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“With America's sons in the fields far away, with America's future under challenge right here at home, with our hopes and the world's hopes for peace in the balance every day, I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office--the Presidency of your country. Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.”
Although I had little grasp of world politics in 1968 I knew who LBJ was because of my interest in the space race and the fact that my morbid obsession with the assassination of JFK had reached fever pitch around this time.
Seeing the photograph of Johnson taking the oath of office on Airforce One alongside the First Lady fuelled my juvenile conspiracy theory that LBJ must have had a hand in the killing of the President. I mean, it’s obvious isn’t it. Isn’t it? Well no, not all but of course there are a thousand books and websites that’ll tell you that and a whole lot more.
All I knew at the time was that LBJ’s announcement (along with the partial cessation of the bombing in
Looking back on it now, I have quite a soft spot for the old codger though I can’t quite decide whether it was something noble or whether his political nerve had cracked.
The reason for this burst of unSid-like activity is that our guestroom is soon to be occupied on a regular basis by my niece, Verity, who needs office space as part of her relocation from London to the north-east. It’s a temporary measure but in order for her to move in, I’ve had to move my junk out of there.
Two boxes of stuff came up to the yellow room and have taken over as I’ve attempted to sort through it all. I found old hand-written diaries, badges, old poems, bills, letters from old employers, various certificates and instruction manuals for items of electronic gadgetry that I no longer have. And so on.
But…
In order to make room for the stuff I do need to keep, I’ve had to address some of the outstanding junk on my desks here in the main control room. So tons of review copies have to be addressed, binned or filed; magazines and cuttings, ditto.
In the interim period just about every available surface is occupied. Actually not so much occupied but more like under siege.
There are some songs that stop you dead in your tracks, which scramble senses and catch our breath. These are the songs of innocence and experience, our lives, our loves and our deaths.
“If You Go Away”, written by Jacques Brel and translated into English by Rod McKuen, captures the grim moments where the thought of losing someone is too much to bear. Though it's been covered by everybody under the sun, my favourite version of this song for years has been Scott Walker’s rendition from 1969s Scott 3. It’s not only that magnificent voice but the sparse, mournful simplicity of the arrangements that gets to me.
I didn't think it could get any better than that but last year I came upon the original version sung by its composer. Here the implicit hope in McKuen’s translation and repositioning of the emotional argument is absent. McKuen talks about “if” – “if you go”, “if you stay”, but in Brel’s world the deed has already been done.
We join the narrator of the song as his love is about to walk away. The words here are brutal, messy, ridiculous and laughable. It is the desperate rambling of a man reduced to an almost incoherent state transfixed by the totality of loss, self-pity, abject supplication, pleading for his life, begging "don't leave me".
He's trying to make his love laugh, creating a diversion, spouting anything simply in order to keep the conversation alive, scrabbling around in the dirt attempting to delay that unthinkable moment when he knows his love will leave for the last time.
By the time he's reduced to begging to simply be in the presence of his love's shadow, or even absurdly, the shadow of her dog, both singer and audience know its over. For good.

