That's the colour of the sky this morning. As you can tell I have not got that much to write about. Listening to Huw Stephens on 6Music but a lot of the music is just passing me by but was impressed by a new one by DJ Shadow (ft De La Soul) "Rocket Fuel" so some good has come of me switching on the radio this morning.
So basically it's go out , pick up train tickets , go to work and that's my Thursday.
I have ordered "Another Green World" on vinyl to complete my Roxy Music related collection (first album , "For Your Pleasure" and "Viva" all from Vinyl Guru in Newcastle) and they sound a lot better that I thought even with the slight paint mark on "Editions of You" (it was second hand and cheap and plays fine). It's amazing what watching a Brian Eno documentary can cause you to do, while it's not exactly advertising but it did influence me and "Another Green World" is coming via Amazon Prime.
There's a little Roxy on my Instagram posts here and here
So we obviously go with "Rocket Fuel" this morning.
This morning my alarm awoke me from a very vivid dream at a point where I was trying to get into a folk club for a gig but thought I had no money so I'd have to find a cash machine, but the person on the door tok my wallet and pulled out a fiver (the admission fee) and pointed out I still had a tenner left . This was the last bit of the fairly vivid dream which has now completely disappeared, barring the location of the folk club that was either near Amen Corner in Newcastle , somewhere in Edinburgh or Settle three disparate locations I know but all places I go often.
I think I've probably written more about "The Illuminatus! Trilogy" than any other book , and in form it reminds me of Bob Dylan's "Tarantula" which is a book that I will keep and reread. But the latest "episode" (the "chapters" are fifty to a hundred pages long so don't look for a text break although there are some images in book one ("The Pyramid and The Eye") but I'm working through "The Golden Apple" at the moment with around thirty pages to go before I hit the final book "Leviathan", but the latest "episode" manages to link in religion and mythology including Adam and Eve as Bavarian subversives and linking them to Kull and Conan characters brought to me by Robert Ervin Howard and portrayed in film by Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jason Momoa.
So it's a bright Monday Morning, and given that for people who read it's just a never ending journey, Limahl's excellent Giorgio Moroder collaboration for the title song of the film "Never Ending Story" (my girls loved it) would be appropriate.
It's just a thought I've had as books usually take a long time to read and often you are never going to reread the them. I'm currently reading "The Illuminatus! Trilogy" which is a grammatically odd title and at 800 pages I don't think I will reread it. The experience of reading it is enjoyable (for me) but would not be to everyone's taste, but it is a book I will never forget although I cannot remember everything about it because it does not have a storyline as such, things just happen. Also because it's such a big book it will make way for other books.
It can go to a friend or acquaintance who may want to try it or to a charity shop, it's irrelevant to me as long as someone else gets the chance to experience and enjoy it.
Certain books like "Imajica" by Clive Barker (my favourite ever book read two or three times and about a thousand pages) and "Lord of The Rings" will certainly never go but others always might.
Some books stay because you can dip in and out of them and find enjoyment that way, and others are reference books and great for researching things, but some have, by their nature, to have a limited home shelf life.
Actually the shorter the book is, the less likely it is to go because a 200 page book is a lot easier to reread that an 800 page book, also stories are usually better to revisit than biographies and factual books.
Music wise CDs are is some ways dead in the water for me unless they are in a special package and I have a few of those, but this weekend I have sold four on Discogs for a combined amount of £50 so some people are still interested in the format.
So what should I leave you with. I couldn't think of a song but here's a short video of some amazing libraries. Remember not everyone can afford books, but libraries give everyone the opportunity to enjoy books.
Again I switched on 6Music and "Double Dutch" by Malcolm Mclaren on the Radcliffe & Maconie show and it is one of the most uplifting records you will here. "Double Dutch" has (ironically) two meanings:
unintelligible language.
the jumping of two jump ropes rotating in opposite directions simultaneously.
The second being the subject of the Malcolm McLaren song which is obviously included here. It is a Saturday so for people like me there is no work, but I am sure that I will find plenty to do.
Currently "The Illuminatus Trilogy" has veered into HP Lovecraft territory in which a protagonist stumbles into a church with rats running between pews and a rusted marble altar, it's not rust it's blood, so obviously not High Church.
