#facility's favourite guitarist

[timeforabathblog]

18. Best Baths on the Thames: Henley Swimming Baths at 90

Ninety years ago this summer, William Lee stood at the gate, boater hat in hand, resplendent in white shoes and white trousers. A butcher by trade, he was also the mayor of Henley-on-Thames, so it fell to him to begin the evening’s proceedings. He smiled for the camera and pushed the gate open to a round of applause. It was 5:30pm on a sunny Saturday just after midsummer, the 23rd of June 1934.

William Lee opening the Henley Swimming Baths. Source: Reading Standard.

Lee, his fellow councillors, and the crowd that followed them into the enclosure, were gathered to mark the completion of the Henley Swimming Baths off Wargrave Road, a facility sanctioned by the Ministry of Health at a cost of approximately £2,000, and designed by the Borough Surveyor, F. C. Wren. 

The Baths and its opening were a triumph of low-tech public luxury. They celebrated the simple pleasure of swimming in a river, framed as a pursuit that was mainstream – even glamorous – and yet, for this Thameside town, also part of everyday life and leisure.

Wren’s design, at once functional and beautiful, embodied this ethos. The entrance was flanked by two brick and timber-framed attendants’ booths, bisecting a sweeping half-octagon of changing cubicles, their raised floor level pre-empting winter floods. 

National Grid 1:2500 map, 1962. Source: National Library of Scotland.

The typical bather paid for entry at one of the booths and then made their way to a cubicle. After undressing and donning their costume, they stepped out onto a raised walkway and, past a white-painted metal railing, looked out over a broad sunbathing lawn extending to the water. 

Clustered at the centre of the bank were three pollard willows and a low diving board. Several sets of steps led down into the river on either side. To the right stood the metal frame of a higher diving platform. 

In the water, the bather had the choice of a shallow end or a deep end within a cordoned off stretch of the stream, hefty white staves marking its corners.

Picture postcard of the Baths, 1930s.

Bringing Wren’s design to life, the opening was a variety show – a ‘water cabaret’ – compéred by ‘English champion swimmer’ Jeanne Clilverd. Taking their seats in rows set out on the grass, the crowd first enjoyed a speech from William Lee, who proclaimed the venue the ‘best baths on the Thames’, to much agreement. 

A parade of ‘London’s leading mannequins’ (the contemporary term for models) then exhibited the latest fashions in beach wear, before racing on ‘aqua-cycles’ and demonstrating ‘how to be lazy on a li-lo’.

Mannequins on aqua-cycles. Source: Reading Standard.

Clilverd performed a series of virtuosic feats in swimming and diving. Russian emigré guitarist Alexis Chesnakov serenaded the crowd from atop the diving platform. And the evening concluded with Reading and Windsor swimming clubs going head to head in a game of water polo.

Alexis Chesnakov serenades the crowd. Source: Reading Standard.

Henley was by no means new to swimming. The previous summer, 2,725 bathers were recorded over the August Bank Holiday weekend – equivalent to 40% of the town’s population. In effect, the Baths updated and rebranded a place known traditionally as ‘Solomon’s Hatch’, a favourite watering hole even before Lee and the other local grandees were born.

The first significant move to formalise and enclose the site came in 1871 with the establishment of the Henley Bathing Company. By the 1880s, there were a free and a paid swimming area, as well as changing sheds and ladders. The first Henley Swimming Club took to the water in 1894. 

Map of Henley with Solomon's Hatch circled. Source: Emily J. Climenson, A Guide to Henley-on-Thames, 1896.

For some, river bathing was an article of faith. William Wing, an earlier Borough Surveyor from a prominent local family, bathed first thing every morning all year round, as well as acting as the Bathing Company’s secretary.

The spot was popular with tourists as well as locals. A visitor in 1880 mentioned ‘rising early for a plunge into the glorious stream at “Solomon’s Hatch”, then back to breakfast with such an appetite as swimmers only can approach, after which a quiet, digestive cigar…’

‘I never could find out who the particular Solomon was that the place was named after,’ added another in 1888, ‘but the bathing-place is a capital institution for Henley; the water is clear and the bottom sandy. Between the hours of 11 and 1 in the morning it is reserved for ladies only, and I am glad to say a good many avail themselves of this opportunity of learning the art of swimming…’

The origins of the name Solomon’s Hatch remain mysterious. Entrances to the vast mediaeval forest of Windsor were known as hatches, a term preserved in names of nearby villages like Playhatch and Hare Hatch. This might explain the second half. But why Solomon?

Henley Swimming Baths, 1930s. Source: River and Rowing Museum.

To find out more about the Baths’ later years, I posted on the Henley-on-Thames Past and Present Facebook group in September 2023, explaining my interest in the history of river swimming in the town and asking whether anyone had memories or pictures of the Henley Swimming Baths. 

No pictures appeared, but the memories were many. Henleyites recalled swimming lessons, the certificates they gained, the link between the Baths and local schools (including the walk from one to the other). Some remembered Harry Burfoot, the attendant from 1950 to 1974 – ‘a serious character but very fair’ – and the swimming teacher Miss Harris. Harris appears also to have been a general teacher at Holy Trinity School: the ‘best schoolteacher ever’, a ‘great encourager’ who ‘coached us in breastroke, balanced over school chairs’.

Many remarked on water temperature – ‘Mr Burfoot’ chalked it up in Fahrenheit at the entrance each morning. One poster noted having to this day ‘nightmare memories of freezing cold water, and trying to change out of a freezing cold clingy swimming costume’. Another remembered buying hot lemonade from the Baths kiosk after a swimming lesson, and pouring it over their feet to warm their ice cold toes.

Some linked the Baths to their not having learnt to swim. One expressed the trauma of being pushed into the river before having any lessons – which put them off for life. Another commented that, given the chill of the water, ‘being taken there for lessons amounted to cruelty’ (followed by several laughing face emojis). Others were more nostalgic. ‘Spent so much time there during the summer,’ one said, ‘It was always so much fun!’ Another wrote, ‘Spent great times there – happy memories.’ A third simply put, ‘Loved it there.’

There were humorous anecdotes, too: ‘I remember a guy back in the early 70s who we called Tarzan used to dive in off the board and come up with a fish in his mouth... I think he worked as a fishmonger because I don’t recall mackerel being native to the Thames’.

The Town Council struggled to find a new attendant following Burfoot’s retirement. The future was uncertain. Then towards the end of the 1970s the gate William Lee opened in 1934 closed for the final time, the booths and cubicles standing derelict and increasingly overgrown. 

Photo by Martin Cook of the entrance to the Baths shortly before demolition, 1980s. Source: River and Rowing Museum.

In 1979, the riverside plot entered a new phase as the HQ of the Henley Rowing Club. Progress was gradual, with much of the construction being taken on by club members themselves. But after seven years’ work the Boathouse was finally ready, and another opening brought new life to the old home of Solomon’s Hatch and the Henley Swimming Baths.

Henley, meanwhile, never stopped swimming. The Henley Open Water Swimming Club continues to take the plunge and this summer marks the 20th anniversary of the Henley Classic, a wildly popular organised swim following the same course as the Henley Regatta. 

Other organised events include Club to Pub, a 1.5km summer evening swim through the heart of the town. The swim honours history in starting at Henley Rowing Club, site of the old Baths, and finishing at the Angel on the Bridge pub, a swimmers’ favourite for generations. ‘The Angel has the good old riverside flavour of sanded floor and cheerful barmaid,’ wrote a correspondent for the Newcastle Chronicle in 1898, ‘In the early morning you will find the bar requisitioned for rum and milk by bathers fortifying themselves for a swim from Solomon’s Hatch or in the Marsh Lock pool.’

Postcard featuring the 'Swimming Pool' and the Angel pub, 1930s.

Swimmers have also campaigned for the health of the river in recent years. In November 2022, a local group called the Henley Mermaids concluded a long distance fund-raising swim with a protest. They called on Thames Water to end its record of sewage pollution, while treading water among giant toilet rolls and turds.

The Baths’ legacy is upheld, too, in a large, sleek, hull-like construction by the river, facing directly out over the Rowing Club: the River and Rowing Museum. Visit the museum’s Henley Gallery, which explores many aspects of local history, and you can look up at the same entrance sign generations of swimmers passed under on their way to the water.

Henley Baths sign at the River and Rowing Museum, 2023.

On Friday the 28th of June this year, the museum hosted a hustings, with the 4th of July General Election squarely in view.

James Wallace of the NGO River Action UK compéred the show, introducing a panel of high-profile representatives from the worlds of rowing and swimming. Then followed speeches from anti-pollution campaigners and Citizen Scientists from River Action UK and Windrush Against Sewage Pollution. And the evening culminated with Labour, Conservative, Lib Dem and Green candidates for the constituency MP going head to head in a Q&A session. 

Sadly there were no musicians, no mannequins on aqua-cycles. Instead, there was much discussion of permits and discharge monitoring, E. Coli and coliform bacteria, combined sewage systems and the esoteric inner workings of Thames Water and the Environment Agency. The Citizen Scientists’s ability to make sense of all this for the lay-audience was especially impressive. 

But the spirit of the Baths presided in more than just the itinerary. Throughout the evening the question of value, of why pollution matters and how we work together to put words into practice, came up again and again. Jo Robb, candidate for the Greens and a Henley Mermaid, was particularly outspoken about alternative ways of living with rivers that could become mainstream, were we to move on from the profit-driven model of privatised water. 

This vision, as Robb pointed out, is mainstream already in many parts of the world, and was mainstream in Henley and all along the Thames, bathing areas like the Baths being a ‘prominent part of municipal life’ in riverside towns and villages within living memory.

Souvenir notice for the opening of the Henley Swimming Baths. Source: Oxfordshire History Centre.

Now more than ever, in the face of the freshwater emergency, we should remember the opening of the Henley Swimming Baths. River swimming was celebrated ninety years ago as a common good – not tolerated but facilitated by local and national government. Much has changed. And as the old saying goes: you can’t step in the same river twice. But the past still offers insight into what’s possible, not only in confronting how we don’t want the rivers to be, but also in envisioning how we do want them to be – for ourselves and for river ecosystems, and for generations to come.

Thanks for support in writing this post go to the River & Rowing Museum, Oxfordshire History Centre, Charlie Young, and Katie Amos and Craig from Reading Central Library.

A version of this article appeared in the Henley Standard, on the 12th of July 2024 – link here: https://www.henleystandard.co.uk/news/river/190741/best-swimming-baths-on-thames-90-years-ago.html

Further reading:

Bailey, John, ‘William VIII: The Last of the Wings,’ Journal of the Henley-on-Thames Archaeological and Historical Group, March 2013, pp. 2-25.

Davies, Caitlin, Downstream: A History and Celebration of Swimming the River Thames (London: Aurum, 2015).

‘Henley: Social and Political History’, in A History of the County of Oxford: Volume 16, ed. Simon Townley (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2011), pp. 120-159. British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/oxon/vol16/pp120-159 [accessed 19 July 2023].

Wenham, Simon, Hobbs of Henley: A History (Stroud: Amberley Publishing, 2020).

[jminter]

Chor Leoni's PopCappella III Pops the Winter Bubble

Chor Leoni prepares to see off winter with an energetic, entertaining concert - PopCappella III - at St. Andrew’s-Wesley United March 3 at 8pm and March 4 at 5pm and 8pm. Audiences will shake off the winter blues at this top of the charts concert featuring hits by Adele, Kate Bush, BTS, Seal, Avicii, and Simon & Garfunkel. Program highlights include an arrangement of Caribou’s song “Sister” by Canadian composer, Marie-Claire Saindon, and an original work off of Jodi Proznick’s JUNO-nominated album Sun Songs.