Back to the future…
Magnificent Fiend
Howlin Rain
Birdman Records
The first impression of Magnificent Fiend was that it was merely a smirking irony-laden parody of all those Vanilla Fudge, Stoneground, and Steppenwolf records that used to clutter the album collections of serious rock-heads back in the day. There was so much to dislike about this record. Every track on it reminded me of something else, every visitor who heard it agreed that you’d never have guessed it’d been recorded in the 21st Century.
Relegating it to the “do nothing” pile, I moved on. That should have been that except that I found myself retrieving it on an increasingly regular basis, regarding it warily as something of a furtive, guilty pleasure.
The brainchild of Ethan Miller, whose vocals evoke vintage Rod Stewart or Steve Marriot (with maybe a twist of Terry Reid), Magnificent Fiend erupts from a melodramatic jazzy blur of blaring trumpet and rolling piano to abruptly jerk the listener into a full-blown early 70s Hammond-led rock convention.
“Lord Have Mercy” forensically recreates the moment when straight rock started branching out. Within the space of one six minute song we move through a series of moods and movements; bluesy, Clapton-like reveries, hard-rock gospel and then a Hammond-led lurch into a turbo-charged prog-rock crescendo that could have come straight off The Yes Album
“El Ray” gets all Curtis Mayfield, “Goodbye Ruby” has flashes of
The energy is high but happily so is the quality control. By taking the best features of the period and ditching the sappy indulgent excesses (there are no sprawling solos anywhere), it bristles with a righteously tight organisation, shifting thoughtful arrangements and carefully chosen timbral highlights (vintage synths, over-driven electric piano, brassy underscores) which will win the hearts and minds of even the most dubious listener.
There must be something in the water or in the air over there in San Francisco for all these retro-future acts to keep appearing with such good material. Ethan Miller hails from psych-rockers Comets of Fire (who contain Ben Chasney - see Six Organs of Admittance) and then there's also Wooden Shjips operating somewhere near the Bay as well. All are doing something genuinely interesting and expressive.
Despite the constant echoes of another time, somehow Howlin Rain emerge very much themselves, with songs that stand up to scrutiny and repeated listening. Arguably the best album I never heard in my teens it really is magnificent stuff.
“I’m a winner not a quitter”
“With me you get 110 % commitment”
“I don’t know the meaning of the word failure”
“I’m simply the best“
“I push the boundaries”
“I don’t ever take no for an answer”
“I’m a natural leader”
“I can’t contemplate defeat of any kind”
“I can sell anything”
“Nothing stops me from achieving”
“I’m a world-class talent”
“I am totally goal-orientated”
“I take no prisoners when it comes to getting ahead of the competition”
“People tell me I’m brilliant all the time”
“I always have my eyes on the prize”
“What you get with me is a winner”
At some point over the next fifteen weeks we are going to hear all of the self-anointing homilies mentioned above, spouting from the mouths of young dashing men and women hoping to worm their into the affections of Sir Alan Sugar or if not, then maybe the commissioning editors of day-time property-porn shows.
The Apprentice has once again trawled the length and breadth of the
Tonight’s episode was the usual ugly-pageant, testosterone-addled pissing contest (and that was just the women’s team), as the two groups ran around London trying to flog as much wet fish as they could, out-do each other and pass the buck when anything went wrong. Shoving lobster out at a fiver apiece was as wrong as you could get as the incredulous look on the punter’s faces should have told them.
These opening skirmishes are probably the least interesting part of the series and it was obvious that the unfortunate Nicholas de Lacy-Brown had was the “You’re fired” fodder from the off. I had hoped I’d got over The Apprentice after last year’s disappointing series but I hung grimly on through the set pieces enjoying the misfortune of others which they so richly deserve.
It’s too early to say who might be a contender but the cocky Alex Wotherspoon held up well against Sir Alan’s boardroom barrage. Certainly one to watch.
Just around the corner, a stroll past what used to be the old Jackson Street Co-operative Society (where I once worked in the early 70's). Though now a dismembered hulk - a far cry from its once-swish department store modernity, it is still breathing but only just.
to another "centre" that is now cordoned off and waiting demolition...
One famous denizen waiting for the chop is the multi-story car park, featured in Get Carter, with which I have a historical performance art connection.
On the other side of the road we get a glimpse of what made the civic planners bristle with pride back in the mid-80s, when this frankly plug-ugly lump of public art was deposited upon the populace.
In a way these two civic homunculus deserve each other, slugging it out for the possession of hearts and minds, but in reality alienating those they come into contact with.
The approach to the old town hall is interesting. What was once quite literally the civic centre of the town has been relegated to an island surrounded by lanes of traffic.




And now, the main feature...


