The Afterword

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Diddly diddly, it’s here again!

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The Didmarton Bluegrass Festival starts today and runs through to late Sunday night.

This is one of the finest celebrations of bluegrass, and bluegrass-adjacent (mostly) acoustic music of quality. I won’t blather on about it, I’ll just put the link here if you want to investigate. Basically it’s £50 per day or just over a ton for the whole long weekend. I’ll only be there for today (some mates are playing), so if you want to avoid a potential Foxy greeting, stick to the rest of the weekend.

Great site, great organisation, only a few hundred punters, many of them also performers – pretty much the perfect little festival.

https://didmarton-bluegrass.co.uk/

Fine Youssou N’Dour gig recording.

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I just came across this (legal) torrent of a well recorded and rather fine late afternoon performance by Youssou N’Dour with his full band at the North Sea Jazz festival last month.

The same performance can be seen on YouTube, and the audio is already on Spotify, but if you want lossless FLACs, here they are.

https://archive.org/details/YoussouNDour2026-07-12

Fill your bitboots.

A delightful Betjeman-fest is on the Beeb tonight

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If, like me, you’re fond of old John’s lively, rolling poetry, and love to wallow in his soft vocal delivery, tonight’s schedule on BBC 4 is right up your street. From 10 pm right through to 1:35 am he’s there.

Anyone unable to access this content due to unfortunate geography or a VPN shortage may possibly be helped, you never know. Miss J.Hunter Dunn can apply directly to me for assistance, if she’s reading this.

Johnny Clegg and Savuka boxed set – incoming

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If you like the sound of Johnny Clegg’s more political band, sticking it to the apartheid bastards and getting banned left right and centre as a result, here’s your chance to get the four Savuka albums in a set coming out on Cherry Red in the near future. There’s a fifth CD of various ‘remixes’ that may or may not add to the party, but the 4 studio albums alone are reason to get this.

@junior-wells I suspect, like me, you’ll have some (or all) of these albums already, but I like their material so much I’ll likely buy this set anyway.

https://www.cherryred.co.uk/johnny-clegg-savuka-beautiful-world-the-emi-years-1987-1993-5cd-box-set

Album art snippets – time for a Flickr practice quiz!

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A while back we’d all got pretty blase about using imgur for our embedded piccies until the imgur folks took our toys away. Since then the number of illustrations in posts has somewhat dropped off.

It’s actually almost as easy to use flickr as the source for graphics, so let’s exercise our flickr Photostreams and share some snips from album covers to challenge the Afterword hive mind to identify the record cover from which they’ve been snipped.

I’ll start – can you tell me which LP the little cartoon in the first comment below comes from?

What do you wash your circular bits with?

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Obviously, to all but Moose, by ‘circular bits’ I am referring to your recently acquired second hand vinyl.

I’ve a few choice but grubby folk LPs to wash before I spin them for the first time, and my 5 litre stash of washing fluid for the trusty Discostat is almost gone. I can’t for the life of me recall what fluids I added to the de-ionised water when I made the mixture up.

What do you folks use?

Israel at Eurovision? What do you think?

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If you think Israel should be subject to a cultural (!?) embargo with regard to Eurovision participation while their cynical leadership cohort commit war-crimes as part of a populist attempt to hold on to power, you can put your name to a campaign to demand their exclusion at the link here.

If you think that’s not the right thing to do, or that it’s pointless as a gesture, I’d love to hear your rationale.

https://action.wemove.eu/sign/2026-05-Israel-out-Eurovision-petition-EN?akid=s7618935..6hvo8i

The Nine Points Of Roguery – No. 7: Withholding payments from artists

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In case you haven’t been following things, here’s a link to the latest news from Dick Gaughan’s legal campaign to regain intellectual, artistic and financial credit from some of his critical early works:

https://gofund.me/21cef1382

Put your hand in your pocket if you can – this is an important campaign that will have ramifications for a lot of other musicians.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/aatux2

Lyse Doucet owes me a new keyboard

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It’s the lunchtime bulletin on the BBC News channel.

Lyse Doucet is being asked to comment upon the latest semi-coherent ramblings from the orange idiot.

With an admirably straight face, she shifts slightly in her chair and gathers her thoughts for a second or two, finally saying, “In recent weeks it’s been increasingly difficult to make any sense of the statements coming from President Trump”.

At this point, a mouthful of freshly brewed tea is expelled from my mouth through pursed lips in the general direction of my keyboard.

In one short sentence of quiet understatement she has raised the perplexing puzzle of why Trump isn’t seen for what he is by those whose job it supposedly is to look after the United States Of America – his government.

Are they all blind? Are they all dim? Are they all in it for what they can personally get? Are they all just Christian religious nut-jobs on a par with the Ayatollah brigade?

What was it he said? “Now’s your chance to get rid of this regime” I think it was.

How long before the rest of the world can can offer the same thing to the » Continue Reading.

Nothing new under the sun…

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Earlier this week, I was sitting in a coffee shop reading a book. I found a paragraph which nagged at me a bit, since it seemed to hint at what was happening in the world today. I’ve copied it below.

