A Purple Bit

Hendrix and Zappa

Yesterday when I was in Stratford I looked at The Vinyl Disctrict app on my Samsung and it came up with Purple Vinyl. HMV is long gone so in Stratford the only source of getting ohold of music is the charity shops. The thing is there were a lot of tourists there, but obviously not enough to support a record shop.

Purple Vinyl Sign

Anyway I found Purple Vinyl close to Shakespeare's birthplace, and they have a Facebook presence here.  The Stratford shop had a lot of Zappa, Hendrix and Pink Floyd stuff nicely displayed and I spoke to the proprietor who told me they were essentially an online operator (check them out here)

I can't remember the guy's name but he was really nice to talk to, and though I didn't buy anything, I'd recommend going along just to see what they have out , or smapling their online selection.

I saw a 99p Jimi Hendrix BackTrack compilation which they were selling for £30, and was almost tempted as I had had it my original record collection. I now only my vinyl as artefacts rather than to play, and they still feel substantial compared to CD or the ephemera of MP3.

Given the amount of Hendrix they had on display and their name, there can only be one song can't there?

Anyway it's good to see a record shop in Stratford and hope they live long and prosper.

Have a pleasant evening everyone.

So Lazaretto

This weekend I have listened to Jack White's "Lazaretto" on CD and the "Ultra" vinyl version. Side one of the "Ultra" vinyl version is a strange and unusual experience. I think I bought it because it was the first laser etched hologram on the runout groove of a vinyl LP , but I also like Jack White and had heard some songs from the LP.

I have the CD as well whicjh means I can listen and enjoy , but the vinyl album doesn't even play in the normal direction , no matter where you drop the needle , it finds it's way to a closed groove at the start of the record.

The angelic holograms are quite amazing , just because they are. You can't get your head round that these are made of light shining on some black spinning vinyl. I was thinking of doing a YouTube video but my Instagram Post is enough. The hologram was designed by Tristan Duke of Infinity Light Science. He also did the Star Wars Holograms as well. You can check out all the videos and the web site.

Watch the video and be impressed.

Stay Free

I don't need any more vinyl, bet deciding on coffee at Meli Cafe near Haymarket, I had to drop into Stay Free Records. I had no intention of buying anything, but Tony is a really canny guy who knows his stuff and we chatted about general stuff , the price of music and what have for what seemed like a very short time but I thought it was later than it was but it wasn't.

Anyway I looked At what was around and there was a Queen flexi disk which I thought my friend Jim may want, the a copy of Al Stewart's "Past Present and Future" for £4 . If there is one Al Stewart album I would have bought on vinyl it would be this. I had also been considering buying "All The World's A Stage" by Rush, and he had a copy of that for £8 . So it was a total foregone conclusion, two vinyl albums on three discs (or is it disks?) both of which were stuff I wanted.

I've also ordered 12" vinyl copies of Television's "Marquee Moon" and "Prove It" from Discogs and think I will ask my daughters to get the album for my Christmas present as I have been considering that.

I need to trim my vinyl collection and Tony has told me to bring some stuff in, so I may do that over the next week of two, but I have plenty to play at the moment so will enjoy my new additions tomorrow morning. So what to share, we had Television the last post, so I thing I will go for Al Stewart's "Nostradamus", one of the reasons I love this is that it is relatively easy to play (or seemed so when I was a teenager, and I reckon I could give it a good stab now if I could remember all the lyrics), I've shared a recent live take but every recorded version is worth listening to.

The Music Collection

My Music Collection

This is really a follow on from the vinyl question I posed yesterday about the nature of music collections. Wreckless Eric and Amy Rigby are playing The Central Bar on 8th March and I thought I'd track down my copy of their album , which I purchased when I was a subscriber to Emusic.I looked at the screen and thought thats how loads of people see their music collections . You will download stuff and maybe never listen to it because it goes onto your portable device and only gets played if the shuffle algorithm includes it.