This will ring a bell…
Music of the Spheres
Mike Oldfield
UCJ
If you’re going to prove your detractors wrong better to do it in grand style. In his autobiography (Changeling 2007) Mike Oldfield describes how, after being the butt of patronising attitudes whilst a member of Kevin Ayers’ band, he wanted to come up with something that would make everyone sit up and take him seriously. Well, it doesn’t get much grander than Tubular Bells and more or less the whole wide world (give or take a few million sales here and there) sat up and took notice.
The phenomenal success didn’t necessarily make him happy. Several times in his book he talks of being grateful for the abiding interest in TB whilst simultaneously resentful about having everything he does compared to that first record.
Despite such stylistically diverse pieces such Ommadawn, the catchy pop and rock of “Moonlight Shadow” , “Family Man”, or even the techno-tinged moods of 2005’s Light And Shade, he’s never quite escaped the gilded cage which his debut album has constructed around him.
It’s no great surprise therefore that the dancing string motif of the opening track “Harbinger” is clearly drawn from the same gene pool as the first fruit of his loins. Similarly the stirring bass figures which stoke the engines of “Musica Universalis” bear a striking resemblance to those underpinning the Stansall-narrated coda of Tubular Bells.
Back then the guitar was pretty much the star. Here, it’s the tunes that he wants us to focus upon but only after they’ve been threaded into Karl Jenkins’ opulent orchestral embroidery class. The pair first worked together when a Soft Machine-era Jenkins played the oboe and keyboards on the BBC’s Full House performance of TB, and it’s interesting to see the way in which their very separate subsequent career paths have crossed once again, losing their distinctive qualities and becoming interchangeable.
Perhaps understandably, Jenkins has taken Oldfield’s melodies and come up with something that sounds an awful lot like one of his Adiemus albums. “Shabda” in particular has those shrill choral voices to the fore which was a feature of the Adiemus aura, though mercifully they aren’t lumbered here with all that ridiculous invented “ethnic” language malarkey.
Possibly because Oldfield’s playing presence is limited to a few fairly anonymous cameo appearances on the classical acoustic, the album lacks the personality and tension which he achieved with side one of Tubular Bells. And if the constant comparison to his former glories seems unfair then bear in mind that so much of Music Of The Spheres sounds like an old arrival rather than a new departure.









The news reports that the wind speed hitting Whitley Bay was 50 miles per hour. Within a minute of being outside my hands were cold and so painful that I had to keep stopping taking photographs and shove them in my checkie. I managed to do about ten minutes out there and it took me about an hour to warm up afterwards.

Arthur C Clarke's place in posterity was guaranteed long before he got together with Stanley Kubrick to create one of the most intriguing movies of the 20th Century. Having predicated the satellite age well before the heavens were filled with our space junk, Clarke's ability to speculate and even appear prophetic was undoubtedly a factor in drawing Kubrick to the writer and having him create a paradoxically down-to-earth cosmic saga that took in the dawn of man and everything beyond.
All Together Now
Sampler 3
Various Artists
Burning Shed
There was a time when you might buy an album simply because of the label it was on. However romantic and frankly daft it might sound now in this corporate multi-national world, punters often placed their trust in labels such as Island, Charisma, Vertigo, Harvest and Virgin. They were like music clubs where the chances were that if you liked one act then you might well like another signed to the same company.
As the record industry establishment flounder any the sense of artistic empathy within their labels has long since been atomised. It has fallen to smaller independent, artist-led companies to recreate the kind of d'esprit d cor which seemed implicit in those oldie but goldie releases such as You Can All Join In, Nice Enough To Eat, et al, by releasing their very own series of sampler albums.
Established in 2001, Burning Shed has evolved from its bespoke CDR distribution origins to a comprehensive boutique encompassing an expanding base of artists and areas of interest. Sampler Three gives us a slice of the glacial ambient trickles via the poignant Harold Budd-meets- Thomas Newman territories of Pete Chilvers' “Empty Space”, A Marble Calm’s “Another World" and Roger Eno’s Satie-esque watercolour, “Angling”.
Whilst the dominant mood borders on sombre (in a post-rock kind of way) this is alleviated with glitchy electronica (UXB’s “White House Black Ash”, Pedaltone’s “”Goodbye Honeypot”),
On the surface this countrified ballad is far removed from the electronics and classical undertows which swirl about it. Yet establishing connections that might otherwise be lost or at first glance are apparently invisible is surely the purpose of such samplers.
I’ve probably heard the track “Larks’ Tongues In Aspic” by King Crimson more times than I’ve had hot dinners. Yet I’ve never failed to be gripped by a piece that seems almost ludicrously discursive in our sound-bite age.
I know that my tastes are outmoded and my opinions outdated, and I know that what I think and believe about music is irrelevant and the object of derision by folks who take their poison on the po-mo couches of the review shows and monthly columns of note.
I know I’m lucky to have felt a visceral connection that bypasses the brain and goes straight to the heart, that sweet clear spot still untarnished by all the things they think I should know by now.
Bernardstrasse...
Bernardstrasse interior with Lesley...
The approach to Rothbury...
Arrival...
A trek through the trees...


