Seventies Copendium

A fifth of the way through "Copendium" the 700-page treatise on music by Julian Cope, and we are into the 1970s, with Alice Cooper, Be Bop Deluxe and a 20-page sequence on the Blue Öyster Cult. This is all music that I am familiar with but think it will be a while before I am finished with this.

The book itself is printed on very thick paper so it is a fairly hefty tome.

I recently discovered that my American Amazon Author page has a feed from this blog which you can see here. It only shows on the .com site but not on others. C'est La Vie.

The music is "Hot Rails To Hell" by The Blue Öyster Cult

Mike Singleton - Vocal Stories

I am not sure if you are aware of my writing on Vocal but these are a few of my stories if you would like to sample them:

1. Barter Books - An Amazing Bookshop In A Railway Station In Alnwick
2. The Plagiaristic Poetry Series - Poems Taken From Random-Themed Lines
3. Another Raven - A Take On Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven"
4. The Cleaner - An Autism-Focused Christmas Special
5. An Owl In A Towel - A Beautiful Book by Lesley and Cheryl
6. Three Reasons Why I Love Settle - Scaleber Force, The Hoffman Kiln and Castlebergh Crag
7. The Accidental Book - Helping a Great Vocal Friend Resulted In Me Publishing My First Book
8. Call Me Les - A Great Friend and An Amazing Writer and this is her Instagram

Two A.M. Too Late or Too Early?

Thanks to virtually a week off , last night I stayed up while 1:30 AM , I think I could have stayed up all night , not sure how I would have felt today but isn't that why party animals only get up in the afternoon , which then means it's easy to stay up all night,

Now if you are partying or at a rave the question in the title doesn't matter , but if you are just at home is 2 AM too late or too early to watch a film , make some coffee or tea or a bacon butty.

I have the dates for my COVID injections and the systems , while a couple of glitches went through fairly quickly , unlike almost all the contracts outsourced to the government's mates and cronies.

I had planned to try a marathon this week , but the thought of maybe spending 12 hours to do 60K steps in 12 hours  in cold weather somehow lost it's appeal. At some point I will go to top my 15.5  miles but that may be at the end of March , but even then it may not happen, we shall see.

I have listened to a lot of music this week and still written nothing . I really need to learn how to use my simple Kindle recording studio as I can't get anything that links up to my computer to use Audacity to record it.

This week's vinyl included Alice Cooper's "School's Out" and maybe their finest album "Killer" , as well has Hawkwind's "XIn Search of Space" and "Space ritual" and as I write this I am listening to "This Time It's Personal" the excellent covers album by Hugh Cornwell and Dr John Cooper Clarke.

But I will share , what is in my opinion Alice Cooper's finest song , the amazing "Halo of Flies" , love the image the title conjures up and the song is eight minutes of aural adventure. I also found this cover's band Pretties For You NYC doing a cover which I also have to share as it is rather good.

The Midgard Serpent #AnimalAugust #3

Still another sixty pages to go in "Everville" and still have no real clue about the Uad Uroboros, the monsters of the book. The Uroboros part is based on Ouroboros , the self sunstaining perpetual worm or snake that surronds the world based on the Midgard Serpent Jörmungandr from Norse mythology.

While thoroughly enjoying the book , I am still confused as to why I bought this and never actually read it, it will definitely be revisited, and I know one of the characters Harry D'Amour maybe just from "The Scarlet Gospels" or "The Great and Secret Show" , so it is slightly surprising.

It is a very grey Tuesday but the rain has stopped and I have been listening to a couple of CD boxes today. One was the first five Alice Cooper albums and this just confirmed that they didn't really take off until "Love It To Death" with some impressive songs with one of their best (and creepiest) "The Ballad of Dwight Fry" sseguing with with frightening but originally funny synchronicity into Rolf Harris' "Sun Arise" . The Cooper song refers to a child stalker and well you know what I mean. The album is still excellent.

"Killer" is even better , but not of the albums hit forty minutes so that was a great morning's listening.

I am now listening to the "Zang Tumb Tuum" box set which is 3CDs and a DVD , and while there is some good stuff on there, I liked the Alice Cooper albums better.

