Unthought of, though, somehow
Wednesday, 16 April 2025
Old (in) New York
Monday, 14 April 2025
Monday Long Song
Have I really never posted this before? It's hard to believe quite frankly. 'Are We a Warrior', the title track of Ijahman Levi's 1979 LP, sits comfortably among my favourite reggae tunes of all time. It lilts, swings and sways, delivering a plea for universal peace in the most soulful way. Let not your arrow from your bow.
Friday, 14 March 2025
Friday Photo #68
A 1930 photo of Joyce in the arms of her maternal grandmother, Anorah.
My Aunt Joyce's life, which began over 95 years ago in an East London terraced house, ended last Sunday evening in a small white room in a Norwich hospital, with my cousin and I by her side. Following a couple of years of steadily declining health, her passing from this world was peaceful.
My cousin has spent much of the last 18 months criss-crossing the Atlantic to care for her mum, while I made regular, though somewhat shorter journeys up and down the M11 to support them both. Latterly my aunt was relocated to a lovely residential care home, just across the Norfolk/Suffolk border, about a mile from my front door. It was by far the longest period she'd spent outside London in her entire life and, unsurprisingly, she didn't care for it much, but it was close enough that I could drop in to see her and report back to my cousin on a regular basis.
For the first 15 years of my life Joyce, my uncle and my cousin lived upstairs in the same house as us. As a consequence, my cousin and I regard each other as siblings and grew up feeling that we'd each been blessed with an extra set of parents.
Joyce leaves her daughter, son-in-law and three remarkable grandchildren.
Wednesday, 19 February 2025
I Think Therefore I Ain't
I have enough miles on the clock to have seen the legendary Old Grey Whistle Test performance by The New York Dolls in 1973 when it originally aired. I was 13 years old at the time and it scared and excited me in equal measure. I followed Johansen into his post-Dolls career, particularly his first three solo albums. The second of those, 1979's 'In Style', is my favourite. It's a Mick Ronson co-production, an unashamedly commercial record, a little of its time perhaps, but chock-full of big hooks and catchy choruses. Sending you all my best David.
Monday, 10 February 2025
Monday Long Song
Soft Machine founding member, keyboard player Mike Ratledge passed away last Wednesday at the age of 81. Although he left the band as long ago as 1976, his contributions to their first eight studio albums and countless subsequently released live sets are immense and the stuff of legend. Here's the short lived 1969 version of Soft Machine consisting of Ratledge, Hugh Hopper, Brian Hopper and Robert Wyatt, performing on John Peel's Top Gear. Within months Brian Hopper was out, to be replaced by Elton Dean, thus completing what many consider to be the classic line-up of the band.
Soft Machine - Facelift / Mousetrap / Noisette / Backwards / Mousetrap RepriseMonday, 3 February 2025
Monday Long Song
My abject despair, towards the end of 2024, at being informed that 'Bluffer's Guide to the Flight Deck', the debut LP by Flotation Toy Warning, had just turned 20 years old (20 bloody years!) was almost immediately quelled with news of an imminent anniversary reissue. Despite this exotic collection of melancholic, far-out pop songs being one of my favourite albums of.....well....., the past two decades apparently, I'd never actually owned a physical copy. For ten years or so it was only available on CD and the initial vinyl pressing in 2015 sold out in the blink of an eye. This time round a mere 500 copies were up for grabs and there was no way I was going to miss out again. If 'Donald Pleasance' tickles your fancy, head over to Flotation Toy Warning's Bandcamp page (here) to check out the rest of the album, particularly the frankly magnificent 'Popstar Researching Oblivion', which, at a smidgen over 6 minutes is sadly a little too short to qualify for this feature. Rules are rules.
The band's splendid follow up, 'The Machine That Made Us', arrived 13 years after their debut and the wait for album number three is now into its 8th year. Come on lads.
Monday, 27 January 2025
All Our Years Become a Tale That is Told
Greatest Hits
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60 years ago today - the fifth of my annual birthday portraits in front of the family radiogram. This morning you find your roving reporter ...
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Today is a milestone birthday for Mrs S. She sees it as a very big milestone, though of course from my aged perspective it's just a mo...
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Throughout long shifts in the supermarket over the weekend, I saw and heard things that caused my colleagues and I to wonder aloud what e...
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Marc Riley paid warm tribute to former gaffer Mark E.Smith on Wednesday evening, when announcing Smith's death on 6Music. Their relat...
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I saw Teleman play in a small sweaty club the other evening, where they offered up a faultless set that blended selections from their 20...