The approach to the house...

Afterwards, another trek through yet more trees...


...and the approach to Bernardstrasse ...
Chez Bernard
We headed down to North Shields. Once a lively fishing port, the place is now pretty dead on its knees. Nevertheless the place has its attractions.
The Lowlight
Looking out towards Knots flats...
Looking out toward the mouth of the Tyne...
And then the phone rings and Bernard obliges me by re-enacting a scene from Get Carter...
After an half and hour of wandering around admiring the 17th Century remnants of Clifford's Fort we pop into The Dolphin for what Chris Wilson would undoubtedly call, a cheeky one.
The joint wasn't exactly jumping (which is a good thing in The Dolphin believe me)...
but we knew somewhere else would be...
Inside you quickly realise they don't make shops like this any more. I ask for a pound and a half of back bacon.





Now thanks to an earlier blog about ace local band Penetration, photographer Rik Walton got in touch. It turned out Rik had a couple of pictures of the band in action which he very kindly emailed me.
I can't tell you how strange it is seeing this photographs after all this time. Quite bizarre. Though we recorded a few demos, and were receiving attention from a couple of labels, managers and producers, I left the band to concentrate on some performance art ventures I'd become entangled with as part of The Basement Group.
Later they changed their name to Zoo Bazaar taking on a New Romantic kind of vibe. I saw the band in concert at the time and they were great (despite the dodgy leg wear!) with Brian ever the striking and the consummate showman. Despite their best efforts, the lack of commercial success sapped the energy from the group and they went their separate ways."I found this in a jewellery box at home (it’s amazing the bollocks you keep over the years). It’s a no expense spared (or should I say no expense incurred) rare collectable from the good old days. Actually I have fond memories of the few gigs I saw with you in that band."
You can always tell when governments are running out of steam or have been around far too long. The tell-tale signs are an increasing amount of snouts-in-the-trough stories as individual and collective arrogance becomes the predominant mind-set, sex scandals, and hare-brained headline grabbing “initiatives”.
And if that paragraph summed up the last years of the last Tory government it also provides a short-hand account of Gordon Brown’s benighted premiership.
To be fair there’s not really been a good old-fashioned sex scandal on the son of the Manse’s watch worthy of the name but there’s ample compensation to be found when it comes to the sounds-like-a-good-idea-if-you-say-it-fast-enough department: namely Lord Goldsmith’s proposals to have school-leavers swear an oath of allegiance to Queen and country.
Had this vacuous, half-baked tosh been in place when I left school I wouldn’t have been able to take such an oath.
I regarded the monarch as a mega-rich, tax-dodging landowner occupying their privileged position by virtue of an accident of birth and/or murdering their nearest rivals for the job. Why would I swear anything to an institution I held (and hold) in contempt?
True allegiance to something can’t be instilled via recitation or incantation. It’s bred in the bone of engagement, the sinews of discourse, debate and dissent; of experience – good and bad.
What’s the point in educating young people to think and question for themselves, if at the end of the process they are required to recite an oath like a mindless drone?
If the institution of monarchy is symbolic of this country then maybe they’ll let those school-leavers who don’t buy it swear to something else that is equally as resonant, such as an oath to roast beef, Fatima Whitbread or The Kinks?

