Do I Have To Cut My Hedge?

It's the last day of February, and it's misty and foogy and soon it'll be garden maintenance time. Half Man Half Biscuit are playing The Boiler Shop in Newcastle so that is one of my favourite bands playing at one of my favourite venues. It's similar to the excellent Wylam Brewery on Exhibition Park is being a very impressive building in a great location and a wonderful place for a gig.

At  The Wylam Brewery gig I was chatting with the guy selling the merchandise (got myself a 12" copy of "Dickie Davies' Eyes") and he told me how they nearly drove into the lake as the walk through Exhibition Park to the building is not exactly well lit.

Obviously the thought of having to trim my hedge coincides with the titel of the new album, which causes everyone who sees  and hears it varying degrees of mirth to eventual hysterical laughter. Whne I originally listened to the album I thought th einstruments were given too much prominence but on subsequent listens, it has just grown on me, and sort of encouraged to redelve back into the back catalogue and realise there are so many absolute gems from Nigel's pen that I have forgotten or completely missed.

You cannot finish listening to a Half Man Half Biscuit album and fail to have a smile on your face, and then want at least a little more. I was going to put a link on here re the genesis of Half Man Half Biscuit in The Guardian but when I did a google search it came back with this huge list. There is this on the lyric project page about half decent articles on the ban, so fill your boots and have a quick gander.

I'll just share "Everytime a Bell Rings" from the latest album (and you know the title) , now go and get your fvcking hedge cut !!

Februarying

Tomorrow is the last day of the month, and I have completed my steps with and it's now just doing a bit extra. The weather is obviously a lot milder even though it's only February. The guy at the back has actually mowed his lawn, though I am putting that off until at least the second day in March.

I look back at some of my old posts and they will be shorter than the first paragraph here. As I keep saying , I like to write a couple of hundred words and I am sure that at school we did 100 word essays, though maybe it was 500 words or a thousand words because one hundred words is about what I have keyed in here so far. How could you write an essay with that little fabric, although as school you could get very creative with very little if it meant more time to play or do what you actually wanted to.

When I am writing technical documents I am a great fan of white space because it draws people in to actually read what you have written. If you present people with dense blocks of text their mind will generally shut off and rail against the amount of words to read. Talking of reading I just downloaded the W. Somerset Maugham Collection from Amazon for a mere 99p. It has a few of his books including "The Magician" (inspired by Aleister Crowley) , "The Moon and Sixpence" (Gauguin), "Of Human Bondage" and more.

So what should we play, what about "Mondo Bondage" by The Tubes......

Musical Mind Wanderings

On my walks to work this week I was listening to Janelle Monae's "Dirty Computer", in my opinion the best album of  last year which I eulogised here and one of the things I love about it is the way it is bookended by two beautiful and wonderful songs, the title track with vocal arrangement and contributions from Brian Wilson and "Americans" which is a brilliant state of the nation song.

I was wondering what to play next  as I was maybe ten minutes away from work, and was tempted by Jethro Tull's "Passion Play" but then went for Thousand Yard Stare's "Fair To Middling" EP which is obviously a shorter listen. I couldn't hum a song from the EP but every one is so easy to slip into full of wonderful guitar motifs and extremely unskippable.

This is how music should be, not everyone has the same taste (I was sat next to  a girl listening to Happy Techno on the bus neccessitating me to put on my headphones and contuing with "Dirty Computer"), but syou should enjoy what you listen to. I'm not a fan of elevator music , phone hold music or lounge jazz but there must be people who are.

The problem with the music "industry" is things are decided by people who think the know "what the public wants" and certainly don't want to risk offending anybody.  It the sixties and seventies the top thirty singles charts were the gauge of public taste and  people like me were worried that one daye the tope thirty would become static and we'd be forced to listen to the same dross over and over. Ironically that is the staple of most local radio stuck in a particular vacuous time warp playing the records I want to forget, smooth , easy listening cheese.

Don't get me wrong I love Abba, Boney M, Erasure  and lots of great pop , I mean one of the greatest heavy metal riffs is the intro to Abba's "Voulez Vous" , basically good music is good music but sometimes certain radio stations just really turn you off. My Radio channel of choice is 6Music, but again that is not  to everyone's taste, though a musician friend once told me no one would ever listen to DAB channels.

Kill 'Em All

We're approaching the end of February and because I've walked enough steps my daily walking has slowed down a bit. I'm also getting used to coffee made with Almond milk , which tastes a bit weird but is not undrinkable and it is supposedly better although dairy milk contains more protein which uses more calories to digest so in theory both are equivalent, but we shall see. The Almond milk I've been buying is only slightly more expensive than normal skimmed milk.

Last night I made an Aloo Chole so the last two days have been fairly vegan, which can't be too bad. I do find it strange that people have a problem with veganism, though these sort of people are always looking for something to have a problem with, so veganism just goives them an excuse to raise their blood pressure.

