Water Music

When showering this morning I thought I could hear music maybe in the pipes , maybe in the water. It's like when you think you can hear something in another house, or a passing car or someone with headphones on. You cannot quite grasp what it is and when you switch the shower off it stops, so it's obviously in the water. This happens quite often with me, and I suppose it's brought to the fore because of the Clive Barker books I'm reading which always have that world just out of your sight or ken, be it music , lights or images.

Because this was music probably caused by water I thought of Handel's "Water Music" which is a rather essential classical piece which I enjoy , although last night I was watching  a wedding on "Brassic" (which is an excellent Joseph Gilgun creation with a cracking soundtrack)  and the music was Pachelbel's "Canon" which has been used as a basis for so many songs (the Farm's "All Together Now" for instance) but one of my most striking moments was when I saw Blair Dunlop (Ashley Hutching's son) tap it on his guitar (the Trace Bundy arrangement) at an Albion Band concert many years back.

I couldn't find a Blair Dunlop but I did find Trace Bundy's TED performance, the sort of guitarist who makes you feel you may as well give up. Amazing stuff, and brilliant arrangement of a beautiful tune.

Halfway Down The Stairs

I'm halfway through "Weaveworld" and it's still got me grabbed, maybe because it touches on so many places that are familiar to me while maintaining and definite other worldliness. The thing is, when you revisit a past favourite , there is always that slight feeling that it may not live up to what you thought it would be, although being a Clive Barker tome I feel on fairly certain ground, and it is proving remarkably excellent on this particular revisit.

Of course I am also re reading "Imajica" on the Kindle Fire so it's a double helping for me , which may actually slow down progress, but who cares when it's so enjoyable.

Similarly the purchase of "Confusion" and "Blue Monday"  12" singles whilst in Edinburgh made me wonder whether my favourite New Order song "Temptation" was available in this form , and it is, so that was ordered and arrived today. My second favourite New Order song is "Love Vigilantes" but do I really need that on a 12" single.... we shall see.

So half way through "Weaveworld" made me think of "Halfway Down The Stairs" by Robin the Frog (nephew of Kermit the Frog in The Muppet Show). My mind drifting off in unorthodox tangents again.

No Dilemma

In a previous post (here) I referred to Michael Moorcock's "Breakfast In the Ruins"  which finished each chapter with an impossible dilemma directed at the reader. I had a dream about a similar thing before I properly woke this morning and here it is:


It's late at night and you are at a bus stop. Your bus is due , you think , but you have a sense of foreboding, you don't feel safe. You can see the next bus stop, about five minutes walk away, there are two dim street light along the way. There is someone at the next bus stop. They may make you feel safer.

So do you:

• Stay and wait for the bus? Something bad may happen
• Walk to the next stop? The bus may pass you by and the person at the next stop may not be someone who will help you , they may even be the cause of your foreboding!

So just a small dilemma for you to consider this morning.

Last night my local Post Office closed an hour early with zero announcement so I have to go to the one at Haymarket which is just always open and very reliable to detach another CD purchased from me on Discogs.

Clive Barker's "Weaveworld has just visited Newcastle , a hotel in Rudyard Street , there is a Rudyerd Street in North Shields but maybe he just chose a random name rather than an actual place.

A fairly appropriate song is the excellent "Which Way Should I Jump?" by the brilliant Milltown Brothers who also did the them to the wonderful "All Quiet On The Preston Front" ("Here I Stand" see here although this site says it's "Out on Blue Six")

Pointless

I like Pointless, it's a quiz show that actually demands some intelligence and you do learn things from it. Richard Osman's "House of Games" is similar except in includes "personalities" (most of who'm I don't know) and is extremely good natured because although there are prizes it's done for the fun of it. Rge "celebrity" Pointless game is also done for charity and, again, is very educational and enjoyable, co-hosted by Richard Osman and Alexander Armstrong  (President of the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society and responsible for some extremely funny comedy sketches as part of the Armstrong and Miller duo with Ben Miller). So that's a hundred words which have nothing to do with what I was going to post about, apart from...

... I awoke from one of the most pointless dreams I've ever had, essentially I was doing something, either laying a floor or lawn on some waste ground under The Tyne Bridge which had a channel running from top left to bottom right towards the Ouseburn. There was a big mirror and records may have been involved and it might have been a carpet. Then I decided that the channel needed to run bottom left to top right so had to take everything up and redo it. It was on the Quayside side (North and Left is West and Right is East and I've just realised on the Gateshead side this would , at one point been a vague possibility. But my work life often means I have to undo things adn also reading Clive Barker's "Weaveworld" could have something to do with it and the carpet and been unwoven and now is being rewoven. But as you can see ultimately pointless.