The start of something big
Fairport Convention
Fairport Convention
Polydor
Though often overlooked in favour of the albums which followed, Fairport Convention’s debut release is suffused with the musical abandon of young people who didn’t know what they couldn’t do and so had a go at everything.
A kaleidoscopic adventure that takes in blues, rock, jazz, pop, bluegrass, West Coast-inspired flights of fancy and anything else they happened to have passed along the way, nevertheless coalesces into a bright energetic collection that retains its importance as part of the folk into rock experiment.
Still finding their feet, the record captures hedonistic lurches, numerous doffing of the cap to their varied influences, intriguing sidesteps and above all, the enthusiastic grasping of an opportunity to make a mark without much regard for caution or reserve.
Richard Thompson’s precocious guitar delivers the majority of the thrills and spills particularly on the proto-prog hack and slash interludes on the four minute, legend-in-its-own-lunchtime surrealistic epic, “The Lobster” and the straighter ripping rock n’ roll of “It’s Alright Ma, It’s Only Witchcraft.”
Though she often gets the short-end of the stick with invidious comparisons to Sandy Denny, the clean lines of Judy Dyble’s vocals are perfect throughout the record and peak on their frantic, exhilarating cover of Joni Mitchell’s “Chelsea Morning” and the comedown lament of “One Sure Thing”.
Though some will opine the relative lack of sophistication and stylistic coherence that would characterise the group’s later output, what we get here is a record that is entirely unselfconscious, a product of fertile (not to say febrile) times with the kind of combined chutzpah that went way beyond any of their years. Classic stuff.
Every year my Gran Smith would come up from her native
I sometimes struggled with her heavy brummy accent and her use of strange words and phrases. For example, instead of saying “toilet”, “lavatory” or “loo”, she would say “Lah Pom”. I have no idea where it comes from and I have never heard any other living soul on this planet utter these two words when referring to the toilet. Even now, the phrase makes me smile, and I associate it with her as a unique aural signature.
Her conversation was laced with other words and phrases whose meaning was beyond my understanding, though unlike “Lah Pom”, they had a certain emphasis and gravity that made them stand out from the crowd, and also unlike "Lah Pom" I was to hear them all too frequently as I got older : “darkies”, “nigger “and “wog” were amongst the ones she usually deployed.
Growing up in an exclusively white working class suburb of
The other phrase I recall hearing a lot of in 1968 (not only from Gran Smith but my parents as well) was “Enoch’s right.” I had no idea at the time who or what Enoch was but I would find out quick enough.
Despite the warnings of dreadful weather, Debra and I togged up and headed out to Bernardstrasse enjoying the unexpected sunshine.
We had been invited for coffee-time and some of Bernard and Lesley's wonderful home-baking.
We also got a chance to chin-wag with my niece, Errin who is up on a flying visit from university in Northampton.
Although I can't say I was particularly impressed by any of the work on show the range and diversity of what was on display was interesting.
We did find a glass vase we both liked though at a reasonable price and Debra plumped for that.
After our bout of art-related consumerism we took a walk over Byker bridge, pausing to look down over the Cluny arts complex (where I saw Theo Travis last year)...
...and look up at some very dramatic and very changeable skies.
The Ouseburn valley was traditionally a site for warehousing, light engineering and further in the past, chemical production. Although it has now been given over to creative industries and arts hubs, (as well as a long-standing city farm), the valley still retains some aspects of its former self - for which I feel a wierd nostalgia.
After doing a spot of shopping for this evening's meal, wejumped on a Metro and headed back to Tynemouth Station to take a peek at their flea market.