This set in with the advent of CD which allowed you to skip , program and shuffle discs. Then you got the multi disc sets and eventually you could burn your own with just the tracks you thought you liked.

With vinyl you tended to listen to at least oneside of an album as track skipping meant lifting the needle and moving on to the track you wanted . You could also stack singles and create your own vinyl playlist, but the vinyl always got played all the way through.

You get broadband and 4G operators telling ius we can download a track in seconds . That may be but music is meant to be listened to not downloaded! Many people will have huge digital collections that they have bnever listened to. Below is an Amazon playlist consisting of cheap compilation albums each containing at least 100 tracks each. You can download these in next to no time but 100 tracks is around six hours listening time , that's a quarter of a day.

It seems that music to a lot of people is just something they collect making you wonder why they bother downloading. You see the bluetooth speakers which effectively recreate the transistor radio scenario of the sixties.



The benefit of a vinyl or cassette based set up is that you will listen to the music rather than just store it on a hard disc or a phone. a friend of mine Mike O' Brien asked what will kids today say when you ask them what was your first record? They will probably just gawp.

My first records were Jig-A-Jig by East of Eden on the Deram, label (single) and The Best Of T.Rex on the Fly lable for my album. Enjoy the playlist , and enjoy some real music.

220020022020

This is post 2200 on 20/02/2020 . I didn't plan it, it just happened, though I could have planned it, but I didn't. That's a lot of twos and zeroes and no other digits. Numbers can be both fascinating and boring, it just depends on your frame of mind.

Today I dropped into Windows and was tempted by reasonable priced vinyl , a Best of Bowie , "Diamond Dogs" and "Rumours" by Fleetwood Mac . I have all these on digital and to be quite honest now I tend to buy vinyl for the sleeve as well as the music. The whole lot would have cost £35. Oh I forgot , there was also Deep Purple "In Rock" , one of my earliest metal album and still, in my opinion , a classic with a great cover, but really my space for vinyl is sort of full.

I believe that you should play music, not just have it. I think I bought a lot to support the artist, especially on CD, but I cannot play my CD collection which is why a chunk of it is on Discogs.

I took delivery of a reconditioned Google Pixel 2XL today and I am still relearning it and setting up apps on it. I need to get a protective cover and load some music onto it but I've got the basic apps on it and am well impressed with my buy from Music Magpie, but still slightly miffed that my Google Pixel would be fine if the charging port worked. Still c'est la vie.

So on this numerically coming together I am thinking of the Cat Stevens album "Numbers" which I do have on vinyl, which is beautifully put together and the music is good as well. A definitely worthy part of my collection so I'll share the opening "Whistlestar".

The Vinyl Solution on The Move

Market Place

App in Action

I was reading Mojo this morning and came across an article detailing an app for iPhone or Android that will give you the address of your local vinyl retailers (records not wallpapers) in the UK , Europe and the USA , apparently in has about 600 outlets listed. You can track down the app on your phone market place and there's more information on their website here.







Now an app for vinyl is to me about as innaproppriate as a chciken omelette (which I wouldn't turn down) , because your average person who listens to music on their phone doesnt even know what they are listening to , because it's on shuffle or it's a Spotify or Last.fm mix channel , but it will be useful to people who DO use their phones and are trying to track down that rare Erasure 12" or Rosebud's 1970s album of Pink Floyd covered for the disco!!

My total vinyl collection

Hardwick Cottage Ampleforth and a Vinyl Record Shop

I may have posted this before , but Ampleforth along with Whitby is one of the few places I could probably live. Obviously I love Newcastle and that's where my life is full of friends and family, and I come from Preston and have lots of friends and family there.

This is about the fourth time we've stayed in Hardwick cottage and it provides the ability to be cut off along with the convenience of local amenities within walking distance, as well as pubs and the option to eat out or have take aways. The cottage is here. In May I thought that would be my final visit, but the situation has changed slightly and we will be back at the beginning of December and maybe again next year which really pleases me.

