The Bok , Stiff , Rabid and a little John Peel

In 1976 Andy Marshall had a gig to fulfil with his band Marshall Law. Unfortunately the band left before the gig took place so after a a phone call or two The Bok (singular of Box) was formed . Simon Clinic (aka Tony Eyre) original vocalist left before the first rehearsal, but in true punk fashion we wrote songs for the gig as well as a few covers to spread out the set. All gigs were in and around Preston in carious clubs , pubs and halls. The band consisted:

• Andy Marshall - Guitar - Vox - Songs
• Mike Singleton - Guitar - Vox - Songs
• The Hippy Mark Lester - Bass
• any drummer we could find but mainly Dave Topping

Songs were chosen for lack of chords and ease of playing and obvious influences were Velvet Underground , The Damned , Jonathan Richman. Covers we did included:

• Waiting For The Man
• Psycho Killer
• Rue Courier (Roadrunner - in French)
• Shot By Both Sides
• The Passenger
• Gloria
• Egyptian Reggae

Songs titles I remember apart for the demo list were:

• Sick of Beer
• Tennis
• Rant and Rave
• Accident
• Magic Eye

We had a gig in the basement of a pub in Preston. I had been using Ollie Halsall's trick of practising with heavy guage strings and playing with light gauge strings. This meant you could play very bendy sols and chords , but also in the hot sweaty confines of the pub basement  the guitar needed continuous retuning as I played . Guy came up to me at the end and send he loved my inplay tuning , didnt have the heart to tell him it wasnt planned. The DJ didnt like us and when we launched into Magazine's "Shot By Both Sides" he started playing the record as loud as he could, The crowd took umbrage and trashed his decks - nice show of appreciation!  Anyway .......
 

........Basically the idea was to choose some songs record them and despatch to people who mattered in music. John Peel tahanked us but said we were too primitive! Stiff Records apologised that they sent us a pre printed rejection letter , but Rabid Records of Manchester wanted to record us and put out a double "A" side single of "Mystery Band" / "Happy Birthday" , with an accompanying video involving pies , bikes and aqualungs!! . We went to Rabid's headquarters in Manchester but everyone had buggered ogff to the CBS launch of John Cooper-Clarke's Disguise In Love. Graham Fellows aka Jilted John aka John Shuttleworth dropped for rehearsals for the Jilted John album . He reckoned we looked like students. Also Martin Hannett did a lot of work with Rabid artists!!

An unexpected side effect was that a lot of girls stopped talking to me because they thought we were going to be on Top of the Pops!! Never could work that one out , the only time being in a band had an adverse social effect!!

After cups of tea and making plans the guy asked us what studio we had used . Studio? We hadn't a clue but the reason for John Peel's dismissal may have become apparent. Anyway Rabid records went bust fairly quickly after that and the band sort of didnt go any further though things could have been different.....

Below are some salvaged demos - enjoy:

Classical Music - The Good , The Bad and The Ugly

From an early age I learned to hate classical music. Music lessons at school consisted of a teacher putting on an album , flipping half way through , then nipping out for a fag leaving us to suffer the noise that we didnt want to listen to . But classical music was and still is deemed to be respectable , while everything else is for the uneducated proles.

Then there were great plays like Abigail's party in which Mantovani was presented as the height of sohistication , and the truly attrocious "Classic Rock" series , attempting to make rock respectable by having the melodies played by an orchestra , finally resulting in the even more attrocious "Hooked On Classics" series ,  classical music , with a disco beat "Stars On 45" style.

My reintroduction to classical music came through Alan Freeman playing "Mars" from Gustav Holst's Planets Suite on his Saturday Rock Show. Mars with its threatening martial rhythm is a superb piece , and prompted me to buy the album. A couple of listens and "Jupiter" is still my favourite instrumental piece from any genre.