Currently I'm two thirds the way through "Kill 'Em All" the latest novel from John Niven following up "Kill Your Friends" although "Second Coming" was also a sort of follow up to "Kill Your Friends" and his referenced in "Kill 'Em All". The Simon Cowell charater is all you would expect and more, a total git , and the NOT Michael Jackson character (he can't be because he is white, and is vaguely compared with Jackson) is frighteningly possible as this takes in the whole post Trump election scenario and the fact that anything can be excused or dismissed as fake news.

So what would be a good song to accompany this, possibly my favourite late Jackson song "Black or White". Have a great day.

Early To Bed

Well it will be once I've written this. I've had a quiet weekend, though I expect my steps for February to be complete by the end of tomorrow. The weather has been a little warmer and soon it'll be time to release the lawn mower, a chore I really don't like doing , but it has to me done. It does amaze me the way that grass, bushes , flowers and trees grow with little more than sun and rain to feed them.

I've been playing Scrabble recently and while you always want to win, you really do need to get beat once in a while to bring you down to earth. I started playing with a lady who normally wipes the floor with me, and I know she has been through hard times recently but aware she is still active on the Scrabble circuit but I have beaten her twice (never happened before) although the third game looks like reverting back to type.

So I've been adding more CDs to my Discogs list and sort of realised that I buy stuff to support the artists usually. Sometimes I may not like the music, but almost always I listen music digitally or on vinyl, it's very seldom I actually play a CD although I do have quite few DVD masters and often listen to "Thick As A Brick", "In The Court of The Crimson King" or "Space Ritual" and the sound on these discs is amazing. I also managed to get hold of a copy of the Newspaper vinyl issue of "Thick as a Brick" from the Skipton Sound Bar so I can listen on DVD or vinyl or just the MP3 ( which I listen to quite often on my walk to work).

So I'll share with you a live take of "In The Court Of The Crimson King" before I hit the sack for tonight

Quality over Quantity?

Most definitely not. Quality is also a very nebulous term, t can be bad or good, and when something is described as "quality" it shows ignorance or shiftiness in the describer and certainly does not inspire any confidence by me in the product.

February has been very sparse on posts this year, my lowest number of posts since July 2016 when I only posted eleven times, this post will take it up to ten and I will probably post again before the end of the week. My posts these days tend to be 200-250 words , so hardly a War and Peace type essay. Very often I see blogs and the post are absolutely huge and involved, and then the blogger decided it's too much and don't post again. Keeping it reasonably short means that there is no pressure on me to produce an in depth article and it is mainly to act as a diary for me although it is nice when I get comments from people.

I had a lovely comment on my Christopher Lee slideshow today

"Oh...oh my God...I dont think ive ever been this excited to stumble onto something haha! 

❤❤❤" 

How nice is that? You can see it here. 

I have shared that video a few times and it is set to become my most viewed on ever, about to hit 16K views.

This morning on my walk to work I stuck on the "Mother, Maiden, Crone" remix EP and the new album "Bardo" by Jordan Reyne. When I first saw her a couple of years back in 2014 supporting The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing (review here) I was amazed, here music and performance gave me goosebumps like no artist before or since. On the night I bought three of her CDs from her I as that impressed, and walking along this morning I felt entranced by the hypnotic dark Celtic rhythms and sounds of her songs.

So it's Friday and I will share with you "Birth Ritual" the first Jordan Reyne song I listened to this morning.....

Sing Hosanna, the Jazz Snobs are all going home

After giving up on "Second Coming " by The Stone Roses ("Love Spreads" is ok), I picked out "Some Call It Godcore" by Half Man Half Biscuit. My first thought was hey I've had this for so long and never listened to it, I don't know any of the songs, so wrong for someone who considers himself a Half Man Half Biscuit fan.

The opener "Sensitive Outsider" is excellent and seemed vaguely familiar , but I felt the over emphasised Jews / Jaws Harp detracted from the song though it does eventually fade. "Fretwork Homework" confirmed I had never listened to the album (Shame on Me, but I did buy it) and it is an excellent second song.

The "Faithlift" hit me, I thought I know this, so darkly funny and a brilliant refrain, in keeping with the vaguely religious parody cover and name, and yes I did know it and memories started to resurface. "Even Me With Steel Hearts" love to see a dog on the pitch, and yes I definitely know this wonderful album, it's just buried deeper that most others. Anyway you will know that the title of this post comes from the excellent "Faithlift" funny and barbed like most of Nigel's writing.

When you hear "(Seen by me mates coming out of a) Styx Gig" there is no doubt that this, while not a top division Half Man Half Biscuit album it's still excellent and better than The Stone Roses "Second Coming" though that's a bit Chalk and Baking Powder, the chalk does have lasting substance.

The finale monologue of "Tour Jacket (With eEtachable Sleeves)" is absolute top knotch Biscuitry, and in fact the album is (like all their stuff) brilliant and it is top disvision , maybe mid table Premiership sort of Watford or Leicester City, it cantains more than a few diamonds.

So that's my opinion of "Some Call It Godcore", well worth an extended revisit if you haven't listened to it recently.