PopCappella : Featuring Chor Leoni Members (left to right) Keith Sinclair, Douglas Leung, Paul Larocque, James Emery, Stephen Nestmann Photo: David Cooper “PopCappella III is a show full of fun, energy, and colour that brings artistry and accessibility together in a potent way,” says Artistic Director Erick Lichte. “The songs are perfect vehicles for personal expression from the choir members, and allow individuals of the choir to connect to the audience.” Chor Leoni will be joined by some of Vancouver’s top musicians including JUNO-nominated bassist Jodi Proznick, multi-percussionist Liam MacDonald, pianist Ken Cormier, and guitarist Keith Sinclair. Ken Cormier and Keith Sinclair have also created six brand new arrangements for the choir. "The band, the state-of-the-art sound facilities, and fantastic light show will bring a new shine to familiar favourites," says Lichte. "Of course, audience members will also get to hear the acclaimed a cappella Chor Leoni sound throughout the program." Energetic and optimistic, PopCappella III showcases Chor Leoni’s classic pop, jazz, and choral blend, and will give audiences a lift to carry them through to the beginning of spring. PopCappella III takes place March 3 and 4 at St. Andrew’s-Wesley United, 1022 Nelson Street, Vancouver. Find details and tickets online at chorleoni.org Read the full article

[angrylizardjacket]

Brian May Exclusive Enterview: Queen, Debauchery and Freddie Mercury (May 21, 2017)

Originally from The Times (which you have to pay to read) but found on SpearHead News (who republished the whole thing for free and I love them for it). Not sure if people had seen it much before but Rock Dad Brian May is v sweet, and the spearhead link has images attached. 

Tragedy, debauchery … and dwarves — the guitarist Brian May gives Krissi Murison an access-all-areas account of his life with Freddie Mercury and rock’s most flamboyant band. by The Sunday Times 

Brian May does a great Freddie Mercury impression. He leans forward in his chair, clasps his hands together conspiratorially and channels the high-speed, staccato delivery of the greatest showman of the late 20th century: “ ‘I had an idea … you know Michael Jackson did this album and it’s called Bad?’ Yeah, Fred. ‘Well, the album we’re making, we could call it Good.’ ”

May laughs. “He would always knock you sideways. Sometimes it was great and sometimes it wasn’t.”

The visitors to Freddie’s dressing room started to change from hot chicks to hot men. It didn’t matter to us — why should it?

May, the guitarist in Queen since their 1970 inception, remembers when Mercury finally announced to him that he was gay, “years after it was obvious”. “In the beginning, the band lived on a shoestring. We couldn’t afford individual hotel rooms, so I would share a room with Freddie … There isn’t a lot I don’t know about Freddie and what he got up to in those days — which was not men, I have to tell you. It was fairly obvious when the visitors to Freddie’s dressing room started to change from hot chicks to hot men. It didn’t matter to us, why should it? But Freddie had this habit of saying, ‘Well, I suppose you realise this, that or the other,’ in this very offhand way, and he did say at some point, ‘I suppose you realise I’ve changed in my private life?’

“And years later, he said, ‘I suppose you realise that I’m dealing with this illness.’ Of course, we all knew [he had Aids], but we didn’t want to. He said, ‘You probably gather that I’m dealing with this thing and I don’t want to talk about it and I don’t want our lives to change, but that’s the situation.’ And then he would move on.”

Dredging through old memories has been the subject of May’s latest project: a compilation book of his personal collection of 3D photos from his time striding around the globe during Queen’s heady reign of stadium-rock supremacy. The accompanying words mark the first time any member of Queen has written about their experiences in the band.

It is harrowing to read of Freddie’s final days and the devastating effect the HIV virus took on his body before he died in late 1991. “The problem,” May writes, “was actually his foot, and tragically there was very little left of it. Once, he showed it to us at dinner. And he said, ‘Oh Brian, I’m sorry I’ve upset you by showing you that.’ And I said, ‘I’m not upset, Freddie, except to realise you have to put up with all this terrible pain.’ ”

Equally hard is May’s belief that the “magic cocktail” of drugs that has since stopped Aids becoming a death sentence was discovered just too late to save Freddie.

“He missed by just a few months,” May sighs. “If it had been a bit later he would still have been with us, I’m sure. It’s very …” he breaks off sadly. “Hmmm. You can’t do ‘what if’ can you? You can’t go there because therein lies madness.”

Brian May on his Queen picture book and Freddie Mercury

Honestly, I had expected to meet a sanctimonious old git. May has been dubbed “the world’s grumpiest rock star” thanks to his online blog, Brian’s Soapbox, on which he posts pious rants about politics, the press, badger culls and animal rights. There are flashes of the same hectoring tone in the book. But it must be a mean trick of the typing, because in real life he seems a terribly gentle and pleasant soul.

I meet him in Windlesham, Surrey, in the vast pile where he has his offices. The bookshelves are lined with antique cameras and 19th-century volumes of Punch. In the middle of the room is a female mannequin wearing a sweeping Victorian crinoline skirt — another of May’s esoteric interests.

He wanders in wearing clogs, gardening trousers and a woven red jacket, almost as arresting as his bright grey corkscrew barnet. Under the jacket is a white shirt, unbuttoned dangerously low for someone who turns 70 in July. Bohemian chain pendants clatter against nipple as he leans in to say hello. He is very tall — or maybe that’s just the hair — and frightfully easy-going.

Tea is arranged and he briefly excuses himself. I assume he’s gone to use the facilities or take an urgent phone call. But after 20 minutes I look out the window to see him tottering around the back garden taking pictures of his rhododendron. Has he forgotten me? When he finally returns, it’s with a box containing his treasured collection of “stereoscopic” (3D) cameras and some of the original slides he took.

He shows me one of his favourites: a picture of Freddie and the Queen bassist John Deacon on a private plane in 1977. A blonde woman gazes at Freddie from the seat next to him.

“That’s Mary, his long-term girlfriend.” Despite Mercury’s sexuality, Mary Austin was his longest relationship and the woman he called “the love of my life”. “They were still very close right to the end,” May nods. “He took care of Mary in his will.”

We look at another photo of Freddie having his make-up applied before a show. “You just feel he’s so close there, don’t you?” May smiles. “It’s almost painfully real. He was this strange mixture of flamboyance and shyness,” he says, remembering his first impressions of Mercury. “He had already built this image around himself, which was very confident and colourful. He was a rock star long before he made a record. In the old days they would have called him a dandy. And more recently a metrosexual. He was like a peacock, a person who brought his own fantasy to life.”

Mercury was born Farrokh Bulsara in Zanzibar, east Africa, to Indian Parsi parents in 1946. He had already started calling himself Freddie before his family came to England, fleeing the Zanzibar revolution for Feltham in west London when he was 17. May grew up a few miles away in leafy Hampton, a studious only child who would later quit a PhD in astrophysics at Imperial College London to pursue his rock’n’roll dreams. (He eventually completed it 36 years later in 2007, specialising in zodiacal dust.)

May tells me about the day he met Freddie. The guitarist was already in a university band called Smile. One day Smile’s singer unwittingly brought his colourful, outspoken mate from Ealing Art College to watch a rehearsal. “Freddie was full of enthusiasm, really fired up,” May remembers. “He loved watching us. Then, on the other hand, he was: ‘But you’re doing all of this wrong. Why are you just standing there looking at the floor? Why aren’t you giving a show for people?’ ”

Was he angling for the frontman job himself?

“I think so. He was very complimentary to me. He said, ‘You should be my Jimi Hendrix.’ Freddie loved Hendrix, he followed him everywhere, he was like a disciple.”

A band, Queen, was born with Mercury as singer. I had no idea how revolutionary his crowd interaction was until May explains that most audiences going to watch a rock band in the early 1970s would sit on the floor, nodding. “These days groups encourage audience participation, but Freddie asking people to sing along was almost uncool in those days. It was viewed as something that might happen in cabaret. What we did, if you want to be crass about it, is we amalgamated rock with music hall. That’s why we wrote We Are the Champions, We Will Rock You and Radio Ga Ga — it was consciously allowing the audience to be part of the show.”

Then there were the outfits. May’s book features some beauties: early 1970s Freddie in flowing locks and Zandra Rhodes’s white pleated “winged” capes; gay-icon Freddie, barechested in black leather trousers and black leather biker hat; “Mediterranean prawn” Freddie with his porno moustache, bouffant wig and strappy red leotard.

Wasn’t he scared of getting beaten up?

“No, not really. There were times when we went, Fred, are you really going on in that? I think the maroon sequin shorts were close to the edge as far as we were concerned. But he loved to outrage people. We were very much a people’s band. If people stopped us in the street and got excited, it was generally bricklayers or truck drivers. Freddie had an amazing way of being in contact with everyone, making people feel like their inner selves were going to come out. We liberated a lot of people.”

Mercury the daring peacock, May the soft-spoken brainiac … it is hard not to see them as two polar opposites, but May disagrees. “We were all striding around the world being big-time rock stars, but actually we’re quite fragile inside. It’s probably the reason we’re rock stars, because it’s a big compensation thing, playing a loud guitar or strutting around singing. You do it because you want to feel confident, you want to find yourself and achieve your potential.”

It says much about Mercury’s light-sapping charisma that May spent much of his time in the shadow of the singer while he was alive. And it says much about May’s strategic brilliance that he hasn’t subsequently faded into obscurity, but become the figurehead of a band that is now even more successful than it was during Mercury’s lifetime. According to this year’s Rich List, May is worth £125m, while a recent survey named Queen the favourite band among fiftysomethings.

Next year will finally see the release of a long-awaited Freddie Mercury biopic, with Rami Malek playing the singer, and May and Queen’s drummer, Roger Taylor, on board as music producers. We Will Rock You, a musical based on Queen’s hits, ran at the Dominion Theatre for 12 years from 2002. Since 2012, Queen have toured live with the American Idol finalist Adam Lambert singing Mercury’s lines (heresy in my opinion, but apparently Freddie would have loved him). Nothing, though, can eclipse May’s 2002 moment astride the top of Buckingham Palace, playing a guitar solo of God Save the Queen for the jubilee. The roof was his idea; the organisers had initially envisaged him wandering through the state rooms for the performance, but he thought it lacked impact. Perhaps he is more like Freddie than we will ever know.

Absent from any of the post-Mercury Queen activity is the bassist, John Deacon, now said to be a recluse. “I don’t see him at all, no,” says May. “It’s his choice. He doesn’t contact us. John was quite delicate all along. He could be very outgoing and very funny, but I think some of the stuff that happened in Munich gave him a lot of damage, and I think losing Freddie was very hard for him as well. He found that incredibly hard to process, to the point where actually playing with us made it more difficult.”

Munich was where Queen holed up at the end of the 1970s and early 1980s to write and record. Things got out of hand. May coyly refers to it in the book as a period of heavy drinking in a local bar, “living in a fantasy world of vodka and barmaids”.

Today he is more forthright: “We all lost our minds … we were all in a perilous place where our emotions were out of control. It manifested itself in way too much drinking, a certain amount of drugs, which I didn’t share — but certainly an awful lot of vodka went through my body. We all fell to bits. That’s the moment Freddie wrote It’s a Hard Life. If you look at the video, it’s a metaphor. There’s all this wonderful, fanciful clothing and excess of food, wine and debauchery, but Freddie’s saying ‘It’s a hard life’ as the grapes are thrust into his mouth. The Freddie writing that song was actually in a very painful, emotional place.”

It inevitably also had an impact on the band dynamic. “We overreacted with each other at times. We all left the band at some point. The studio’s a hard place for a band anyway, but in our case all four of us as writers had had worldwide hits — and I think that’s unique, I don’t think there’s another band in history where that’s true. You have four writers trying to create the next statement of what we are, so what could that statement be except a fight between the different visions? The lifestyle we led magnified that conflict.” In Deacon’s case, it culminated in “John disappearing to Bali and seeing God or whatever”.

When it comes to legendary Queen decadence, May’s book does its best to brush over the carnage. So let me be the one to remind you: there was the Madison Square Garden aftershow party at which male guests were served by topless waitresses in stockings and heels and female guests by men in nothing but gym shorts (to avoid accusations of sexism). And the champagne bill for Freddie’s 35th birthday in New York in 1981, which is said to have been £30,000. Most outrageous, though, was a 1978 album-release party in New Orleans, involving “a flock of transvestites, fire-eaters, dancing girls, snake charmers and strippers dressed as nuns”, according to Mark Blake’s well-respected Queen biography. The tales of what happened next range from the lurid (naked mud-wrestling, public fornication) to the unprintable, but perhaps the most famous involves a fleet of dwarves carrying platters of cocaine strapped to their heads. Does May remember seeing them?

“We knew a lot of dwarves,” he concedes. “I’m still very friendly with the dwarf community because my wife, Anita, used to do pantomimes. I don’t want to sound big-headed, but I’m pretty big in the dwarf world. I’ve spent many long nights propping up bars with dwarves.”

