Tagged: music

Chicken – Egg?

Tame Impala? “Never heard of them” you may say.  Well I was in the same boat for a long while.

What came first, the song or the video in terms of entering my own consciousness?

Hard to tell really. But I saw this initially on Vimeo and loved the video first and foremost. It is a surfing video that happens to use the track as its theme tune. The whole package did not encourage me to surf, but it did make me look up the band involved.

It is not quite the same as hearing yet another Groove Armada track on a car tv advert. You know the song already, so the advert is not really important. In fact it is verging upon the annoying after a while.

So which came first the video or the sound track?

Who cares in this case? Loving it all.

I know that people should be allowed to make money in a free market led society, but ………

Saw a band play at the Aylesbury Civic Centre a fair few years ago. Just starting out then – Jangling guitar riffs, shirts buttoned up to the neck, floppy fringes masking scowls and bum fluff tashes.

The band were hip enough for me to get enough respect after the gig from the bunch of year 10 lads. They were also there to enjoy the show. I bumped into quite them literally as they pushed and slammed around auditorium. I do not know who was more surprised to crash into who.

So the band are still hip now, seven years later, but beards have replaced those wispy moustaches and they get interviewed by the Guardian to publicize their new tour, rather than rely on word of mouth and posters.

Nothing grabbing you so far, well something is bothering me.

The Bristol show of this latest tour is at the Bristol University Student Union. A pretty large venue for Bristol, which has no big events arena, but will do soon. The whole tour went on sale simultaneously and the Bristol tour date, along with the other gigs went on sale today (21/8/15) at 9 am. Can I get on to any of the ticket agencies online at 9 o’clock? Nope. but I do get through to one site that allows me to book 0 tickets at £27.50. It is 9.16 am. Sold out.

Hard luck, I hear you say. Agreed, but when you see the same tickets being offered already at 9.30 am at three or four times their face value on online re-sale sites, it rubs salt in the wounds. It is all wrong.

Music of the moment….

Not been listening to many new tunes of late, but am hoping that Elvis Costello’s new album with The Roots will grow on me. Meanwhile………

In most peoples’ minds Ukraine is a source of political unrest and a shed load of Natural gas. Vakula brings you something different to test those state of the art headphones that you got for Chrimbo.

I wish there was a record shop in town.

It is like the good old days. A musician plays his heart out at a gig  and after had your socks knocked off by the live performance you wait in anticipation for the next album to come out. Then when you find out this record is to made in collaboration with  another favourite combo then it is time to get really excited!

Time to buzz down to  Raynors/Rival/Revolver and get your hands on a copy of the LP.

Well Elvis Costello has teamed up with The Roots to make his latest album.

He did his best to shake up the dullards who were stood waiting in their chosen spots to see The Stones be wheeled out later. It was said that Freddie Flintoff used to bowl a lot of ‘effort’ balls in his Test career. Well Glastonbury 2013 was one of Elvis Costello’s ‘effort’ gigs.

So he has now gone onto work with Philadelphia’s finest. It just is a download away to see how they got on.

Record Box – the ultimate

John Peel died nearly 7 years ago. It seems such a long time that has passed very quickly. I have a box of vinyl records that I have referred to a few times on this blog, but the ultimate record box has to be the one that belonged to John Peel.

I found this documentary about this ultimate record collection on youtube and it comes in 4 parts. The first part is here and if you are a music fan I think you will enjoy the programme.

Bad Manners still going!

“GET WELL SOON BUSTER!”

[CLICK]

was a post written 2 years ago when Buster Bloodvessel was laid up in hospital in Italy. At the time it did not look good. It was even reported in the NME that the  front man from Bad Manners was in a bad way and obituary writers were being summoned in readiness.

However all is well with the big man, which puts a smile on my face. As in my recent trawl of various ticket agency web sites to see which forthcoming The Hives gig  was nearest to me I saw the list of bands due to play at the Reading festival next month. There they were, Bad Manners, and with a future Christmas count down tour lined up too. I might even go to the Fleece on December 15th and see them for myself! It has been a while.

Anyway Buster looks the picture of health to me – here he is playing Mighty Sounds festival in the Czech Republic in June. Good news I say.

bbv2

Box of vinyl………(6)

Got the old box of 45’s out for a flick through.

A bold purple cover stood out; I had rediscovered a GothRock classic. The Cult – She Sells Sanctuary. In fact it gets a brief mention in a previous blog, but I think that it deserves more than an honourable mention.

