The Afterword

Musings on the byways of popular culture

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Dear Santa….the Afterword Christmas gift list

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I’ve just found something I want for Christmas. I’m pretty sure there are others amongst us (do we still call ourselves the Massive?) who will be similarly tempted.

If you’re not a Feat fan though, I’m sure there are other Afterword-friendly pressies you covet. So what will you be asking Santa for?

http://i866.photobucket.com/albums/ab226/NickDuvet/Feat%20T_zpsnbsonysb.jpg

Short-ish run perfect-bound book printing: any printer recommendations?

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I’m musing on making an updated version of the bonus chapters and appendices (roughly 100,000 words of content, which would be roughly 290-300 A5 typeset pages) to my John McLaughlin biography available next year in hard copy form. I’d like to find a way to do this as a fairly short run thing, so not a print-on-demand model but say 200 copies. Can any of the Massive recommend, from experience, any printing services that would be good to go with?

Googling such services is easy enough, but a recommendation about reliability and quality would go a long way!

Lol Coxhill – Solo in Scarborough

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“I can remember what it felt like at 17: I was a cat, a dog, a lizard, a mouse….”

No, I wasn’t….however, it was the last & final time when I went on a family holiday with my parents & younger sister. Piled into the family car and off to Scarborough for two weeks, summer of ’79. “Ye Punk” and “Ye Post-Punk” hadn’t quite made it to our house, although one chap at school called Tim* appeared to be cutting his own hair & wearing his blazer inside out. Mind you, he had a weekend job on a record stall at the Barras & took his pay in vinyl – a couple of years prior, he had been the first on the block to have a copy of the “Virgin God Save the Queen single in picture bag”, when I was raving & drooling over Animals…..but I digress.

Scarborough became a cat ‘n’ mouse game with the parents, trying to sneak off for a lager & spend as little time with them as possible. With nearly forty years of hindsight and a family of my own, I can see that I was an ungrateful little sod and as moody as » Continue Reading.

Johnny C’s ‘Sus chords: time for a reappraisal’ thread

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No doubt non musos around here were baffled by Johnny C’s recent reference to ‘sus chords’. I don’t use the phrase myself (they’re suspended chords), but Australians (Aussies) are big on abbreviations (abbrevos?) e.g. barbies, tinnies, ‘this arvo’, etc…

So, having kicked the jargon into touch, let this man – ironically, an Australian – explain what such chords are and give examples. He does so very well. Once your brain has assimilated what they sound like, let us hear any great, or better still unusual, examples of the suspended chord in music.

Caveat: I’m banning all examples from The Who and U2 otherwise there’d be no room for anyone else.

I’ll allow the ‘honorary suspended chord’, the greatest example of which is probably ‘Alright Now’, which goes from A to a sort of D, but the sort of D sounds like a sort of A sus4.

Over to you…

Antidepressant music

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I’ve been a bit glum today – doesn’t matter why – but I wanted to share my absolute 100% guaranteed music for getting me out of the dumps & grinning widely again….

…and it’s Jethro Tull – almost any toon will do the trick, today it was the Warchild album…

I listen to a wide variety of music: progressive, jazz, classical….nothing cheers me up quicker than Jethro Tull!

Anyone else have a sure fire musical Prozac, guaranteed to work for you?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=t0yUWd4Nnb8

1972 Light Entertainment at its best!

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Yes, the format seems implausibly glossy and cheesy at this remove, and we wonder how the world could ever have been this way, and yet, and yet… there’s something rather fun and uncomplicated about this episode of LWT Light Ent show ‘2Gs & the Pop People’.

A terrific Heads, Hands & Feet performance, Sandie Show being great in one song and outrageously camp and un-PC in the next, Scott Walker being Scott Walker (before he startet making records to annoy people), Mike Raven being… well, beyond camp, and a lot of brightly coloured people (the 2Gs) jigging about. Oh, and some woman covering a Sandie Shaw song… when the real Sandie Shaw is actually on the show. Curious…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyv1SZ5mMMA

New Van!

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Hurrah! There’s a new Van album coming out. A promotional single featuring snatches from all the songs has been circulated, grafted on to the formula slow blues attached. Pretty much all the songs on the album, of course, can be sung to this track. Sing-a-long-a-Van…

Let It Rhyme, Every Time – Let It Rhyme, Every Time – I See A River, see a river, see a river – Going Down To Bangor, down to Bangor, down Memory Lane, Out In The Cold Again – Gonna Look Behind The Hill In Tiburon In Tiburon – next door ta Avalon – Share Your Love With Me, Holy Guardian Angel, high in the art a’ suffering one, hand me down my greatcoat and my big boots, Keep Me Singing, Keep Me Singing, keep me churnin’ out lists a’ things, lists a’ things, smokin’ dope in Kendal, with Wordsworth an’ Coleridge, Lambert an’ Butler, Flanagan an’ Allen, Bill an’ Ben, Flowerpot Men, remember when remember when – we did the twist, we did the mashed potato, the potted herring, the pasty supper, the Caledonia Swing, Caledonia Swing – it ain’t Too Late, it ain’t Too Late, ‘cos The Pen is Mightier Than The Sword, » Continue Reading.

