The Afterword

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Let’s BRRR…Randomise!

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It’s a chilly morning here in the UK and I couldn’t decide what to play to put a spring in my step on the walk to work. I put the iPod classic on shuffle and up popped Jackie Leven, subject of much admiration here this week. I wasn’t really surprised. iPods are psychic like that.

This made me think that we haven’t had a randomiser thread for a while, so here we go. Usual rules apply – set your device of choice to play tracks in a random order and let us know what the first 5 are. No cheeky editing to make your playlist look cool or we’ll know.

Mine took it’s lead from Jackie Leven and delivered an exclusively male list of tracks in a singer-writer vein, all very Mojo.

1) Gomez – Devil Will Ride 2) Elvis Costello and Steve Nieve – Why Can’t a Man Stand Alone? 3) Roger McGuinn – Lover of the Bayou 4) Richard Thompson – Dad’s Gonna Kill Me (NPR live session) 5) Pulp – Help the Aged

LP Frame Bargain Alert

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I was in a local Poundland today, rummaging through the end of season mulled-wine-scented candles, tinsel door decorations and so on when I found a stack of LP cover frames (black plastic frame with glass). Not a pound, not 50p, but just 25 of your puny human pence each. Fill your boots.

Bros: When the Screaming Stops

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Year: 2018 Director: David Soutar

I don’t suppose that many of the Massive were Brosettes in their youth, which is a shame. Not because of the music, mercifully little of which appears in this jaw-dropping programme, but because it might mean that you have missed out on one of the TV highlights of the year. Fear not, it’s on iPlayer, which is where I saw it during the dire Christmas Day TV schedules after seeing what a stir it was creating on Twitter.

For those of you who have managed to suppress the memory, twin brothers Luke (drums) and Matt (vocals) were the heart of one of the biggest boy bands of the 80s. They went their separate ways, and although they have adapted to the ageing process in very different styles they are of course still twins. To help you tell which is which it might be useful to remember that Matt is the one with the rug. Now they are to reunite for a show at the O2 and the cameras are in tow, presenting documentary footage without narration nor captions, leaving the brothers’ words and actions to tell the story.

These days both live in California. » Continue Reading.

Bob Dylan – Mondo Scripto

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Venue:

The Halcyon Gallery, 144-146 New Bond Street, London

Date: 10/11/2018

This show will probably be old news to the more on-the-ball Bob-cats among us, but I confess I might never have heard about it if I hadn’t seen mentions on Penn’s (of Penn and Teller) Twitter feed. Consider this my alert for anyone else who would regret missing it if I hadn’t written about it on here. You’re welcome.

This exhibition at the Halcyon Gallery gathers several dozen hand-written Bob Dylan Lyrics, each of them accompanied by a pencil sketch by Bob, along with several of his acrylic on-the-road paintings and, this came as a surprise to me, some examples of his ironwork. The selection is broadly greatest hits, and I don’t think there are any lyrics here which will be unfamiliar to the casual admirer. The more trainspotterish fan will delight in reading every word and spotting subtle changes to lines, the rest of us can just enjoy the art and juxtapositions of word and image.

Regarding the art, there is no doubt Dylan can draw. Time and again I found myself enjoying the fold in a piece of clothing or the flow of a limb » Continue Reading.

To you

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How long have the web goblins been waiting for us to pick up on that?

Going anywhere nice this Year?

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The schools round here break up tomorrow, which fires the starting gun on peak holiday season. What do you have planned?

For us there is no pressing reason to seek out the sun this year. A local weather page confirms that my corner of Essex has had no rain for 31 days, and a grand total of 1.1mm in the last 50. Perhaps the kids breaking up will act as the traditional invitation to the rain gods?

We usually go away in the last week of June, which covers The Light’s birthday, but her daughter’s graduation last week took priority. Much as I like Manchester it’s not what you would call an exotic holiday. (A wonderful week though – Apart from the highlight of the graduation there was a show in London to start, Squeeze at Brentwood Festival to finish, a 100 plane RAF flypast straight over my house in between, then the finals of Wimbledon and the World Cup to round things off).

We have just booked, literally this evening, to go to Dubrovnik at the start of October too, which I’m already looking forward to. Apart from the obvious Game of Thrones sites (we have a terrific » Continue Reading.

