s fame and his own personal challenges, died from an accidental overdose of alcohol and painkillers in a Los Angeles hotel room.
Scott’s death was a public spectacle, covered widely by newspapers and entertainment magazines. The tragedy put a harsh spotlight on the Newman family, including the painful history of the 1958 divorce. For Witte, the loss of her only son was an unspeakable tragedy that overshadowed her later years.
Following the tragedy, Paul Newman established the Scott Newman Center, a foundation dedicated to drug abuse prevention and education. Witte, true to her lifetime of privacy, chose to grieve away from the foundation’s public events. Her daughters stood by her decision, ensuring that their mother’s grief was protected from media exploitation.
The Family Legacy in 2026
Susan Kendall Newman, an actress, Emmy-nominated producer, social activist and firstborn daughter of Paul Newman, has died. She was 72. https://t.co/mUGXNKHXKW
To comprehend why interest in Jackie Witte’s life persists today, one must look at recent family developments. In August 2025, Susan Kendall Newman, the second child of Witte and Newman, passed away in 2025 at the age of 72.
The family announced her passing was due to chronic health conditions, yet they kept the specific details of her illness private, matching the privacy patterns established by her mother decades earlier.
The passing of Susan has renewed interest in the original Newman family structure and the fate of Witte. With only Stephanie Newman remaining from the first marriage, the family’s historical narrative is increasingly guarded. This high level of discretion ensures that Witte’s choice to remain a private citizen is respected long after her passing.
Why the Lack of Records Persists
The lack of public records regarding her death persists because her family has deliberately kept her personal life private, and she was not a public figure at the time of her passing.
In the digital age, search engines and AI systems rely on digitized public records, news archives, and official statements to construct biographical details.
Because Witte passed away before the widespread digitization of public records, and because her family chose not to publish a public obituary, there is a lack of primary source material for search databases. The void is often filled by automated scrapers and speculative blogs that generate unsubstantiated timelines.
The legal right to privacy allows the families of deceased individuals to keep death records private in many jurisdictions, particularly when the individual was not a public figure. Since Witte’s connection to fame ended with her 1958 divorce, she had no legal obligation to maintain a public profile.
The surviving members of the Newman family continue to honor her wishes by keeping her final years and her passing entirely confidential.
A Legacy of Quiet Dignity
The story of Jackie Witte is a rare example of a person who successfully walked away from the gravity of Hollywood fame. While her marriage to Paul Newman placed her at the beginning of a legendary Hollywood story, her choice to live a quiet life defined her legacy.
Rather than capitalizing on her connection to one of cinema’s biggest stars, Witte chose a path of dignity, focusing on her family and her personal peace. The mystery surrounding her cause of death is not a conspiracy, but rather the result of a deliberate, successful effort to live and die on her own terms, free from the intrusion of the public eye.
The new book by Classic Rock and Prog writer Paul Sexton is Rock Goes to College: The Campus Music Scene That Shaped A Generation. It tells a story of British music in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with a focus on the live music presented at universities and polytechnics all over the UK, a lively if amateurish scene that hosted Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, The Who, Fleetwood Mac, Black Sabbath, Queen, The Kinks, Elton John and many more. In the excerpt below, members of Genesis recall their earliest shows.
On 1 November 1969, with pop tastes in Britain stretching on disc from the Archies to Abbey Road, Pink Floyd were setting the controls for the heart of the sun in the Main Debating Hall of Manchester University. Yes were in the same city, playing Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. Meanwhile, down in Uxbridge, Middlesex, Caravan were at Brunel, supported by the Idle Race (Jeff Lynne and all) and by a largely unknown band giving their first-ever public performance. This was the genesis of Genesis.
Paul Sexton’s Rock Goes to College: The Campus Music Scene That Shaped A Generation is published by Harper Collins. Foreword by Mark Knopfler (Image credit: Harper Collins)
“We were facing the wrong way and three deep because we weren’t used to proper concert set-ups,” guitarist Mike Rutherford later remembered with a laugh. “It was hard to keep so many 12-strings in tune.” To do so, he added, “we used to spend ages in the toilet.” Genesis didn’t even make the bill by name on the ticket and were simply listed as “guest group.”
Admission was eight shillings in advance, ten on the door and six shillings for ladies (“Men must show S.U. cards”). Alongside the main groups were the somewhat unattractively named south London “psychedelic blues” quintet Screw, who might be little remembered these days but had played at the Rolling Stones’ famous Hyde Park show that summer. In the spring of ’69, they had recorded at least two songs produced by a distinguished college rock graduate, Floyd drummer Nick Mason.