In keeping with #AnimalAugust (and the Midgard Serpent) I am going with the excellent Northern Soul song "The Snake" by Al Wilson , a truly great record that always grabs your attention when it comes on the radio.

Let It Rain

The sky is grey and it's raining. I normally like rain but at the moment it's a threat because I have an intermittent roof leak  that I have been waiting three weeks for the roofer to sort out. He's an OK guy but  not as quick to deal with this as I'd like.

I'm reading Matt Haig's book and one of the things we should listen to to relax and unwind is rain and waves, things that you hear but are constant but don't grab your attention but give your mind a relaxing bed to sleep on, it's a good idea. Youtube has some sequence of up to twelve hours of natural sounds (waves, rain etc) that you can put on and fall asleep to, check here.

When  I was starting to write this Chris Hawkins played "Sometimes" by James which brings up rain and waves and water in its lyrics and I will share that with you this morning.

I often go to sleep listening to lots of music, Brian Eno's "Thursday Afternoon" is wonderful because like natural sound there is nothing that grabs your attention. The night before last I listened to Alice Cooper's "Killer" and I got through most of that. Last night I put on three Weather Report albums  ("Heavy Weather", "I Sing The Body Electric" and "Mysterious Traveller")which is excellent jazz instrumental but fell asleep before the first piece had finished. I got up three times to go for a wee (I am old and diabetic and it was one of those nights but that is life) but each time chose a different Weather Report album and went straight back to sleep.

I think I will also include "Birdland" which was going to be my original piece for this, but we can have both.

We Are All Nervous

.. to some extent. After finishing "Norse Mythology" by Neil Gaiman, I've picked up "Notes on a Nervous Planet" by Matt Haig. This sort of follows on from his "Reasons To Stay Alive" which addressed how he dealt with his depression, and the book really helped a sadly missed great friend of mine Craig Puranen Wilson who was one of the most positive people that I have met it my life but also dealt with his own demons while helping so many others.

I read "Reasons To Stay Alive" on a train journey down to London for my friend Paul Campbell's 50th Birthday, it took me just three hours and I started thinking "I shouldn't be giving this as a birthday present" and finished thinking what an absolutely brilliant, uplifting and hopeful book. I think I could do the same with "Notes on a Nervous Planet" but am not on a three hour train journey, but it has started very well.

"Notes on a Nervous Planet" posits that anything can make us worried or nervous and how we can deal with that. A lot of that can be answered by the answer to the question:

"Am I in Control Of This?"

If we are we are usually Ok, but it's when we are dependent on things that are out of our control that the worry bomb starts ticking. Today I parked up a hire car rented from Enterprise  to pick up something from the Post Office (a clear vinyl copy of the first Faust album) . If the car gets damaged I am liable for £1,000 excess so that is always on my mind, and it doesn't have to be my fault , and a combination of an idiot parking me in (he was on double yellows) and another one pulling out of a side road without looking could have caused me to be in an accident. I waited til everything was clear so there was no accident but the nervousness was there while it was still a possibility.

Though to put things in context when I was was coming up the A19 in driving rain, I was not worried at all but just wanted to get home, and really , you would think that would be when an accident might happen, and therefore I should be worried, but if you were that worried you probably couldn't drive. You need to have confidence in yourself.

So again , I wasn't going to write anything today but things just trigger something, and given the subject it has to be the opening song from Side 2 of my favourite Alice Cooper album "Killer" , "You Drive Me Nervous". Legend has it that Vincent Furnier changed his name to Alice Cooper after a 17th Century Witch (You probably can find one) but the name was chosen because it sounded wholesome, normal and at odds with the band's raison d'etre.

Talk Talk

It's always good to talk and chat with peopla about non essential things. Today I was in a shop discussing the merits of Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" (wheich everyone should have and at least try to read and understand) and Simon Singh's "Fermat's Last Theorem" which while educating you about mathematics is also a brilliant cliff hanging detective novel.

Then I held the door open for a girl with amazing hair braiding / dreadlocks and mentioned a Facebook post by my friend Kaz which brought a smile to many people's faces., about her encounter with a Jamaican "bruddah", (see image).

The thing is encounters like this definitley make youy day better and it's always good to talk.

In my work environment I encourage lots of social talk and interaction, because that makes it much easier  to  then talk work when it matters. Social interactions remove inhibitions about whether you can actually speak to people.