Of New Orleans, he says: “We chose to launch the album there because it was completely broad-minded. We knew a lot of people on the ‘edge of society’, as you would have called it then. You wouldn’t call it that now, you’d call it LGBTBF or whatever it is now. To that party came all sorts of pretty outrageous performers of every sex — and there are a lot! It was fun, nothing sinister went on at all. Nobody was abused, nobody was taken advantage of.”

Fat Bottomed Girls — I was proud of that song. The nude photoshoot was fun at the time, but I wouldn’t find it amusing now. Attitudes change

He would rather distance himself from some of Queen’s less politically correct japes. “For instance, Fat Bottomed Girls. I am very proud of that song, but as part of the album packaging we had this nude [female] bicycle race for a photo session and it all seemed quite innocent and fun at the time. Now I wouldn’t think that was amusing. Attitudes have changed to lots of things.”

He was far from the hardest-partying member of Queen. He’s never even tried drugs, having decided while still a student that “I want to get to the end of this and know that everything I felt was real”.

His weakness was always “company”. He bemoans his sensitive and emotionally immature nature, which meant he was endlessly trawling the world for “the perfect bond with the perfect partner … the place where you could dissolve with someone to the point where you don’t know where they start and you end.”

Did he ever find it? “No, it’s impossible. I’ve glimpsed it. Various times, various moments. But it’s a wonderful fiction, really.”

Don’t feel too bad for him. While he was searching, his then-wife, Chrissie Mullen, was stuck at home with their three children.

“It was very different in those days. There were no mobile phones and phone calls were incredibly expensive if you were on the other side of the world. There was this feeling that life on the road was this separate bubble from your life back home. Nowadays you can’t even begin to think that because communication is so good. We lived in a time that was very exciting, but lonely because you were cut off. You were exploring the frontiers of what was around you, but also the frontiers of what was inside you. In the same way as people who went to look for the Northwest Passage in the 1950s. It felt a bit like you were an explorer in another universe.”

As justifications for adultery go, I suppose it’s a pretty classy one.

He met his second wife, Anita Dobson — aka Angie, the original Queen Vic landlady from EastEnders — in 1986 at a film premiere, while he was still married to Mullen. He and Dobson wed in 2000. There was much amusement in the early days about them both having the same huge poodle perms — though May’s is the real deal and Dobson has been platinum and straight for some time now. In his book’s acknowledgments, he thanks her for managing to live with “possibly the most infuriating man in Britain for 30 years”.

“I know I’m not easy,” he says. “I’m constantly obsessed with one thing or another — astronomy, stereoscopy, music, saving animals … Living with someone like that is appallingly difficult, so I think she deserves a medal. I’m not going to tell you she’s easy, either. She’s an artist and a fearsomely creative person, so our life has always been turbulent, but I suppose that’s what’s kept us young.”

He has previously spoken about the depression he suffered from in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as he dealt with the fallout from his first marriage breaking down and the deaths of both his father and Mercury. Last year he cancelled a tour due to a mystery “persistent illness”. And on Christmas Day he published an alarming blog on Brian’s Soapbox. “I’ve been going through some radical and painful changes in my life … if you had seen me a few weeks ago, you would’ve wondered if I was going to make it to Christmas,” he wrote, before publishing a “tool kit” of apps, a book and a prayer to help others struggling to cope “physically or mentally or spiritually”.

“I went through a very bad period before Christmas and cancelled everything, not just the tour, everything,” he explains. “I just knew I couldn’t handle it.”

Would he call it depression?

“Strangely enough I prefer not to call it depression now. I’ve recently got very much into the body and mind. All my life I’ve been pathetic at doing exercises. I now have a regime — every morning I do 40 minutes’ exercise, then I finish with meditation. It’s really enabled me to recentre. I feel like I’m in a much better place.”

He is an advocate of mindful meditation — a way of living in the present that he believes Mercury used in the final days of his illness. May is happy to speak openly about his own mental health. “I noticed Prince Harry opened up in a similar way. I’ve always thought it’s nice to be open and I get reinforced in that because I get tons of mail saying the fact that you talked about it has helped me feel like I wasn’t alone and wasn’t a freak. I don’t think all this taboo business is helpful at all.”

I wonder if it might be a better use of his platform than his zealous activism on behalf of badgers, which seems a rather niche concern. In brief, then: he is a fierce campaigner against the policy of culling badgers to try to eradicate bovine TB. It is his scientific belief that the cull isn’t working. But it is muddled by his more deep-seated conviction: “Martin Luther King said we hold it self-evident that every man is born equal. I hold it self-evident that every creature is born equal.”

He can point to numerous childhood traumas that led him to this conclusion: watching his mother pour boiling water over an invasion of ants on the path outside his house; squirting a bumblebee with the pesticide DDT, then recoiling in shame as it dropped to the ground, buzzing to its slow and agonising death. If he hasn’t yet had therapy for the latter, he really should.

The animal fanaticism is odd, because on everything else he seems so calmly rational. Perhaps he learnt some of that composure from Freddie. Despite his pain, Freddie was determined to keep working during the band’s final days together in a recording studio in Montreux.

“What we did was get on with business as usual, which is what Freddie wanted,” May remembers. “He said, ‘I don’t want anything to change. We just do what we always do and we love what we do, so it’s going to be fine.’ Certainly those days towards the end were fabulous, full of laughter and joy, Freddie as wicked as ever. He was incredibly matter-of-fact about everything. ‘Oh darling, I’ll just get on with it.’ There wasn’t any self-pity at all. He wanted a ballad, so I very quickly sketched something in the studio and Freddie liked it. He said, ‘Gimme some words’. It was a question of scribbling a few lines and he’d chuck a couple of vodkas down — because he could hardly stand at that point — ‘Oh darling, I’ll do it now.’ Then he’d prop himself up on the desk and sing the lines. We didn’t quite get to the end. I gave him the last verse and he said, ‘Oh darling, I’m not feeling too good now, so I’ll come back to it. In a couple of days I’ll be fine, we’ll do it then.’ And he never did.”

May finished the song after Mercury’s death. It’s called Mother Love, “an attempt from the two of us to look at life and sum it up, to reconcile the end with the beginning, although we wouldn’t have put it that way.”

What does he think Freddie would be doing now if he were still alive? “I don’t think he’d have the patience for social media, because I hardly do and he was much more impatient than me. I don’t think he would be tweeting, he would probably be still writing his little memos on pieces of paper. He was becoming more and more reclusive towards the end of his life. That was partly because he was becoming more and more visible, but partly not wanting his illness to be public. But he was very private anyway and I think that would have continued.”

He is adamant Mercury would still be creating music. “His creativity would have carried on. He was unstoppable and very lateral-thinking. Always coming up with things that were surprising. Often Roger and I, if we’re creating something for Queen, both of us have said that we feel like he’s in the room and you know what he’d say. You can tell if he would have been scornful or enthusiastic — although of course the whole thing about Freddie was that he wasn’t expected.”

We have touched upon May’s depression, infidelity, the painful death of one of his closest friends and the painful death of a bee. Yet there is one subject so sensitive, I have avoided raising it until the very end. His hair. He hates talking about it, but he must on some level like the attention it brings, otherwise why doesn’t he just cut it off?

“I’m comfortable with it,” he says. “It’s completely real. For a time when it was going grey I got very worried that I had to keep it a certain way or I wouldn’t be me any more. Anita encouraged me not to worry about it.”

Would he ever cut it off?

“If it would achieve world peace, I’d do it tomorrow. If it would stop the badger cull, I’d probably do it tomorrow. Because the badger cull is a worthless, senseless operation, it’s not working and sooner or later our government has to realise …”

The images in May’s new book are not just any photos, but 3D pictures, taken on one of the Queen guitarist’s prized “stereoscopic” cameras.

Alongside music, astronomy and badgers, May is deliriously passionate about 3D photography. He first became hooked, aged 12, when Weetabix gave away free stereoscopic picture cards. He petitioned his parents to send off 1s 6d for the photo viewer so he could see them properly in 3D. “It’s probably about £2.50 by today’s money. But we were poor in those days — £2.50 was a lot of heating and lighting.”

“Stereoscopic” photography was originally a Victorian phenomenon and May’s book is published through the London Stereoscopic Company, a 19th-century business he brought back to life in 2008. He has also designed and prototyped his own stereoscopic photo viewer, the Owl, to see the images in their full, 3D majesty; it comes with the book. “It’s just magic to me,” he says, “when you see a picture of Freddie in the viewer and he springs to life.”

[brn1029]

Get those tin foil hats ready to go!

The 10 greatest conspiracy theories in rock

By Emma Johnston

In a world where fake news runs rampant, rock'n'roll is not immune to the lure of the conspiracy theory. These are 10 of the most ludicrous

Conspiracy theories, myths and legends have existed in rock’n’roll for as long as the music has existed, stretching all the way back to bluesman Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil at the crossroads in exchange for superhuman guitar skills, fame and fortune.

There are those who believe Elvis Presley and Jim Morrison live on, others who think the Illuminati control the world through symbolism in popular culture, and plenty of evangelical types with their own agendas trawling rock and metal songs for secret messages luring the innocent to the dark side.

Let us take a look, then, at rock’n’roll conspiracy theories ranging from the intriguing to the ludicrous, as we try to separate the truth from the codswallop.

Lemmy was in league with the Illuminati

Few men have ever been earthier than Lemmy, but one conspiracy theorist claims that the Motorhead legend didn’t really die in December 2015, instead “ascending into the heavenly realm” after making a “blood sacrifice pact” with the Illuminati.

A “watcher” of the mythical secret society some believe are running the world – despite evidence that is at best flimsy, at worst straight from The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown’s discarded notebooks – told the Daily Star: “Lemmy signed up for the ultimate pact – he signed his soul to the devil in order to achieve fame and fortune.”

While we can only imagine what the great man would have to say on the matter, there’s one word, in husky, JD-soaked tones, that we can just about make out coming across from the other side: “Bollocks.”

Paul McCartney died in 1966

As you might expect from the most famous band that has ever existed, there are enough crackpot theories about The Beatles to fill the Albert Hall. From John Lennon’s murder being ordered by the US government, who, led by Richard Nixon, suspected him of communism (the FBI actually did have a file on Lennon, but the story is spiced up by the man behind murderlennontruth.com, who apparently believes author Steven King was involved due to, uh, looking a bit like Mark Chapman) to Canadian prog outfit Klaatu being the Fab Four in disguise, there are plenty of tall tales more colourful than a Ringo B-side.

The most enduring, though, is the notion dreamt up by some US radio DJs that Paul McCartney died in a car crash in 1966 and was replaced by a lookalike. They came to this conclusion having studied the cover of Abbey Road – McCartney’s bare feet on the zebra crossing apparently symbolising death, while others found “evidence” in the album’s opaque lyrics. There were a lot of drugs in the 60s.

Gene Simmons has a cow’s tongue

It’s easy to see why all kinds of far-fetched stories sprung up when Kiss first took off in the 1970s. The fake-blood-spitting, the fire, the demon-superhero personas – middle America clutched its pearls and word spread that these otherworldly weirdos’ moniker stood for Knights In Satan’s Service. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t.

It was Gene Simmons’ preposterous mouth that got the nation’s less voluminous tongues wagging though. So long and pointy is his appendage, and so often waggled at his audiences (whether they asked for it or not), that eventually the rumour spread around the world’s playgrounds was that he’d had a cow’s tongue grafted onto his own. The bovine baloney is, of course, bullshit, but Simmons has admitted it's one of his favourite Kiss urban myths.

Supertramp predicted 9/11

The Logical Song may be Supertramp’s calling card, but one man in the US stretches common sense to the limit having come to the conclusion that the artwork for their 1979 album Breakfast In America gave prior warning of the terrorist attacks on New York on September 11, 2001.

Look at the album cover – painted from the perspective of a window on a flight into the city – in a mirror, and the ‘u’ and ‘p’ band’s name appears to become a 911 floating above the twin towers, while a logo on the back features a plane flying towards the World Trade Center.

So far, so coincidental, but when our intrepid investigator falls down a rabbit hole of Masonic interference, strained Old Testament connections (“The Great Whore of Babylon – Super Tramp”), and the title Breakfast In America reflecting the fact that the planes crashed early in the morning, things get really tenuous.