There were a couple of stalls selling CDs of which most were Russian counterfeits. After this we got the Metro back to Whitley Bay and prepared the evening meal - a picnic-style feast in honour of Sam who has just completed his first week in a new job.
I was talking to Sean on the blower earlier today about how homespun drama and serials on British TV is generally pretty poor stuff. I’ve been watching the first season of Six Feet Under on dvd and last year spent time catching up with The West Wing in a similar manner. Though very different both benefit from tight plotting and razor-sharp scripting.
Even though it was uneven in a lot of places, the Aaron Sorkin produced Studio 60 also shared these qualities. Sean extolled the virtues of The Sopranos, The Wire as well as the running, kicking, and staking malarkey of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Although I don’t share his enthusiasm for the latter I recognise why this show works and why their nearest
It didn’t seem to always be the case.
The BBC produced series from the 80s, The Singing Detective, bristled with imagination and a complete absence of clunky exposition. The quality bar has been so lowered in the intervening years, Sean argues, that were Dennis Potter to pitch The Singing Detective now he’d be signed up to the BBC drama mentoring course and given a job coming up with ideas for Casualty and that it would be HBO who’d be more likely to green light Potter’s groundbreaking drama rather than any of our domestic producers.
Although American TV is responsible for mucho drosso it also the place you look to for real juice when it comes to prime-time drama. Why is that? Are punters like Sean and I simply seduced by glossy production values, exotic-looking locations and Mom’s Apple Pie or has the quality of UK-made drama at an "all-time low" (and yes, that was a gratuitous reference to the utterly abysmal BBC show Ashes To Ashes).

Sometimes when I’m in this situation I get kick-started by reading how other writers (noticed how I resisted the urge to say real writers there) approach their work. Years ago a pal suggested I read Stephen King’s treatise On Writing. At the time I didn’t pick it up but the other day, when I was out shopping (also known as dodging the page) I saw a copy of the book in the window of one of the many charity shops.
Truth be told I’ve never read any of King’s novels although like most people in the sentient universe I’ve seen a bunch of movies based on or adapted from his work. Debbie has read tons of his books. “You know he’s going to tell you a story and entertain you in the process” she says when asked about why she reads him. Debbie who reads a lot of fiction tells me that I’d be surprised by the amount of authors who have a decent story but can’t actually tell it very well.
So, I’m reading On Writing and trying to see if I can gather up some scraps from the table of someone who knows what he’s doing.
King recalls being asked early on in his career how he wrote. “One word at a time”, he told his inquisitor, neatly encapsulating
If you lived through the late 70s and early 80s in the
Her admission to hospital reminds us that at 82 her death can’t be too far away. When it comes the Thatcher era will be picked over for its pros and cons, the tributes will come thick and fast and there will be calls for her to be given a state funeral.
The last ex PM to be given this honour was Winston Churchill – an event which I watched as child on television. Though I would disagree with his politics (mostly) I can see why the old cove was given the 21 gun salute given his position in WW2. His premiership united a nation during grave times.
But Thatcher? Her legacy is one of polarisation, divisiveness and firing the starting pistol on rampant corporate greed.
Morrissey summed up the distaste and revulsion I feel at the prospect in his 1988 toe-tapper from the Viva Hate album, “Margaret On The Guillotine.”
The kind people
Have a wonderful dream
Margaret On The Guillotine
Cause people like you
Make me feel so tired
When will you die ?
When will you die ?
When will you die ?
When will you die ?
When will you die ?
And people like you
Make me feel so old inside
Please die
And kind people
Do not shelter this dream
Make it real
Make the dream real
Make the dream real
Make it real
Make the dream real
Make it real