I still see a lot of cliquery but often that's induced by familiarity and inhibitions about straying outside your box. Maybe my problem is that I often go way outside the box and end up tripping over my own feet, but more often than not it is a good end result.






Anyway today's music can only be "Talk Talk" by Talk Talk, which is a break from the recent proliferation of Alice Cooper, David Bowie and Rolling Stones.

It's Friday, it's the weekend and it's still sunny. Enjoy everyone

Vaguely Homonymic Musings

When I titled my last post "Speed Too" I though how far can you count using homonyms instead of the actual numbers. I know it's convoluted (especially seven), and someone else will have done this better, but it was an interesting thing to think about. THis is the list:

Won

Too

Free

For

Fife

Sicks

'S Even

Ate

Nein

Tin

I was vaguely thinking of numbering blog posts with these words but decided against it, as I'd get bored , and I've done it all in one here.

Today I went for a Tofu Katsu Curry at Wildflower, but I still find Tofu to spongey and featurelessly chewy. The Katsu Curry, rice an dleaves were excellent though and really I should have asked for the tofu to be replaced by Mushrooms.

I also gave in to temptation and bought a vinyl desk copy of Alice Copper's "School's Out" on a Green Warner Brothers label, and that should complete my vinyl collection barring any new inventive covers or picture discs.

So maybe we can do more Alice Cooper today and go with a live take on Gutter Cat vs The Jets.

Speed Too

This time I know what music I'm going to include so I should be able to keep to my ten minute to create this blog post but I sort of know I wont. As I've said before, and therefore repeating myself, but we always do that don't we, this blog is also a diary for myself so that I can store things that I like and are worth remembering for me.

When I was first blogging that first paragraph would have been enough but I also have to tell you about the frightening "Ballad of Dright Fry" by Alice Cooper from the album "Love It To Death" about and mentally unstable child murderer ... but the way that song sotally unnerves you still doesn't prepare you for the segue into the abum's finale a cover of Rolf Harris' "Sun Arise" which does sort of leave you with a smile on your face while feeling cold inside from the previous song.

So that's that, another very quick post and it's still Wednesday.

Oh and this post took me over 160K page views.

Speed

I'm sure that I used to be able to knock off a blog post in ten minutes, but these days it can often take an hour ,or sometimes thirty minutes. When I see what others write I thin, for me, that would be about a days work if I could actually concentrate on it for that long. Just vaguely timing this I'm actually writing at about a line a minute, although the actual post is on a wider screen so that's not as many lines therefore when I'm writing I look and think "That looks a decent post" then when I publish it I think "Is that all?".

The weather is still excellent although my walking this month is only just keeping up with what I need to do, and next month may be extra difficult because of the time I need to take off walking for the Liver Biopsy, though having said that my last one must have been last year so I must have coped with that, or maybe it was two years back. I need to check that out

So this was to check if I could actually do a fast blog post. This one is going to be about 250 words havingg taken basically ten minutes. Maybe I am just gettiing less efficient or more inefficient, who knows?

I need to choose something new to listen to on the way to work but not sure what that will be. As on the last post I mentioned Alice Cooper I was going to leave you with "The Ballad of Dwight Fry" from "Love It To Death", a very scary song and an example of why early Cooper albums were so good, but then I saw this amazing animation from "The Diary of Tortov Roddle" by Kunio Kato,(check here for original) for Pink Floyd's "The Narrow Way" , the Dave Gilmour solo piece on the studio disc of  "Ummagumma", maybe Dwight Fry tomorrow.

As you can see I've got totally sidetracked and gone of on a tangent because I just saw something interesting that I wanted to share and remember, so this blog has almost tripled in the time it has taken me to produce. C'est La Vie.

It's the middle of the week, enjoy yourselves.

..... and another problem with Vinyl

I hadn't really thought about before, but it's only the unusually hot weather that made me think about it. This morning I picked up a copy of The Rolling Stones "Sticky Fingers" with an intact zipper cover, and of course to have to try it out and play the record, don't you? It's The Rolling Stones. I Instagrammed it here. if you want to see.

There's an article about the cover and why it was abandoned here.