It’s fair to say it’s unlikely a British prog-pop band had prior knowledge of the terrorist attacks 22 years before they happened. But maybe Al Qaida were really big fans.

Stevie Wonder can see

Stevie Wonder is a genius. That fact is not up for dispute. The soul/jazz/funk/rock/pop legend was born six weeks prematurely in 1950, and the oxygen used in the hospital incubator to stabilise him caused him to go blind shortly afterwards. But his love of front-row seats at basketball games, the evocative imagery in his songs, and the fact that he once effortlessly caught a falling mic stand knocked over by Paul McCartney (who, let us reiterate, did not die in 1966) has caused basement Jessica Fletchers to muse that he’s faking his blindness as part of the act.

Wonder himself, a known prankster, has great fun with his status as one of the world’s most famous vision-impaired musicians. In 1973, he told Rolling Stone: “I’ve flown a plane before. A Cessna or something, from Chicago to New York. Scared the hell out of everybody.”

Dave Grohl invented Andrew W.K.

When Andrew W.K. first broke through in the early 2000s, dressed in white and covered in blood, his mission was serious in its simplicity: the party is everything. He took his message of having a good time, all the time, to levels of political fervour. But rumours of his authenticity have been doing the rounds from the start.

Reviewing WK’s first UK show at The Garage in London, The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis wrote: “One music-biz conspiracy theory currently circulating suggests that Andrew W.K. is an elaborate hoax devised by former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl.”

As time went on, the theory gained traction – Grohl was believed to be the mysterious Steev Mike credited on the debut album I Get Wet. And as W.K.’s style changed over subsequent records, and his own admission that there were legal arguments over who owns his name, whispers began that he wasn’t even a real person – he was a character, played by several different actors, an attempt to create the ultimate Frankenstein’s frontman.

"I'm not the same guy that you may have seen from the I Get Wet album," W.K. said in 2008. “I don't just mean that in a philosophical or conceptual way, it's not the same person at all. Do I look the same as that person?" The jury is out, but if this is a great white elephant concocted just for the sheer hell of it, we kind of want this one to be true.

Jimi Hendrix was murdered by his manager

An early victim of the 27 club, the death of Jimi Hendrix was depressingly cliched for a man so wildly creative: a bellyful of barbiturates led to him asphyxiating on his own vomit, according to the post-mortem. But in the years following the grim discovery at the Samarkand Hotel in London on 19 September 1970, a different theory was offered by the guitarist’s former roadie, James “Tappy” Wright.

In his book Rock Roadie, Wright claims Hendrix was murdered by his manager, Michael Jeffery, who he says force-fed his charge red wine and pills. The motive? He feared he was about to be fired and was keen to cash in on the star’s life insurance. One thing we do know for certain is Jeffery won’t be able to give his version of events, as he was killed in a plane crash over France in 1973.

The 50th anniversary of Hendrix's tragic passing was "celebrated" with the release of Hendrix and the Spook, a documentary that "explored" his death further and was described by The Guardian as "a cheaply made mix of interviews and dumbshow dramatic recreations by actors scuttling about flimsy sets in gloomy lighting." Sounds good.

Courtney killed Kurt

Courtney Love is no stranger to demonisation from Nirvana fans. When Hole’s second album, the searing, catchy, feminist, witty, aggressive, vulnerable and unflinchingly honest Live Through This was released, days after Kurt Cobain’s death, rumours almost immediately started up that Love’s late husband wrote the songs. That was insulting and sexist enough, but nowhere near as damaging as the conspiracy theory that Love hired a hitman to kill Cobain amid rumours they were about to divorce.

After Cobain’s first attempt to take his own life in Rome, the Nirvana frontman was eventually convinced to go to rehab following an intervention by his wife and friends. He ran away from the facility, and the private investigator hired by Love to find him, Tom Grant, eventually became the source of the idea that Love and the couple’s live-in nanny Michael Dewitt were responsible for Cobain’s death shortly afterwards.

His claims, made in the Soaked In Bleach documentary, include the notion that Cobain had too much heroin in his system to pull the trigger of the shotgun, and that he believed the suicide note was forged.

People close to Cobain (and the Seattle Police Department) have refuted the theory, including Nirvana manager Danny Goldberg: “It’s ridiculous. He killed himself. I saw him the week beforehand, he was depressed. He tried to kill himself six weeks earlier, he’d talked and written about suicide a lot, he was on drugs, he got a gun. Why do people speculate about it? The tragedy of the loss is so great people look for other explanations. I don’t think there’s any truth at all to it."

The CIA wrote The Scorpions’ biggest hit

Previously synonymous with leather, hard rock anthems and some very questionable album artwork, West Germany’s Scorpions scored big with Wind Of Change, a power ballad heralding the oncoming fall of the USSR, the end of the Cold War, and a new sense of hope in the Eastern Bloc.

In a podcast named after the 1990 song, though, Orwell Prize-winning US journalist Patrick Radden Keefe follows rumours from within the intelligence community that the song was actually written by the CIA, as propaganda to hasten the fall of the ailing Soviet Union via popular culture.

“Soviet officials had long been nervous over the free expression that rock stood for, and how it might affect the Soviet youth,” Keefe is quoted as saying. “The CIA saw rock music as a cultural weapon in the cold war. Wind of Change was released a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and became this anthem for the end of communism and reunification of Germany. It had this soft-power message that the intelligence service wanted to promote.”

It's a convincing theory, but one that is disputed by Scorpions frontman Klaus Meine: “I thought it was very amusing and I just cracked up laughing. It’s a very entertaining and really crazy story but like I said, it’s not true at all. Like you American guys would say, it’s fake news."

There are satanic messages in Stairway To Heaven

The great comedian Bill Hicks had something to say about people searching for evidence of devilry in rock’n’roll: “Remember this shit, if you play certain rock albums backwards there'd be satanic messages? Let me tell you something, if you're sitting round your house playing your albums backwards, you are Satan. You needn't look any further. And don't go ruining my stereo to prove a point either.”

The memo didn’t get through to televangelist and stylus ruiner Paul Crouch, who in 1982 attempted to scare the Christian right into believing Led Zeppelin’s Stairway To Heaven was stuffed with demonic meaning, and that played backwards it revealed the following message: “Here’s to my sweet Satan/The one whose little path would make me sad, whose power is Satan/He will give those with him 666/There was a little toolshed where he made us suffer, sad Satan.”

Guitarist Jimmy Page, of course, is no stranger to the esoteric, making no secret of his interest in occultist Aleister Crowley and the attendant magick, and there were even rumours the band made a Faustian pact to achieve fame and fortune. But hiding messa

[grimelords]

Hello I finished my July playlist a week ago but when I went to post it tumblr was down, and then I just plumb forgot! Anyway, here it is - properly sequenced this time for a very special listening experience that seamlessly delivers you from disco heaven to black metal hell and everything in between. Also I’m thinking of making these playlists a tinyletter that people can subscribe to that comes out on an actual schedule, rather than me posting them at a random time weeks after they’re finished. Is that something you’d be interested in? Who knows. Check back next month! Anyway, here goes:

listen here

Stay Away From Me - The Sylvers: You know when you’re listening to a song and the sample is super hot but the rest is just ok, so you think to yourself well why don’t I just listen to the original instead? That’s what happened to me with Final Form by Sampa The Great. That song is good but it’s also kind of not doing enough to convince me not to just listen to this super hit by The Sylvers instead. A fun thing with this song is to try to count how many instruments you can hear because it is surprisingly densely arranged for some reason. There’s a xylophone back there going off if you listen.

Sizzlin’ Hot - Paradise: The same thing happened with this song and Sizzlin’ by Daphni. I think they were going for an Armand Van Helden style distillation of the pure essence of the song, sampling the hookiest part and speeding it up and thickening up all the percussion and all that, which can work amazingly but for me it just made me want to hear the original and so I have been all month. What’s so good about being alive now is that in most cases it’s just as easy to access music from 2019 as it is to access music from 1981 where an original copy is apparently going for $1000 on discogs. Every day I thank god for inventing mp3s and putting them on the ark.

Manaos (Canzone) - Fabio Frizzi and Crossbow: I forget how I came across this, I was going through random Fabio Frizzi soundtracks for some reason. I just love the concept of a disco song about escaping from vicious assailants. Funkily singing ‘God help us, if they catch us we all are gonna die.’ as spears fly past you.

Holding On - Julio Bashmore: I think this is one of my favourite pieces of sampling ever. The way the vocals in the background are cut they don’t even sound like vocals. They just a strange contextless textural sound that works so well before eventually revealing itself as vocals in the run before the drop. It’s just so good.

Weight Watchers - Parallel Dance Ensemble: First of all I love this disgusting bass sound. It sounds like two different indistinct bass lines playing at the same time and they both drowned. I’m also mounting a change.org petition to bring back this kind of extremely naff Tone Loc flow, it rocks.

Dance - ESG: I found this incredible band while I was looking for the rapper ESG and I’m so glad I did. Their song UFO is one of those songs that’s been sampled so many times you think of it as more of a sound effect than a song, like it comes preloaded on a drum machine everyone has or something, but it’s also a good template for ESG’s sound. Every ESG song I’ve heard so far goes like this: a straightforward beat that doesn’t change for the whole song, a functional bassline that doesn’t change for the whole song, and good old fashioned simple lyrics about dancing and having a good time that sound more like schoolyard clapping games than anything. It doesn’t sound like much but over the course of an album it adds up to this incredible sort of hypnotic post-punk funk that I cannot get enough of. It sounds like kids who have 1 idea making a whole album out of it because that’s exactly what it is and it’s great!

Crave You - Flight Facilities: I love how elementally simple this song is. The vocals are hypnotising enough so everything else just quietly supports it. The only part that stands out is the thick bass synth halfway through which makes the short sax solo at the and all the sweeter, a tiny little cherry on top.

You - Delta 5: Get a load of this band bio: “Initially inspired by the success of local heroes The Mekons and Gang Of Four, Leeds, England’s Delta 5 later emerged as one of the key figures of the feminist new wave. Formed in 1979 by vocalist/guitarist Julz Sale, fretless bassist Ros Allen and bassist Bethan Peters.” Just going to gloss over them having TWO bass players before they even have a drummer?? Absolutely amazing. I love this song because it’s such a specific, targeted fury. Imagine being the loser at your girlfriend’s gig when she launched into this one for the first time. ‘who’s got homebrew with lots of sediment?’ oh fuck that’s me ‘who took me to the Windham for a big night out?’ oh fuck that’s me ‘I found out about you’ oh FUCK

Siren - Gong Gong Gong: I love the way the bass works in this, just looping and layering different variations of this noisy, stationary riff on top of itself - steadfastly staying in the exact same place the whole song and growing in power the whole time as it sits in its stubbornness.

Changes - Antonio Williams and Kerry McCoy: This came up on my Discover Weekly and I completely fell in love with it, then I realised it’s Antwan and Kerry McCoy from Deafheaven which is extremely intriguing collaboration and fell in love even more. The vocals are so good. The pure broken-hearted anguish, and the super blunt delivery that progresses to straight up yelling by the end of it combined with the Radio Dept type instrumentation is just so powerful. This feels like it’s a song that could really be a life-changing piece of catharsis for everyone in a 5k radius done live.

Fuck A War - Geto Boys: Absolutely in love with the conceit of this song: rapping a whole song down the line to the army drafter. The incredible part being of course that Bushwick Bill would be able to dodge any draft easily, being as he was both a dwarf and blind in one eye.

God Make Me Funky - The Headhunters: I found a lot of great songs going through the samples list for We Can’t Be Stopped by Geto Boys and this is one of them. I have so much love for any song that takes its time like this: nearly two minutes to set the scene and somehow taking deadly seriously the very funny lyrical idea of desperately praying to god to PLEASE make you funky.  The way this song escalates is also amazing, moving from a hot groove that sits in place to a full-on saxophone meltdown that feels like god placing his finger on your forehead and saying ‘so you want to be funky, do you?’ in a scary voice.

