Monday, 25 November 2024
No Hello and No Goodbye
Friday, 15 November 2024
Friday Photo #66
Monday, 4 November 2024
Monday Long Song
Monday, 7 October 2024
Monday Long Song
Sitting between Soft Machine's earliest psychedelic Canterbury scene fusion odysseys and the contemporary jazz-rock noodlings of their later line-ups, is the sometimes overlooked Karl Jenkins period. These days he is Sir Karl Jenkins, noted classical composer, though at the time he joined the band in 1972 he was a jobbing musician who'd already served as saxophonist for Graham Collier's late 1960s' group, played on the original recording of 'Jesus Christ Superstar', lent his oboe talents to Elton John's 'Tumbleweed Connection' and co-founded the mighty Nucleus with Ian Carr.
Karl Jenkins' eight year tenure with Soft Machine commenced with 'Six', the album Swedefaced above. It's an ambitious affair, a double LP - one studio and one live. The band rarely sounded more European than they do on the Karl Jenkins composition, 'The Soft Weed Factor'.
Soft Machine - The Soft Weed Factor
Monday, 16 September 2024
Monday Long Song
Friday, 30 August 2024
Friday Photo #65
Monday, 26 August 2024
Monday Long Song
The aforementioned kettle was pressed into service once again with the arrival of the rep from Phonogram Records. Back in the day, Phonogram handled the manufacture and distribution for a number of small labels including, at that time, Charisma. I'd wandered off up the shop, coffee in hand and was idly browsing through the racks when one of the staff called out to me. 'Do you wanna go to see Van Der Graaf Generator this evening?' I had a little history with band and knew they were playing locally, though with my abysmal teenage cashflow situation being what it was, I'd already discounted the possibility of going, but he was waving a ticket in my direction - a record company freebie!
A few hours later I found myself sitting in the stalls of a sparsely populated local theatre. Actually the phrase sparsely populated doesn't do the audience number justice. The room holds 1500, though I doubt there were 150 of us scattered around the place - little wonder that tickets were being given away. The band absolutely delivered nonetheless, playing a powerful set in support of their seventh LP, 'World Record'. The hefty (dare I say progfunk?) organ and sax driven 'A Place to Survive' was a favourite of mine back then and remains so to this day.
Friday, 16 August 2024
Friday Photo #64
It's the Spring of 1964 and I've just arrived home after a little rough and tumble down the park at the end of the road, probably instigated by the lad across at No.13 ringing the doorbell and, with all the innocence he could muster, asking Mum '...is Swede playing out?' My shirt hangs loose from beneath a favourite cardigan, one that I will outgrow within a matter of weeks. The wellies are still on and a plaster just above my left knee covers the most recent scrape in a childhood full of scuffs, cuts and grazes. Look at that face though - properly over-excited. The reason? It's right behind me. While I was out, Dad (and probably Uncle Ivor) had installed a full sized swing at the bottom of the garden - a swing! Actually at this point it's just the metal frame cemented into the ground, but the all important hanging bit would materialise shortly afterwards. The swing's arrival was a complete surprise and I'm impishly as pleased as punch about it.
On and off for a handful of young summers, that swing at the end of the garden was central to my world. The frame alone became a mini-chicane as I careered around the garden on a succession of scooters and bikes, it also formed the goalposts for a thousand kickabouts (reducing Mum's grass to a muddy swamp in the process) and it substituted as a Bat-pole for my imaginary adventures as the Caped Crusader. All this in addition to being a, y'know, swing!
I've no idea (and irritatingly never thought to ask) how Dad acquired this magical plaything that made me the envy of my infant school pals and equally I have absolutely no recollection of it being dug up and removed from the garden a few years down the line, after I'd outgrown it it. The scruffy little scamp in the photo couldn't give a hoot about the details though. What larks he's going to have.