That takes me to "Fleabag" which I finished watch ig last night, superb cast and writing and only six episodes in each series so I will continue with "Parks and Recreation" on the Amazon Prime subscription. I am quite surprised, but it's a good business modell to make money, how many people have Netflix , Now TV and Amazon Prime subscriptions but never watch them.
Switched on 6Music this morning and Chris Hawkins was playing "Gravel-Pit" by Wu-Tang Clan which for some reason reminded me of "Turtle Power" the theme from the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film, which was a surprisingly excellent song and the film wasn't that bad either.
My daughters Juliet and Kirsty were huge fans and the action figures were very difficult to get hold of, but I remember walking into Asda at Boldon just before Christmas and there were two huge baskets filled with the figures. Christmas was sorted, sometimes things do unexpectedly drop into your lap.
So it's Friday and this is effectively my diary entry to fine the Partners In Kryme song should ever want to listen to it, so just a very short post before I get off to work wondering if I've got that record, it's probably somewhere in my digital collection and that has just reminded me of a couple of streaming service surveys that i've seen.
Basically streaming music is being pushed in many forms , including podcasts and the like. The thing is when you stream music or video you have to remember that if you are not on wifi then you are using up or paying for your data and this is what the various communications companies are pushing. From an artists point of view the Spotify business model doesn't work but most of my friends are aghast when I say I don't have Spotify. Apple Music, Amazon and the rest will all devour your data.
I had a chuckle at the latest EE 5G advert advertising "Hannah" from Amazon Prime where Kevin Bacon says you can download it in seconds when the girl says she hasn't got time. If the network is that good why not stream, the data use would be the same. Also while you can download something in seconds it still takes 90 minutes to watch and generally it's better to watch on a big TV that a relatively little phone, I'd rather watch on a fifty inch screen than a five inch screen.
So now it's time for work.
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:
This is post 2012 ans 2012 was the year that the UK staged the Olympic Games with those amazing opening (mastered by Danny Boyle) and closing ceremonies celebrating the diversity and history of this country resulting is a racist tirade from the Daily Mail denigrating the Windrush citizens who came here and help rebuild this country after WWII , the article on their website was eventually pulled.
The celebrations included our NHS and industrial heritage and each of these ceremonies last a while but these days you can watch them on your big screens.
There is also a plethora of music featuring David Bowie, Queen , Muse and many, many more.
This post is one of those diary posts so that I can easily find this in the future. There was a great TV series on the BBC about the "preparations" which I can't find on iPlayer but I can find "W1A" that morphed out of it with much of the office comedy.
So enjoy your Wednesday and if you have eight hours spare get these videos on your big screen.
It's 4am on a Wednesday morning and I should be asleep but have been woken up by a tickly cough, so have made a cup of hot chocolate to coat my throat and hopefully get an hour's sleep before I get up for work.. Basically I have stuff running down into my throat causing the tickle and that's what's causing me to cough and wake up, but I am tired and want to go back to sleep. The hot chocolate is helping.
The other thing is that Feedburner has picked up the blog again so yesterday the blog overall got over 1,000 hits rather than the normal 50-100 jhits , so not sure if this is just a daily spike or if I will get another month like May and June which hit 20K and 25K respectively, it it does then the blog will hit quarter of a million visits by mid September as it's currently sitting at 229K so that would be nice.
The thing is chocolate and paracetamol are scientifically the best things for treating a cough as the chocolate coats your throat better than any cough medicine according to several articles such as this one although this one says not.
So "Sleepwalk" by Santo & Johnny, the inspiration behind Peter Green & Fleetwood Mac's "Albatross" would be suitable before I go and get a little rest before work.
For years I've been trying to get my weight below 100Kg and it just hasn't happened. While I have been making efforts I have not been forcing anything but at my last Diabetic checkup they prescribed me dapagliflozin (forxiga) which basically makes you pee out excess sugar and it seems to be working. Blood sugar reading are down in the normal 4-9 range and my last weight reading was 98.4 Kg and I have been sub 100Kg for over a week now which is good. Obviously the less weight you carry generally it's easier for you body to cope with.
The other thing was for my Christopher Lee slideshow to hit 30K views and that has happened, though I am quite surprised that it's not resulted in a single sale of the song, though Youtube probably redirects Amazon links so it gets the sale, and I think there's a lot of that goes on, but you cannot prove it and I cannot be bothered with investigating it.
Today looks like a summer's day after yesterday's rain which is good, although showers are forecast later.
