Leaving The Devil's Country

On my walk on this foggy Sunday I noticed a few cars with a full set of flat tires and two tire outers that had come off something. I would think that if you can't be bothered to keep your tyres up then get rid of the motor rather than sit and let it rot. The cars were all fairly neglected and soften used as a dump for detritus that they had decided not to bin.

Coming to the end of "Coldheart Canyon" and the Devil's Country has served it's purpose and has now unraveled and been taken apart by Lilith and the ghosts and there is still seventy pages left in the book , which has been rather excellent. The Devil's Country is almost a McGuffin as the story could have been told without it, but it's the only part that really stuck in my mind from the first time I read the book.

But the finale now has me wondering what is going to happen next, which is always a good thing when you are reading a book.

So it's a long time since Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877 , that's not last century, it's the century before last, and I have been enjoying a lot of vinyl over the weekend , and for some reason Cozy Powell's "Fance With The Devil" comes to mind with the riff lifted from "Third Stone From The Sun" which my friend Harry Clark reckoned was lifted from the "Coronation Street" them, listen to them all on the Amazon links below and see what you think.

Positively Negative

 For the first time in a long time the temperature was negative this morning, according to my Google Pixel -4˚ Centigrade , there was ice on the car windscreens, and it was inviting me to go out for a walk. I did go out tonight and it was 3˚ Centigrade but actually felt quite warm , and it was 7˚ higher than this morning, but we are not in December yet and I'm not sure if Autumn has become Winter yet , although this tells me that the seasons start o, the appropriate Solstice and Equinox days so Winter starts in about three weeks time on the 21st of December.

Normally by this time I am in bed but need to use the alarm on my phone to get me up tomorrow and it was down to 20% so thought thought I would pen a few lines while it charges.I have also watched the second "Borat" movie which is enjoyably subversive and working my way through American Horror Story:Freaks which is excellent but essentially a tragedy about exploitation, when I finish it that will be up to date on all released series of the show.

Some of the music has been rather good although seventies and eighties classics sit oddly with the fifties timeframe of the series, but go well nevertheless.

So musicwise I have been listening to Thin Lizzy , Stats Quo amd Curved Air on vinyl so will go with "The Rocker" by Thin Lizzy which has one of the best blockriffs (that's a riff played with chords rather than notes) you will ever here. Listen and enjoy Thin Lizzy from their Decca years.

Classical Ruination

I said this year I wouldn't post as much, last year it was over a post a day, but this is post 188 so that is still and average of a post every two days, although some gaps between postings have been bigger than that , and obviously this is a post straight after yesterdays post.

I've listened to a chepo compilation called "Rock Instrumental Classics: Volume 3 - The Seventies" which barring Edgar Winter's "Frankenstein" , Electric Light Orchestra's "Daybreaker" and "Apricot Brandy" by Rhinoceros , is made up of funk and pop. There is "Rock and Roll Part 2" by Gary Glitter (and yes Paul Gadd , is an evil , vile person quite rightly behind bars, but should that stop us from appreciating the work of the rest of the band and his cowriter Mike Leander?) which it compares to "Tusk" by Fleetwood Mac , in that there's no real tune just a relentless sound with primeval calls and is still, in my opinion and impressive pop record , but I hope Gadd's royalties have been sequestered to help the sort of people the vile man abused.

Anyway in the songs on th ealbum are "Joy" by Apollo 100 a take on "Jesu Joy of Man's Desire", one of my favourite Bach pieces , "Also Sprach Zarathustra(2001)" an jazz take on the Strauss piece by Deodato , and "A Fifth of Beethoven" by Walter Murphy , all of which are more than enjoyable , especially the Deodato one. That's three classical lifts on one single disc compilation.

Manfred Mann's Earthband got permission from Gustav Holst's estate to use the composer's theme from "Jupiter" in "The Planets" suite in their single "Joybringer" . Keith Emerson with The Nice and Emerson Lake and Palmer plundered the classics  impressively over the years , with Mussorsky and Copland featuring highly in the band's repetoire.

Lots of pop songs left classical themes and melodies , Pachelbel's "Canon" reappearing so many times in the charts in various guises.