Friday, 5 April 2024
Friday Photo #63
It's the summer of 1974. Go down to the bottom of my road, through the park, round the edge of the allotments beyond, on past the cricket pitches, then over the Lea Flood Relief Channel and you'd eventually find yourself in a remote open wasteland, criss-crossed by railway lines. It was the kind of no man's land where all sorts of mischief took place. Where burned out husks of cars, vans and fridges sat rusting and abandoned and where smashed bottles, broken bricks and jagged chunks of metal littered every surface. In short, it was our playground. Oblivious to the inherent danger of cuts and bruises from all of the dumped rubbish, or bloodied noses from the bigger boys who invariably loitered menacingly nearby, my mates and I often headed down there when nothing else was going on. And yes, each of us at one time or another, returned home with a cut, a bruise, a bloody nose, or occasionally all three.
In one area, a crude mud track had been carved out by the bigger boys on their mopeds and whenever they were otherwise occupied, no doubt giving some other poor unsuspecting youngster a bloody nose, we would hare around it on our bikes. Yay, yet more opportunities for cuts and bruises! And here I am, haring around that very track 50 years ago, long hair and flares flailing in the breeze, a vision in colour co-ordinated clothing. But what colour is that jeans/jumper combo exactly? Mauve? Purple? Violet? Scarlet? Vermillion? Who knows, but it sure ain't pretty and the fashion police have most definitely been informed.
The good news to end on is that the dangerous sprawling urban wasteland of my youth is now home to a spacious nature reserve and lengthy walking trail.
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I'm sending today's tune out to our mutual blogging chum John Medd, as I reckon it fits in rather neatly with his recent Philip Glass/Steve Reich/John Adams post.
Friday, 29 March 2024
Friday Photo #62
Friday, 22 March 2024
Friday Photo(s) #61
Tuesday, 19 March 2024
Together Riding On a Crest, It Was Swell
Back in the 1970s, most of the Friday morning playground chatter concerned the previous evening's edition of Top of the Pops. A lucky few of us would've recorded selections from the programme on our new fangled cassette machines, turning to shush our parents as we held a microphone up to the tiny tinny speaker next to the screen. The rest relied on mental highlights, etched into transfixed memory and enhanced by the shared recollections of classmates. Memorable performances seemed to come thick and fast for us throughout those years; David Essex's extraordinary 'Rock On', Leo Sayer's pierrotesque tour-de-force 'The Show Must Go On' and our first glimpse of the unique genius of Sparks, via 'This Town Ain't Big Enough For Both of Us', to name but a few - all of these before we even start on the likes of Bolan, Bowie, Slade, Sweet etc. The cultural impact of Top of the Pops may have been tarnished by the evil actions of some of the presenters and dimmed by the passing years, but those performances resonate with me to this day. Another that stands out is Cockney Rebel's 1974 TOTP debut with 'Judy Teen'. The following morning, before the school-bell rang, a group of us huddled together beneath the netball hoop to exchange our thoughts on the brilliant quirky oddness of the song and frontman Steve Harley's strangely alien appearance. It was the stuff we lived for. Needless to say, the BBC have wiped that particular edition of the show, though a later TOTP version of the song is preserved on YouTube.
I happened to be in London on Sunday, just half a dozen miles from my childhood stomping grounds, when news of Steve Harley's sad passing pinged onto my phone. In The Boleyn later that evening, I raised a pint of Five Points Best to Steve and to all those pals from the old schoolyard.
Friday, 15 March 2024
Friday Photo #60
Friday, 9 February 2024
Friday Photo #59
Friday, 2 February 2024
Friday Photo #58
Friday, 26 January 2024
Friday Photo #57
Friday, 12 January 2024
Friday Photo #56
Butlins holiday camp in the mid 1940s. Mum in her teens is second from left at the back. To her right is a family friend, to her left is her cousin Emily with future husband Matt. To Matt's left is Emily's brother Cyril with my maternal grandfather at the end. My maternal grandmother and her sister Carrie (Emily and Cyril's mother) sit smiling broadly at the front of the group. My grandfather and the family friend are the only two people in the photo that I didn't eventually get to know.
Friday, 5 January 2024
Friday Photo #55
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