So going with "Who Killed King Tubby" from "Hometown Hifi" by Screaming Target for obviously obscure reasons. Enjoy Your Tuesday.
Basically don't buy them. It amused me that whet the National Lottery started there were lots of books on "How To Win The Lottery" (surprisingly there are still lots of books on this, who buys them?) and I've heard people talk about about how to win at scratch cards. Jordan Ellenberg wrote a book called "How Not To Be Wrong" and it contains a chapter on how to win on certain lotteries where there is a trickle down if the main jackpot is not won, but this requires a sizeable dedicated team and a lot of money to crack it. Remember that for each person to win £5 million on the National Lottery more than 2.5 million people have to lose, yes you might win, but it is not very likely is it.
Today it is hot but raining and thing is in some ways that's not a great thing , because the water falls then because of the heat in evaporates filling the clouds with more water to rain down on us. The benefit is we don't have to water the garden but is a definite symptom of global warming.
Been listening to a lot of vinyl this morning while relaxing , Boston, Bowie , Brubeck and Split Enz , the laser etched disks still amaze me (on my instagram feed here), and the first side of the Boston album is close to perfect, I should really play the second side sometime, but it is twenty minutes of vinyl perfection.
So what should I share with you, I think we'll go with the best football song ever, "England's Irie" by Black Grape for the chorus lines:
"I live in a land of class hypocrisy,
We're going to win the National Lottery,
E I Adio, I don't think so"
Don't you think so?
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:
I was trying to think of an analogy for "The Illuminatus Trilogy" and that came to mind. It's a loosely noir canvas but this ranges from American location , proisons, hotels , big cities , small towns with secret societies to submarines and sunken cities and lands such as Atlantis and wars and fights with gangs and armies and societies featuring every continent of the Earth and even some extra terrestrial locations. The whole thing can change between paragraph , one line you're in a seedy New York hotel next you're a Yellow Submarine the you are locked in a southern tale before ending up on a small island off the West African coast.
I am about halfway through the book and despite incredibly long unbroken chapters I am finding it incredibly readable, though maybe others would not.
I'm selling a lot of my CDs on Discogs but sometimes I hear things on the radio by bands I thought I didn't really listen to then think , no I'm not selling that. That's recently happened with Kate Tempest and Fat White Family , both well worth a listen.
The weather is still absolutely mad but we still have to venture out. Ever since the leak (temporarily fixed) I am now constantly listening in case it comes through again , but any regular noise such as a tripping tap or the ticking of a clock or watch can trigger the worry mode , and when you think about various forms of mental illness related to OCD and just somethings taking all of your attention and triggering anxiety , something that is everyday for me can be absolute hell for others.
If you do suffer in this way Matt Haig's "Reasons To Stay Alive" id a book that should be in your position . A friend of mine told me it saved his life.
So it's Saturday and yesterday I bought two vinyl records, Bostons' eponymous first album with has one of the most perfect AOR vinyl sides ever, and the "Substance" Joy Division compilation and leaving JG Windows met Jonathan Wells-Lee and Hedley Sugar Wells and their young charge who were watching a twenty grans self playing piano in the window. Lovely people, and lovely meeting them for a quick catch up.
So we'll go with a live take of "Foreplay / Long Time" by Boston , showing that they could play taking in in progressive bombast and euphoric AOR . Enjoy.
Many years ago when I was still being paid by the PPA , a team played a trick on their manager. In IT there is always a new "better" methodology and you hear word like "agile" , "structured" and many others , we used JSP and Bachman as well, anyway there was an article on JFDI and how it always delivered on time and fast. The manager said they had to sort out training courses in this methodology as soon as possibly (ironic considering what JFDI mens). I'm quite surprised at the number of toned down meanings of the phrase, and Nike dropped the "F" for their tag line, not surprising for a company that has never made any of it's branded products, they outsource everything.
So yeasted after god knows how long I had lunch at Snack Wallah with my friend Nicky Black (one of her many names) and we had a long catch up discussing art and Facebook bans and what we were doing and going to do. Also the fact that last time I saw her I mistook her for another friend, and this is the problem when you don't see people often enough. We always can find a reason to put something off til next week but we should really do things as soon as we can.
I need to go and visit my dad and his girlfriend , see my girls , and know that this will happen eventually but really we should have much more JFDI in our lives, and we will enjoy life much more.