I've hardly scratched the surface on this, but will leave it here for now.

Goozlegogs

"Coldheart Canyon" is a lot more interesting that I remembered, though I am down to the last hundred pages now, and don't have a clue how it is going to finally end.

I'm quite surprised it's a week since my last post, although I've kept to my promise to post less this year than I did last year, and I think I may end up with around two hundred posts.

Though I've lived in Fenham for twenty years , there's still lots of places I've never visited and one is the Moorside Allotments Association shop , who sell gardening related stuff and other things and I finally visited them this Sunday morning past, and bought three jars of their home made jam, one of which was Gooseberry which I have not had for years, and certainly not homemade. I think my great , but sadly missed friend Chris used to call Gooseberries Goozlegogs , which I think is a great word, though it generally seems to be Goosegogs an the internet. If you live in or near Fenham it's well wort a visit , though only open Saturday and Sunday ten til 12.

So I've been listening to a lot of music this week as always and am wondering what to share with you, I would like something gooseberry or jam related and I suppose a gooseberry is the one who make it a crowd so for some reason the song that has sprung out at me is "The Uninvited Guest" by Marillion, which is a wonderful song and a good one to share as Friday draws ever closer.

Listen Now

We often do things that may become monotonous if they are seemingly long tasks. I like walking , but the nature of walking means it takes time , and in this lockdown often the paths I take are repetitive. It's the same with work, you often have to do repetitive tasks or do tasks that require repetition.

Although your mind needs to be on the task it also wants (or mine does) something to break up the repetition , and I find listening to music is a great way of making repetitive things fly by. I had been walking but not listening to music and this week (because it's cold and my headphones keep my ears warm) I goy out the headphones and have listened to Roxy Music and Janelle Monae , and given that it's only 2°C outside I will need them today.

Workwise , working from home, enables me to listen while I do work , and share what I'm listening to on my Instagram channel. My Rhino box sets (when they came out it was roughly five albums for a tenner) have provided a lot of listening, recently that has been Grunge , Jean-Luc Ponty , Cockney Rebel and De John,

Each day I don't know what I am going to listen to , and this actually means I am not listening to the radio , but sometimes your own choice is a good thing to trust . During th eseventies there were two instrumentals that I loved , one was Deodato's take on Richard Strauss' "Also Sprach Zarathustra" the the theme from Stanley Kubrick's "2001" , and  Roger Williams take of Bach's "Toccata" used as the them to "Rollerball" in 1975 , so I will share both of those with you , which you may or may not enjoy on this cold Friday Morning.

So Why Vinyl?

Seems like a fair question. I once said that CDs were the McDonaldisation of music, MP3 and digital music even more so. All of a sudden album content became irrelevant. See this post from 2015 for more thoughts. 

We see people doing mixtapes and playlists but anyone can list some songs or drag a couple of MP3 and share them , or share a bloody Spotify playlist, but there's hardly any personal investment and the chances are that the person receiving the said item will look at it and not bother listening to it. The iPod generation , or is it iPhone generation often don't even listen to whole songs let alone an album. 

I once watche da bit of the X-Factor and the act covered the Moody Blues "Nights in White Satin" (a five minute song) which was cut to ninety seconds for the performance, so I wasn't impressed by that.

Digital media is great for when you are walking and this morning I was listening to the non album disk of  "The Thrill of It All" by Roxy Music and "Sultanesque" came on, one of my favourites. It's a Bryan Ferry composition , five minutes of drone sound and was the "B" side of "Love Is The Drug" , and I used to love putting it on pub jukeboxes much to the annoyance of most of the clientele , but it is a great piece of music and a great example of Ferry's adventures in tone and sound, "South Downs" is another similar piece. I am thinking of buying th evinyl single because I like it so much.

So "Why Vinyl?" . Well thanks to the persuasion of my friend Marek at RPM I have a wonderful retro reconditioned record player, and when I listen to an album apart from providing a warm deep bas backbone to the music, there is no skipping or resequencing songs . You listen to the album , well at leas a side of it , and that is twenty minutes or so, which is long enough but not too long.