Slim Whitman 78

Elvis at the door

There are lots of small towns near such as Helmsley, Thirsk and Northallerton which I visited yesterday and shockingly found a vinyl record shop. I'm not a vinyl junkie but it was a pleasant surprise to actually find somewhere selling records just off the main street. The name of the shop is BetterDaze and has lots of vinyl, memorabilia, jukeboxes and record players, mainly rock and rock and roll. They also have a Facebook page here.




You're greeted by an Elvis figure when you enter the shop and there were quite a few people in there when I dropped by yesterday afternoon.

So I'm just having a great holiday here and am really enjoying it, and the Happy Days intro always puts a smile on my face. Have a great day everyone.

Edinburgh 2017 #2 - Elvis Shakespeare

When I was last in Edinburgh I researched where there were any record shops in Edinburgh other than FOPP (who are owned by HMV I believe) and found a a few that looked more than interesting. HMV had been moved out to Leith in their shopping centre and while I went there last time that area really didn't bear a repeat visit, but on the bus to and from there I did notice Elvis Shakespeare which is one of the best names for a shop ever.

Elvis Shakespeare is full of music and printed words and theguys in the shop were great to talk to and one of them reckoned I was the same age as him (53). There is lots to browse and I walked there on Saturday morning so this was helpful in me hitting 20K steps on Saturday. We chatted and I said the problem now is finding something interesting, ideally on vinyl when I saw a copy of The Beatles' "Magical Mystery Tour" EP , and I loved the film when I saw it as a kid (it had the Bonzo Dog Band and strippers) but remember my uncle's friends bringing it to a party at my parents.

It was released as an album, and I have the DVD of it and now I have it as the 1981 reissue vinyl double EP.

I was talking to the guy and I mentioned that I'd bought the "Star Wars:The Force Awakens" soundtrack on vinyl just for the 3D Tie Fighter and Millenium Falcon hologram etchings which, while they are not hugely impressive to look at, the very fact that someone thought of it , did it, and it works still has my mingd in knots. You can see it here.

As I was leaving I saw a green vinyl copy of "Happy Christmas: War Is Over" by John Lennon and Yoko Ono so I took that as well.

On the Sunday I was in FOPP and heard someone asking about a Star Wars soundtrack with a hologram, the assistant wasn't sure so I told him what it was and it turned out that the guy asking was the guy from Elvis Shakespeare , so that was a coincidence.

So maybe I will go for "Happy Christmas:War Is Over" for you to listen to. Have a great Tuesday everybody.

5.1 Vinyl ?

There's a lot of big boxes to celebrate anniversary releases , notably David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust and Paul McCartney's Ram.  Now McCartney's release is sort of OK , but if you want the 5.1 mix you have to buty the most expensive box , but you can buy the vinyl separately.

Bowie's box and the Station to Station release require you to fork out for vinyl as well if you just want the 5.1 mix. Pink Floyd have done similar thinks with their immersion sets.

5.1 sound is worth hearing if you have a home cinema set up but you should have to buy the vinyl version as well to hear things in 5.1.

Kink Crimson , Black Sabbath and The Talking Heads have released reasonably priced 5.1 mixes of classic albums without requiring fans to break the bank. So until the 5.1 mixes are available as a reasonably priced option my money will be staying in my pocket. I have the King Crimson , Black Sabbath and Talking Heads albums so I have plenty to listen to.

Neglect

Since I started writing on Vocal , that has become my main creative focus. It has a slightly easier interface but posts need approval and have to be between 600 and 5000 words long. There are other caveats such as no religion and quite a few others. So I have a feeling that this year this blog will not be hitting anything like a post a day , although I will be beating my first few years posts.

This is just my second post this month and 85th this year and we are almost half way through 2021, but I have 40 posts on Vocal which you can see and read here.

I feel that a lot of my creativity has gone into the Vocal posts leaving nothing for here.