So for no reason other than it's a great record and he was mentioned in the Brian Eno documentary "The Man Who Fell To Earth 1971-77" which I am watching on Amazon Prime , when Island put together the Ayers , Cale , Nico, Eno (unfortunate acronym) gig at the Rainbow to celebrate the the signing of ex Velvet Underground members John Cale and Nico, I'll leave you with "Barracuda" from the album "Fear".
There's thunder, lightning and rain. It's getting dark early. I'm amazed how accurate the weather information app is though I always look out the window to confirm what's happening . Another lightning flash , another roll of thunder.
Today when mowing the lawn there was a small short shower, but now we have the reall stuff. The positive is that I don't have to water the garden. Hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to walk into work without being forced to get a bus.
I wasn't going to post today but the image of "growly night" just seemed to be something worth capturing and recording.
My grandma used to say that thunder was the angels playing then pin bowling, which is a fairish analogy.
So given that I've nothing really to say I'll share an appropriated of music, "Night on Bare/Bald Mountain" by Modest Mussorgsky possibly rearranged by Rimsky-Korsakov and featured in Disney's "Fantasia" which he created to teach children about classical music and it is largely successful with stunning animation. "Night on Bare Mountain" was also rejigged as "Night on Disco Mountain" on the soundtrack of "Saturday Night Fever" So enjoy.....
This is nothing about tennis, which is a game I find generally tedious (I can't play or hit a return serve), although Wheelchair Tennis actually does command my total respect, I cannot play being reasonably fully mobil and these girls and guys do it from a wheelchair, how absolutely amazing is that.
The Bok had a song called "Tennis" but I don't have a recording of that, maybe I should try and recreate it, but this is just about the Cream song which is one of those Cream songs that is like nothing else Cream did and I like it and actually think it's good. There are others like "Pressed Rat and Warthog"(the "B" side) that are just plain silly, and I suppose lots of bands tried and keep trying completely different sounds to the point of taking on alter egos to either be able to play more intimate gigs aor see if it's just their name that sells.
"Anyone For Tennis" is the Theme from the film "The Savage Seven" (a biker film lost in time but available on Amazon.com) and was recorded during the "Wheels of Fire" sessions and released as a single and on the album soundtrack. It was written by Eric Clapton and someone called Martin Sharp
I don't know why I wanted to post this, possibly because I saw a "Best of Cream" (which doesn't feature the single) in Beyond Vinyl but it's Saturday , it grey , and it's the first day of the Football season, so all is reasonably good.
I keep looking at posts I've done and often notice spelling and grammatical mistakes and more and more I think I am being wrongly autocorrected rather than mistyping, or maybe I am just being paranoid. The latest was a post which had "their" instead of "there". Now given that I am a bit of a grammar stickler myself that is not a mistake I think I would make but autocorrect might.
I know it's short (this post) but see what you think .
Nothing deep, but due to my rate of posting from March this year , if I post twenty two times a month for the rest of the year then I will have another record year. I'm not expecting to do that though given this is my second post today you may not believe it.
The thing is the more you post , the more you feel like posting. I just wish I could get myself into gear with writing , and writing songs and recording them. I have all the tools so no excuse not to do it, just the extreme lack of discipline.
Today I found a couple more covers of Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart" by The Cure and "Ceremony" by Radiohead. I was completely unaware of these though the song has been covered by almost everyone but it still belongs to Ian Curtis.
These songs don't seem to have been officially released but they are on Youtube so you can listen fairly easily.
It's one of those English words that in isolation you cannot be sure of what it means or how it's pronounced. It can mean nearer (and this is probably how you actually normally read it) or the opposite of opener.
The reason I've chosen it it is because of a section in the Joy Division film where they talked of the title of their second album, which I always assumed was the former meaning, but give the tomb on the cover, the death of Ian Curtis and the fact that it was the final Joy Division album the latter meaning makes far more sense.
This is the first post of August and we had another downpour during the night but the sky is just a uniform grey as it was last November recorded in this post.
I watched a film "The Colony" last night which was a lot better that it's 5.3 IMDB rating although there was some Walking Dead grade horror, but my only problem was the extremely sudden ending when there was actually and decent chink of hope.
So we obviously go with "Colony" from "Closer" by Joy Division on this first day of August.
I can hardly believe the extreme heat and extreme rain we've been having, and amazed the the people in power don't seem to see a problem. We've been lucky we haven't been hit by floods but I made the mistake of trying to walk to work without an umbrella today and got hit by two heavy showers. Looking out the window it's grey with some impressive cloud formations.