ATM – And so to bed …

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My current mattress, a cheap Silentnight which has given sterling service for a decade, is showing signs of sag and will soon be retired. I have a mind to go for memory foam, or memory foam / spring combo this time round, and as I’m in better financial shape than a decade ago don’t mind making an investment in something which will bring comfort for years.

Does anyone have experience of Eve, Kaspar and so on (you know the ones – the mattresses which seem to sponsor every podcast with promises of special offers and discount codes). Perhaps you’re chosen brand of memory foam developed amnesia after 6 months, or the spring in you summer mattress began to fall by the time winter came around.

Front runner at the moment is probably the Hypnos mattress which Premier Inn use (I’m actually typing this sitting on one, ready to check out as soon as the unfamiliar water falling from the sky eases up). As always I’ve found the Peremier Inn beds wonderfully comfortable with just the right degree of give. Any thoughts to share?

Salute Him When His Birthday Comes

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Today is Bob Dylan’s birthday. I don’t consider myself a serious Bob Cat, but even so dozens of songs of his are part of my psyche, and go to the very heart of why I loved music and song in the first place. Once every couple of years I fall into a Bob Dylan (the) rabbit hole, where something clicks and I listen to almost nothing else for a month or so. Then the mood passes, and I may not play a whole album for many months after.

An odd aspect of my fandom is that I didn’t catch on to Dylan until I was about 30. I had the idea that he was somehow ‘difficult’, and didn’t really explore. Then a couple of CDs of Dylan covers issued as cover-mounts on Uncut got stuck on repeat play at mine. Once the songs sank in I looked for the originals and I was away.

It’s hard to pick an absolute favourite, so for no other reason than that today Bob reaches the age of 77, here is 7 Days. Your picks, for whatever reason and whatever level of fandom, welcome.

» Continue Reading.

Picasso 1932 – Love, Fame, Tragedy

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Venue:

Tate Modern, London

Date: 07/05/2018

If you have any interest in twentieth century art at all you will already have seen several reviews of this show, which will almost universally rave about its brilliance. You might have found yourself thinking that the reviewers were getting a bit carried away, that it couldn’t be as good as all that. You would have been wrong.

The Tate has gathered together 9 rooms of works from a single crucial year of Picasso’s life, a point when he in danger of becoming yesterday’s man in the art world and becoming regarded as bourgeois. Symptomatic of this comfortable position in the establishment, along with his chauffeur and his apartment on the Champs-Élysées, is that 1932 was also the year of his first retrospective (a rarity for a living artist then). This has allowed for the inclusion of a 10th room of works from before 1932 which were part of that exhibition. His reputation, at least based on his earlier output, may have been secure, but inside he was raging.

It is a truism that we should not allow the life of the artist to cloud our opinions of the art, a trope which » Continue Reading.

‘Assists’?

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I’m watching Match of the Day and finding myself wondering when ‘assists’ became a feature of of play which are counted and listed alongside a player’s goals. I also find myself wondering when ‘assist’ became a noun.

It was probably explained in the same email, but I’ve had a lot on recently.

Scarred for Life – Growing Up in the Dark Side of the Decade

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Author:Stephen Brotherstone and Dave Lawrence

If I walked into the Afterword clubhouse, tapped on a wine glass with a teaspoon as a request for your collective silence and attention, then declaimed ‘Polish a floor, put a rug on it … ?’ I would expect to be deafened by the chorused reply, ‘You might as well set a man trap!!!’ Many of us around here are of that generation, the ones who’s formative years were the 70s. And what a very strange set of years they were for the impressionable young mind.

That strangeness is the subject of this vast celebration of the dark side of 70s pop culture. Scarred for Life is only available online; you can download an ebook for the bargaintastic price of £5.99 but I recommend you stump up £16.99 for the print edition. It’s a brick of a book, more than 700 densely printed pages of essays on topics from Pan Books of Horror Stories (no childhood holiday trip in my dad’s Cortina was complete for me without one of these) to When Animals Attack! movies (bees, bears, aardvarks, it really didn’t matter so long as a group of campers could be suitably imperilled by wildlife).

» Continue Reading.

An A-Z of makes the Afterword great

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26 new 10 pence coins are to be issued, representing something that makes Britain great for each letter of the alphabet. I like a lot of them, though ‘ice cream’ is a bit of a stretch and I admit I don’t really understand ‘X marks the spot’.