So I am going to share Armstrong and Miller's streetwise Spitfire pilots with you as it's extremely funny. Although this unrelated pointless site is quite amusing.

Not Bored

I don't do blog posts when I'm away on short breaks although I haven't posted in nearly a week, which is quite a long blogging break for me, but Edinburgh was great but cold.

Edinburgh whilst being the joint capital of Scotland seems a remarkably unplanned city , which just adds to it's interest, and is small enough to easily explore on foot as well as having some amazing buildings and constructions. It's also full of small alleys, high level walks, stone steps and you can usually see some landmark so you can always find your way back if you ever get lost.

I got back yesterday evening and watched two episodes of 30 Rock, two of Veep and the final Frankie Boyle Scotland travelogue and then thought I don't have time to blog and realised how the quantity of choice on television can actually steal your time. The thing is I don't even have Netflix and despite it having lots of series I want to watch , my ivo disk is 90% full and I have Amazon Prime, BBC iPlayer and the commercial channels hubs to watch so much television that I really don't have the time.

People often tell me they binge watch series, but more than two episodes of anything is too much for me, and then I have two Clive Barker books on the go and music to listen to too.

So as I close off this first March post to go to work , the sun is shining outside, and tomorrow I am going to visit Kirsty and Mark to see and hear Mark's latest record player upgrade and Edinburgh did provide me with four more pieces of vinyl , two New Order 12" singles , "Fans" by Malcolm McLaren and "Gris,Gris" by Dr John so I'll go with "Confusion" by New Order which has one of the cleverest covers I have ever seen, although I have seen similar examples before, but even the guy selling it in Vinyl Villains wasn't too sure what it was, and the remix I'm sharing (cos it uses the cover) was used in the film "Blade".

Amelia

I'm currently working my way through the discs of the box set "Forever Changing:The Golden Age of Elektra" and there is some damned awful folk music that wouldn't be out of place in "The Wicker Man" (an absolutely brilliant film which Christopher Lee did for free) , but the music improves as you work through the discs. Though there are gems on the early discs and duffers on the later discs.

"Five To One" by The Doors is a great song , vocals excellent and the bass and drums menacingly good, but the guitar and keyboards are just far too light, however on the self produced (with Bruce Botnick)  "Riders on The Storm" everything is perfect, and I didn't think I would recognise a song from the rain at the beginning. It sounds so good I am considering buying "LA Woman" on vinyl. Incidentally the following song "The Future Is Not What It Used To Be" also opens with rain and is also rather good and was going to be featured in this post but .....

... then "The True Story of Amelia Earheart" by Plainsong came on and starts by mentioning her Electra plane hit the ocean bed so given that I'm listening to Elektra albums it jumped to the top of the queue. The song is base on and unsubstantiated theory  but there is a website dedicated to her here if you would like to find out more.

There was also a great acapella version of "Amazing Grace" by Judy Collins which is worth tracking down.

So enjoy this Plainsong song my friends ...

Going Back

The older you get , the more stuff you have to revisit. Sometimes this works out and sometimes it doesn't. It happens with places, books , people , films and music. But you always have to try to see if it was as good as you think you remembered it.

The obvious song is the Byrd's cover of Gerry Goffin and Carole King's "Goin' Back" , and the Byrd's always made songs sound as though they were drenched in perfection. I first saw them performing Bob Dylan's "Mr  Tambourine Man" on Thank Your Lucky Stars around 1965 and loved it , but was shocked by how rough the original sounded. The thing is I eventually came to love Dylan's voice as well and sometimes found The Byrd's covers a little too perfect, as with "Positively Fourth Street" on "Untitled", but it's still good.

Back to what I was originally going to post, I had started to reread "Weaveworld" by Clive Barker. Part of it brings back memories of my time in Liverpool , but two hundred pages in I think that it's as good as when I first got into iit. My memory has always been rubbish (it's why I had difficulty with English Literature  and Law, I could remember what things were about and describe them but couldn't remember quotes and cases) so things keep popping up in the book that I had forgotten such as The Rake and even Suzanna, though I remembered Cal, the pigeons , Shadwell , The Scourge and of course The Magic Carpet.

"Weaveworld" still has the magic for me and I am looking forward to enjoying the bits I remember and the bits I've forgotten.