After All ... How Good Is The Man Who Sold The World?

One of the good things about walking and having mobile music and random play technology is that as well as hearing tracks from albums that hadn't caught your attention the first time round (Sparks and XTC are currently doing this for me) you are also thrown stuff that you haven't heard in ages because you haven't played the album and it doesn't get radio play.

If you analogised David Bowie's album output to a terrestrial mountain range it would be The Himalayas and in my opinion "Station To Station" would be Everest, and "The Man Who Sold The World" would be K2. Like Station to Station every song is amazing and it has a no skip factor from the eight minute opener "Width of a Circle". Everyone knows the brooding title song covered by Lulu, Nirvana and many others, but a few weeks ago "All The Madmen" came on to my player, which made start to remember how good the album.

The yesterday "After All" came on , an almost twisted Victorian music hall piece that could have come from some Neil Gaiman / Salvador Dali scripted take on Oliver.

Every collect should have a copy of  "The Man Who Sold The World" and "After All" is just another amazing piece of that wonderful musical jigsaw that fits together so perfectly. I was unaware that Tori Amos had also covered it , she makes it a Tori Amos song but for me it loses the sinister aspect of the Bowie version but it made me think I would love to hear a Joanna Newsome take on it.

I spent yesterday afternoon fight with my Windows roaming profile, therefor not actually getting any work done. The positives is that it gave me a reason to speak with the support guys and girls. I am hoping it's sorted this morning, but we shall see.

It's Friday, so have a great day.

#LikeNoOther #6 Its Only A Painted Chariot - The Incredible String Band

One of the good things about doing this Million Step Challenge is that I am listening to part of my record collection on random play and some corkers have come up over the last few days.

 I'm fast thinking that David Bowie's "Man Who Sold The World" is one of his best with songs like "All The Madmen" , "After All" and Width of A Circle" , very dark and sister, and in a similar vein this morning The Incredible String Band's "Painted Chariot" came on.

I must have first heard this when it came out, I'm not sure if it was a single or I heard it on John Peel, but t has a very Celtic Pagan feel to it , like something that slipped away from the soundtrack of The Wicker Man. It starts out as rickety solid folk before descending to an almost hymnal finale. I really haven't heard anything like it before or since, and this morning I thought I need to put this on the blog.

My Million Step Challenge is over 92 days so I need to hit just under 11K per day, Today is day 18 and I have hit 210K steps so far so I am still on target to hit it. I was going to catch a bus this morning but kept on walking listening to the Incredible String Band and visiting a herd of cows on Nunsmoor (see here for video evidence).

Anyway I intend to be in bed a little earlier than last night, but enjoy  "Painted Chariot" and sleep well.

Wake Up

This is post number 1300. It's a gloriously sunny day. I will probably walk into work.

I love the light on the leaves of the trees, and I often try and capture that in photographs, though surely you can only see so many green leaves but every combination is different, it's the same with clouds. The number of times I've thought, that looks amazing, and two minutes later I decide to take a picture and it's gone. Clouds are big things but very volatile, and when you see that combination of cloud and light you need to capture the moment, although it will be there in your memory.

Imagine if you could photograph your memories or imagination, now that would be an amazing thing and I think it's probably not that far away. As I mentioned in my last post we now have the technology to do things on tap. The film Tangerine was filmed on iPhones, I don't know about the editing and stuff, but you could make a movie with your hand held device.

The film Monsters had all the special effects and CGI done on an everyday PC, so YOU can make your own film too. I've just noticed there's a follow up Dark Continent so need to check that out, both Monsters and Tangerine are great films.

We live in an age where we have the ability to do amazing things.

So for some reason "Amazing Journey" from Ken Russell and The Who's "Tommy" came to mind so that's what you get today. It contains some amazing imagery,

Enjoy yourself today , enjoy the sunshine and do something amazing.

Wide Awake

It's almost midnight and I am wide awake but shattered. I finally finished watching The Fall, and managed almost 11K steps today. I didn't intend to write anything, but thought maybe I could have a midnight themed #ATuneaDayinMay , I mean there are load of songs with a midnight or night time them aren't there....

The first that comes to mind is "Midnight Rambler" by The Rolling Stones then you have "Midnight Rider" by The Allman Brothers both very worthy songs, and both favourites of mine. I remember I was going to do a post about Half Man Half Biscuit but that's just fallen by the wayside at the moment.

I've just had a decent payout from TopCashback which I took as an Amazon voucher and have spent some of it on a Digitech guitar pedal processor thing which you can see here. It's funny whenever you put a link on the word here Blogger messes up the link processing.

Hopefully this will make me do something with my home recording set up, which is probably better than a lot of bands had in the sixties. My basic problem is having the discipline to do it all on my own. I have an idea of the sound I want and need to actually create some recordings before I can think of playing live again. Another problem is that I am not a musician, I am undisciplined , but I used to record a lot of solo stuff to tape, it;s just getting the hang of my digital tape recorder. I have a lot of fragments recorded , so it's just a question of putting them together and getting stuff done.

Anyway, it's now crept past midnight so we will go with The Rolling Stones "Midnight Rambler" as that's what I am doing now, midnight rambling when I should be sleeping.

Goodnight mes amigos.