CDs are up to eighty minutes and digital streams can never end , so vinyl lets you listen in manageable chunks an dthe only choice you have is what to put on.

It is my preferred listening medium these days, although I listen to CDs and digital when I work from home , and digital when I am walking. 

So I will share "Sultanesque" with you as the sun goes down on this November Tuesday.

Imperfect Memory

Two thirds of the way through "Coldheart Canyon" and I do not remember it going like this. Huge chunks of it are like a newish book to men. That's the benefit of my imperfect memory, I forget things which means I can reread books and enjoy them as I did the first time round.

I suppose the same can be said of films and TV series, I generally remember overall part of the narrative and major incidents and occurrences, but they can still surprise me , so I can revisit and enjoy time after time.

I wrote that my hard drive had died, but I couldn't find an ethernet connected disc and thought I would just have to link via the USB connection on my router and access my content via that. My Kindle wouldn't connect but I found that my phone would, which was useful. Today I discovered that the ES File Explorer app on my Amazon Kindle could not only see the drive but also play content from it , so as the only disks I have is a backup disc (1 Tb) and a second backup (500Gb) , I have now ordered an 8 Tb one. I can't connect my DVD player up yet , but that's hardly an issue as if I want to watch something I can put them on a stick and watch them

As I write this I am listing to "No Parlez" by Paul Young , which is a bit of a curates egg , good in parts. Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart" and Anthony Moore's "No Parlez" are week takes on th ethe originals , but Paul Young has an excellent voice and loved him with the Q-Tips (but not Streetband) , so I found a live take of "Some Kinda Wonderful" which is quite impressive.

It's always good to revisit the good stuff

2345

This is post 2345 on sevendaysin and I am not sure I would ever reach this number or keep posting for this long. I started here on the 18th of February 2007 and am still doing this now. I chose Echo and The Bunnymen's "Never Stop" because it is a great record and appropriate for the point of this post.

The thing is in life we do things that seem to never end (apart from the obvious Grim Reaper scenario) , such as washing up , cleaning , working , and watching TV and listening to music , plus walking and lots of other thing.

The thing is if you break things up into manageable chunks you can then enjoy the success of each finish point you define.

While working from home I have listened to several CD box sets which I don't think I could have done even walking to work. I have just finished the Electric Light Orchestra box and, apart from "Discovery" , I would rate all of the albums, although the first five are my favourites.

I have Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen boxes and they are being lined up for my next plays. Having a CD player to hand , plus the discs i sa great convenience, but it means I am not listening to much Radio 6 for a change as certain DJs I thing would be more at home on Radio 2 , so I don't feel I am mising anything.

So that's post 2345 , and basically I will never stop with this here blog.

896504

This is post 2344 , the next will have it's number as the title. We really can't do without numeracy, although politicians are fine without it. The number in the title is the dimensions of the video above. I thought this may be a good starting point for a post , but it's not really, I can't think of anything else to say about it , so I will mention the music that I have been listening to this week.

I started with some Roxette Greatest Hits then PJ Harvey "The Hope Six Demolition Project" , followed by Prince "1999" (which was released in 1982 so more numbers there, and in the PJ Harvey title) , and this was followed by Kate Bush "Director's Cut" which three CDs consisting of "The Red Shoes" , "Sensual World" then reworkings of songs from those albums, it is a very illuminating listen.

My latest is an Electric Light Orchestra box , which  does trace their fall from pioneering musos to prepacked pop purveyors. They are responsible for my second favourite album ever "ElDorado" and Jeff Lynne is a purveyor of some extremely muscular riffs on the earlier albums ("Ma-Ma Belle" and "10538 Overture") , he also revisits The Move's "Do Ya" which is possibly his finest moment , on "A New World Record" which is when they hit paydirt and the fall began.

I'm currently up to "Face The Music" and not sure if I will finish the whole box, but the first five albums are worth the price of admission, maybe on the next post we will find out how far I got.

On Pins

To get to this point I had to enter a PIN for my computer and password to get to this site, I also had to enter a PIN for my phone as well (though that's not related to this). When I was at Littlewoods in 1980 we had to use a swipe card and enter a pin. These days it's often just a swipe card, even for payments, so if someone picks up your card they can use it.