Around this time John Peel started playing music by the Portsmouth Sinfonia and energetic Orchestra who basically couldnt play their instruments but tried , a bit. They backed Brian Eno on "Put A Straw Under Baby" from "Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy" and are rumoured to be making a comeback. They had at least one album and a single "Classical Muddly" . Whatever "Hooked on Classics" could do , the Portsmouth Sinfonia could realy screw up and manage to entertain in the process.

Now we have stuff like Classic FM which just presents classical music as stuff to fall asleep to . This si not so , you have Stravinsky , Wagner and lost of challenging stuff , for fun the light opera of Gilbert & Sullivan . If you were to tell me that Beethoven's 9th or something by Mozart was the greatest piece of music ever written , I wouldnt argue. My own personal favourite complete suite is Carl Orff's Carmina Burana . In "O Fortuna" it displays on of the main problems with classical music , going from quiet below human hearing level to earsplitting crescendo in a minute or so. Sound systems cant really cope. Anyway below should be a playlist of the album for you to listen to. Just because a lot of it is bland , boring , long , in a foreign language , doesnt mean it isnt worth the effort. It is , but you do have to be selective!!

Some People

I often listen to Brian Matthews' Sounds of the Sixties and love the fact that the only criteria is that it was a hit or released in the sixties, meaning you can get the sublime such as Jimi Hendrix , Led Zeppelin , The Beatles or Beach Boys , to some absolute rubbish  which has been erased from my mind. But listen to the show and you will hear what I mean.

One of my bugbears is certain peopel who will write in and say something loke could you play "Step Inside Love" by Cilla Black , it's my favourite ever record and my copy melted when left on  a windowsill in the sun and I've never heard it since !!  Brian now sends such ignoramuses a CD copy of their favourite record (which no doubt they'll microwave as soon as they get it) , but most of the time records are readily available in one form another if these people can be bothered to leave their front room or phone their local HMV. The apathy and lethargy of some people amazes me.

Seventies - Not what was required

Then I noticed this for a review of a CD on Amazon:
"I was hoping this would transport me back to the 70's, but many of the songs I remember from the seventies, were not on this album, I was a little disappointed. Sorry to say it's put away in a drawer!"





The album has a tracklisting , didn't they bother to look before they ordered?



Some People ......

In Defence of Mike Ashley

St James Park - It always will be

Mike Ashley is percieved by man as a fat arrogant cockney git who knows nothing about about football and is the worst think to happen to Newcastle since the architectural abberations of T-Dan Smith in the 1960s. Ashley with able help from Derek Lambias certainly manages to continually shoot himself in the foot while it's still in his mouth , and look at what has happened since he came:

• Sacking of a perfectly good manager in Sam Allardyce
• Bringing back Keegan , and having Dennis Wise as director of football , a great player but a rubbish manager (Leeds , Millwall etc)
• The debacle of trying find a manager after Keegan , resulting in JFK (Joe 'king Kinnear) and Alan Shearer
• Relegation
• The attempted sale of the club , that no one wanted to buy because of the mess Ashley had made of the place
• Chris Hughton's appointment because no one wantted the job
• The sales of Andy Carroll , Jose Enrique , Kevin Nolan , sacking Joey Barton who they could have sold for a decent return , if not a profit
• The sacking of Chris Hughton and replacement by Mike Ashley's cockney casino buddy Alan Pardew
• The attempted commercial rebranding of St James' Park - yeah the Sportsdirect Arena sounds cheap , charver and nasty

So basically with this catalogue of horrors everyone in Newcastle is wondering what the hell is coming next , after all this . I mean look at Portsmouth, Hearts  and Rangers , is Ashley any better than these owners deemed fit and proper by the English and Scottish Football Associatians?

Well really you have to look at where the club is now . Mike Ashley expressed a desire to make the club like Arsenal , to bring players through without spending a fortune and make the club a viable financial proposition. On thing Ashley can do is make money , look at Sports Direct. So where is the club now?