"The Illuminatus Trilogy" is going along but it's essentially stream of consciousness slipping between realities with long meaninglessly titled chapters / splits but I'm about two thirds through book one "The Eye In The Pyramid" coming across the detective Saul Goodman, Atlantis , gratuitous sex ., pyramids, giant submarines and right wing southern USA jail stays but you are never in the same place for long. I'm enjoying the read / ride but this will not be most people's cup of petrol.
I watched a couple of films on Amazon Prime including the remake of "Suspiria" which has a lot of touchpoints of "The Illuminatus Trilogy" and an experience to watch with a Thom Yorke soundtrack, I may have to watch the original now which is an hour shorter.
I also watched a documentary on Joy Division which again was excellent and to me their music sound as fresh and pertinent now as when it first came out. The thing is everything was generally analogue so the sounds and noises were actually made and not just something downloaded. A highly watchable film following on from Nico 1988 that I watched the other week.
So I am going to share the excellent video for Joy Division's "Atmosphere" always one of my favourites, as i get ready for bed.
Like the 1999 post the 2001 post will go the same way except not with the Prince song but the Arthur C Clarke book and the Stanley Kubrick film which still look jaw droppingly awesome now, fifty years sich it was brought to us in the days before CGI, and thank god no one has decided to to ty and remake it for a modern audience.
The original main theme is "Also Spake Zarathustra" (there are various alternate spellings and wordings by Richard Strauss , also used to open Elvis Presley's '68 Comeback Special , but remember being shouted down in a pab discussion when the shouters said it was Holst, proves that shouting louder does win the argument.
Johann Strauss was the composer of the "Blue Danube" for the docking scene included below.
So this is post 2001 with some appropriately great video and musical accompaniment. I know there's not many words but it is good to be able to share this film and book and if you haven't read the book or seen the film do yourself a favour and make time to do it now.
I don't know whether I expected to do this many posts. I do know I expected to have a book written but the ideas come and go, and I expected to have some recordings out there and a combination of laziness and "not having enough time" , life and things have distracted me from hitting those targets.
My first Millennium Post can be seen by clicking on the link and was about eight and a half years after I started this blog. This one is about four years after the last one so the rate of posting has doubled and again I'm not sure if the quality has improved although the quantity definitely has.
One of things in the last four years I have started walking a million steps every three months on a rolling basis which was inspired by the Diabetes UK One Million Step Challenge which raises money for charity. I just did it to see if I could do it and it has helped me discover a lot of places that I would never have seen if I had not been on foot.
The fact that this has fallen on a Sunday would have some kind of divine significance for some people but lets face it there was a one in seven chance it would happen. At the beginning of the year I wanted to hit two thousand posts by the end of the year, and because I kept posting I realised I could actually hit it this month, so I have done that.
This means I will soon have the number of posts up to our number of Anno Domini years whether that's significant or not.
So nothing momentous to write about, and trying to think of a significant song for this , should we go with Pulp's "Disco 2000" or The Rolling Stones "2000 Light Years From Home" but definitely not Robbie Williams "Millennium" (which I always thought was spelt with one 'n') or "2000 Man" by Kiss , but then I saw on "Their Satanic Majesties Request" the Stones had a song called "2000 Man" so we will go with that, with it's heavy Kinks influences. The video is full of images that appear in "The Illuminatus Trilogy" so it's strange how many things just coincide.
I thought Captain Beefheart had a song called "2000 Man" but I had got it mixed up with "25th Century Quaker" , understandable mistake.
So it's a sunny-ish Sunday have a good one and thank you for reading.
This is post number 1999 so there's only one way this is going isn't there. In fact the next few posts could all definitely be music related, but "1999" is one of those all time perfect songs.
It's not like the album was short on quality but opening with the title track followed by "Little Red Corvette" and you already have a killer, and this was pre CD so I had a double vinyl copy, and it is one to consider for my vinyl collection.
I'm quite surprised I'm on my third paragraph and everyone knows who I am talking about but I haven't yet even mentioned him by name, the sadly missed , immensely talented guitar titing funkster Prince Rogers Nelson.
Though 1999 appears in lots of artwork , books and film , as well as music as the pre millenium year this is what the Google search gives you. so you don't even have to search.
