March Final

It's after ten and this is my last post for March 2018. The weather has been miserable and I couldn't do that much walking although I hit my target for March.

I'm fifty page from completing "The Catcher In The Rye" by JD Salinger an have decided it is worth the effort of completing it, but it's a bit like cleaning gutters or unblocking a drain. It's not pleasant but has to be done. The protagonist is not pleasant. If he were in the UK today he would read the Daily Mail and vote Tory without being articulate eno0ugh to give a reason why. He always finds a reason to despise people especially if they are not well off. He himself is provided for by well to do parents that he is still, for want of a better word, a git. This book makes you think of how to deal with annoyances like Holden Caulfield, a privileged nobody who believes the world owes him whatever he wants. I haven't finished the book so I may be completely wrong in my evaluation, but if you take this book on don't expect to feel better after reading it.

Yesterd I took deliver of "Suffice To Say: The Complete Yachts Collection" on Cherry Red Records  masterminded by Henry Priestman the music behing The Christians. I've moaned that The Yachts had never appeared in digital format apart from the odd track on compilations, but now that has been rectified and I ordered it from the excellent Action Records in Preston, and it really is an excellent set.

It's funny that I was thinking twent quid for three CDs is expensive but it really isn't. In 1975 (I think) I was on the dole and my JSA was £3.25 a week (it was subsidised by undeclared lump work so I could actually live) . Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here" came out  and was priced at £3.25. So if albums had kept in line with JSA we'd be paying £80 for an album.

So I will leave you with "Yachting Types" and you can buy the albums mentioned below.

To Infinity and Beyond

Today is Good Friday and it was a pleasantly good Friday (apart from Preston getting trashed 4-1 by Sheffield Wednesday) but wandering around the Clayton Street / West Road Intersection I noticed what looked like a Vinyl display in what was Blue Moon. I wasn't mistaken, and it turnes out there is a new vinyl emporium in town called Beyond Vinyl.

Essentially it's a Vinyl shop which will do coffee , cake and paninis and will have a performance space as well, plud of course a lot of class vinyl.

I spoke with the guys in there and touched on the laser etched holograms on the Star Wars soundtrack (which you can see here) and they told me the first laser etched hologram was on a White Stripes album.

Actually it was Jack White's "Lazaretto" and you can see the Angel hologram here but it still bends my mind to think how you could possibly even think about putting that into play let alone actually doing it. Added to that the vinyl album has some weird hidden tracks built in that play at 33rpm , 45 rpm and 78 rpm, but even though I have ordered a copy it's just for the hologram as I alread have the CD of the album. You can see the effect here.

Beyond Vinyl is a new brilliant space for music in Newcastle as well as meeting up . It is similar in concept to the absolutely excellent Long Play Cafe in The Grainger Market (and Quayside) and Pop Recs in Sunderland and I am looking forward to dropping in quite a lot as it is round the corned from where I work and close to Kazbat's Den if you fancy extending your wardrobe.

I've found an excellent live take of "Just One Drink" from "Lazaretto"  to share with you as you read. Sleep well.

Catcher Not Caught

A couple of days ago I started reading "The Catcher In The Rye" by JD Salinger and while I know virtually everybody else has read it, and it gets four and a half stars on Amazon, the only thing I like about it so far is the cover. Published in 1945 therefore of it's time the writing is vaguely film-noir  and the protagonist is just annoying. A friend of mine told me not to bother, which made me slightly more determined to read it and now I'm half way through it. I had the impression it was about a kid skipping school, but it's an older student being expelled (again) and ping ponging between being an annoyance and pretending to be an adult.

Today there ice on cars and rooves and there's fog as well so the walk into work may be a little chilly.

It's the day before the Easter weekend so I now have a four day weekend, I could definitely do that permanently.

Anyway for some reason the video for John Fogerty's "The Old Man Down The Road" from "Centrefield"  came into my head because of the incredibly long guitar lead that runs through. It's an unusual way of linking a lot of disparate scenes of American.

So enjoy your Thursday and make sure you have all your Easter Eggs.