I still maintain that the only safe place for a pass key is in your head. People extol the virtues of password keeper systems, but come on , would you give your house keys to a nameless entity, and what if someone cracks the password you use for that.

Then there's fingerprints and retinal scans, a friend of mine emailed work telling he'd sanded off his fingerprints so couldn't get into his iPhone , so what could he do. I think there was a work round but again corporations are always supposedly saying they are increasing security by making things less secure. How often do websites and Google suggest them remembering your password? So if someone walks up to your computer and you are not logged out they then have full access.

Also too complex passwords are no good because people write them down, I see so many people go into notepads to get their password for whatever they are accessing , so I know where THEY keep their passwords.

The other thing is more that four passwords, is a security risk, because people start to write them down.

My passwords are variations on unmemorable phrases like say fishandchips or kilburnandthehighroads , though needless to say mine are nothing like that.

As I mentioned Kilburn and The High Roads (Ian Dury's old band)  , I found this live take of "Vidiot" for you to enjoy, though it was only ever performed live, I have been unable to find a recorded version.

Here Comes The Sun

Waiting for the Election Results in the USA is like watching a very slow sunrise , we have had four years of darkness in the USA (and ten in the UK) but it looks like things will start to take a turn for the better in the next week or so. I keep checking the news feeds and nothing seems to have changed with lots of childish "not fair" whinings from the the "we won you lost , suck it up crowd".

Today's early morning fog has burned off and it is now a very bright day.

This week, thanks to working from home , I have worked my way through the first seven Bruce Springsteen albums , his five disc live 75-85 release and more surprisingly the Blue Oyster Cult Columbia boxed set , which is an excellent listen. I think it is one of th ebiggest boxes I have and certainly the largest one I have listened to end to end.

There are lots of high points but the jewel in the crown is the final album "Imaginos"with a Lovecraftian libretto ,  an (unused) intro (to "Astronomy" by Stephen King  which reads thus:

The Soft Doctrines of Imaginos: A Bedtime Story for the Children of the Damned

From a dream world paralleling our Earth in time and space, The Invisible Ones

have sent an agent who will dream the dream of history. With limitless power,

he becomes the greatest actor of the 19th century. Taking on many disguises,

he places himself at pivotal junctures in history, continually altering its

course and testing our ability to respond to the challenge of evil.

His name is Imaginos.

It's worth following the links if this is tempting to you.

So I'm not going to share any version of The Beatles "Here Comes The Sun" but the "Imaginos" version of "Astronomy" , listen and appreciate. I found a "Wild King" mix which grafts the Stephen King intro the "Imaginos" version. Apparently there was some issue with Albert Bouchard around the release of the album , and he has released "Re-Imaginos"  which is on my to buy list, and songs like this have decided me to track more of his solo work.

Into The Devil's Country

Finally , nearly halfway through "Coldheart Canyon" we get to properly find out what "The Devil's Country" is about. It's been a great read getting there , covering lots of stuff I had forgotten about ,but now I am there. I probably won't tell you what happens but I do recommend the book.

This incidentally coincides with my first time in the office (just to clear my locker so they can rearrange floors) since lockdown began. I just emptied my locker and was in and out in less than ten minutes, ironically coming back home to actually start work.

I did walk into work and saw some amazing skies , and the moon was also very clear, the days are getting shorted and it is dark by five pm so my walking my be curtailed although today and yesterday have been fine. The problem is when I work in the office I always go out for a lunchtime walk , but at home I just tend to work through.

Today's listening has been the first official live Bruce Springsteen plus his first two studio albums , which has been another rather good listening day , with some great songs, and this time no repeats.

So music wise we'll go for "Devil's Sidewalk" by Graham Parker , although Neil Young also has a song with the sleep well and the dark nights draw in people.

Hello November

Today I will see my grand daughter , Alexis ,  for the first time so a walk over to my daughter and son in law's will do for my step count on the day after Halloween. Although there are grey clouds scudding across the sky it is a pleasant walk across the central motorway skirting Cow Hill through the Town Moor.

