The Afterword

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Lamont Dozier skips gig commitments, the rascal.

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One of the gigs I pre-booked aeons ago, pre-pandemic, was to see Lamont Dozier perform solo at St. Georges in Bristol. Sadly, due to reported ill-health, he had to cancel, and the tickets were put into limbo, hopefully anticipating a re-schedule at some later date. But now he’s cancelled, permanently, and I won’t ever get to experience his particular genius in person. What a giant of popular music, alongside his Holland buddies, I’ve missed. Nowhere to run to hear him now. RIP old chap, you soundtracked a huge part of my life. Thank you.

Guess the one in between?

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Like a lot of folk with a decent number of LPs on the shelf, I’ve managed to keep them all arranged alphabetically, allowing me to find stuff easily* when the urge to spin descends.

I wondered if it might be fun to give you the names of two long players that sit to either side of another, unidentified LP on my shelves, and see if you can guess what the LP is that sits in between them.

While you’re guessing what the one in between on my shelves is, you can give us a pair of adjacent titles from your own shelves, and we’ll see if we can work that one out… over to you in the comments, folks.

* this is in contrast to my CDs, which remain stored in a random fashion that relies upon visual memory to know roughly where they are on the shelves.

“Oh yeah, that CD reissue of Horslips’ ‘Drive The Cold Winter Away’? Yeah, I have that one, hang on, I’ll put it on now”…….

….three hours later…..

“Here it is!”.

Socialists to be deported by UK to Rwanda

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Priti Patel has announced that all those identified by the security services as ‘socialists’ are to be deported to Rwanda next year. RAF Brize Norton is to be re-purposed as the exit point, and the Government intends to begin the process by vetting all known members of the Labour Party before flying out any confirmed reds in redesignated Airbus A400M troop transporters.

A Labour Party spokesperson is quoted as saying, “There’s only a few socialists left in the Party, so that won’t take them very long. I doubt they’ll fill more than one transporter aircraft.”.

It is understood that, on arrival, each deportee will be given a copy of ‘Teach Yourself Kinyarwanda’ and RWF 100,000 (about 75 quid).

Budget brilliance bought when you were broke

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The sad news that Gary Brooker has passed led me to recall that my first proper exposure to Procol Harum as an album band – having obviously heard the mighty ‘Whiter Shade’ and ‘Homburg’ etc. on Wunnerful Radio Wun over the breakfast table – was via this lovely little LP from the cheapo label ‘Music For Pleasure’ (mfp).

I’ve still got the LP, along with several other fine mfp releases (Animals, Monkees at al) and I’ve also got some Starline cheapies and various others from budget labels.

Do you have any, and which are your favourites?

Let’s exclude any of the cheap compilations – ‘Nice Enough’, ‘Picnic’ and so on, we’ve done those quite recently – what about the single artist ones you picked up for 50p or a quid on some dodgy looking budget label, but which led you on to greater and more expensive joys when you subsequently acquired the ‘proper’ albums by the same artist, having had your appetite whetted?

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Vlad’s mad – what can we do?

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Anybody care to speculate what happens next? So far from him we’ve seen copious amounts of lying, shouty piss-contesting (so far at least he’s kept his shirt on) and most recently a complete denial and rewriting of the history of Ukraine. On the part of the west we’ve had plenty of disingenuous statements (a.k.a. lying) about how much damage sanctions will cause, seen a wilful avoidance of any effort to see things from the other side, and been subjected to a lot of posturing and spoken defiance.

It’s hard to see any happy path though this cluster of idiocy.

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Sarah McQuaid conjures up magic in a little village hall

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Venue:

Under the Edge Arts, The Chipping, Wotton-under-Edge

Date: 12/02/2022

In the quirky space of this warm and charming repurposed old village school hall, Sarah played ‘The Tug Of The Moon’ for us at Wotton last night, and I was entranced. It was just one highlight in an evening packed full of fantastically original songs – all introduced with a charming anecdote to explain their provenance – and altogether the night was a beautifully measured performance. She threw in some perfectly chosen covers too; her rendition of the gorgeously gentle classic ‘Autumn Leaves’ for example was utterly mesmeric and transcendent; at the close of the song I heard myself whisper a quiet ‘Wow’ to myself.

She’s been compared vocally to Joni and Lana Del Ray on occasion, and I could hear those hints, certainly, though they don’t convince me of their weight. As comparisons go, what struck me most was that the venue organiser, introducing her at the start of the evening, also mentioned Natalie Merchant. I thought about that, and then she started singing. Yes, that’s in there too, maybe more than the others. But more than all this, much more importantly, is that Sarah has a » Continue Reading.

A wistful anthem. A single track to evoke a sense of calm. Your suggestions?