Keep on Moving

It's Wednesday and I'm feeling better but not 100%. As for many things the solution is "Keep On Moving" , keep active , keep doing things. I said this in my first post of the week and that caused my friend Julie to get "Keep On Movin'" by Soul II Soul as an earworm. That's not a bad thing as it is a great song.

The last two days I've used the bus to get in to work but today I will be walking and have another album loaded to listen to on walk in which I will write about soon.

The song I've chosen is Bob Marley's "Keep On Moving", a pre Island song but it does appear on the deluxe version of "Exodus"  as well as any number of buget compilations. I first remember coming across the song on UB40's first "Labour of Love" album and they do a cracking version too, but it is a great song.

Anyway time to get off to work and to KEEP ON MOVING. Have a great Wednesday.

There's A Mean Eyed Cat ...

.. so Bill Haley says, but really we have a great Mean Eyed Cat in Newcastle, and I visited it today. I was not feeling physically too good but thought a walk would do me good so went along to St Thomas' St and entered.

The place improved my mood immediately, garage band and rock and roll decor with CoyoteMen memorabilia photos of Johnny Cash and a big Cramps sign over the bar with Dave Campbell playing Mein Host and we chatted on with another couple of guys while I had a Diet Coke and we talked vinyl and rock and roll and the failures of the music industry. You can see a short video I took of the place here.

We were talking about the first picture discs which both Dave and I though was Curverd Air's "Air Conditioning" which you can see here but it was predated by a German Elektra compilation called "Hallucinations Psychedelic Underground" which features The Doors, MC5 and others and you can see here. I sourced both of them from Discogs.

SoThe Detroit Cobras were on the sound syste so I'll leave you with "Cha Cha Twist", but if you want a new slightly different pub  with a great atmosphere, great people , and great music get yourself down there and enjoy it.

I will be back.

Discomfort

I'm currently dealing with (for me coz I'm soft) a fair amount of discomfort ,my lower back hurts after sitting too long so walking and moving is the natural solution to that, but as I am sitting on my comfy chair at home writing this , my lower back is definitely not feeling great.

Also my left hand oddly pains me when I grip anything hard , or say push a door. Again if the hand is immobile for any length of time it does become painful, and is again rectified by movement and use, so that is an excuse to play guitar or piano more, you can always take a positive spin on anything,

This is the reason I haven't wrote and posted over the last couple of days, although my readers have dropped significantly so not many people will have noticed  ☺☺.

I've finally managed to stop listening to The Hawklords "25 Years On"  on my walking, though I do love the album so I think I will share the excellent "Psi Power" with you, which is the opening track from the album.

Enjoy your rainy Tuesday.

The Audacity of Psi Power

I finished "The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets" by Simon Singh and now I am embarking on "The Catcher In The Rye" by JD Salinger, which is one of those books that everyone has read apart from me, I'll let you know how it goes.

Today I also managed my first multi track recording using Audacity and managing to deal with teh Windows Latency issue. It involved a little lateral thinking and switching off the sound pass through for the recorded track in Audacity. This basically means letting the recorded tracks play through the computer sound system while listening to the track being recorded through the U-Phoria box which feeds into Audacity via the USB connection. This means I can actually start building songs on my computer, they won't be sophisticated but will end up on Soundcloud here.

Over the last few days an odd thing has happened with my listening, normally I listen to album once or twice at the most but I have had an album on repeat and have listened to it four or five times so far. When I first put on I though the production was a bit lacklustre but the songs were more than listenable. Each song was excellent and slightly influenced by the punk ethic at the time. The album is the debut by the Hawkwind alter ego band Hawklords, and almost every song has a two word chorus refrain., the album is "25 Years On"  and clocks in at just over half an hour.

It opens with "Psi Power" (using the title as the catchy refrain) segueing into "Free Fall" with a slight lull for the short "Automaton" before hitting the title track. "Flying Doctor" is great an it's refrain is "Cabinet Key" and that's the song I will share with you.

The fact that I only gave it a cursory listen when it first came out but now I feel I know all the songs intimately shows just how good it actually is. Definitely another on ethat every one should have.