Music night ramblings

Thursday night has been dedicated to music, no movies, no TV, just music, music videos, and concerts. It is, in other words, the highlight of my week.
Some form of alcohol is usually involved too.

Ask any music fan/collector what the highlights of the 80s were, and chances are you'll get two (linked) responses: picture discs, and 12" EPs. Picture discs came in 7" and 12"versions, 7" were usually the same tracklisting as the 7" single, whereas the 12" picture disc often differed slightly from the 12" EP tracklisting. The style of pressing the picture of the disc tended to ruin the sound quality, but eh, they looked great. I've got a reasonably complete set of Marillion 12" PDs (singles, not album PDs unfortunately), made superfluous by the single boxsets released recently, and the remastered CD series. But they still look great.
The remixes, or alternative versions on the 12" singles, different significantly from the radio single version, although in many cases were closer to the album version - particularly for the prog(ish) bands. Think of them as the precursor of the dance floor remixes. They often included different drum versions, or at least drums being more prominent in the mix, with extra keys (or keytars!!!) somewhere in there. I have fond memories of listening to an incredible variety of remixes of Falco's Rock Me Amadeus. Awesome stuff.

The death of the single (7" and 12") and the move to CDsingles, which have also died, killed the remixes. I think it's safe to say the main market for remixes are dance singles, which is sad from a collectors perspective. Having said that, there's a significant remix market in the ambient/noise groups, for example the collaborations between Muslimguaze, Bass Communion and Andrew Giles. But often not on vinyl.
Here's a Marillion extended version of Going Under, which appeared on the 12" for Incommunicado (and the CD single).

There appears to be quite a market for these 80s remixes. A few years ago Queen released an album called The 12" Collection, I'm not sure how widely available the album is. However Queen weren't that keen on remixes, and the differences are not significant from the released versions. But for completists, it's not a bad CD and I do play it reasonably frequently.
Marillion caught most of their remixes on the remastered CDs, and the two boxsets of singles (Fish era and H-era). Pet Shop Boys had bonus discs out recently.
For me one of the kings of remixes were Frankie Goes To Hollywood. I'd hate to be a completist for their remixes. For a band who have such a limited number of releases, the number of 12" remix versions is ridiculous (same could be said of Duran Duran).
So here's the Power of Love, the extended mix.


Talk Talk, who did do quite interesting remixes, had a compilation of A and B sides released (titled, imaginatively, Asides Bsides) which captured a lot of these. But do avoid Remixed which was a bunch of remixes done in the early 90s without the bands OK.

I was browsing amazon some time ago and looking at compilation CDs (I was after some funk compilations), and came across a number of 80s 12" CDs. Tempting. I succumbed to a 6CD set, 80s 12" (complete with garish fluoro writing) for the princely sum of 5 quid. 72 tracks, some utter crud (well ok, a lot of it), but extended cheesy goodness on so many levels. There's stuff on it I've never heard of before (Classix Nouveaux?!), but it's all "...in the best possible taste.".

I do miss the 12" remix, before the current trend of dumping a heavy dance beat to everything.

I leave you with some Mel and Kim, which I'm currently listening to.

P Addict

Following a impromptu decision to go to a gig in Glasgow a couple of weeks ago, I was looking forward to a trip involving roughly 5-6 hours of trains each way. But I like Pallas (the band we were seeing), and it's always good catching up the psychochicken.
The band Pallas started around the same time as Marillion (very early 80s), but things didn't really click for them. I hadn't really heard them until I had PC post over Dreams of Men a few years ago on a whim. Brilliant stuff.

Sadly, on this trip, things spiralled a bit out of control. Some readers may remember our visit to the Summer's End festival last year where gold lame capes were unveiled on the final night. We thought they were a hit, other bands thought they were great, the band we unveiled them for seemed to see the funny side, but the hardcore Pendragon fans appeared to have had their funny bones removed.
But as the Prog Crusaders trio were to be reunited, could the capes have their first Scottish outing?

Prog Crusader Al, upped the ante by questioning the band directly on their policy of cape-age. They called his bluff with :

OK folks ,there are a bunch of nutters called the PROGCRUSADERS coming tonight and talking about wearing capes !! Get your capes out!!! Lets see all you Wakeman impersonators tonight. If I see capes in the crowd then I too will don my cape, which I of course wear everyday, for the encore.

Yes thanks Al. Guess we can't really get out of it now. And so, the cape was thrown in the bag and I headed up north, idly wondering if I could don the cape early and swish through the train. And then realising I hadn't had beer, so it probably wouldn't be a good plan.

