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Gavin Bryars and Academy of St Martin in the Fields et al – Never Failed Me Yet

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Venue:

The Tanks, Tate Modern, London

Date: 12/04/2019

This was a truly unique musical experience, though I can admit to only enjoying about 15% of the complete performance. Some forty years ago, Gavin Bryars got hold of a fragment of tape of a homeless man singing an unknown religious melody – “Jesus’s Blood Never Failed Me Yet”. He created a loop of it, so that it ran for as long as anyone cared to play it for. Bryars composed music to play along with the voice. Over the years he has released a number of versions of performances of the piece, constrained only by the medium – a vinyl version (24 minutes), a tape (30 minutes), the on to a CD version at 74 minutes. There was also a version performed with Tom Waits. Last night through to this morning Never Failed Me Yet had its ultimate performance. A non stop 12 hour rendition, starting at 20:00 Friday evening and ending at 8:00 this morning, performed at The Tate, with free admission. I went along for the first hour and arrived back in time to catch the final 45 minutes. The performance opens with the old man’s voice. He » Continue Reading.

Roy Harper

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Venue:

London Palladium

Date: 16/03/2019

That was it; coming up for 44 years since I first him and more than 20 gigs later I’ve seen my last Roy Harper performance. As he told us, he’s 78 next June and so this is his farewell tour (though he dropped a couple of hints that it may run for a while longer – I don’t believe him).

I really wish that I could report that he went out with a mighty bang. He didn’t, though it was a lot more than a whimper. It just didn’t hit the heights I have been hoping for since I bought my ticket many months ago, though it contained many fine moments.

The good news for us Harperphiles is that there will be at least one more record, but the three new songs here were a microcosm of the evening; the second new song, utilising the tune of Times They Are A Changin’ was about cyberspace and clickbait and was to my years a crock of shit. The first new song was a rage filled recounting of the injustice he underwent inspired by the court case where he was prosecuted in a post-Savile accounting for » Continue Reading.

Jeremy Hardy – RIP

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I’m really saddened and shocked at this announcement. From past correspondence about Jeremy, I suspect there are a couple of people here who will be raising a glass and saying good riddance (or maybe they have left, I don’t know). He wore his heart and politics on his sleeve but was nonetheless genuinely funny. He’d probably say the putting RIP after his name was inappropriate, but I’m not sure what else to put. Many people won’t know much about him as he wasn’t really a national figure. He was notorious for his lack of singing ability, nay his bray, on I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue’s rounds that called for vocalising – namely Pick Up Song and One Song To The Tune of Another. He was also notoriously blacklisted from Just A Minute for bad language. On The News Quiz the best team ever was Jeremy and the late Linda Smith. I was fortunate enough to be in the audience at The Drill Hall in Bloomsbury for a recording when those two were paired. It was fabulous. Jeremy and Linda riffing off each other. The recording took almost two hours but the nation never got to hear most of what » Continue Reading.

Let’s Park The Unicorn!?!?

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I have just heard Emily Maitlis use this term on Newsnight, in a discussion with Health Minister Matt Hancock. It’s a new one for me. Has anyone else ever heard that phrase before?

Albums of 2018 – Rereleases Poll – The Results

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Here are the results – I’m unable to format, copying from a spreadsheet with the result it looks even messier with the points totals. So I’m giving scores for the top 5 alone.

There were a total of 99 different entries. The top five scored thus: 1 – 71; 2 – 51; 3 – 35; 4 – 21; 5 – 19

Beatles – The Beatles (White Album) 1 Bob Dylan – More Blood, More Tracks 2 Primal Scream – Give Out But Don’t Give Up 3 Bobby Gentry – The Girl From Chickasaw County 4 The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society 5 Jethro Tull – Heavy Horses 6 Marillion – Clutching At Straws 7 John Coltrane – Both Directions At Once 8 Kate Bush – Complete =9 Tom Petty – Hidden treasures =9 Love – Forever Changes =10 Martin Freeman and Eddie Piller Present Jazz On The Corner =10 David Bowie – Loving The Alien Box =10 The Moody Blues – In Search Of The Lost Chord =10 Robert Kirby – When the day is done =10 John Lennon – Imagine =16 Prince – Piano & Microphone 1983 =16 Roxy Music – Roxy Music =16 Frank Sinatra – » Continue Reading.

Rereleases 2018 – only 34 entries so far

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Is there no widespread interest in the rereleases poll? Thirty four entries must be well under half the contributions to the new releases poll. I will, as with LoW, be closing the poll on the 31st. There are two albums clear of the field but a third is in touching distance should there be late support for it. Come on people now, smile on me, let’s have those favourites, even if there are only one or two you want to nominate.