• After relegation , the club won the Championship under the leadership of Chris Hughton at a canter.
• In their first season in the Premiership things were going OK until the sacking of Hughton and appointment of Pardew
• This coincided with an influx of French unknowns and the sale of Andy Carrol for £35 million on the final day of the transfer window last January. Pardew was promised the money but it never seemed to materialise
• Apparently it has been invested in undersoil heating at the training ground. Have you noticed that under Ashley's stewardship Newcastle's only injuries happen on the playing field.
• The team have taken 4 points off Manchester United , and lie a comfortable fifth in the Premiership
• Demba Ba a free transfer replacement for Andy Carroll - well compare the scoring records
• Papiss Demba Cisse the biggest buy under Pardew at £10 million scored the winner on his home debut
• Hatem Ben Arfa , Yohan Cabaye, Tim Krul have all progressed under Ashley's overall stewardship
• Apparently the naming rights for the stadium would pay for Cisse , whether that's right or wrong is another question

Basically the thing is the club is in an apparently better state under Asley that I can ever remember . John Hall's stewardship with hindsight could only ever have been temporary , but if at the start of the season you'd have said Newcastle could have a good shot at European football next season , I think you would have got a few laughs.

Basically Ashley is doing more right than wrong , and expect more gaffes , but beware of getting rid because there's not that many decent club owners out there

World Book Night 2012 - For Me It Starts Here

Last night I got my email confirming me as a World Book Night Giver for 2012 , The book I've chosen is "Notes From A Small Island" by Bill Bryson , and it will be great to try and get people to read this book. Like last year I'm going to base it around Newcastle and Tyne and Wear's Metro system and hope we dont get hit by the fact that there were no flights in or out of Newcastle Airport and the stretch between Tynemouth and Byker being clsed , meaning I couldnt do Wallsend, with it's Latin signs!!

The date is April 23rd.

Most people are enthusiastic , but a lot of people get very suspicious of anyone offering something for nothing , especially if they are alone on the Metro despit , there being other passengers in the vicinity. Last year Stephen Fry gave his away in Trafalgar Square , but mine will be much lower key. But it is a great initiative to be involved with m, and now need to recruit a few helpers ......

Below is a preview for last years event

Getting Older With Hall & Oates

I do find it amazing the number of people who refuse to acknowledge birthdays , or the fact they are getting older . Surely a birthday is an excuse for a celebration . And its funny when I was young people wee old after thirty , had grey hair , smoked pipes , wored cardigans , slippers and cords, and sat in a chair to await their inevitable demise.

These days if you take reasonable care of yourself you can go on for a very , very long time and have great fun doing it. Itook delivery of the first Hall & Oates CD this week and compared the pics of these two with the latest of their CDs that I have "Do It For Love" , on the first CD Daryl Hall looks like an androgenous afghan hound hybrid , with John Oates looking similarly bestial , but this was the seventies and that got the girls and helped sell the records . I wish that I looked like that in the seventies , I might have even got a girl!! . On the more recent CD the guys look very good and this is 35 years or so after the first photographs were taken  , so while we'd all like to be younger I think we'd rather go for the current look.

This then led me to the discovery of the excellent Live From Daryl Hall's House site , so the guys are obviously enjoying life , and having a good time. A definite lesson for us all , always look for the good things , and be positive , and generally life will be better and make it easier to deal with the dross and crap that comes our way!!

Now That's What I Call Whitney

Sad to hear of the demise of Whitney Houston , a more than capable singer that inspired a million wobbly lipped X-Factor imitators . It's not waht she was , but what she caused that annoyed me , a diva of the first degree and lot's of aspirant imitators thought the behavious was OK without the talent to back it up . At least Whitney could sing and control her voice.

Which brings me to my second gripe , I have neevr owned , and never will own a Whitney Houston album , I don't find her music particularly engrossing , but due to compilations like the Now series , and various soundtracks and what have you I have the odd Whitney Houston track corrupting my collection. Still you knew she'd made it when she was name checked by Half Man Half Biscuit in "Everything's AOR" -

"Mary oh Mary
Quite ordinary
Tell me how does your CD collection grow
With Sade and Whitney
Vandross and T’Pau
Everything’s AOR"