Time Sharing

When I started first in programming at Littlewoods we were given access that used a "Time Sharing System" which we were told would make it seem as though we were the only person using the system. It was a lie of course but we dealt with it.

In life we often have to work out how to share time between work , chores , stuff that needs doing , time to be alone, do what you want and rest , and spending time in a social environment with friends, family and loved ones. I try to load mine in favour of the last two, but each of these groups can also be subdivided into sub groups.

Today I have to go to work so that's eight hours out of my day , after six hours sleep, ninety minutes of getting up and showered and writing this, then an hour to walk in to work , to try and hit my 11K for today, but I need to get the bus home as I have a delivery from Iceland coming. How mundane is this post? Still these things may be the highlights of some people's lives.

Ideally aim to do what you want and enjoy , and be happy. Life is difficult and confusing at times, but if you do things you want, then life improves wonderfully.

So before I leave , here's #ATuneaDayinMay , what more appropriate that The Buzzcocks "Boredom" from the "Spiral Scratch" EP. This allows me to have a brief rant on the genre of "indie" music. Many "indie" bands are on major labels, so how can they be "indie". It's 1984 doublespeak (which the governments in the UK, USA and Russia seem to use as a matter of course where the words used mean the opposite of their real meaning) . "Spiral Scratch" however was real "indie" , the Buzzcocks first release which they organised end to end. Ironically in this digital age we all have the technology available to record and release stuff from our own bedroom or office.... and that is still on my "To Do" List.

I decided to include the whole of the EP for you so you have eleven minutes of real "indie" music.

Anyway, have a great Monday everybody.

Catching Up

Due to one thing and another , rain and Andrew and Glen's wonderful wedding , I didn't even hit 6K steps yesterday, although I am still 1K steps past the required target, so today I need to catch up.

As a start I thought I would walk down Two Ball Lonnen to Westgate Road, then back all the way up Wingrove Road to the Central Motorway , then along the Motorway to Morrisons, pick up a few essentials and walk back down Two Ball Lonnen then eventually home. That clocks in at 10.5 K steps which puts me just ahead of the required number but I need to do another few thousand. We shall see.

Yesterday I ran out of data on my EE phone plan. Because of EE's grabbing top up policy (like every mobile phone company) I am going to try not to buy a day add on. They put a time limit of a week on the data you buy, 1Gb would last me a fortnight, but there's not much one can do if you want to stay on the same number.

It's a bit weird not having information at your fingertips but if you walk along Westgate Road there is free on street wifi provided by the shops via XLN and it works (unlike As You Like It when I was at Andrew and Glen's wedding, which spent an age before timing out, like several bus companies I could mention), a sensible concept but mobile phone companies like EE won't like it.

Without data the step monitoring app doesn't update (but it records steps) , so having done 10.5K I wanted to hit 12K, but had to just guess and when I got home I found I'd done another 5.5K so that's 16K for today and I am back to 6K over my required target.

I wrote this in two parts as I was incredibly tired after my first walk, and still feel awfully tired and achey, almost as though I have the physical aches of 'flu' without the cold symptoms , I should have really had a bath , but it's too late so I will probably just go to bed.

I haven't really done much today apart from catch up on some TV (Broadchurch, The Fall, The Aliens, Doctor Who) and am enjoying Darwin's Armada although Charles Darwin liked a fight and hunting animals, odd as he wanted to be a clergyman.

So #ATuneaDayinMay, , what's it to be, it's just come to me , as my may walk today to catch up on my walking was a big rectangle we'll have Dave Brubeck's "Unsquare Dance", which all based on the handclap rhythm then everything hangs of that. The piano is almost superfluous.

There's a load of  other things I was going to write about but they will keep for another day.

Sleeping In

My body has stopped letting me sleep in at weekends. I used to be able to sleep til mid day quite easily. Now it's like I have an internal alarm that kicks me out of bed as early as 6 am, sometimes leaving me til 7 am. But both are a lot earlier that it used to be. My eyes are tired and my body and brain are, but something is pushing me to get up, and by the time I have washed and shaved I think I may as well have a shower and by that time I am awake and up.

So while it's 7:45 when I am writing this, I have done everything I mentioned and gone out and got the papers, done my first thousand steps of my Million Step Challenge , and need to iron a shirt or two because later I am going to Andrew and Glen's Wedding.

I need to update Song of The Salesman , and see if I can fly that drone again , write some songs (and more importantly record them) and walk at least another ten thousand steps and probably a lot more things.

I have ripped a couple of music DVDs including The Who at the Isle of White, Public Service Broadcasting at Brixton Academy and Van Der Graaf Generator at Metropolis Studios, because I am now so lazy I can't be bothered to get up and put the DVD in the player, though that same Sony Player plays the ripped DVDs from my home network as I become "Homo Sedens".

I also found a load of rare David Bowie songs on Youtube and need to update the MP3 tags and ad to my already vast Bowie collection, and although I've used it before I will use the Spiders from Mars version of "Holy Holy" which is not on official CD release but in my opinion one of Bowies's finest songs (but how many songs could you say that about). His original was good but a little pedestrian and both version are available in the Five Years Box Set here, a ittle expensive but ten discs for £90 is not that bad really.

Anyway I will let you listen to both versions so you get two candidates for #ATuneaDayinMay,  enjoy your Saturday my friends.