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Here’s my suggestion. With stylistic echoes of the marvelous ‘Sullivan Street’ from Counting Crows, it’s another strange, slightly melancholic immersion in a nostalgic dreamscape. It’s suffused with bohemian surrealism; it’s looking backwards to wilder days, and somehow also carries a quiet fond peace at the promise of the present and the days ahead.

It’s the title track from Flying Cowboys, the 1989 album from Rickie Lee Jones.

Down there by the river is a man Whose horn is twisted into shapes Unknown to the wicked and the wise And he bears the look of an animal Who’s seen things no animal should ever see He has been driven beyond all towns And all the systems until now though it is Long past too far he keeps going Because it’s a desert Because it’s a desert We come to the river We’ll walk away from all this now We come to the water We’ll walk away from all this now She first saw him he was standing in the doorway Illuminated from behind by a light Though imaginary posses chased them To these distant adobes Standing on the cliffs today I thought I saw you below Walking by the river » Continue Reading.

No apologies, this is political. Please watch this fillum.

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I don’t know if this kind of thing will attract a dull chorus of ‘remoaner!’ from some quarters. Probably. But only from w*nkers. Something I do know is that this should have been expected all along, but the blond booster from the Bullingdon pulled the wool over a sufficient number of eyes to leave a large proportion of our fishing industry now crying into their own voting records.

£350 million frigates to deploy matelots with cork-screws in battle against over-loaded ribs.

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This just in: the Home Secretary has rounded up all of the spare cork-screws from the various rooms within Number 10 and is to re-deploy them using Royal Navy frigates patrolling the channel in search of over-loaded rigid inflatable boats (‘rib’s).

Matelots will receive special training in puncturing the rubber vessels using short stabbing motions of the repurposed tools, in order to demonstrate the full return of border control to HM Govt. post-Brexit.

ATM – learning how to use WordPress – what book to buy?

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Our village needs a better website than the thing our Parish Council currently has. The existing site is pretty static, barely meets the accessibility rules, and doesn’t let anyone in the Council make changes beyond posting new docs (as pdfs) to a linked Google docs site.

Changing anything else means a call to the bloke what wrote it, and there’s a subsequent charge for his time. TBF he isn’t stiffing them for vast sums, but the delay in making even simple changes (updating phone numbers etc.) is a PITA, and it would be better if they had more direct control.

As the only person they can find who knows a little bit about html and urls and so on, I’ve been volunteered to do some investigation and exploration of the possibilities. To that end I’ve recently opened a free account with WordPress, bought an appropriate domain name, and started using the online WordPress editing facility to see if I can knock something into shape. It’s coming along OK, but the learning curve is still pretty steep.

Trial and error is all well and good in this early exploratory stage, but once the thing gets published it’ll be a more » Continue Reading.

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe at Christmas

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“Liverpool’s ‘Forgotten Town’ hitmakers, The Christians have made something beautiful, a song our family are proud to be part of. And a video of struggle, but also of the power of holding on. The song echoes an earlier generation of hostages. It was originally written for John McCarthy, then held in Lebanon, and Jill Morrell, who battled for him. It was a testimony to the power of the love outside.

If you are still willing to help after 6 years of petitions, please do consider downloading the song and sharing the video. For those in the UK and beyond, still looking for a last minute Christmas gift, the deadline for downloads for the Christmas charts is 23:59 GMT Thursday December 23. Generally, it takes 8,000 sales in a week to get into the official charts, and ten times that to get close to the top.

Intently watching a song bob around the charts is not usually something that matters to middle aged auditors, nor for that matter government stand offs over hostages and debts. We reached out to the Prime Minister asking him to speak to Nazanin on her birthday. He was not available. His office did not explain why. » Continue Reading.

Great docu on telly about the best Disco film ever ever ever made.

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Just a heads-up in case anyone missed it; BBC4 broadcast a fantastic documentary last night about the making of the best Disco film ever, ever, ever; the joyous romp that is Saturday Night Fever.

I recall that watched the movie on a big screen cinema in Exeter back in the day and boogied all the way back to my flat afterwards. The documentary was hugely engrossing, and just made me want to get the DVD out and PAAAAARTY.

Anyone overseas without a VPN, drop me a line if you missed it.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b09jxjxs/saturday-night-fever-the-ultimate-disco-movie

Brilliant little METAL documentary

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Just watched this little fillum about two guys going to the Bloodstock moshfest. Even if you don’t like metal, I think you’ll really enjoy this.

Apologies to Afterworders who cannot access the BBC iPlayer. If you really want to see the programme, drop me a line (winks).

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0b5xyds/radio-1-stories-sashay-to-hell