nigeblog

The theme this time was Latin American. I got in early with Santana as three of bought that record. Si Firmi O Grido by A Certain Ratio is a great track. A well attended night, I also played the Gibson Brothers and Chris Montez.

The theme next time is Plaid Shirts which was one of my entries in to the hat. At the time I was thinking Echo and the Bunnymen, Orange Juice, Jesus and Mary Chain as well as Neil Young and Billy Bragg.

Had been to Edinburgh the week before but this was my only pickup…

I used to have both versions of this. I remember selling the Small Wonder one on eBay thinking I still had The Second Sitting. There was a time in my early 20s when pretty much all I listened to was anarcho, having lost most of my favourite records in an unsuccessful flat move. Unsurprisingly I can still sing along to almost every lyric.

In 1950, he understudied Richard Burton as Konstantin in a Swansea production of The Seagull. Orson Welles, who directed Williams on stage in London in Moby Dick, tried to persuade him to come to New York to play the Fool in King Lear. Judy Garland knew his sketches by heart, having “worn out the grooves” of the vinyl recordings of his 1959 theatrical revue, Pieces of Eight (in which his understudy was firebrand-to-be Ken Loach, who later said of him: “He was very nice … but he could be capricious. Sometimes, he just cut you dead”).

From this profile of Kenneth Williams in the Graun.

“I keep telling young people: keep a diary, get a camera, learn to print your own photos. Don’t put it all in your phone, because everything in your phone belongs to someone else. And if you want to write a secret to someone, send a letter. There’s nothing wrong in slowing down and stepping everything back.”

Excellent advice from this Tracy Emin profile in the Guardian this weekend.

So looking back at the version of this post from last year, I was committed to getting back in to work and foreign travel. I didn’t achieve either.

I did get a first grandson, I did walk London corner to corner and I did walk the Edinburgh bypass (which I had been talking about for four years).

I sold 40 copies of Tales of Paranoia by Robert Crumb and a Batman #423 I found in a charity shop. I recovered that data from my future son-in-law’s corrupt SD card (like a 1337 H4X0R) and I jerry-built an adaptor for our foot pump to inflate my youngest daughter’s air bed (like I’m Isambard Kingdom Brunel).

I saw a bunch of great gigs (all of this year’s TFEH shows, Jeffrey Lewis, Rezillos, the Mekons, Sexual Objects, Nectarine No. 9, the Pastels and many more) and played records with my vinyl group friends each month.

My todo list at this point is little changed from this time last year and my big worries are much the same. But generally I’m taking pleasure living in the moment and enjoying time spent with my wife, my family and friends. And that’s mostly what I’m going to keep on doing.

£11.50 total spend. Ultimate Lessons 2 was good value and a great listen. Saint Germain Des Pres Cafe was right up my street as well – looks like there’s loads in that series. And I love Who’s That Lady by the Isley Brothers which my mum had on a cheap hits comp when I was a kid.

I didn’t really know who Danny Kruger was before I read this profile in the Guardian today. It’s pretty wild. Regular readers will know I’m quite interested in socialism and Christianity, and generally speaking a little knowledge of Christianity will expose the hypocrisy of most Christian folk on the right.

Kruger seems to be in a different place, as we see in the paragraph below:

“I think that socialism is in heaven,” he says. “The problem with socialists is they don’t accept the fall of man. They try to create heaven on Earth with the assumption that if we somehow just got our institutions or culture right, we could be synonymous beings and all behave nicely to each other.” Wait, I say, checking I have heard correctly. Heaven is socialist? “Heaven is a socialist state,” he says. “The effort of socialists is to bring heaven on Earth, with the state in the position of God. That is not a good idea. That’s because no state of human beings can be all good or all powerful.”

I completely accept that most systems of power lead to corruption and abuse, but to use the fall of man as a reason not to pursue the improvement of people’s lives through state action seems a pretty extraordinary position for a politician.

I’m probably going to be thinking about this for quite some time…

Jeffrey Lewis played La Belle Angele a couple of weeks ago and I was there, going straight from the Royal Infirmary after seeing my daughter and new grandchild.

Jeffrey was manning the merch stall before the show and I picked up a couple of comics and his Watchmen book. I realised I didn’t have a copy of my own comic to give him, but la di da… I always have copies in my bag in case I meet some much admired creative person while out, but I don’t usually take a bag to gigs.

Jeffrey’s third song, which I hadn’t heard before, was about how he doesn’t keep anything people give him (including “that poetry book in an edition of nine”), so I think things probably worked out for the best.

Jeffrey’s opening song was People Were Morons and the whole show was just great.

Support was from Sergeant Buzfuz, who I didn’t know previously, but this history of medieval papacy was both entertaining and informative, and right up my street.

This month’s theme was West, hence Rawhide, Apache, America (from West Side Story), Buffalo Stance, Leroy’s Boots and Devo (West Ham) and Go West.

Next month’s theme is Songs You Never Get Bored Listening To…

We only got round to four of my selections on the theme of “really got you excited”, but Grandmaster and Melle Mel did get a rewind (I think that’s what the young people say 😉 ).

Silver Dollar Forger and People Who Died really power forwards and are in themselves just exciting. My kids would dance excitedly to Warm Leatherette when they were wee, and the song is about getting excited in car crashes. White Lines is just great and I was pretty excited to hear it performed by Tackhead at the Voodoo Rooms a couple of years ago.

The theme next time is West. So far I’ve got Go West by the Cult and the Barmy Army album which is full of West Ham terrace chanting.

I’ve hardly seen any examples of Robson Green’s acting but I think his round Britain travelogue show on the BBC is quite watchable and he recently shot an episode in Longniddry with Mark Benton who I am a big fan of. However, I remember attending a wedding in Sunderland many years ago where there was much bitching about him, so I know not everyone likes him. Maybe that’s a Sunderland thing 😉

Anyway, whatever his own merits as an actor, according to this interview in the Guardian he gave us Ralph Ineson, so a big thank you for that. And thanks to York Mystery Plays as well — I went once with my mum when Christopher Timothy was Jesus,

[Ineson] got involved with the York Mystery Plays – a tradition that’s been going, on and off, since the mid-14th century: a Bible story told every year, once performed on a roaming cart, then, by the time Ineson did it in 1992, at the York Theatre Royal. All the characters were played by the people of York, except for one professional actor, who that year was Robson Green.

“He was pretty lonely on his own, sat in his hotel. We’d go out for a drink and I ended up sharing a dressing room with him. And he said: ‘You’re not wedded to being a teacher, are you?’ I wasn’t, although I did enjoy it, but I hadn’t been to drama school, I wasn’t classically trained. He said: ‘Go home and watch TV tonight, look at the characters you could play.’ So I watched a soap, I watched the nine o’clock drama, and there were about five people I thought I could play.”