Question Time chair – Fiona Bruce

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I can’t help thinking that the BBC is trying to ensure they keep someone they regard as a star performer rather than appoint the best candidate. To me Fiona Bruce is a bit of a lightweight. This is nothing against female presenters; any of Martha Kearney, Kirsty Wark, Sarah Montague or Emily Maitlis, among prominent BBC female staff could do a great job. Emily Maitlis especially seems to have the steel and nerve for the job, given her no punches pulled interview with David Cameron’s former advisor Steve Hilton on last Wednesday’s Newsnight. The only male I could think of as a suitable candidate was Jim Naughtie, who has demonstrated over the years that he has all the credentials. But that’s all academic. We’ll see how FB does in the QT bear pit. I wish her well, nonetheless.

Albums of 2018 – rereleases poll

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Given that @Lodestone of Wrongness has volunteered to produce a chart for best new albums of 2018, I will volunteer to run a poll on the best rereleases of 2018. I’ll limit submissions to five albums. I will similarly award points in descending order with your first choice scoring 5 down to 1 for the fifth.

Israel Nash

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Venue:

The Scala, King’s Cross, London

Date: 22/11/2018

One of the preconditions for a great gig is that the artist/band are actually enjoying themselves on stage. Israel Nash was having absolute blast.

This was the final night of their European tour, which may have given a supplementary boost to proceedings as Israel and his band didn’t have to save anything for tomorrow. Against that friends in Holland saw him Nijmegen a couple of weeks ago and they reported he was brilliant there too, so maybe he’s giving his all every night.

This was my gig of the year. I’ve seen some top-notch gigs in recent weeks, (Kacey Musgraves, Bruce Cockburn, Over The Rhine) but much as I enjoyed them, they lacked was the joy, exuberance, ecstasy and intensity of this gig.

Whatever, Israel was over to promote his last album, the excellent Lifted and most of the set was focussed on songs from that, but there was plenty from earlier albums too.

The band was smokin’ hot and for people who like guitar duels (that’s people like me) Israel and lead guitarist Joey McLellan had a couple of really storming battles over the evening. I should also acknowledge the » Continue Reading.

Gordon Jackson – psychedelic musician

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I’ve been listening to the magnificent Chris Wood box set Evening Blue, which covers Chris’s career including, naturally, Traffic, unreleased solo work and sessions he did for various bands and artists, some well known (Free, John Martyn and Nick Drake) and others not so well known. One of the lesser known artists is someone called Gordon Jackson. Not the actor from Upstairs Downstairs, The Professionals and The Great Escape (the dumb ass, falling for “the oldest trick in the book”) but a guy who was apparently well regarded in the Midlands’ music scene at the end of the 60s. Until listening to this collection I’d never heard of him before (or if I had, I’d totally forgotten about him). He seems to have produced one album only Thinking Back, and then disappeared. There are three tracks on Evening Blue which feature all of Traffic. Other musicians involved were Jim King and Pole Palmer of Family and Julie Driscoll. It’s all very much of its time, but I rather like the tracks I’ve heard. I’ve posted a link to Song For Freedom. He was still living a couple of years ago, because there is a YouTube film of hm talking about » Continue Reading.

Amanda Anne Platt & The Honeycutters

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Venue:

The Green Note, Camden, London

Date: 28/08/2018

This gig redefined what a tight band is. The Honeycutters are without doubt musically a very tight unit, but the meaning was squared at The Green Note as they performed on a stage that tends to look crowded when there is an acoustic duo playing, never mind a five piece band. Just fitting a drum kit, pedal steel and a keyboard on to it was a logistical nightmare, squeezing the musicians to play them plus a bassist and Amanda on there was a minor miracle.

This was my first time seeing Amanda and her band live. I discovered her music last year just a couple of weeks after she had played here, I was somewhat downhearted to find out.

Given that my favourite album of 2017 was the eponymous Amanda Ann Platt & The Honeycutters and also given my disappointment with last year’s near miss of the opportunity to catch them live, this gig was long anticipated and my expectations were pretty high.

So overcrowded stage notwithstanding, this was a night that left me, my wife and the audience grinning form ear to ear come the final encore.

The first half » Continue Reading.