The-Cult-She-Sells-Sanctuary

The video was not that great, but I do remember it being on the video jukebox in the “Volley” on King Street. Video jukeboxes were all the rage back then after the dust had settled in the Betamax/VHS format war.

Goths were pseudo punks in the mid 80’s.   The sort of mainstream Gothic rock singles that were out then on the video screens were things like this Cult track, Killing Joke – A Love like Blood and Billy Idol’s – White Wedding.

I did like a lot of that style of music. Robert Smith of the Cure was a clever bloke in my opinion who wrote some unique songs. Siouxsie and the Banshees were another band that I thought were pretty sound. I never bought a Cult album though, but the single here was good to bop about to.

So this landed in my singles collection.

Coming back to King Street, pubs and music videos a couple of personal favourites of mine back then that were also on the jukebox were The Ramones – Teenage Lobotomy and Van Halen’s – Hot for Teacher. They stick in the mind. I somehow still remember staring through the smokey fug at the tv screens to watch those two videos, whilst I nursed a beer in the upstairs bar  The Ramones promo video was not as slickly produced as Michael Jackson’s Thriller,  but was a load more scarier from memory. I cannot find the actual video from then on-line today. Maybe it got banned by the Health and Safety people.

The Van Halen video just appealed for base reasons I suppose. Watching it now makes everything seem so dated. I will not post it as it is degrading to women, all warm blooded males can Google it.

Those were the days Part 27

Staff talent show.

The Staff Talent show was something that students eagerly anticipated for weeks leading up to Christmas. This lunch time performance was hotly contested affair, which always took place on the Thursday of Charities Week (See Those were the days Part 26).
The winner was chosen by a panel of judges that was not quite of the same caliber as that from X-Factor. Teachers used to dodge the honour of appearing on this judging panel as it always used to end in tears and tantrums from the Staff band in particular if they did not come out on top.
Your brief as a judge was basically to decide if the Staff band had done enough to defeat a less talented, but very determined bunch of reprobate teachers (mainly teaclub members) that locked horns with the band every year. Other groups of staff performed various party pieces, or mimed to tracks of the day from performers such as Rick Astley. Invariably these side acts were poor and often slightly toe curling. Therefore it always boiled down to a straight shoot out – The band versus the “Tea Club Boys”.
The Band was pretty tight and would bash out an Oasis cover or something similar. The Rake 2 for further stories from the band’s exploits.

The lads in opposition knew their limitations, but would use props, bribes, humour and what talent they had to try and win over the audience. One year they built a life size Cadillac out of MDF for their performance of Grease Lightening.
The vision that I still have of one of their best shows was of the four of the reprobates lined up, wearing tutus, leotards and ballet shoes performing a series of demi plies to the soundtrack of the Sugar Plum Fairy. The whole front row of the audience was screaming in shock and blind panic every time the lads bent their knees to lower their torsos gracefully and sweep their arms upwards. This was due to the fact that one of the teachers had burst his tights in a rather crucial area and so every time he stooped down his scrotum squeezed out of the hole for a gentle airing! This was the cause of the screams of terror from the Year 10 girls who were copping an eyeful of this in the front row.

Mad Men – Bootsy Collins on Rock school

Bootsy Collins is a crazy cat. The sort of bloke you would not sit next to on the tube unless you had to. Well he does dress terribly loud.

He appears here on a classic BBC2 series from the 1980’s called Rock School – the programmes sought to give musicians an insight on the technicalities of playing certain instruments with certain styles, be it Rock guitar, Reggae drums or in Bootsy’s case – Funk bass guitar.

He makes it look so simple!

It is just all about being on the “ONE”!

Now where am I heading on this post then? Well there are two things that stand out about Bootsy.

Firstly he has lived a life and seen the World, for instance you see him happily playing bass lines for the Great James Brown in a televised show in Italy. Notice the crowd clearly do not know what to make of the Godfather of Soul here as he struts on stage. Nevertheless Bootsy seems to be enjoying himself in the background.

Now that was years ago – but Bootsy keeps busy giving talks on his musical past and also helps to encourage  and support young musicians with his own University of Funk. The next clip has  Bootsy telling a story in one of his seminars about the relationship he had with James Brown.

So I say “Good on you Bootsy!” for giving it back.

And listening to Bootsy speak reminds me of, the second thing…….

PETER CROUCH – Mr “You know….” immediately to mind when you hear Bootsy speak. You know you end up counting them, you know, during any interview that Crouch gives on TV.