Last night I bought a tub of sweets for Halloween , but due to lockdown, of course , there were no groups of kids out so I have a tub of chocolate to myself that will obviously go down very well. Today is All Saints Day or All Hallows Day or Hallowmas (hence the day before was Hallow's Eve or Halloween) , although this is another Christian theft to replace the Celtic festival of  Samhain. While I know lots of good people who are practicing Christians , the history of Christianity is one of total control of the populace and that permeates society today cherry picking the constantly rewritten Bible to forward their controlling agenda.Jesus would not be pleased and I could see a thieves in the temple scenario ensuing if Jesus returned.

Now who'd have thought that Jello Biafra would cover a song by two ex members of Mungo Jerry. Paul King and Colin Earl left Mungo Jerry to form the King Earl Boogie band and penned and released "Plastic Jesus" which Paul King must have raked in a lot of royalties from the myriad covers, so I've included two versions. The Mojo Nixon / Jello Biafra is available for download but the King Earl Boogie Band original is only available on the Dawn singles collection (at the moment £1.29 on Amazon) . Have a wonderful day everyone.

Back Into The Canyon

 My reading , as it often does, has taken me back to Clive Barker and "Coldheart Canyon" . Title wise I think it's pretty awful sounding like some sixties doomed romance soap , and maybe that was the intention. While I remember the basic premise of the book , finding "The Devil's Country" I don't think I am giving anything away by mentioning that.

There are adverts for "The Secret Garden"  on Sky at the moment and that has vague reminders of what is happening in "Coldheart Canyon" , as well as Halloween references which given that it's Halloween tonight , is another coincidental link. Thanks to the lockdown I doubt there will be any trick or treaters out tonight although today has been rather miserable weather wise.

My listening this week has included "The Business" by Madness which is early singles and rarities, but is enhanced by lots of interviews about the history of the band, that was followed by the eight disc "Smiths Complete" box although three of the discs are compilations so there are a lot of repeated songs , but all rather excellent. This was after finishing the Bruce Springsteen "SoundStage" box which was five concerts over fifteen discs and again a lot of repeated takes on songs but all worth listening to.

Next week I have my first Bruce Springsteen box which is all the studio albums up to "Born In The USA" and that will probably be followed by the live 1975-85 box , so next week will be another Springsteen binge.

As I've mentioned "The Secret Garden" and Bruce Springsteen that's the obvious song that I need to go with , even though it's not on the albums I'll be playing next week. I'm using the video from the film Jerry Maguire.

Have a great Halloween

The Camera Always Lies

 The other week I just did not feel like walking at all, although I managed a few steps , last week I did get back to sort of normal although th eclocks going back has had an effect. Last night I went out in daylight at around 4:30pm , when I returned around 5:30pm I was in total darkness, the dark came nown very quickly and although the weather is cold it's not freezing.

When I go I out I do enjoy trying to capture pictures, especially the skies , simethimes you don't get what you want, but sometimes you get things far more amazing than what you have actually seen. This morning the sky was a gorgeous pink with mackerel cloud effects , but the pictures I took were grey and nondescript. This week I have taken some amazing looking sunrise pictures , and they were nowhere near as good as the photographs that I took.

The thing is I remember photography being film based , you took the picture , then when you finished the film you paid to have it developed and a week or two later you got the results which may or may not be in focus. Now thanks to enormous jumps in technology we have cameras as part of our communication devices and ofthen these allow us almost instant access to take pictures.

The other thing is that if you don't take pictures immediately then the moment is gone, that was never an option with film based cameras.

Another thing is that often see vistas which I want to take a picture of , but the camera cannot capture the faraway image sthat I see like a plane or a bird. The other thing is that the human eye only captures part of what we see and the brain fills in the gaps.

With a phone camera we don't have an optical zoom, so we need a a very high pixel capture to enable the digital zoom , which works to a point, but still is nowhere near as good as the human eye or cameras with optical zoom (which have enabled me to capture images that I couldn't actually see when I took the photograph),

I once had a Sony phone and the camera on that could take some amazingly psychedelic images, which I sort of loved , but was not good fir capturing a normal picture. Apparently my Google Pixel 2XL is one of the best phone cameras, and the number of photographs I take are a testament to that, but I know things are only going to get better in this area.