Met PC, and we headed to a pub. Then we went to another pub, met Al, soundly berated him for his plan. And drank more beer. Found another pub, drank beer had food. And then donned the capes. Too much amusement from punters sitting outside the pub. Much swishing ensued. Mmm swish.

As we are men, not mice, we walked the mean streets of Glasgow to the venue. This seemed to bring joy and happiness into the locals lives, the highlight being a driver yelling out 'ya goin' t' Pallas then?' heh respect.

We got there early, planting ourselves in the best position and chatting to the sound man. Although he now thinks we think he broke the sound system at Summer's End....I blame Al. It just seems right that way. 

The gig was superb, really fun, relaxed, the new singer is superb - really rocky, and great voice. And we had a great time (I lost most of my voice, don't panic, it's back). 

Downside: the band had their bluff called and didn't actually have their capes. Lying bastards. No worries, we donated ours for the encores. And to their credit, capes were worn. Pictures and video attest to this. 

From the band: 

thanks to all who came along to the Ferry tonight. The band had a Fantastic time!! We had great fun on stage and as usual YOU the Glasgow audience were SUPERB.....and yes we wore our Prog Capes with Pride !!!! lol!

We will ignore the lol, out of respect for the band. The new tracks sound superb, and quite different to the last couple of albums, far more straight ahead rock. And I got to hear ghostdancers live, which was fantastic, and probably the cause of the voice loss. 

What made the gig were the fans, not only were the band into the music (and the capes), but the fans got the humour of the cape-age. Randoms chatted to us, and enjoyed the event. And Graeme (bass player) thanked us, as he returned our capes, for bringing a bit of fun. Well it's prog FFS, you cannot take it seriously!

Speaking of prog, I'm well out of the progloset now. I've come to accept my love of prog, and have embraced it fully. And so a full weekend of Prog was something to look forward to. Nothing but prog on the trip up and back. Awesome. But it did drive home to me how many Prog bands begin with the letter 'P'.  From my ipod:

Paatos (Steve Wilson produced)

Pain of Salvation (prog-metal)

Pallas

Paradise Lost (goth metal)

Parallel of 90 Degrees

Pendragon

Peter Gabriel

Phoenix Foundation (go on, you know they are)

the Pineapple Thief

Pink Floyd

Porcupine Tree

Pure Reason Revolution

Timothy Pure

Alan Parsons

Anthony Phillips

John Petrucci

Weird. But there ya go. I had a great time, and it was definitely worth heading up. Thanks hugely to N and S, and Al for a great time, and big ups to the band for making it something special.

Morale tips for the workplace

Office discussion:
Me: I think we should hire a monkey troupe
Others: what?
Me: A monkey troupe, it'll cheer everyone up. Imagine coming to work knowing you're going to see monkeys playing! Awesome. See, you're smiling already.
Others: sigh.
Me: Sometimes I wonder if I should ever be in a position of power.

Cooking with Bruce: Sweet n Sour the quick version

Want a quick Sweet n Sour recipe that's ready to eat in 10 minutes? Here ya go.

Firstly, finish the glass of wine you're halfway through, refill. I'm prepared to accept ale, voddie, or gin as substitutes.
Put A-Ha 'Hunting High and Low' on very loud, ideally vinyl, but I'll accept other, lesser, formats.

Mix: remember all measurements are approx
1T rice wine
2T soy sauce*
1T brown sugar (or in my case, jaggery poor, cos I'm a wanker)
2T cornflour mixed into 2T water
juice from a can of pineapple (I used a 250gm-ish can).

Put on some rice.

Fry:
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
3cm ginger, finely grated
2 red chillies (I never bother with deseeding)

Fry for 30s at high temp, add the liquid and cook for 2 minutes, it'll thicken - that's a good sign.

Add:
1 red pepper chopped
225gm can water chestnuts drained
200g raw prawns
pineapple pieces

Fry for 3-4 minutes or so until the prawns are cooked, reduce time if you're really cheating and using pre-cooked prawns.

Serve on rice. Green salad works nicely as a side dish.

Another example of I can't be arsed cooking, but hey look what I threw together....

It's not the greatest sweet n sour I've made, but it's more than adequate, and for 10 minutes, what the hell were you expecting?!

b

Movie: Inception

I wandered along to this as it was pissing down with rain and I didn't have much else to do. It's the new flick by Christopher Nolan starring Leo DiC, and comes with a number of big ups from prominent reviewers.
I came out with very mixed feelings. Visually it's superb, utterly gorgeous in fact. Leo is certainly an excellent actor, and of late has been choosing some interesting roles. I think where I felt let down was the story. To quickly summarise, the plot revolves around using dreams as a source of information, or in the main case of the movie, to plant ideas.
I came away thinking that it was lacking something, and that was probably empathetic characters. None of them are bad, or good, but all are difficult to empathise with. The plot is quite lumbering in places, and typically of Hollywood, certain key elements are laboured (witness the 'totem'). The movie seems to collapse under the pressure of trying to be too intelligent, too knowing, and that annoyed me. I think it's excellent that Hollywood made this, an intelligent thriller, but maybe, ironically, a better movie would have been made with less money. The concept was interesting, and should have held the movie together, but again felt too laboured. It's almost as if the writers were thinking this is cool, and we all know about it, but can't assume the audience will, so let's explain everything.