I also have not listened to 6Music for absolute ages, preferring random choices from my collection and my Discogs store. It is a Record Store Day , but I feel my vinyl collection has as much as I need. I've stated that often the idea of making a record special is coloured vinyl or a picture disc maybe featuring the band. That doesn't cut it for me.

I have a great vintage record player I got from RPM and that makes the vinyl sound awesome, and often it's the reggae that has the best sound, although everything sounds good , and yes there may be some surface noise but as the great John Peel said "Life has Surface Noise Mate!!"

So I will leave you with "Boops" by Sly & Robbie , a song I have digitally on CD and on a 12" vinyl single purchased from Stay Free records in Newcastle. Enjoy my friends.

So Far Away

When we got hit by CD I noticed something about two particular albums "Brothers In Arms" by Dire Straits  and "No Parlez" by Paul Young. I'll talk about the latter in my next post, but the CD versions of these albums were longer than the vinyl versions, taking advantage of the fact that due to compression and dropping of frequencies you can fit up to eighty minutes of music on to a CD (though I believe a Mission of Burma one actually exceeded that).

Basically the songs were just longer than the vinyl release, the ideal length for a vinyl album is about 18 minutes a side, and making it louder shortens that, the early Led Zeppelin albums have virtually no run out as Jimmy Page wanted the maximum effect from his production. Again Todd Rundgren brought out a sixty nine minute vinyl album "Initiation" which came with a warning to use a new needle each time you played it (that may be an urban legend but you get the point).

Anyway "Brothers In Arms" while a decent album , I only liked every other song on it and particularly the opener and closer. I first heard Dire Straits playing the excellent "Sultans of Swing" laid back but with stunning guitar work from Mark Knopfler.

The opener is "So Far Away" and got me thinking, thirty years ago , everyone I knew was on this island apart from a couple of relations who had departed for the antipodes. When I went to Mexico around the millenium someone told me that a bus from the Texas border to Mexico City took 24 hours. Mexico is BIG , but our maps show it as this little isthmus joining North and South America. Someone also mentioned about flying across Australia taking seven hours to fly! In Britain I don't like travelling by train for more that three hours (though some journeys are far more pleasant than others).

Now thanks to social media and the internet I am in contact with with people around the globe (remember messaging a friend to see if he wanted to come to a gig, he replied he had moved back to India) and the main problem is the time differential, but it does bring us much closer together in a way we couldn't imagine even in the nineties.

So another day , and another walk towards work.

Packing In Lollipops

Today has been a busy but relaxing day. My first goal was to photograph the Ribblehead Viaduct . The problem was that I had a thirty minute window to take the photo's shortened by the fact the outward train was ten minutes late then I misread the return time which knocked another ten minutes off my free time. If I didn't catch the return train then I'd have a two hour wait for the next one, and the distance to the Viaduct was downhill and probably would take twenty minutes so my compromise was to take photographs from the car park of the Station Hotel and from the platform of the Station which you can see here on my Instagram feed.

Secondly, on my return to Settle, I walked to The Hoffman Kiln which is a remarkably eerie experience to walk through. I haven't a clue what lime burning entails but it seems a huge physical enterprise for the production of lime. You can see my walk through it here. There's more information than I can tell you here.

Vinyl From SCAD

When I came back to Settle I visited the S.C.A.D. charity shop, and ended up buying three vinyl LPs. I don't need any new vinyl but there was a Weather Report eponymous album that I've never seen before, some Debussy (Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune is one of the most beautifully creepy pieces ever), Vaughn-Williams and Delius.

One of the things is this blog does enable me to share music with friends all over the world, and I love when I do mange to share something new with them to increase their experience.

Sometimes it's something you like, sometimes it leaves you cold but it can be like food, I am not a fan of most Thai food and am picky about sushi and it is the same with music.

So what should we go with? Well I have seen a lot of fifties vinyl, including The Chordettes "Lollipop" which is always good to share with friends.