“Since then, new tyrannies and new wars have shaken Europe, and we find ourselves the uneasy heirs of the first romantics, still committed to their ideal of refashioning the world, though more soberly in view of bitter experience. Their central problem – the discrepancy between human aspiration and human weakness – is still ours, manifest in Europe’s powerlessness to fulfil boundless potentialities for progress, owing to the diversion of human energy into preparations for a possible war of annihilation.”

So here’s the quiz question: can you suggest in which decade this sentiment was expressed – out of, say, the last 150 years? No googling, mind! It’s an honour thing…

Your favourite album Americana, Alt-Country, Sounds of the New West

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Since 1998 (seem more like 5 or 6 years a go), I have found myself buying and listening to more and more albums classed as Americana, Alt-Country, Sounds of the New West. Can I ask for favourite album in this genre over say the last 30 years?

For me, it is a tough decision between The Jayhawk’s – “Sound of Lies” and ‘super group’ Golden Smog’s – “Weird Tales”

Misty In Roots – Counter Eurovision – limited edition re-issue – CAVEAT EMPTOR

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I ordered a copy of the standard (i.e. black) vinyl re-issue of the outstanding ‘Misty In Roots’ live album from Bandcamp on August 23rd last year.

This record means a lot to me because of a number of factors; principally because of where I was and who I was with when it first came out, and also because, having failed to get my hands on a CD copy, I was sent one by Stimpy of this parish, with whom I had communicated and become a bit of a pal.

So I was hugely keen to get a nice brand-new vinyl copy when the re-issue was announced back then. ‘Package ships on or around October 1, 2025’ it said on the Order confirmation from Bandcamp. It went on to say “Estimated to ship October 6, 2025 and estimated to arrive no later than October 20, 2025”.

October came and went. Still no communication from ‘Misty In Roots’ or whoever acts for them these days. Nothing. Just a quiet, stealthy change of the release date to December, but no direct communication of this information to those who had actually already parted with money to buy the product.

The Bandcamp page » Continue Reading.

Joe Ely

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It’s been a hard week in the roots music community. Another icon Joe Ely, passed away yesterday at age 78 due to complications of Lewy Body Dementia, Parkinson’s, and pneumonia. I got to see him open for The Clash at what must have been one of his most miserable moments in performance. Here’s Bhagavan Decreed from The Flatlanders.

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

Joni Mitchell bargain alert – only for today 8th Jan

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Anyone looking to fill a gap in their Joni Mitchell collection needs to know that Rhino are doing a “12 days of Christmas” sale thing this year, and day 8 is Joni Mitchell day. There are some large discounts, particularly if you’re looking for one of the Archive or (record label) Albums sets – roughly 40% off I think.

Having been gormlessly in lurve with Joni for the past 60 years, I’ve got ’em all already, but if I didn’t, I would be buying them now at these prices.

Here’s the link: https://store.rhino.com/collections/12-days-of-rhino

/public service announcement ends

Afterword soldiers on through today’s Cloudflare barf, hoorah!

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Discogs went belly up for some time today, and apparently a load of ‘socials’ were brought to their knees at the same time. Chortle; the Afterword sailed on regardless.

I hate it if Discogs is unavailable but I couldn’t help thinking that the longer Twatter was offline the better we’d all be for it.

Apparently it was all due to issues somewhere in the Cloudflare infrastructure. Me neither, and I work in IT.

Anyone else had Cloudflare related error messages during your browsing today? Be careful what you admit to accessing, of course.

An acid folk sampler for the curious

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Checking up on the expected dispatch dates for some recent Bandcamp purchases, I stumbled across this cracking offer from the marvelous Owl Service people – a rich sampler of vaguely psychedelic folk music – so called ‘acid folk’ – that originally inspired the members of the band.

For any of you of a folkish bent you’ll likely have one or two, or even several, of the tunes therein, but here they are in a nice little continuous collection of delightful breadth, and all in full lossless glory for you to freely download.

If you avail yourself of this splendid gift, I’d urge you to invest in a few of the Owl Service’s own titles while you are there. They are prolific and talented as well as generous, and I’ve been delighted by every one of the ones I’ve bought over the years.

https://theowlservice.bandcamp.com/album/acid-tracks-an-introduction-to-the-roots-of-psych-folk

EVRi disgracefully delinquent delivery disaster

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Which is the worst possible courier by which you might be horrified to discover that your latest LP purchase is to be delivered to your door?

It used to be DPD, until they seemed to up their game a year or two back, but now it must be EVRi, the bargain-basement, careless, cack-handed pillocks who seem to gleefully lob everything, irrespective of contents, value or ‘FRAGILE’ markings, into the back of a half knackered white van driven by a gormless idiot primate with a mobile for a sat nav, a soggy old sock for a brain and a carefree attitude to private property that has been entrusted into their ‘professional’ care.

See my latest delivery in the comments.

Any more tales of EVRi hopelessness, or the depressing failures of your own courier-related shoddy experience?