The expanding book mystery

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I, and I’m sure many of you, will have noticed the tendency among publishers to go for larger font sizes in new books, thus making books much fatter than they need to be. Earlier today I was browsing in a local book shop and noticed John Le Carre’s novel Absolute Friends, looking a bit bigger than I recalled. This edition runs to 438 pages and costs £8:99. I’ve compared with my paperback edition from 2004 which was 383 pages and cost £6:99. So that’s a 14% increase in size. Using the Bank of England inflation calculated the cost then is equivalent to £10:22 today, and adding in the 14% increase in size today’s price should be £11:65 (I realise this is a crude equivalence, but this is a blogpost, not a management report). I’m mystified by firstly the increase in the size of books generally, when we’re in an age where we’re supposed to be conserving resources and secondly by the lower prices. No doubt printing technology has improved in the intervening years, but my feeling is that this is so unnecessary.

40 trillion trillion trillion packs of butter

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We get frequent comparisons to Olympic swimming pools, London buses and elephants among other things, when people try to help us image the volume of something. However I am unable to compute, even approximately, 40 trillion trillion trillion packs of butter, as expressed by unnamed scientists in this story.

Milky Way clogged with trillions of tonnes of ‘dirty, toxic space grease’, study finds

First World problems – the latest in an unending series

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It’s been some years since dog owners started using dog-poop bags to pick up faecal matter deposited on the footpath. It was a development I was really pleased to see, substantially reducing that hazard of dog-shit being walked into your home for one as well as reducing infection risks like toxicara to children. But in the last few years I’ve noticed a change in behaviour. Dog owners are bagging the shit and then just leaving it in the street for others to pick up. Last year my wife and I visited Snape Maltings in Suffolk. We went for a walk across the flat lands behind it. We were appalled to come across a tree “decorated” with dozens of bags of dog-shit hanging from its twigs. Now I’ve had someone deposit such a bag on our garden wall. It may be a small problem but it is really f*#&ing hacking me off. Does anyone have any other fresh, first world problems they’d like to add?

A slightly pretentious piece about Sandy Denny

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I came across this article via The Browser website. I believe the guy thinks he’s writing an article for mid-80s NME. But, as there are a fair few people here who have an interest in Fairport / Sandy, I thought I should share it: A writer in something called The Paris Review on Sandy

Apropos nothing other than it is very irritating, my Mac spellchecker keeps changing Fairport to Airport.

Miles & Trane – When the Student Became the Master

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There is an up and coming Columbia Legacy box set of the Miles Davis Quintet’s tour of Europe in 1960.

This article gives a bit of background to the creative tensions within the band and certainly whets my appetite for this set.

Are there any sax players out there who can enlighten me to multiphonics? If it’s two notes at the same time, does that mean the two combine to create a third sound or is there some technique that means each note is distinct but is played simultaneously. It is clearly easy to do on a piano or a guitar (or any instrument that has seaparate strings), but I can’t understand how two separate notes can sound on a sax (or any other wind instrument), because that is my reading of the comment in the article.

https://slate.com/culture/2018/03/miles-davis-and-john-coltranes-the-final-tour-reviewed.html

Crabby Appleton – Crabby Appleton & Rotten to the Core

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What does it sound like?:

I was intrigued by the release of these albums because Crabby Appleton was one of those bands that would be alluded to in early 70s rockzines like ZigZag and Dark Star. Others of this ilk were McKendree Spring, Sopwith Camel, Kaleidoscope and more. Bands that I never got to hear, but were aware of as having some part in (mainly) West Coast rock culture. Bands whose names nestled in my subconscious ready to be woken from slumber. And bands that might be worth listening to.

So I was more than happy to give this pair of albums a listen.

These two albums display the recklessness of a band “progressing” (in the vernacular of the time, when progressive meant something different to what it eventually became), but in retrospect and in reality what it shows is that they de-evolved. They show a band giving up on the qualities that could have took them somewhere, namely a nicely defined pop sensibility that was ditched in favour of a blues rock formula that was being adopted by a million other bands because it was seen to be the a move to produce real music that expressed a » Continue Reading.

Dick Morrissey/Jim Mullen – Cape Wrath

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What does it sound like?:

Given the title Cape Wrath, (the most northwesterly point of the British mainland) and the cover art image of a body stranded on a rock surrounded by a storm tossed sea, I’d expected to hear something a bit more aggressive from Morrissey and Mullen. What they produced, on this reissue of their 1979 album (originally on Harvest, now out on Man In The Moon records) is a very smooth sounding album, more reflective of the rear image showing the same Silver Surfer like body sitting on the rock surrounded by millpond calm sea.

It is so smooth that my initial impression was that it was fairly bland, but repeated listening reveals that it is more about the band creating a mood and a groove and it is, in my view, a fine piece of work that is anything but bland. It rewards repeated listening to unearth the diamonds that lie within.