I think it's worth seeing, and probably on the big screen. 6/10.

Guy Garvey

Really is the bomb. His Sunday night 6Music show should be required listening. For example this Sunday just past included a long admission of love for Mark Hollis (including playing The Watershed) and The National (The Geese of Beverly Road).
Both of which are so good, you need to listen to them. Again.





There, two music (ish) blogs in one day.

HMV suggestions

I'm in the mood for new and different music, nothing like diversification eh. Rather than my usual random approach, I've decided I want to explore African psychedelia. I've heard a couple of tracks over the years on random compilations, on 6Music, and from the sadly gone Delerium Music. So I've spent the last few week idly flicking through for a reasonable compilation. I've come across two that I'm interested in, Astral Daze, a compilation of South African psychedelia, and Vol 8 of love peace and poetry. The latter is more appealing as it's easily available, and the vinyl is 2 quid more than the CD.

Anyway, I decided to have a look on Amazon and HMV for these. When searching for Astral Daze, HMV told me they had no idea WTF I was looking for, but that I might enjoy Clash of the Titans and Eminem instead.

Awesome!

Anyone with suggestions for other weird ass stuff I should check out, give me a yell.

B

Duck cocks

While stumbling around my RSS feeds today, I came across this.

Duck penis length is related to how many other males are in their duckyverse.
Actually most reptiles (incl birds) don't have external genitals, so this is even more remarkable.

If you want a special bathtime rubber ducky, go here.

Booze, the British tot of Rum

The tot of rum to British naval lads was stopped 40 years ago. And the last remaining casks of rum have just been bottled and are available for sale (a mere 600 pounds here).

But for general interest, it's worth reading this.
Background on the term grog and how booze was used in the Navy.

Trivia: naval rum was poured out in 1/2 gill portions. A gill was 1/4 of a pint, or 0.142 ml - except in some districts where it's a half-pint (quarter pint was a 'jack'). As a term, it's interchangeable with 'noggin', but only in the south of England, those wacky northerners, and their gratuitous intake, have a noggin as 2 gills.

This actually caused me to do some digging around the OED to see where these words came from. Gill first popped up in 1275, even Johnson used it (each man called for his own half-pint of wine, or gill, if he pleased) in 1773. Interestingly, the Channel Islands apparently had a different measure for a noggin, with pots (half-gallon), quarts, pints, gills (quarter of a pint), and noggins (an eighth of a pint).

The word gill derives from the latin for a wine vessel, as does gallon, possibly.
Noggin may be derived from Knag (a measure of a barrel), but the gaelic and irish (noigean and noigin) are derived from English.

Gill is also used as a familiar or contemptuous term for a woman. Must remember that.

Noggin seems to date to later, OED lists first usage as 1588. The now more common usage of noggin, as head, dates to 1769 (boxing slang), but it doesn't take much to work out how that came about.

Obviously, as in evolution, these all post-date first usage.

Ohhh, Australasian war slang (Korean and Vietnam), noggy - asian soldier.

there you go, education for the day.

Cooking with Bruce: Sunday fry-up

The point of Sunday meals is to do fuck-all, while making it tasty. Tricky. Unless you join up to the Bruce school of Sunday cooking (based on an Ottolenghi recipe).
The other trick is to make the bare minimum of dishes, unless you've got someone else to do the washing up, in which case, go crazy.

In a large-ish frypan
Olive oil
2-3 medium onions thinly chopped
2 smallish potatoes chopped into 5mm thick slices
1/2 red chilli
1/2t smoke paprika
some cajun spice
salt and pepper

Heat oil, add everything, cook on med-low heat for 20mins.  Stir in 2 cloves crushed garlic, 1/2t sugar.

While the onions and spud are cooking
Mix juice from 1/2 lemon, 100ml greek yoghurt, and some oil.

Grill 3-4 tomatoes (chopped in half) until charred.

Once the onions are cooked, break 3-4 eggs into the pan (don't break the yolks), cook until the whites are set, drizzle some tahini paste over the mix, heat a bit more, remove from heat drizzle yoghurt mix, sprinkle some coriander over and dump the tomatoes in. Serve from the pan.

me