Enjoy

Edinburgh 2017 #3 - Vinyl Villains

The final new shop I visited in Edinburgh was Vinyl Villains, just a bit closer to the centre and down the road from Elvis Shakespeare. It opens around 10:30 on Saturday and again the uy who runs it is very helpful and very knowledgeable about his stock.

On Friday night on BBC4 Danny Baker was presenting a seventies show with a rock slant including Brian Eno's "Seven Deadly Finns" the clip you can see here is from a Dutch pop program, but later in the show was Frankie Goes To Hollywood's "Two Tribes" , one of the most vicious and agressively brilliant dance tunes you will ever hear. I loved the video featuring "Boris Yeltsin" and "Ronald Reagan" in a fighting pit , and really that's the way any war should be fought but we all know what cowards politicians really are, they always get someone else to fight for them.

Anyway back in Vinyl Villains  (they are on Facebook too) they had a lot of albums suspended from the ceiling and I noticed a picture disc of "Two Tribes" and thought "That has my name on it". The guy said he thought it was an interview disc but he got his ladder out and brought the disc down to check, It turned out it was "Two Tribes" backed with their take on Edwin Starr's "War" so I parted with a fiver for an excelent slice of vinyl.

Again this place is not too far from Edinburgh centre and will be on my list when I am next there.

I revisited Coda who are just off the Royal Mile and came across Underground Solu'shn next to The Malt Shovel when we were out with Maureen and Scott , but that's one for the next visit to Edinburgh.

Stay Free

I thought Iknew Newcastle, well the record shops in Newcastle. Today I was in Kazbat's Den talking Donna Summer, Giorhio Moroder, Human League , Black Sabbath and the las who was in tere said his favourite record shop in Newcastle was Stay Free. I'd just been to Beyond Vinyla and this week I discovered 586.

"Where's Stay Free"?" Quoth I
"Opposite Haymarket Metro, down the alley next to Boots, in The Antique Centre" Quoth He (Roughly)

So I wandered off across down before it got swamped with Blaydon Racers and Ed Sheeran fans. (I love Ed Sheeran as a person but find his music leaves me unmoved)

Anyway I tracked down Stay Free and wandered upstairs , also seeing signs for Meli Cafe which I visited briefly, and was well impressed with the warm welcome, interesting Greek Menu and incredible vies of Northumberland Street. I will be revisiting soon.

Then I wandered into the Antiques Centre and straight into Stay Free which has a great selection of Vinyl , so great wall displays and is most reasonably priced. A record shop is good if you walk in and can immediately find somthing to buy, I managed to get two items . A 12" single of "Boops" by Sly and Robbie and "Should I Stay or Should I Go" by The Clash backed by "Rush" by Big Audio Dynamite II.

Tony the owner is great to talk to, and knows his stuff and is very helpful and the couple of customers who dropped in liked it too. This is another gem of a record shop I have found so below is my up to date list of record shops in Newcastle:

• RPM
• Reflex
• Beatdown
• Long Play Cafe / Empire Records
• Beyond Vinyl
• Vinyl Guru
• 586
• Stay Free

plus spectial mention to Oxfam at Jesmond ( I used to work there briefly and the manager Katie knows her stuff , Pop Recs in Sunderlan and there are record shops in Durham, Hexham and Gosforth,  and if you are pushed HMV is not bad for a high street shop.

Please comment with any I've missed.

So really there's only one song isn't there?

Regression

Was just wondering if my purchasing of vinyl was a sort of childhood regression. While I have never actually grown up, I do like to have actual things. Digital recordings are convenient to listen to music and watch video on the move, but it' gives a wonderful pleasure to have a wonderfull packaged item.

Albums like Hawkwind's "XIn Seach of Space" (See video here on my Instagram Channel where there are more examples. These include picture discs and I am still stunned by the holograms on the Star Wars - The Force Awakens soundtrack album (see here) which I now have on order.

Public Image Ltd's "Metal Box" shows that you can do similar things with CDs but often the size of things are scaled down, but that is still a beautifully packaged CD.