Use Me - Bill Withers: Fortunately and unfortunately, because of how this song was in Anchorman and because I’ve seen Anchorman one million times I can’t listen to it without hearing the noise Ron Burgundy makes when he sees Veronica in the first few seconds. Anyway, this song is so horny. The part where he has to explain to his bro how good this shit is? Doing all kinds of weird dom shit like ‘getting him in a crowd of high class people and then acting real rude to him?’ Weird. And the escalation into the claps at BABY! is amazing, he’s just going off powered by horniness and god bless him for it.

America! I’m For The Birds - Nicolas Jaar: Unbelievably, the deluxe edition of Sirens is possibly superior to the original. It’s a whole new tracklist, new songs interspersed throughout rather than the usual ‘three new songs at the end’ and it really gives it a whole new feel. This song is my favourite of the new ones and it’s a song I had in my head for a solid week. A perfect song to sing to yourself because the lyrics are so indistinct that you just end up mumbling pleasantly exactly like he is.

Cable Guy - Tierra Whack: I’m finally catching up on Tierra Whack and everyone’s right: she rocks. The sheer restraint in these songs is amazing, they just get in and out with only the good parts and no bullshit. It reminds me a lot of To The Innocent by Thingy which is one of my favourite albums for the same reason - the economy of the songwriting just serves to amplify the feeling of it. They both have this total irreverence in the lyricism where the songs are kind of about nothing but they’re so short and heartfelt that you dig for the feeling underneath it.

No Drug Like Me - Carly Rae Jepsen: I’ve previously written that what I love the most about the Carly Rae Jepsen is how horny it is and I’d like to double down on that sentiment here. I love how slow this song is, it’s the perfect tempo between danceable and ‘fucking’.

Con Calma (Remix) - Daddy Yankee, Katy Perry and Snow: I’ve been on a european holiday for most of this month and I would like to report that across Spain, Portugal, Czech Republic, France and Germany this is the absolute song of the summer. It is completely inescapable and personally I can’t get enough. Informer is one of the greatest and strangest one hit wonders of all time (it’s also canada’s highest selling reggae song of all time and Snow is thusly named because he’s white) and I’m psyched to hear it reworked by Daddy Yankee like this. Katy Perry being on the crossover attempt remix isn’t a good sign for her new album but she kills it so maybe that’s all that matters.

Chase The Devil - Max Romeo and The Upsetters: Here’s the other half of my short lived dub phase from the end of last month. This is a good example also of how completely beguiling lyrics can still be so effective. I have no idea what he means by putting on an iron shirt but it rhymes and he’s saying it with conviction so I’m nodding!

Glass - Bat For Lashes: The new Bat For Lashes songs have got me revisiting Two Suns which is an all time great five star album and this is my favourite song from it. Maybe the most powerful opening track of all time, it does as much worldbuilding as most fantasy novels do in 1000 pages. In fact almost every line in this is a viable fantasy novel title. A Thousand Crystal Towers. The Hand Of The Watchmen. A Knight In Crystal Armour. A Cape Of Rainbow. The way she sings ‘to be made of glass’ is.. incredible. I love Natasha Khan and I cannot wait to see what she does next.

Unsquare Dance - Paddy Milner: In searching spotify for other interpretations of Unsquare Dance after getting obsessed with it last month I came across this absolutely bonkers version. It’s maniacal, it feels like you would be physically and mentally drained by the end playing it because I am just listening to it. Need a little lie down.

Gimme Some Skin, My Friend - The Andrews Sisters: My girlfriend has turned me onto The Andrews Sisters lesser known hits recently and this is the best one: a song from when high fives were a novelty that those wacky blacks over in Harlem town were inventing. Extremely odd but an undeniable banger. The thing about The Andrews Sisters is one of them was an absolute force of nature as a performer and the other two were complete wet blankets and it’s kind of funny they were together as a group for their whole career because anyone with eyes can see where the real star is. The way she sings ‘baby’ at 1:25, and that whole run really, is absolutely amazing and so much better than this extremely dumb song deserves.

Kids On The Run - The Tallest Man On Earth: The piano sound alone in this is just so beautiful. This song could be about anything at all and it would still make me cry, and luckily for me: it basically is!

King Of Spain - The Tallest Man On Earth: Good song I had in my head the whole time I was in Spain. It’s incredible that his voice is so good. It feels like if it was even the tiniest bit different, slightly rougher or tinnier he would be completely hilariously unlistenable but instead he’s amazing. Plus the fact that he leans into it with the purposefully lo-fi trebly production is just so confident you can’t help but love it.

Romeo And Juliet - The Indigo Girls: A great cover I wasn’t aware of before that I heard in this great documentary Wildwood I was watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOWxnh012J0. The way she absolutely flies off the handle and nearly tears the song down around her near the last chorus is pure power and I love people who can do that in an acoustic song without it feeling overblown, just getting totally swept up in it and taking everyone along with you.

On The Bus Mall - The Decemberists: Definitely the number one song about gay teenage prostitutes who love each other and are optimistic against the odds.  

White Fire - Angel Olsen: This song feels like a piece of dark magic. It feels like a 4am moment of clarity, speaking everything true in a five minute monotone and then instantly falling back to sleep with only a dim memory in the morning.  

Glass Eyes -JW Ridley: JW Ridley is a genius and I cannot wait to see what he does with an album. Every song he puts out seems to be better than his last. The central melody in this is just beautiful, and the whole thing has so much space in it it feels so much longer than 3 minutes. It’s like a song you can live in.

Nullarbor - Floodlights: I love how rough this song is, and driving across australia because you’ve got nothing else going on and want to rattle your own cage is a Huge mood.

Made Too Pretty (Audiotree Live Version) - As Cities Burn: I’m so glad As Cities Burn are back, because it means they get to do good shit like this Audiotree session where they absolutely killed it.

Dirty Hearts - Dallas Crane: I think I’ve put this on a playlist before for exactly the same reason: it’s a song I wake up with in my head fairly often for some reason and it’s a very fun slice of pub rock that doesn’t overstay it’s welcome.

Ruin This Smile - The Number 12 Looks Like You: Did you know The Number 12 Looks Like You have reformed after 10 years away and haven’t missed a step at all?? I’m salivating. This song is as good as anything they’ve put out before, and feels like it fits somewhere between Mongrel and Worse Than Alone which is fantastic news for me who always loved those a lot more than their earlier more explicitly grindcore stuff.

Nutrient Painting - Yellow Eyes: A special thanks to my friend and yours Powerburial for linking this song on his twitter. There’s something about the guitars in this song, in almost every riff, where it sounds like they’re playing backwards somehow. Like the structure of the melodies is backwards. It doesn’t make sense but that’s what it sounds like to me and it’s very disconcerting.

Jejune Stars - Bright Eyes: I think this an underrated Conor Oberst era, when he became a sort of buddhist for a while and wasn’t sad anymore but just observed earth from outer space instead. I also love the instrumentation of this song, Bright Eyes and blast beats a match made in heaven. Also the strange sample about pom’granite at the end is one of my favourite things ever. A very strange album to retire the Bright Eyes name on but a very good one too.

At The Bar - Dirty Three: When I was overseas I was thinking about cultural music, and Australia’s place in the world and things like that. I ended up thinking about Dirty Three who I think along with The Drones make the most distinctly Australian sounding music to me. Just the vastness they manage to conjure from such straightforward barebones instrumentation is incredible.

listen here

[rockandrollstorytime]

Rock and Roll Storytime #8: The Rolling Stones at Altamont (AKA One of the Worst Concert Disasters of All Time)

The year 1969 had been a hectic one, both for the world in general (with the continuing Vietnam War, the Chappaquiddick incident, and the moon landings) and especially for rock and roll (with the death of Brian Jones, Woodstock, and the Beatles starting to head full-steam down the road that led them to their break-up in April 1970). Capping off this year full of highs and lows, there was Altamont, which has been labelled by many as the death of the 60′s. At the very least, it certainly brought a premature end to the idealism that the youths of that generation held dear.

Lord knows, I will always say that Brian Jones should have had a chance to get back on his feet and I’m super salty that he’s dead, but honestly, I’m glad he missed out on this one. 

Before I tell the story of Altamont though, I must ask… Whose bright idea was it to hire the Hell’s Angels as security for a Rolling Stones concert and pay them with $500 of beer?

Well, to answer that question, I’m going to have to begin this story with the ending of another. Truly, the roots of this ill-thought-out decision lies within events that had happened that summer. 

I’ve mentioned Brian Jones already, but to give those of you who are new to this the rundown, Lewis Brian Hopkin Jones was the Stones’ first guitarist, and at the start, he was the brains of the band. Seven years, a bunch of internal conflict with Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Andrew Loog Oldham, a messy relationship with Anita Pallenberg, drug abuse and alcoholism, two drug trials, and a fuck-ton of stress later, Brian was in a state we’d call “mental exhaustion” (didn’t help that his physical health was shit too). Where in 1966 he was contributing some of the best parts of the Stones’ early music, such as the sitar on “Paint It Black”, in 1969, he’d rarely show up to the studio, and if he did, he would usually be too intoxicated to properly contribute. In fact, on Let It Bleed, he only contributed to two songs: “Midnight Rambler” (congas) and “You’ve Got the Silver” (autoharp).

In June 1969, the Stones decided they wanted to go on tour again, but then, they found out that due to the fact that Brian had twice been convicted of drug possession, it’d be unlikely that he could receive a visa to perform in the U.S.A., if at all. Ultimately, Mick and Keith decided that their best option would be to fire Brian, and so, on June 8, 1969, they went down to Brian’s home, Cotchford Farm, to tell him that he would no longer be with the group. According to those present, Brian had been expecting this, and in the various press releases, it was made to appear as if Brian had left the band on his own terms. His statement read, in part, “I no longer see eye to eye with the others over the discs we are cutting. We no longer communicate musically. The Stones’ music is not to my taste any more. The work of Mick and Keith has progressed at a tangent, at least to my way of thinking. I have a desire to play my own brand of music rather than that of others, no matter how much I appreciate their musical concepts.”

At this point in time, whether Brian was accepting of this turn of events or not is up to conjecture. 

In either case, the Stones brought in 20-year-old Mick Taylor (previously of John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers) to replace Brian, and at a press conference on June 13, the Stones announced that they would be holding a free concert on July 5 in order to properly introduce their new guitarist. 

And then, just three days before the concert was set to take place, Brian drowned in his backyard swimming pool, being just twenty-seven years old. Although the coroner ruled it death by misadventure (which personal research seems to support), theories have long persisted that Brian was, in fact, murdered, but that is, of course, a story for another day. 

The Stones in the Park concert quickly became a tribute to Brian Jones, and at the start, Mick read two verses of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Adonais, and as the band launched into “I’m Yours and I’m Hers” by Johnny Winters (one of Brian’s favourite songs), thousands of butterflies were released, though this was against park stipulation, as they were voracious Cabbage White butterflies, and many had died due to the boxes not being properly ventilated. 

What’s important to this story about the concert at Hyde Park is that the London chapter of the Hell’s Angels was there providing security that day. It is also important to note that the Grateful Dead (who, incidentally, also had a member of the 27 Club in their line-up) had also hired the Hell’s Angels as security numerous times. 

Several months later, the Stones had been having a pretty good run with their American tour, which was able to slightly mitigate some of the shady business practices Allen Klein had subjected them to, but throughout, fans and journalists kept complaining about high ticket prices. If you ask me though, those bitches were lucky. I’d rather be paying three to eight dollars (equivalent to $21.21 to $56.57 in 2019) as opposed to a minimum of $159 that tickets to a Rolling Stones concert now sell for. Not to mention, Woodstock had happened in August that year, and that was a big success, so in Mick Jagger’s 26-year-old, immature, unwise brain, that obviously meant that they should have another free concert like the one at Hyde Park. Really, in his mind, the peace and love movement was only just beginning, so what could go wrong?

As Murphy’s Law will tell you, “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong” 

Oh, and go wrong it did. 

The first major problem was that they couldn’t get a venue. 

The concert was set for December 6, and their tour manager, Sam Cutler, struggled to get them a venue. He tried San Jose’s State University, but there had been a three-day festival recently, and the city wasn’t exactly in the mood for another batch of hippies storming the city so soon afterward, so that was out of bounds. He then tried gunning for San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, but there was a football game between the Chicago Bears and the San Francisco 49-ers taking place in the same general location, which made use of the venue impractical. He then tried getting Sears Point Raceway on board, but disputes quickly arose over filming distribution rights and an up-front fee of $300,000.