Wisely they have steered clear of popular culture, with the exception of B for James Bond. That needn’t be a constraint on us though. What are the A-Z, distinctly British things we should celebrate around here? I expect music to dominate but don’t let that stop you suggesting ‘C for Coronation Street’ or whatever if you so wish.

I suggest surnames for nominated individual’s letters. This follows the ‘B for Bond’ rule established by the Royal Mint and allows ‘T for Thompson, Richard’ as well as ‘R for ‘Rolling Stones, The’ who, along with the B coin, I assume to be a shoo in.

http://www.cityam.com/281484/royal-mints-26-new-10p-coin-designs-z-why-britain-great-

Hackney Empire – This Saturday

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It looks unlikely we’ll be able to go to the English Touring Opera’s The Marriage of Figaro at Hackney Empire on Saturday. We could have coped with the weather or rail replacement busses back to Essex, but not both.

If anyone can make it and wants 2 free tickets let me know and I’ll tell you how to pick them up from the box office. They’re cheap balcony tickets, but we’ve been there before and the view and sound are fine. I’ve posted this on my Facebook and a couple of other places so they may go to someone other than an Afterworder, but I’d much rather they went to anyone rather than being wasted.

If you’ve always been opera-curious and can get to Hackney here’s your chance of a free show!

https://hackneyempire.co.uk/whats-on/the-marriage-of-figaro/

We hear surprisingly little of Terrorvision on these pages

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In fact a quick click on the search button revels a sole (brief and unflattering) mention by Retro, who saw them at Bearded Theory a couple of years ago and sounds like he wished he hadn’t. It comes as news to me that Terrorvision were a going concern in 2016, but they could make a great racket in their heyday. A favourite memory from late era ToTP is Julian Cope introducing their anthem Whales and Dolphins, and appearing again after the song, swinging on the scaffolding to the side of the stage while bellowing, ‘Bless you Terrorvision!!!’

They are on my mind because I cherrypicked a couple of singles and an album from a large stash I found in a charity shop today. The singles are signed, but sadly I suspect signed Terrorvision merch is not going to allow me to retire early.

Here’s a reminder for those inclined to hear it.

https://youtu.be/VOOcJobuZTc

There is a special circle in Hell reserved for …

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You know what this place needs to take the edge of the relentless Christmas Jollity? One of those grump threads we do so well. So with that in mind, who would you like to see consigned to the flames for some minor transgression which they probably don’t even realise makes them worthy of damnation and an eternity of suffering?

My nomination is people who try to walk and text simultaneously in public places. The pitchforks are given a special honing for those who try to text while walking down stairs, their elbows protruding just enough to make it impossible to overtake them. Why do they slow down as they reach the end of the message? Is there some rule that says they’re not allowed to hit send if they don’t finish it by the time they reach the bottom step? Oh, people who text and walk on Tube platforms too. Is it really so hard to find a corner where you don’t get in people’s way for a minute or so?

Thea Gilmore’s Christmas Party

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Venue:

Tooting Tram & Social, Tooting, South London

Date: 20/12/2017

The splendidly named Tooting Tram & Social was an almost accidental host for this gig. Thea had struggled to find a venue for her London Christmas show, more usually held at the Half Moon in Putney, and when she finally secured The Sound Lounge on Tooting Road it promptly closed down leaving her to seek a last minute replacement. This worked to her advantage because the Tooting Tram & Social turned out to be a great space, a disused tram shed with white tiled walls, huge ceilings, a bar down one side of the main area, a raised seating section down the other and a small, low-ceilinged stage at the end opposite the door. Tricked up for Christmas with decorations and huge chandeliers it looked a treat.

Nigel Stonier, Thea’s right hand man in music and life, opened proceedings with a few solo numbers. He’s a very fine songwriter and built a relaxed rapport with the early attendees. Even so he lacks the crucial extra factor which would make him a headliner in his own right rather than a much valued producer, arranger and song writer for others. His » Continue Reading.

Your Christmas cultural traditions

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What do you need to see, hear, end or whatever just because it’s what you always do at Christmas? We’ve done Christmas songs, we know that @Locust has an admirable tradition of reading A Christmas Carol up loud, maybe you watch Elf or Die Hard every year to mark the festive season. I dig out David Sedaris’ Holidays on Ice for the Santaland Diaries and this one, Six to Eight Black Men.

https://youtu.be/hPfg20k5TE8