So basically I am still 15 at heart and I like a lot of the things I liked when I was 15. While a lot of music is coming out on vinyl I seldom see inventive and impressive packaging like the stuff that Barney Bubbles would come up with for Hawkwind or Hypgnosis' packaging for Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of The Moon" and "Wish You Were Here"

So what should I leave you with? I think Black Sabbath's "Paranoid" on vinyl featuring the Vertigo Swirl , still my favourite label , and you can see that on a CD, and at 500 rpm even if you could you would miss the hypnotic effect.

Have a great Saturday night everybody.

DAT's Your Lot

About twenty five years ago greedy  record companies made a fortune turning people from tape and vinyl to CD on the pretext that the sound quality was excellent and CDs were indestructable and you could smear them with jam and they would still play. Well think of the logistics !!  What really sold CD to the masses was the MacDonalds like convenience of being able to program tracks , skip tracks you didnt like and repeat ones you did as well as random play.

These facilities were actually available on tape and vinyl players , but when a friend of mine demonstrated it on hi cassette player they was a lot of rewinding and fast forwarding .

Anyway , I digress , what has brought this post on on is the re issue by Rhino of Fleetwood Mac's excellent retrospective The Chain , which I bought in its original incarnation about twenty years back. I've been playing it today and very good it is too.

No , after the initial , virtual investment free windfall of CD (records already recorded and often not remastered, remasters were another wave of cash) , they began to circulate rumours of CD decay , and your everlasting CDs would in fact crumble to dust withing five years. To combat this you had to switch to DAT , expensive players , and back to tape with it's inherent fragility and at the the time blank DAT's were as expensive as a full price CD!! This time the public didnt fall for it, and where is DAT now ?

Twenty years on my copy of the Chain is in fine fettle , and CDs are still an excellent and portable storge medium and there are some excellent packages out there . I recently purchased a superb Emerson Lake and Palmer box for around £15 .

So CD is still as bouyant as ever , Vinyl has made and amazing recovery ,  Newcastle still has 3 or 4 real record shops plus HMV and That's Entertainment (The outlet for Music Magpie)  , and music is still brilliant.

Have a nice day!!

Boxing Spectacular

On of the things with CDs iand vinyl is having a tangible artefact and sometimes the packaging that goes with it. From the heydey of vinyl Jethro Tull's "Thick as a Brick" with it's fold out full newspaper and Hawkwind's "Space Ritual" and "In Search of Space"  were major experiences. The Hawkwind ones were reproduce in CD format.

The japanese do some great vinyl / CD reproductions but often the wording is illegible without a magnifying glass!!

We've recently had the Pink Floyd Immersion editions , and the latest major addition is the Blur 21 box. Now these might be worthy endeavours but each one clock in at around a hundred pounds or more , not too easy on the pocket!

Following on from that we have the Peter Gabriel "So" and Sex Pistols "Never Mind The Bollocks" again in wallet destroying editions. The think is once you get them you have to put them somewhere , they are 12" by 12" boxes.

The only one I have at theat size is the Elektra box set , which was reduced from it's normal £150 to £40 , and I have a number of smaller boxes such as the CD version of the Smiths Complete and The Electric Light Orchestra's Classic Albums (11 albums for £20).

These are great if you want them but you can't really get too many of them from a cost and space perspective!!

Record Day In York

Quite a surprisingly successful day today in York with the discovery of three sort independent record shops. HMV is still lurching along and I  believe there is a That's Entertainment within the city environs. I'm also writing this on the iPad and the performance is completely atrocious. Keys don't act as they should so I may wait until I can get to a PC before I finish it properly.

Anyway these shops are not places to visit if you want the latest number one or X-Factor product.

Anyway got a laptop to finish this . The Attic is the smallest almost entirely vinyl , up two flights of stairs and run by the owner as a hobby. They have a facebook page here. The address is 1 Patrick Pool and it's next to a camera shop. Directions are here and it's worth a visit.