The Beat Goes On (and on and on)...
System 7
A Wave
Techno hippy outfit, System 7's latest album illustrates a story that encompasses Hinotori – a bird of fire that speaks in a magical telepathic voice and is seen at the outer edges of the universe by future space travellers – and other characters populating manga artist Tezuka Osamu's sci-fi samurai worlds. These include Wolf-Head, Space Patrolman Masato Eternity and a cute-looking robot called Chihiro 61298 who appears to be blessed with a pair of pneumatic looking rabbit ears. Like, wow man…
Lest he be accused of jumping on a bandwagon, even a cursory listen to almost any part of Steve Hillage's career reveals a long-term fascination with things that make diddly-diddly noises and riffs that go round in circles. With his old outfit Gong (sampled here to appropriately comic effect on “Chihiro 61298”) the music was suffused with cartoon cosmology, astral 'oohs' and 'aahs', and although the pot-head pixies were replaced by a New Age manifesto when he went stratospherically solo in the late 70s, it pretty much amounted to the same hedonistic space trip.
Having hung up his Strat in exchange for a sequencer, Steve Hillage and Miquette Giraudy left behind the space rock days of yore to soar away with born-again techno-beats back in 1990 under the System 7 moniker. Hillage's credibility with the trance scene stems from 1979’s Rainbow Dome Musick, whose floating tones seemed custom-made to have a bunch of repetitive beats and uber-low basslines foisted upon it by The Orb's Alex Paterson; the man who played his augmented version of the album to the chill out crowd.
If you're a fan of ambient techno and manga then this album will probably float your boat. Should you not be blessed with such enthusiasms then it represents a curiously joyless state wherein the tyranny of the cyclical beats are quickly established and rarely (if ever) overthrown. Ornamented by a series of by-the-book synth sounds and anonymous guest appearances (including his old boss from Gong, Daevid Allen), it's frankly lacking ambition.
Occasional sparks fly as Hillage's prodigious digits connect to the fretboard (“Makimura – Space Pilot” and “Wolf-Head” locks horns with some kick-ass beats) but that's about as interesting as things get.
Despite carefully following the instructions on retrieving the blighters through an automatic export (or something like that), I could not get the buggers to appear. Knowing they weren’t lost was of course of some comfort but it meant that I had to retrieve them manually which took up a ton of time that I wanted to spend on other things. Grrrr.
And if that hadn’t worked I could have always dredged up the stuff from the laptop but it’s not quite as in synch with my desktop as I had assumed. Backup before it packs up I suppose is the moral of this particular story.
Joe is currently in the Yellow Room researching biographical detail for a school project on his favourite band, Killswitch Engage. Though I can live without the horror movie growling that accompanies many or most of the songs I’ve heard, I quite like the extreme dynamics encountered in their music.
I enjoyed Mad Men on BBC4 despite feeling like I needed a trip to the dry cleaners on account of all the cigarette smoke billowing about virtually every single shot. A solid opening which introduces the players and their their unsavory habits and even more unsavoury attitudes and views.
MAD came into my life sometime during 1968 when Storm’s bookseller in Wallsend (where I used to pick up my Marvel comics) started stocking second-hand copies. Several of these were actually the American editions rather than the
In effect I was only looking at the pictures (Don Martin was especially good in this respect) but in doing so I was also absorbing the contours of another culture by osmosis. Children are much better at this than adults think. A pity then that I didn’t have my snout in permanently stuck in my school text books instead of MAD, Look & Learn, Valiant, Hurricane, and all the other ephemera of my youth.

Spirit: Live At The BBC 1971 – 1978
Jack Bruce
Polydor
Though forever preserved in amber as one third of Cream, Jack Bruce broke free of the confines of blues rock via a series of ambitious solo albums. From the brash something-to-prove eclecticism of 1969’s Songs For A Tailor, the dream-like vistas of 1971’s Harmony Row, through to the thrumming fusion of How’s Tricks in 1977, the extent to which Bruce pushed against type-casting is chronicled over these three action-packed CDs.
With the possible exception of guitarist John McLaughlin, it’s difficult to think of another
There’s a ragged brilliance to much of the first disc showcasing the quartet he took out on the road in 1971 to support the just-released Harmony Row. That album’s crystalline beauty was roughed-up a bit to favour the punchy dynamics desired in a live setting. Nevertheless, the effect is both exotic and powerful even if Bruce sometimes struggles to nail the intricacies of Pete Brown’s wordplay.
In 1975 Bruce was on the Old Grey Whistle Test with the previous year’s Out Of The Storm and back for the In Concert strand of 1977. Both sets (albeit with different line-ups) show that although they remain basically a rock outfit the jazzy undertow of the playing is always present and occasionally given full reign in the Return To Forever style work-out of Tony Willliams’ composition, “Spirit”.
Jazz is the most definitely the name of the game on two sessions with John Surman and Jon Hiseman. Amounting to a tumultuous 40 minutes rather irritating the largely improvised tracks are scattered across all three discs, dissipating their impact somewhat.
This minor quibble aside, Spirit is an excellent example of how Bruce was never content to merely play to the crowd but rather challenged them to keep up with his restless musicality.