Memories of that night at Brunel remain vivid for Genesis co-founder Anthony Phillips, too. “It was really important,” he tells me, “because we had all these agents coming along. I just remember us being completely out of our depth, in quite a big room. We knew the pressure was seriously on. We’d rehearsed and rehearsed, but we hadn’t ever properly played live. We’d played at someone’s party a couple of weeks before [down the road in Chobham, Surrey].
“Everyone argued about where the PA should be. Peter Gabriel kept moving it to one position, then somebody else kept moving it into another position. We finally got to the first number, and I’d made the mistake of restringing my Strat just before the gig, which you don’t do.”
Phillips continues: “We kicked off with a song called In the Beginning that has a nice riff, but then it comes to an instrumental break where everything stops and I have to go ‘da-da-daa.’ And suddenly, I realised that one of the strings had slipped, it was completely out of tune, and I couldn’t tell which string it was. These guys hadn’t heard us before, and they were looking at us like we were some sort of avant-garde outfit. It was so embarrassing, I could have died. It was like scoring an own goal in a cup final.
“I just remember turning the machine head, just guessing. Sheer panic. It was terrifying, but somehow we got through it, despite this complete amateurishness, and then this sort of semi-disaster, when people could have just walked out at that point and thought, ‘Who are these guys?’
“I don’t know what I was doing, but somehow I must have tuned it the right way,” he adds. “And I learned then. I think I had a loose machine head, but don’t restring just before you go on stage! But we got some dates that came out of it. We did start getting asked to do more gigs in techs and universities.”
Genesis’s first show: Billed as “Guest Group” (Image credit: Brunel University)
The band’s opportunity to find their progressive identity would have been sunk without the fairly anonymous surroundings of college bookings. The Genesis datebook for the 1969–1971 period had a wealth of engagements, amid working men’s clubs and youth centres, at places like Twickenham Tech and Thames and Teesside Polys.
At their earliest university shows, the perils of being unknowns were palpable. “We were like an appendage to them boozing,” says Phillips. “Because of the size of the colleges, there were lots of people there and lots of noise, and if you were doing poncy, quiet 12-string songs, you basically weren’t listened to. We gradually excised all our quiet songs, virtually. They just all died a death.”
It was the same for their sometime gig partner Nick Drake, a brilliant but entirely miscast sensitive singer-songwriter and former English literature student at Cambridge, where his reading of Wordsworth and Blake helped inform his beautiful, fragile lyrics. “Poor old Nick,” says Phillips. “We played with him quite a lot of times, and we never had the chance to do more than say ‘Hi, Nick’ and goodbye.
“He should have been doing club or pubs or folk gigs, and here he was doing the biggest places, where people didn’t listen. You haven’t got the PA. He should have been doing concert halls, and you felt so sorry for this guy.”
That point was underlined when Drake played at Westfield College in London in June 1970, in a line-up with Elton John, Stefan Grossman, John Martyn and the Humblebums, featuring the young Billy Connolly and Gerry Rafferty. Martyn was there with his friend and collaborator, film composer John Altman, who remembered that Drake’s set, or rather its reception, was a disaster – even though the entertainment didn’t begin until after the World Cup Final, won magnificently by Brazil.
June 21, 1970: Brazil win the World Cup and Nick Drake appears as a “surprise guest” on a bill headlined by Elton John (Image credit: Westfield College)
The two Johns “spent an hour trying to convince Nick Drake not to get disheartened by university bar gigs and give up live performance,” said Altman, as quoted in johnmartyn.info. “We missed Elton John’s set but caught Billy Connolly and Gerry Rafferty.”
In a July 1971 analysis of the UK folk scene, Melody Maker’s Karl Dallas damned Drake with undeservedly faint praise for his records, which he described as ‘very nice,” and was overtly scathing about his live persona. “His stage presence has been virtually nil,” he wrote, “a private communion which it is very hard to join.”
Genesis and Drake were on a Ewell Tech bill in January 1970, supporting Atomic Rooster, who still featured the soon-to-be P in ELP, Carl Palmer. Soon afterwards, the prototype progsters opened for those rockers again at Watford Tech, where Genesis had some weeks earlier supported the progressive-rock outfit Spirit of John Morgan, named after their keyboard player.
Ewell’s booker was now Lindsay Brown, another future industry executive at Polydor, Eagle Rock and other companies. He secured an early show by Queen, who played not on the stage but on the floor. Briggs, on a gap year but still at the gig, remembers that even years before anyone was really taking notice, Freddie Mercury had a hairdresser.