Finally, just two days before the concert was set to take place, the Stones’ management managed to get a hold of Altamont Speedway (it helped that the owner, Dick Carter, apparently offered the venue for free). 

As you can imagine, there was a whole shit-ton of problems that arose from that, and Rolling Stone magazine, in its piece on the tragedy, listed the following logistical problems: 

“1) Promise a free concert by a popular rock group which rarely appears in this country. Announce the site only four days in advance.

2) Change the location 20 hours before the concert.

3) The new concert site should be as close as possible to a giant freeway.

4) Make sure the grounds are barren, treeless, desolate.

5) Don’t warn neighboring landowners that hundreds of thousands of people are expected. Be unaware of their out-front hostility toward long hair and rock music.

6) Provide one-sixtieth the required toilet facilities to insure that people will use nearby fields, the sides of cars, etc.

7) The stage should be located in an area likely to be completely surrounded by people and their vehicles.

8) Build the stage low enough to be easily hurdled. Don’t secure a clear area between stage and audience.

9) Provide an unreliable barely audible low fidelity sound system.

10) Ask the Hell’s Angels to act as ‘security’ guards.”

Most sane people would have quit while they were ahead, but this is the Rolling Stones we’re talking about. Between Brian Jones having five kids by the age of twenty-three, Mick Jagger allegedly sleeping with over 4,000 women (and don’t get me started on him and David Bowie), Keith Richards’ drug habits and his snorting his dad’s ashes, Bill Wyman dating a teenager while he was in his forties, and Charlie Watts punching Mick Jagger in the face, we are absolutely not dealing with the most sane bunch of individuals on the planet. 

And let’s not forget that some idiot decided it’d be a great idea to pay the Hell’s Angels in $500 of beer (the equivalent of $3,535.43 in 2019).

Yeah, if you listened closely to the sounds of the earth in 1969, I can guarantee you, you probably would have heard a barely-cold-in-the-ground Brian Jones spinning in his grave over this stupidity (because he was acting as the band’s manager for a time in their early days before Andrew Oldham came on board). 

Let’s also not forget that they hired a particularly notorious batch of Hell’s Angels from Oakland, California, whereas the Grateful Dead found their “security bikers” in Sacramento. Apparently, Grateful Dead manager Rock Scully even tried to warn the Stones about the “real” Hell’s Angels after seeing the footage from Hyde Park, but obviously, they didn’t take whatever warning he tried to give them to heart. The hippies in general had a romanticized image of the Hell’s Angels in their heads, seeing them as “outlaw brothers of the counterculture.”

No points for guessing how that worked out, but let’s continue regardless. 

Set to perform that night were Santana, Jefferson Airplane, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, the Grateful Dead, and of course, the Rolling Stones. 

They would all be performing on a stage that was just thirty-nine inches off the ground and surrounded on all sides by over 300,000 attendees. Apparently, this had been planned to create a more “intimate” experience. 

From what I could tell, waivers were not involved. 

For the sake of time, I can’t give you a minute-by-minute analysis of the event, but I can still provide a basic timeline of all that happened. 

So, everything went relatively smoothly as Santana performed their set, but it was only downhill from there. As the day progressed, the crowd started fighting each other, and the “security” sure as hell didn’t help matters. At some point, someone knocked over one of the Angel’s motorcycles, which was likely an accident. However, the Angels were already pretty pissy, and plus, rule number one when it comes to the Angels is “Don’t mess with the motorcycles.” So, the Angels, already high thanks to someone spiking the beer with acid, started indiscriminately assaulting audience members they didn’t like with sawed-off pool cues and motorcycle chains, including a guy who was running around naked and someone else who was trying to take pictures of the stage. One woman who called in to a radio station the next day reported that she saw five fistfights, and the Angels were involved in every last one. She tried to intervene, but the people around her warned her not to, fearing for both their safety and hers. 

During Jefferson Airplane’s set, Marty Balin was knocked unconscious when he tried to intervene in a fight between the audience members and Hell’s Angels. When Paul Kantner grabbed a mic and sarcastically thanked the Angels, Bill Fritsch grabbed the mic from him and started arguing with him about it. In addition, Denise Jewkes, lead singer of Ace of Cups, was hit in the head with a beer bottle and suffered a skull fracture. Her husband, Noel, had to lead his six-month pregnant wife through the sea of people so she could get medical attention. The Stones later paid her medical expenses. By this point, news of what was going on out front was beginning to seep into the backstage areas and even back to the Stones at their hotel room, but most of the acts decided to press on regardless. However, after hearing about what happened to Marty from Michael Shrieve, the guys from the Grateful Dead decided to book it. 

Yeah. Thanks a bunch, assholes.

The crowd did calm down a bit for the Flying Burrito Brothers’ set, because really, who can say no to Gram Parsons? However, that calm was only temporary. When the Stones arrived by helicopter, it wasn’t even ten seconds before someone punched Mick Jagger in the face. Also, Bill Wyman missed the first helicopter out, so the Stones were already going to be late.

And then Mick Jagger decided he wanted to be all dramatic and shit, so the crowds were forced to wait until nightfall for the Stones’ set.

Meanwhile, during Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young’s set, a “stoned out” Angel reportedly stabbed Stephen Stills in the leg whenever he stepped forward to sing, leaving trails of blood running down his leg.

By the time the Stones were anywhere near ready to take the stage, things started to degenerate even further, to the point where the Angels (who already despised Mick’s scrawny, English arse) pretty much forced the Stones to go out on stage regardless of whether they were ready or not, just to prevent a full-scale riot.

It was in that moment Mick knew… he fucked up royally.

As Mick observed the constant fighting between the audience members and Hell’s Angels during the show as he sang “Sympathy for the Devil”, he desperately, defeatedly, pleaded for calm, his usual bravado completely absent for once in his adult life. However, it was clear that the Angels already weren’t going to listen to the flamboyant musician they clearly hated, and tensions had been simmering too long throughout the day, so Mick’s pleas for peace practically went completely unheard. 

Mick Taylor later said, “The Hell’s Angels had a lot to do with it. The people that were working with us getting the concert together thought it would be a good idea to have them as a security force. But I got the impression that because they were a security force they were using it as an excuse. They’re just very, very violent people. I think we expected probably something like the Hell’s Angels that were our security force at Hyde Park, but of course they’re not the real Hell’s Angels, they’re completely phony. These guys in California are the real thing — they’re very violent. I had expected a nice sort of peaceful concert. I didn’t expect anything like that in San Francisco because they are so used to having nice things there. That’s where free concerts started, and I thought a society like San Francisco could have done much better. We were on the road when it was being organized, we weren’t involved at all. We would have liked to have been. Perhaps the only thing we needed security for was the Hell’s Angels. I really don’t know what caused it but it just depressed me because it could have been so beautiful that day”

(I feel so sorry for Mick Taylor. The kid was just twenty years old when he saw all this bullshit going down.)

Now, what I’m going to do with this go-around, before I describe what happened next, is tell you a little bit about Meredith Hunter. He was just eighteen when he went to Altamont with his girlfriend, Patti Bredehoft. The only reason he had a gun that day, according to his family, was for self-protection, given that he was basically a young black man with a white girlfriend in a sea of white people, at a time and place where racism was still very much prevalent. Allegedly, the gun didn’t even have any bullets in it; it would just be a last resort to deter anyone giving him trouble. Like most 18-year-olds, he was also a bit naive, and though his girlfriend wanted to leave, he convinced her to stay for the Rolling Stones’ set. At one point, he was already set upon by Hell’s Angels, but that time, it was only a scuffle. What is known is that he was high on methamphetamines, but what isn’t known for sure is his general demeanour. Some said he had a crazy look in his eye, while others said that he seemed calm, though he was upset at the violence. 

And then, all hell broke loose. 

As “Under My Thumb” was ending, cameras found an opening into the crowd, into which stumbled Meredith Hunter. He grabbed his gun, a .22 calibre revolver, which was visible to cameras against Patti’s dress. When Alan Passaro saw this, he immediately assumed that Hunter was trying to shoot somebody, and started stabbing him (this was, again, in plain view of a bunch of cameras). Subsequently, he was repeatedly kicked in the head, trying to tell his attackers that he wasn’t trying to kill anybody. However, the Angels were convinced that he was attempting to shoot somebody, and that’s essentially what the narrative became- that a crazed black kid high on meth tried to shoot Mick or one of the other Rolling Stones (which, believe me, I’d be salty about even if I hadn’t read a Rolling Stone article about him).

It was little Mick Taylor who managed to keep things rolling (a bit) by suggesting they play “Brown Sugar”, which had only been recorded the previous Tuesday. 

Somehow, after the vicious beating he’d suffered, Meredith was still alive, and a doctor at the scene looked at him and recommended that he get immediate medical attention, or else he’d die. However, the only helicopter at the scene was reserved for the Rolling Stones, and the pilot made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that no one else was allowed on board. Hunter ended up dying of his injuries while they waited for emergency responders. 

I don’t quite know how well the situation was explained, but still, dick move on the part of the helicopter pilots. 

In addition to Hunter, three other people died, one after falling into a fast-moving irrigation duct while tripping on LSD, and two others were killed in their sleeping bags during a hit-and-run accident. There were also four reported births, one of which occurred during Jefferson Airplane’s set. 

The day after the concert, the Stones flew back to London, as the news slowly disseminated throughout the world. 

In 1971, a documentary about the tragedy, Gimme Shelter, was released to the public. However, in the years since, many have argued that is meant to excuse the Stones’ actions and is an apologist piece of media. Still, the footage itself does show a chilling account of what happened that day, if you can ignore that overall narrative (though you really shoudn’t ignore that). 

Alan Passaro was later charged with Meredith’s murder, but was acquitted by an all-white jury, who likely either excused the crime due to racism, or just didn’t have the full story.

After Altamont, just about everybody turned on each other. The audience members, many of whom undoubtedly still live with the scars of that fateful night blamed the Hell’s Angels, whereas the Angels laid some of the blame on the audience members, and most of it on the people who hired them, whilst the Stones said they’d never work with the Hell’s Angels again (which, allegedly, almost resulted in some of them trying to assassinate Mick Jagger). 

In my honest, humble, not-so-professional opinion, I say the blame should be laid with the Stones’ management, Mick Jagger, the Grateful Dead, and the Hell’s Angels. The concert should have been planned over a matter of months instead of weeks, held in a proper venue, and above all else, not had fucking Hell’s Angels as security guards. 

While the Grateful Dead came out of it rather unscathed (mostly because they didn’t play), it’s been said that the Stones lost quite a bit of their edge. It’s easy to say that they grew up a lot because of this event, becoming a lot humbler, and a lot less greedy and risky as a direct result of this. It’s even to a point where people haven’t liked much of what they’ve put out since the 1980’s. Santana and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young declined to have their performances shown in Gimme Shelter, and have since spoken very little about the event. Meanwhile, Alan Passaro drowned in 1985, though the circumstances of his death are suspicious, to say the least. Meanwhile, Meredith Hunter’s family still deals with the trauma of his death, and aside from a $10,000 ($70,708.59) settlement, the Stones never even approached the family to offer their condolences, or even a half-assed explanation (I don’t recommend the latter approach). The Hell’s Angels also had their reputations as dangerous outsiders cemented by this event, given that they’d caused at least 75-90% of the violence that took place that day. 

Keith Richards has maintained his “fuck-all” attitude about this through the years, even writing in his 2010 autobiography “In actual fact, if it hadn’t been for the murder, we’d have thought it a very smooth gig by the skin of its fucking teeth.”

There is a reason that many of the dreams of the 60′s died at Altamont, and all the evidence you really need is the footage that was shot that night and the words of the people who saw the fiasco first hand. 