The word "Camera" appears in a wonderful line in the John Cooper Clarke song / poem "Post War Glamour Girl" and is:

"Glamourous Cameras Clickety Click"

I always thought "Glamourous Cameras" would be a great name for a band as well. So that is the song we will go with on this dreary Thursday.

The Twenty Five Hour Day

I vaguely knew that the the clocks changed this weekend but I wasn't sure if they went forward or back. So I thought I would look it up on that internet thing and it would tell me. Well it told me what daylight saving was but not what to do with the clocks. Eventually I did find the information I wanted but that's the problem with search engines , you need to be in tune with how it searches and be exact in what you state what you are looking for.

For the first time in my life I've realised that this is actually a twenty five hour day, and although my clocks say it's nine o'clock we have have ten hours so far today. Also most digital devices update themselves so you you know what time it is but you have to manually changes your unconnected devices , so that's my watches that still work , three clocks and the cooker which I reset yesterday.

I remember, many years back, getting through to Monday and not realising the the clocks should have been changed. I remember Catweazle being surprised that we let ourselves be effectively ruled by an alarm clock. When I searched Catweazle on Amazon one of the first thigs that came back was "Whips and Exorcists!" (see below) , god knows why, though the normal search is free of such things.

The twenty five hour day concept reminds me of "The Eighty Minute Hour" short story by Brian Aldiss where the powers that be control all timepieces and slow them down when you work and speed them up when you are doing things that you want. Does that sound like real life?

So the song I've gone with is "Hard Times" by the Human League , great minimalist eighties synth that mutates into it's original source "Love Action"

When Midnight Comes At Noon

 Took the title from a Daniel Easterman novel, although just referring to the early morning darkness on my walks this week, and not what actually happens in the novel. Last week I did little walking this week it's been a lot.

This week my main network hard disk died so need to sort another one so that I can listen to music round the house , the backup drive is doing fine but a bit smaller. We expect things to last forever but they don'yt always.

There is no real sign of this lockdown ending so we have sort of drifted into an alternate reality, mask wearing , and avoiding contact, I'm not sure when I'll see any friends again, and I still remember the last friend I had physical contact with was Sophia which was a hug as we finished a lunch at Snackwallah.

The working from home has enabled me to catch up on a great deal of music, although I am barely scratching the surface of my own music collection, and my own collection while large is a mere dot on the universe of music.

One other thing is that I have managed to curb my chocolate addiction , I have had two 100g bars courtesy of The Co-Op and Morrisons for my birthday , and they were very nice but I have not felt a desire for any more. Tesco didn't give me one.

So it's late at night , and my posts have been sparse this month , so song time . One of the songs that impressed me was "Season of The Witch" from the album "Bang Bang You're Terry Reid" , also a rather good album, so that's what I'll play out the week with.

Alexis

The most important thing that happened this weekend is that I became a grandad to my grand daughter Alexis , mother , father and Alexis looking great, but due to social distancing not sure when I will see her in person , but thanks to modern communication methods I certainly don't feel cut off, and looking forward to seeing her grow up with her great mum , dad , aunt and Molly the dog plus great grand parents who are still enjoying their own lives and will be pleased to welcome  this new addition to the family.

People have asked if I object or feel old being a grandad , and it's just a special state of play , it's like getting older , these things happen , and all they are is a new experience. When I was a kid grandads were old geezers like the one Clive Dunn portrayed in that god awful song , but I fgo with that saying:

"You don't stop playing when you get old, You get old when you stop playing"

And I have never stopped playing and don't intend to, and I am sure that Alexis will be a major addition to family like. I've told my daughter and son-in-law to have faith in themselves to do the right thing, because bringing up a child can't be done by numbers.

So one song came to mind for this , and that's "Family" by Spirit from the album "Son Of Spirit" which is a short but very uplifting album full of songs I love and this is one of them , although not available to download.