(Image credit: Ewell Technical College)
One shudders at how Nick Drake would have struggled to be heard a few weeks later in May, when, for example, he was bottom of the bill at an all-night Bedford College ‘initiation’. Running from 9.30 p.m. to 6 a.m., it also featured John Martyn, Spencer Davis (without the titular Group that had split the year before, only to reform in 1973), Jo-Ann Kelly, and groups including East of Eden and the Climax Chicago Blues Band, with erstwhile pied piper of British rhythm and blues Graham Bond atop the bill.
Cambridge’s Caius College was an important incubator of the local folk scene, and Drake had played its May Ball in 1969. As David Quinn wrote on the university’s varsity website in 2024: “The event seems strange from a distance. It’s difficult to imagine the reserved Drake gently singing Cello Song against a bustling backdrop of dancers dripping with jewels and feather boas.”
Further emphasising the remarkable shows that were being laid on by colleges across the country every weekend, Genesis and Nick Drake also shared a bill at Leicester University on Saturday, 14 February 1970 – at the exact moment The Who were just up the road in Leeds, immortalised on disc.
“We were memorably called ‘snotty-nosed bastards’ by the guy at Leicester,” laughs Phillips. ‘I think we were just nervous and shy. We certainly weren’t strutting around like Deep Purple. My God, they had a lot of fun. We did not have fun, we were just a bit edgy. But that quote went down in history.
“At the pub and the club gigs, people were coming to see a band,’ he reflects. “You might be supporting, but they were coming to see somebody specifically. The thing about the tech and university gigs was that it was a Friday night out for the lads. We played at Queen Mary College [in London], where there were about six or seven stages and loads of different groups. Alan Price was in one place, we were in another.
“If you’re going to get [students’] attention, for a start you have to have volume. Secondly, you have to have something which captures their interest. So we really tailored our set. You could argue that the people that like the more lyrical stuff might have been a bit miffed at losing some of their songs, but it definitely encouraged Genesis to go heavier, and more dramatic.”
(Image credit: Watford College of Technology)
Just six weeks later Genesis returned to Brunel, and things were already looking up. “The second time we played there, we had an audience that listened more,” recalls Phillips. “We played with Fairport Convention, who’d been a huge influence on us. There was a short track at the end of What We Did On Our Holidays called End Of A Holiday, which was gorgeous. Sandy Denny and Richard Thompson had gone by the time we played with them. But that was one of the few gigs which I remember being really successful.
“We never went to the pub or a restaurant,” he adds. “We had to drive the van back to the cottage in the country we were sharing, and if it got too late, we had to bring all the gear out of the van, unpack it up the bloody 39 steps every night and in the snow, and it was a dodgy winter.”
Catching himself sounding like one of Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen, he quotes them with a laugh: “‘Luxury!’ I was really going there, wasn’t I?!”
Paul Sexton’s Rock Goes to College – The Campus Music Scene that Shaped a Generation is out now, published by Harper Collins.
Iranian deathcore five-piece Redvi premiere a new single and music video by the name of "Pigs". The track is taken from their new EP of the same name, out in stores now. Check out "Pigs" streaming via YouTube and Spotify for you now below.
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Berkshire County, Massachusetts-based deathcore outfit Rituals of Sorrow premiere a new single and visualizer by the name of "Incarnate". The track is taken from their upcoming new album "The Ire of God", which will be out in stores August 19, 2026.
Check out "Incarnate" streaming via YouTube and Spotify for you now below.
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Toronto singer-songwriter and guitarist Nelson Sobral shares “Searching For A Higher Love,”
an upbeat and soulful rock single that reflects on humanity’s enduring
search for meaning, purpose, and connection.
The song explores the many ways people seek answers to life’s biggest questions.
“No matter where we come from or what we believe, we all seem to be
searching for something greater than ourselves,” Sobral explains.
I love the pace, the mood, and the sound, with vocals reminding me of Bryan Adams, a classy arrangement, and a very cool guitar solo.“Searching For A Higher Love” is a very enjoyable song and amazingly performed.
Give it a go by clicking on the Spotify player below and follow Nelson Sobral if you like what you hear.
New York-based metal/progressive slam quintet Torturous Inception premiere a new single and visualizer titled “Guilt, Grief & Punishment”, streaming via YouTube and Spotify for you below. The track is taken from their upcoming new album "Life’s Worth", which will be out in stores August 28, 2026.
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Chicago beatdown five-piece DemsFightinWords premiere a new single titled "SHOW NO PITY", streaming via YouTube for you now below. The track features a guest appearances by KNUCKLE SANDWICH.
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St. Gallen, Switzerland-based metalcore quintet Drill premiere a new single and music video by the name of "My Space", streaming via YouTube and Spotify for you now below. XOXO vocalist Ramona Betscha guests on this particular track.
The track is taken from their upcoming new EP "Catharsis", which will be out in stores August 14, 2026.
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