I was quite glad that I’m able to review this positively because I feel I owe Dick Morrissey a small apology. Back in the mid-70s a couple of mates encouraged me to go along with them and see British jazz-rock band If, (appearing » Continue Reading.

Spiral – Series 6 discussion (warning – will contain spoilers)

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It is clear from the What Else Have I Been Missing thread there are a few Spiral fans around, so I thought we could wean ourselves off our Saturday night addiction through some talking therapy. Lots to discuss now series 6 has ended (Series 7 has already gone into production, so we can breathe easy after that ending). Here are some topics to explore, but feel free to go off in your own preferred direction. I thought the end with respect to Laure made perfect sense. She has never fully faced up to the reality of being a mother; she’s made some maternal gestures, but seems more concerned with convincing others she is capable (especially the father, whose name escapes me) and now she has to face up to a reality she has made no preparation for, she has to run. Josephine’s future: I guess this will be one of the axes of Series 7. I think there is going to more investigation into Vern. Will the hitherto creepy Edelman become, through necessity, an ally of Laure and Gilou in trying to bring Vern down? Even if they succeed will Josephine get off, or is she looking at serious time » Continue Reading.

Chastity Brown – Silhouette Of Sirens

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What does it sound like?:

Serendipity has led me to two of my favourite albums of the year. Recently I posted a review of Amanda Ann Platt & The Honeycutters; today it’s Chastity Brown and this absolutely knock-out album which also came out in the middle of the year and is one I’ve been enjoying for a few months.

I was struck by her song Colorado listening to my Discover Weekly playlist on Spotify. It gave me one of those “What was that?” moments, leading me to go back and play it again and again and then go to the album.

I found it remarkable that Chastity performed Colorado back in September 2014. I didn’t see it and if I had I’m not sure I’d have been sold on it. In the intervening time she has evolved the song’s dynamics to make it into the very different beast it is today. It has gone from pleasant and unremarkable to outstanding and essential. I guess the delay between writing and release is that modern day malaise facing so many artists of the lack of any record company backing. Chastity include in her thanks in the sleeve notes her Kickstarter backers. » Continue Reading.

Amanda Ann Platt & The Honeycutters

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What does it sound like?:

I’ve had this album about four or five months now and over that period it has become one of the most played records in our house, loved by both myself and my wife.

Stop reading now if you have no interest in Country/Country Rock/Americana because this album is packed with music that fits down that particular rabbit-hole. Superb music, but if pedal steel guitar sets your teeth on edge this is not an album for you. On the other hand, there is a constituency here that loves that sound and this review is very much for you.

I’d never heard of Amanda Ann Platt until July this year when I read a review of this album on the No Depression website. But it was strange review, written as an open letter of complaint because The Honeycutters have existed for a few years and now Amanda Ann (the songwriter and vocalist) has set herself apart from the other guys.

Despite the separation of elements he still loved the album. This led to a bit of investigation on my part via Spotify and damn! This is one hell of a fine album and being old-fashioned » Continue Reading.

Chuck Prophet & The Mission Express

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Venue:

University of London Union

Date: 17/11/2017

I think I have probably seen Chuck Prophet, either fronting his own band or as part of Green On Red, more than any other artist. I estimate all the time I’ve spent standing in front of stages watching, listening to and enjoying Chuck’s playing and singing amounts to about two days of my life. (I realise this is as naught compared to dedicated Springsteen followers or Deadheads who probably can count weeks of their existence spent in front of their favourites, but it is a significant time for me).

What that means is I’ve seen performances of varying intensity and enjoyment over the years. There is a group of friends I go to CP gigs with, and we’ve been in agreement that his last couple of London gigs have been rather lacklustre. When I was sorting out the tickets for this gig, people were actually questioning whether we wanted to go.

That won’t happen next time because this was a fully energised, fun-loving, concentrated, dedicated, brilliant performance.

The band came out, started up then Chuck bounded out. A huge grin on his face. They play an intro, which something of an » Continue Reading.

Bands you didn’t know you knew

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Listening to Bob Harris Country earlier tonight, Bob was presenting a Country Rock special (a pre-recorded show, because I know he’s in the USA at present). Anyway he introduced a song by Pure Prairie League, who are a band I thought I know by no more then their name. My recollection is they were somehow associated with The Grateful Dead.

But he played this song, Amie, which it turned out is really familiar to me. I don’t know where I’ve heard it. I certainly didn’t know it was them, but it’s a song I know well enough to sing along to the chorus.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4xp2lgiAjY

Has anyone had similar experiences recently?

http://bobharris.org/pages/playlist.php?progcode=c09112017