The cover was designe d by Andy Warhol and featured some well filled underpants that various people have claimed to be, see here

Then, as the sun came through the window, and started getting really hot, I thought if I left this record out it could end up melting on the turnatable. Possible similar the RCA's Dynaflex in the seventies which just seemed to be a built in warping mechanism for albums and David Bowie was on RCA , how not good was that?
 
Today I noticed HMV were selling The Rolling Stones "Hot Rocks" for £9.99 but if I bought it, I'd have five pieces of Rolling Stones' vinyl and I don't think I need that. I was also tempted by a green label Warner Brothers copy of Alice Cooper's "School's Out" with it's desk sleeve (though missing the original paper panties that it came dressed in) , I also managed to avoid buying that as well.

So basically keep your vinyl out of the sun or it may become unplayably flexible

Flexibly Free

Back in the sixties and seventies music was often promoted by giving away vinyl flexidiscs. These were'nt meant to last but were meant to give you a taster of something so you would buy the actual single or album and generate income for the artist and definitely the record company.

The thing is sometimes these flexidiscs contained exclusive music (at the time), I'm thinking Alice Cooper's "Slick Black Limousine" which was promoting "Billion Dollar Babies" and the interludes on the promo for the Rolling Stones' "Exile on Main Street". These were both NME freebies as it was my music mag of choice at the time. Both these were committed to cassette as soon as I got them, but were lost way back. They may be worth something now.

I recently bought a couple of flexidiscsfor Long Play Cafe / Empire Records in The Grainger Market and was surprised that the Adam and The Ants one had no track name on , but is their take on The Village People's "YMCA" called apparently "IMCA". Because the flexidiscs slip you need to put a couple of coins to stop the vinyl slipping.  The other was by Hazel O'Connor and you can see the details here. LAter sounds actually started giving away vinyl EPs.

But in the sixties we started getting loss leader compilations. At first I thought these would be very expensive, but they were very cheap and full of amazing music. Again these often contained music you couldn't get anywhere else, I'm thinking "America", Yes' ten minute take on the Siman and Garfunkel song and Led Zeppelin's "Hey,HeyWhat Can I Do" on the "Age of Atlantic" samplers.

The first one that I bought was Island's "Nice Enough To Eat" which introduced me to Nick Drake, Fairport Convention, King Crimson and many more.

In the disgital age Amazon used to give free downloads but that seems to have stopped but often artists make music available to download for free in exchange for an email address.

I suppose music is still effectively free to listen to on the radio and Youtube, but I do like to have the music and make sure the artist gets something from me.

Well I am looking out at the blue sky and sunshine and think its time to wake the neighbours by mowing my overgrown jungle of a lawn.

Today Fiona and Helen are doing a 26 Mile walk for MacMillan which you can track here and donate here.

Have a most enjoyable day

Alice Cooper To The Rescue - #ALifeInNumbers #18

Today I took my first sick day in my present job. The lurgi I'm fighting hit me with a vengeance last night with coughing , headaches, runny nose , aching bones although I have been worse. I slept for 8 or 9 hours then I had a bath, took some lemsip,  ate , felt as though I was improving, now I am running a temperature and going through lots of tissues. While I do know I will feel better soon, I don't feel good now, so to business then bed.

Number 18 has to be Alice Cooper's "I'm Eighteen" possibly their most important song, the USA equivalent of The Who's "My Generation". When I say it's their most important that doesn't mean their best, but this song has amazing power, and addresses the transition from youth to so called majority. All of a sudden the rebellious youth has become what they are rebelling against. You should have all the early Alice Cooper albums in your collection anyway (here is a good way of doing that).

There may have been other "18" songs such as Pete Wingfields excellent "Eighteen With A Bullet"  but Alice Cooper is so far ahead of the pack for this one it was no contest.

Anyway I am hot headachey and I am going to try and get better.

Sleep well my friends.

18

More than halfway through June (it's already the 18th), and the Summer Solstice draws near . Than immediately makes me think of "Ring Out Solstice Bells" by Jethro Tull , which is essentially a winter song so I will stick with my original June's Tune, which is just based on the day and is going to be "18" by Alice Cooper. Although Alice Cooper surpassed this many times , it's still a great song , the American equivalent of The Who's My Generation:


Oh and it's still far, far too hot