New Zealand (jazz-)rocks!

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For a small and allegedly sleepy, backward civilisation, New Zealand’s musical community has great taste. Here are a bunch of Wellington musos who seemingly got together recently to perform a load of Mahavishnu Orchestra covers. Several have just appeared on YouTube. Hurrah!

The players are:

Hannah Fraser Johnny Lawrence Daniel Hayles Tyson Smith Shaun Anderson

The Mahavishnu Orchestra performed only two concerts in New Zealand (in their Mk2 version, in 1974). It seems their trip was not wasted.

Harry Beckett – cool 1974 Brit jazz-rock-soulful vibes on vinyl for only 12 quid!

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At the risk of causing our vinyl-moratorium-struggling friend Vulpes ‘The Vulpmeister’ Vulpes yet more despair, the great Richard Williams has recently flagged up this tantalising brand new archive offering ‘Still Happy’ from Brit-jazz legend Harry Beckett: 30 pristine minutes live at the BBC in 1974, on limited edition vinyl for a mere £12 (plus free download) or just £6 for the download!

Link to the label’s Bandcamp ordering facility attached.

Let’s groove!

https://myonlydesirerecords.bandcamp.com/releases

Wookalily Rocks! In a Swedish style…

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At last, after endless gigs with crappy sound systems, misbehaving banjo pick-ups, noisy punters, forgotten plectrums, unplugged cable TV sessions and dodgy cameraphone clips Wookalily have finally SORTED THE WHOLE THING OUT – and not only that, but this PA/public relations epiphany has happily coincided with a brilliant live performance, a convenient camera crew, a gay disco classic, and a huge white room with NO PUNTERS WHATSOEVER!

The Wookas doff their collective cap at Abba and feature the closest they’ve yet got to fusion solos – terrific flute, banjo and bass improvisations. And WookaLyndsay, not only causing jaws to drop having only taken up the bass four or five months ago – and having to sing at the same time… and being left-handed… – is not even wearing shoes!

This is a blistering performance – let’s rock!

Anne Briggs: New Music!

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Okay, that was a bit of a teasing headline… No, there is not newly recorded music by the mesmerising English traditional singer who retired in 1973 (bar a few gigs in 1992 and appearances in a couple of documentaries), but David Suff, maestro at Fledg’ling Records, has valiantly battled the demons of BBC bureaucracy to access, at last, three tracks she performed live on BBC radio’s ‘Folksong Cellar’ in August 1966. And, in the process, has found a fourth unreleased track from the same period, ‘The Verdent Braes of Skreen’, which she never otherwise record.

I’ve had a reference copy of the other three tracks for some years, and they are wonderful performances, especially ‘Polly Vaughan’ – gentler and more beguiling, to my mind, than the Topic studio take. ‘Recruited Collier’, the opening song, is perhaps the most beautiful and poignant in her whole recorded output.

I understand the EP (on vinyl) comes with a well illustrated booklet, including unseen photos.

David’s series of reissued vinyl EPs and new vinyl singles, on Topic and Fledg’ling, have been a joy thus far – Anne’s ‘The Hazards of Love’, Davy Graham’s ‘3/4 AD’, reproductions of several Shirley Collins rarities, new singles » Continue Reading.

It’s Sandy Brown, live in Eastern Europe, 1968!

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Sandy Brown was one of the great characters of British jazz – traversing/transcending all the factions in a career from the 50s to the early 70s (and an untimely passing). He made trad jazz, ‘mainstream’ jazz, a proto jazz-rock record in 1968 with John McLaughlin on guitar (‘Hair At Its Hairiest’, yes, a jazz version of ‘Hair’ – available in full on the Fellside/Lake CD titled ‘Work Song’, a lost gem well worth seeking out), wrote for ‘The Listener’ and designed recording studuios for a living – including, from memory, the one in Lagos that Macca used for ‘Band On The Run’. He wrote a very eccentric autobiography in the third person, posthumously published as ‘The McJazz Manuscripts’.

I heartily recommend exploring his works.

I’ve just noticed this half-hour TV concert on YouTube, so pour a glass of McWhisky and enjoy the great man (with a borrowed/so-so rhythm section) on some foreign platform before the flood…