Sources: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/remembering-meredith-hunter-the-fan-killed-at-altamont-630260/ https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/the-rolling-stones-disaster-at-altamont-let-it-bleed-71299/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidchiu/2019/12/03/altamont-at-50-the-disastrous-concert-that-brought-the-60s-to-a-crashing-halt/#535871c31941 https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-chaos-of-altamont-and-the-murder-of-meredith-hunter https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-altamont-festival-brings-the-1960s-to-a-violent-end https://datebook.sfchronicle.com/music/altamont-wasnt-the-end-of-the-60s-it-was-the-start-of-rock-n-roll-disasters https://worldhistoryproject.org/1969/12/6/altamont-free-concert Altamont by Joel Selvin Life by Keith Richards https://allthatsinteresting.com/altamont-speedway-free-concert https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/lifestyle/altamont-rolling-stones-50th-anniversary/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altamont_Free_Concert https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Meredith_Hunter http://timeisonourside.com/chron1969.html https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/02/01/altamont-free-concert-in-1969/ https://www.ranker.com/list/altamont-free-concert-facts/jen-jeffers http://www.findingdulcinea.com/news/on-this-day/On-This-Day–Deaths-at-Rolling-Stones–Altamont-Concert-Shocks-the-Nation.html https://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/bk-aow/altamont.php https://westegg.com/inflation/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUlyVSfhgaM https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/the-rolling-stones/1969/altamont-speedway-tracy-ca-43d6fbb3.html https://slate.com/culture/2018/07/just-a-shot-away-a-history-of-altamont-by-saul-austerlitz-reviewed.html

[thatsnotcanonpodcasts]

Pokémon Crash, Beetles & Fox Movies

Hello and welcome to another illuminating episode of fun and frivolity with those goofballs from Nerds Amalgamated. First up we have a story about how Nintendo are crashing Roku devices. That’s right, Nintendo have an issue with Pokémon Sword and Shield that is causing Roku to crash and shut down. Now if you want to know more you will need to listen in and then you can tell us what you think in our Facebook group if you think Buck is being to grumpy.

Next up we have the start of Jurassic Park with a beetle trapped in amber. That’s right, a real beetle trapped in amber. This one in particular is historical due to a few important factors, such as the age of the beetle. Would you believe it was around almost 100 million years ago? That’s right and it played an important part in the local ecology. Want to know how the listen in for our second story and then tell us what was your favourite part of the Jurassic Park movies?

Last up we have those poor people at Disney having to vault movies to try and increase the value and increase the margins. That’s right, since Disney the evil organization seeing world domination have bought Fox media they have begun to reduce access to Fox movies to create a false scarcity. This is only one of the underhanded things that they are doing, if you want to know more you know what to do. Also let us know what you think about these dirty tricks by Disney in our group.

Pokémon Sword and Shield crashing Roku devices - https://www.cnet.com/how-to/pokemon-sword-and-shield-are-making-rokus-crash-nintendo-switch/

A beetle in amber - https://www.futurity.org/beetle-in-amber-first-flower-pollination-2208542-2/

Fox Movies being vaulted by Disney - https://www.vulture.com/2019/10/disney-is-quietly-placing-classic-fox-movies-into-its-vault.html

Games currently playing

Buck

– Spyro - https://store.steampowered.com/app/996580/Spyro_Reignited_Trilogy/

Rating – 4.5/5

Prof

– DNP

DJ

– Age of Empires Definitive Edition bundle - https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/11831/Age_of_Empires_Definitive_Edition_Bundle/

Rating – 4/5

Other Topics Discussed

Reddit post on Pokemon Sword & Shield crashing roku devices

- https://www.reddit.com/r/pokemon/comments/dxc5yg/psa_pokemon_swordshield_causes_roku_devices_on/

Roku (Digital Media Player)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roku

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (2018 crossoverfighting game developed by Bandai Namco Studios and Sora Ltd., and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo Switch)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Smash_Bros._Ultimate

Link (Legend of Zelda character)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_(The_Legend_of_Zelda)

Pebble (discontinued smartwatch developed by Pebble Technology Corporation)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_(watch)

Pokémon Sword and Shield Pokédex cut can be permanent

- https://www.techradar.com/au/news/pokemon-sword-and-shields-pokedex-cut-could-be-permanent

Pokémon Sword and Shield Pokédex restored by hackers

- https://www.polygon.com/2019/11/18/20970489/pokemon-sword-shield-hacking-modding-national-dex-cut-monsters-nintendo-switch

Helium leak disables iPhones

- https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/gye4aw/why-a-helium-leak-disabled-every-iphone-in-a-medical-facility

The Magic Switch

- http://catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html

Pterodactylus (extinct genus of pterosaurs, whose members are commonly known as pterodactyls)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pterodactylus

Pollination of Cretaceous flowers (Article by Tong Bao, Bo Wang, Jianguo Li, and David Dilcher)

- https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/11/05/1916186116

Witchetty Grub (term used in Australia for the large, white, wood-eating larvae of several moths)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witchetty_grub

Copyright infringement (colloquially referred to as piracy)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement

More details on Disney vaulting 20th Century Fox Movies

- https://collider.com/disney-vault-20th-century-fox-movies/

Baby Driver’s Edgar Wright Isn’t Happy About Disney Putting Fox’s Movies In The Vault

- https://www.cinemablend.com/news/2484090/baby-drivers-edgar-wright-isnt-happy-about-disney-putting-foxs-movies-in-the-vault

Artificial Scarcity (the scarcity of items that exists even though either the technology for production or the sharing capacity exists to create a theoretically limitless or at least greater quantity of production than currently exists)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_scarcity

Sony keeping Spiderman

- https://variety.com/2019/film/news/sony-marvel-tom-holland-spider-man-1203351489/

Fox Searchlight Pictures (American film studio that is a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Studios, a division of The Walt Disney Company)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_Searchlight_Pictures

JoJo Rabbit (2019 American satirical black comedy film written and directed by Taika Waititi, based on Christine Leunens's book Caging Skies)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jojo_Rabbit

Guy Ritchie (English film director, film producer, screenwriter, and businessman, known for his British gangster films)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Ritchie

Aladdin (2019 American musical fantasy film produced by Walt Disney Pictures)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aladdin_(2019_film)

Age of Empire 2 old intro

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rS_n3JVTPE

Wololo sound effect

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNTxlafhWYo

Glenn Martin, DDS (American/Canadian adult stop-motion animated sitcom that premiered on Nick at Nite on August 17, 2009)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Martin,_DDS

Musicals Taught Me Everything I Know (TNC Podcast)

- https://thatsnotcanon.com/mtmeik

Shoutouts

16 Nov 1902 - Brooklyn toymaker Morris Michtom named the teddy bear after US President Teddy Roosevelt. It was named in honor of President Theodore Roosevelt, after he refused to shoot a bear during a Mississippi hunting trip in November 1902. During the trip, guides clubbed a bear and tied it to a tree then invited the president to shoot it; instead, Roosevelt, an avid outdoorsman and hunter, declined, saying it would be unsportsmanlike to kill a defenseless animal that way. - https://www.nps.gov/thrb/learn/historyculture/storyofteddybear.htm

18 Nov 1926 - Writer and playwright George Bernard Shaw refused to accept money from the Nobel Prize. Shaw initially wanted to refuse the Nobel Prize in general, in line with his principle of not receiving public recognition, but his wife convinced him to receive the award. - https://history.info/on-this-day/1926-why-did-george-bernard-shaw-refuse-the-money-from-the-nobel-prize/

18 Nov 2019 – Shoutout to the firefighters, SES, Ambulance services, Police, RSPCA & other services - https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7703587/Australia-scorched-125-year-heatwave-bushfires-continue-burn.html

20 Nov 2019 - Dr Karl Kruszelnicki is being awarded the 2019 UNESCO Kalinga Prize for the Popularisation of Science. Dr Karl is the first Australian to win the prize, which he received in recognition of his "longstanding commitment to fire up people's curiosity for science and share his passion for the subject". He prides himself on being able to explain in minutes concepts or ideas that take him hours to research and understand. - https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2019-11-20/dr-karl-kruszelnicki-unesco-award-science-communication/11717044

Remembrances

18 Nov 1962 - Niels Henrik David Bohr, Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. Bohr was also a philosopher and a promoter of scientific research. Bohr developed the Bohr model of the atom, in which he proposed that energy levels of electrons are discrete and that the electrons revolve in stable orbits around the atomic nucleus but can jump from one energy level (or orbit) to another. Bohr was involved with the establishment of CERN and the Research Establishment Risø of the Danish Atomic Energy Commission and became the first chairman of the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics in 1957. He died from heart failure at the age of 77 in Copenhagen - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niels_Bohr

18 Nov 1941 - Walther Hermann Nernst, German chemist known for his work in thermodynamics, physical chemistry, electrochemistry and solid state physics. His formulation of the Nernst heat theorem helped pave the way for the third law of thermodynamics, for which he won the 1920 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He is also known for developing the Nernst equation in 1887. Nernst developed an electric piano, the "Neo-Bechstein-Flügel" in 1930 in association with the Bechstein and Siemens companies, replacing the sounding board with vacuum tube amplifiers. The piano used electromagnetic pickups to produce electronically modified and amplified sound in the same way as an electric guitar. He died from a heart attack at the age of 77 in Zibelle, Landkreis Rothenburg, Gau Lower Silesia or present-day Niwica, Lubusz Voivodeship - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walther_Nernst

18 Nov 2017 - Malcolm Young, Australian musician and songwriter, best known as a co-founder, rhythm guitarist, backing vocalist and songwriter for the hard rock band AC/DC. Except for a brief absence in 1988, he was with the band from its November 1973 beginning until retiring in 2014 due to health reasons. Young and the other members of AC/DC were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2003. Malcolm was described as the driving force and the leader of the band. In 2014, he stated that despite his retirement from the band, AC/DC was determined to continue making music with his blessing. As the rhythm guitarist, he was responsible for the broad sweep of the band's sound, developing many of their guitar riffs and co-writing the band's material with Angus. He died from dementia at the age of 64 in Elizabeth Bay, New South Wales - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Young

Famous Birthdays

18 Nov 1939 - Margaret Eleanor Atwood, Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, inventor, teacher, and environmental activist. Since 1961, she has published 17 books of poetry, 16 novels, 10 books of non-fiction, eight collections of short fiction, eight children's books, and one graphic novel, as well as a number of small press editions in poetry and fiction. Atwood is also the inventor and developer of the LongPen and associated technologies that facilitate remote robotic writing of documents. Several of her works have been adapted for film and television, increasing her exposure. Atwood's works encompass a variety of themes including gender and identity, religion and myth, the power of language, climate change, and "power politics". Many of her poems are inspired by myths and fairy tales which interested her from a very early age. She was born in Ottawa,Ontario - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Atwood

18 Nov 1953 - Kevin Nealon, American comedian and actor. He was a cast member on Saturday Night Live from 1986 to 1995, acted in several of the Happy Madison films, played Doug Wilson on the Showtime series Weeds, and provided the voice of the title character, Glenn Martin, on Glenn Martin, DDS. He was born in St. Louis, Missouri - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Nealon

18 Nov 1961 - Steven Moffat, Scottish television writer and producer. He is best known for his work as showrunner, writer and executive producer of two BBC One series: the science fiction television series Doctor Who, and the contemporary crime drama television series Sherlock, based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. In 2015, Moffat was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire for his services to drama. He was born in Paisley - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Moffat

Events of Interest

17 Nov 1999 - Sleepy Hollow came out, it earned decent reviews and doing solid business. Burton fanatics who loved his creepy aesthetic were thrilled to finally have a true horror film from the director at last. - https://nerdist.com/article/sleepy-hollow-tim-burton-20th-anniversary/

18 Nov 1865 – Mark Twain's short story "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" is published in the New York Saturday Press where it appeared as "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog". In it, the narrator retells a story he heard from a bartender, Simon Wheeler, at the Angels Hotel in Angels Camp, California, about the gambler Jim Smiley. The narrator describes him: "If he even seen a straddle bug start to go anywheres, he would bet you how long it would take him to get to wherever he going to, and if you took him up, he would foller that straddle bug to Mexico but what he would find out where he was bound for and how long he was on the road." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Celebrated_Jumping_Frog_of_Calaveras_County

18 Nov 1978 - In Jonestown, Guyana, Jim Jones led his Peoples Temple to a mass murder–suicide that claimed 918 lives in all, 909 of them in Jonestown itself, including over 270 children. Congressman Leo Ryan is murdered by members of the Peoples Temple hours earlier. Jonestown resulted in the largest single loss of American civilian life in a deliberate act until September 11, 2001. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown

18 Nov 2015 - "Kangaroo Dundee" wildlife TV series premieres featuring Brolga and Roger the ripped Kangaroo on BBC Two - https://www.onthisday.com/date/2015/november/18

Intro

Artist – Goblins from Mars

Song Title – Super Mario - Overworld Theme (GFM Trap Remix)

Song Link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GNMe6kF0j0&index=4&list=PLHmTsVREU3Ar1AJWkimkl6Pux3R5PB-QJ

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[nuclearblastuk]

In 2 weeks, Dutch symphonic metal giants EPICA will release a cover EP for the highly successful ‘Attack On Titan’ theme songs. ‘Attack On Titan’ has conquered not only the print world with over 70 million copies, but also the anime sector with an adaption that is currently airing worldwide.  The EP entitled ‘EPICA VS. Attack On Titan‘ features metal covers of the anime’s theme songs and will be released worldwide – outside of Japan – on July 20th via Nuclear Blast Records.