Next on the list is a sort of retro shop , with books, vinyl, 78s , comics and a number of record players. The ower is a really friendly hip-hop loving guy extremely knowledgeable about his stuff and  currently getting to know David Bowie's back catalogue.It's called The Inkwell and it's on Gillygate in York. Their web site is here. Well worth a visit if you are into anything retro. Oh abnd they serve tea and coffee. Oh and their very interesting blog is here.



Lastly , also on Gillygate is Rebound Records. A great selection of CDs and vinyl , well laid out and a welcoming chatty proprietor. Lots of jazz , Americana, 50s , 60s , folk and I picked up a Terry Reid retrospective and 5 CDs of music banned by the BBC. There is a facebook link here but I don't think they have a website.

Here's another guide to York's record shops worth following up if you are in York. Link here.

So York has small selection of excellent record shops still , which has really mead my day.

I Feel Love

There is a flying ant on the outside of my window pane, and the sky is a uniform grey. It is a Friday morning and 6Music is celebrating women in music with "Hear Her Day" with female-dominated playlists and female  DJs. However due to one thing and another I had to leave this unfinished, but I can now write about what I wanted to write about.

I keep thinking that my vinyl collection is close to complete and then there's always just one more thing, these one more things have included Cat Stevens' "Numbers" for the overal package and book as well as being a decent album, "True Colours" by Split Enz which I didn't know was actually laser etched, I have the single "History Never Repeats" that looks amazing when it's playing and I am looking forward to seeing the album, you don't get that with a CD or MP3 do you?

The third was going to be the Patrick Cowley Megamix of Donna Summer's "I Feel Love" all 15 minutes of it on 45rpm vinyl but even I shy away from paying twenty notes for a single. The thing is you can download Donna Summer's Greatest Hits (26 songs) for four pounds so that's what I did, and then ordered a double promo remix vinyl set for fifteen pounds so hopefully, that will satisfy me.

When "I Feel Love" came out in the mid-seventies for the rock and rock and roll cognoscenti, Disco was a dirty word, but me and friends were into German psychedelia and Giorgi Moroder's metallic rhythms on this single made a lot of people listen, who would have normally dissed Disco.

It turns out that the sound was stumbled on accidentally with the note on the synthesiser being played twice with the slightest delay resulting in an amazing sound. This was perfectly complemented by Donna Summer's voice and is perfect for remixing as it's both skeletal but more than powerful enough to stand on it's own. It's similar to the guitar delay favoured buy Pink Floyd and U2, and also the accident in the drum machine pattern that resulted in New Order's "Blue Monday".

So I managed to find the Patrick Cowley Mix on Youtube so I will leave that with you to enjoy.

Enjoy your Friday.

256

I've just got to page 256 in Pete Townshend's autobiography "Who I Am" and again with my recent semi obsession with numbers he's just on about the story and completion on Quadrophenia , the lead single from that being 5:15 . 256 stick out because it's just the number two to the power eight , that is multiplied by itself eight times. If you do the same with one it's still one. One never changes, multiply it by itself or divide it by itself and it's still one. If you go up to 3 then the powers create much bigger numbers 2^8 = 256 but 3^8 is 6,561 , I doubt I will ever read a book with that many pages.

Yesterday the new Nick Cave album Skeleton Tree was released, and it's great that people are still producing things I want to hear, I love the new single and am sure I will love the album when it turns up.

The Vertigo Swirl In Action

I ordered a copy of Rod Stewart's Gasoline Alley album and Black Sabbath's Paranoid single as I wanted some vinyl with the original hypnotic Vertigo Swirl label. I do like the look of vinyl playing and the Vertigo Swirl does look good. I got a copy of Split Enz "History Never Repeats"  on laser etched vinyl which you can see here.

Anyway it's Saturday and I am going to get back to watching Casino Royale , which is enjoyable. You all have a great Saturday everybody.

I just found this unaccompanied performance by Rod, absolutely brilliant.