Colour Me Impressed! Replacements Reunite

It’s been good news all around of late if you happen to be a fan of the Replacements.  From brand new songs from front man Paul Westerberg to news yesterday that the former had reunited with ex-bandmate Tommy Stinson to record four cover tunes for a new EP.  (The two longtime bandmates had previously confirmed plans to work together for a track to benefit guitarist Slim Dunlap, the former Replacements member who suffered a stroke earlier this year.)

Rolling Stone is now reporting that the collection will released under the Replacements banner rather than another band name. The cover tunes, which were recorded in a day at a Minneapolis studio in late September, are as follows: Busted Up by Slim Dunlap, Everything's Coming Up Roses from the musical Gypsy, I'm Not Sayin' by Gordon Lightfoot, and Lost Highway by Hank Williams.

These songs will be pressed on 10-inch vinyl in a limited run of 250 copies, all of which will be auctioned off online. Proceeds will go to Dunlap.

So, could a full scale Replacements reunion be in the works?

"It's possible," Westerberg said."After playing with Tommy last week, I was thinking, 'All right, let'scrank it up and knock out a record like this.' I'm closer to it now than I was two years ago, let's say that."

Time to start crossing your fingers and your eyes folks.

John Peel in Space

Massive John Peel Record Collection Will Be Available Online

I remember very well fine tuning my shortwave radio to static filled BBC broadcasts of the late John Peel’s influential radio program.  At one time these groundbreaking sessions would serve as the primary source for my voracious musical appetite.  This was the one program that I could guarantee I would hear music that barely any one on the planet had ever heard before.  Hearing the Fall for the first time was transformational on my young musical sensibilities.  I miss the man and everything he did dearly.

John Peel spent decades digging up amazing music and bringing it to the masses, and sure you can still find low quality mp3’s and compilations of some of his sessions if you dig.  Great news (thanks Amity)  has emerged though at and now we'll get online access to Peel’s entire music collection. It's a new BBC-backed project called The Space, and it goes live in May. The Space will feature music from John Peel's 25 000-deep vinyl LP library as well as 40 000 vinyl singles and CDs.

"We're very happy that we've finally found a way tomake John's amazing collection available to his fans, as he would have wanted," said John Peel's widow Sheila Ravenscroft when speaking to the BBC. The plan for The Space is to make 100 new albums from the collectionavailable online each week, with the goal of hitting 2,500 by October.

"What we're hoping to do is create an online interactive museum which which answers the question 'what is in John Peel's record collection?' but also provides the audience with a visualisation of it.We hope that giving them access to a particular band or their first album orlistening to his show will inspire people to tell us their stories," said Tom Barker, director of the John Peel Centre.

I cannot tell you the palpable joy that this news brings to me.  I’ll be sure to update when further details emerge.