In May the band released the first single from the EP, the theme from Attack on Titan, Crimson Bow and Arrow:Today the band releases the third trailer where guitarist Isaac Delahaye and keyboardist Coen Janssen discuss the process of translating the lyrics for the songs. Watch the trailer here:

If you have missed the previous trailers, watch them here: Trailer #1 Trailer #2

The band released the second single of the EP entitled, ‘If Inside These Walls Was A House‘ two weeks ago:

Mark Jansen comments: “‘If Inside These Walls Was A House’ is my favourite track on the EP and it sounds most like an EPICA song. We played this track together with some other tracks from the EP in Japan live in front of a thousand enthusiastic fans, I will never forget that. Enjoy!”

Get the single digitally here: ‘ EPICA vs. Attack On Titan‘ will be available in the following formats: – CD Jewelcase – Vinyl (violet, yellow, black)

Pre-order your copy of ‘EPICA vs. Attack On Titan‘ via Nuclear Blast:

Pre-save the EP via Spotify

‘EPICA vs. Attack On Titan‘ was recorded during the summer of 2017 at Sandlane Recording Facilities by Joost van den Broek. The original songs, which were influenced by the music of EPICA, were composed by Revo of popular Japanese band LINKED HORIZON. For the EP, the tracks were adapted by EPICAand produced by Joost van den Broek. The choir arrangements and scoring were completed by keyboardist Coen Janssen who also handled the orchestral arrangements with Joost van den Broek.

‘EPICA vs. Attack On Titan’ – Track Listing: 01. Crimson Bow And Arrow 02. Wings Of Freedom 03. If Inside These Walls Was A House 04. Dedicate Your Heart! 05. Crimson Bow And Arrow (Instrumental) 06. Wings Of Freedom (Instrumental) 07. If Inside These Walls Was A House (Instrumental) 08. Dedicate Your Heart! (Instrumental)

[lostandfoundmagazine]

Pillow Queens Debut Album

Dublin band Pillow Queens are a band who are both concerned with producing music alongside pushing for social change. Forming back in 2016, they released their first EP the following year titled ‘Calm Girls’. 2020 saw the release of their debut album ‘In Waiting’ - We caught up with their guitarist, Cathy McGuinness, to find out who Pillow Queens, as well as discuss what their album is all about.

Who are Pillow Queens? Can you tell us a little bit about yourselves?

Pillow Queens are a four-piece Indie rock band from Dublin (Pam & Sarah), Kildare (Rach) & Wicklow (Cathy). First and foremost, though, we’re friends. We’ve known each other for many moons and we’ve been in some very bizarre and funny situations together. None of which we’re prepared to write down. All of these things considered, we felt it only right to start a band and it looks like we were right! 

What’s the motivation behind your music? Where do you find inspiration?

Our music is the offspring of our experiences. Love, life, loss etc. We take inspiration from our surroundings and our past brushes with music. We’ve all played in bands previous to Pillow Queens. I think we have all taken a lot from those bands. When we joined forces, it just clicked. As four queer women playing together (that experience was new to all of us!) we just kind of got it. We had similar experiences we all related to. So, while this sounds superbly cliché, I think we inspire each other. 

The band seems to be going from strength to strength since forming, what’s been the highlight moment for you? 

I mean, the obvious would be touring on a double-decker bus with SOAK, playing with Future Islands, Pussy Riot, American Football, selling out all of our favourite venues in Ireland and loads of great spaces in the UK. I think for all of us, though, to be asked to be part of KEXP in Iceland was the pinnacle. We were all trembling with fear and frostbite but we loved every second. DJ Kevin Cole is such a dude as well, what a gent!

‘Holy Show’ has had a brilliant reception since its release. What’s it like as a band to see people respond and engage with your material?

It makes us feel warm and fuzzy inside!! The first time we played ever, people sang back ‘Rats’ to us. We all looked at each other and said “err what?”. People were invested and they wanted us to do well. That wave of positivity was magic. 

Fast forward to touring in new places where people would come to us after shows and tell us what our music means to them. I think it fuels the band, honestly. Pillow Queens feels like it’s run on a community. It’s not just us anymore, our fans are an integral part of what Pillow Queens is. We have parents coming up to us now saying that their daughters look up to us! 

We asked people to send us selfies for our video for ‘Liffey’. Seeing everyone’s face in the Liffey was surreal. These people cared enough to be part of something. 

Speaking of new releases… How does it feel have released your debut album?

Ohhh... it’s a wave of all of the emotions. We’re excited, we’re scared and all of the things in between. We all feel like the album is how we want it to be. Hopefully everyone else does too! Every time we get tagged in a review though, my stomach does flip a bit. Thankfully, so far everything has been positive. 

What was it about the name ‘In Waiting’ you felt best described the album?

We all have different interpretations of the album title. It was suggested and it just felt right for each of us individually. When we discussed it, we all had really different ideas of what it meant, but all equally valid. It was fun teasing it out actually. We felt that ‘In Waiting’ felt like that space between childhood and adulthood and that incongruence in between, yearning for both but having neither. Our generation seems to be stuck in that gap. We keep getting screwed by our government and the idea of having a home or a permanent job is a foreign concept and if that does happen, we are embarrassingly grateful. We are waiting for something better. An equal Ireland for all. For our brothers and sisters in Direct Provision, Mental Health facilities, in Homelessness. We are all in waiting. 

Have you made any plans to tour with the new music soon?

Yes! And we are remaining superbly optimistic about this. We have a tour planned in February for Ireland and the UK. Tickets are selling like hotcakes so you better get on it! 

Who influences Pillow Queens outside of music?

Our families. After the tour, when all the shenanigans are done, we retreat to our mam’s for hugs so they can tell us we are ‘good girls’. We can pretend to be rock n’ roll but the love and support from our families is second to none. 

Also, I think the girls really dig Harry Styles, it would be remiss of me not to say. And I’m a big fan of Britney. 

#FreeBritney

[ianmoonestuff]

PILE ASIA TOUR IN MALAYSIA[WHOLE DAY COVERAGE]

I PROMISED TO MYSELF THAT I’M GONNA POST IT AFTER I GOT BACK!!!! But my browser crashed, I didn’t save it and my body was already taking their toll so..yeah. This post will be extremely long and blogging style. So take your time to read and brew a coffee or something.

UPDATE: -Q&A Corner videos -Removed the video(it was copyrighted and we managed to take it down eventually, sorry for late edit)

It was not a great start. I woke up at 8am(blame the hype!!) but still managed to get a cab at 9am. And as you can see I had to take a train first then changed to LRT to get there. Also as you can see, since this was not in Japan, it is typical for the train to arrive a bit wee late.

Then off to LRT.

Got to stop at Sentul Station since it was the only station located quite near to the HGH Convention Hall.

Haha now there was something nice to look at for this sore eyes. This banner was made by us the Malaysia’s Love Liver.

Redeemed my ticket there.(FRONT ROW FTW!!!)

If you ask me was it packed? I would say ma~ ma~ or so-so since it was still early in the morning and the first session was Meet and Greet so not a lot of people shows up actually. I’ll talk about it later at the end of the post.

HERE WAS PILE SAMA’s FLOWER STAND!!

Thanks for all the contributors for making our project a success! Notice my name there, I goes as KEI in real life.

Also the Callbook! Sponsored by Love Liver Malaysia.

Before I proceed to the Meet and Greet session. Please do understand that I didn’t took any pictures since I had to respect her agency/organizer’s wishes and SO DO YOU.

The session started off with a Q&A Corner and from there I learned a lot about her. Like..A LOT!

-She ate chinese dish called daikonmochi here in Malaysia(hmm...) -When she’s tired, she love to play with her dog and watch some movies(fun fact: she bought a leek so that she can pretend to use it as a lightsaber www) -She hate wearing contact lenses.(?) -Her favourite colour is Pink despite her room is Blue. -She interested to do a collaborative work with other singers/bands but she thought that she got a lot of things to improve so she hold that for awhile(aww a Kouhai admiring her Senpai) -This one making me really interested. She describe some people here in Malaysia quite...’Mysterious’. Haha I really indeed understand this and I really do. You guys probably know that the main religion here in Malaysia is Islam and majority of the people are muslims. So she was probably having like a ‘culture-shock’ or something when she saw the women here wore scarf(or tudung we called it here) covering their head. Haha you learned a lot now PILE-chan.

Next was a Game Session. Contain 3 games: Batsu Maru(simply X and O), Green or Red and Janken(Rock-Paper-Scissor). Noticed that all the games are basically gamble type :D

So Batsu Maru was consist of PILE’s trivial question that test your knowledge about her. I’m not a big fan of PILE so I already expected to lose here. If you got it correct you need to stand up and for those who lost need to sit down. It goes on until we get 2/3 of the people. Did I win?

NO.

Next would be Green or Red. Simply use your card like above and guess what was the colour of the ball that PILE draws. As usual it keeps on going until a few people left. Did I win?

NO but have been volunteering for 3 years in ACG event and I knew the tricked behind that draw box. *wink**wink*

Last would be Janken against PILE herself. Unfortunately for any game session like this with guest star, there is no such thing as draw. So you will consider as lose eventhough you are ‘draw’. Did I win?

NO.

BUT! Thanks to PILE-chan’s generosity, we still have a chance at Lucky Draw!! I believe in GOD that my luck was beside me. So did I win?

YES MOM!! MMMMMMGGGGHHHHHHHH!!! KYAAAAAA!! KFJHDSFJSBFANFJWEOIRN!!!

The other will received the same Polaroid picture with PILE-chan herself. (OMG HER FASHION SENSE!! MMMMMMMMGGGGHHHH)

Other than that was PILE-chan’s New Year postcard.

This part was during Concert Session. As I said before I won’t post anything that violate the organizer/agency wishes. They even said it there on the screen. CAN YOU EVEN READ?!? I wish they did this on other live concerts though.

Here are my summaries during the concert; -The concert was a BANG!! -BURNING!(https://www.instagram.com/p/BPiLLqKgY-C/) Like literally because I was at VIP seat and those fire effect was like infront of me. But that was nothing for PILE as she was more closer during that time. -PILE DANCING INFRONT OF ME!!! KYAAAA!! -HANABI SONG IS THE BEST!! Especially the calls(PILE CHAN!!) -She impressed that we understood her Japanese well. -There was this funny moment where when she said that it would be the last song, all of us were like “EEEEEHHH?” She shocked that every single of us respond it that way which is kinda funny to her. She still insisted of saying it and again we respond with “EEEEHHH?” that lead to her saying “いやいや序段じゃなくて…” www -Bringing us back our Love Live moment by singing それは僕たちの軌跡, . Showing us that µ's is still in our heart...forever. -Kudos to PILE’s guitarist. He’s awesome with his guitar performance. Almost got a chance to shake his hand though T_T

The rest of the post would be some pictures I took and from other sources and my point of view.

PILE did some prayers hoping for the concert to go smoothly and same goes for her guitarist~ (Awwww~)

I had to buy another KB just for her event.(D.E.D.I.C.A.T.I.O.N)

But still I forgot about this lightstick. My hands were full of KB! What do you expect?

And that was it. Hoping to attend more concerts after this(...and expecting my wallet-kun to burn)

So here are my opinions, do note this is my PERSONAL opinions. So do take it with a grain of salt;

-The venue is kinda in-the-middle-of-nowhere. Sure extra mark goes for the hall and the facilities(those washroom was like being inside a michelin-rated kinda washroom...literally) but it was surrounded with housing areas and school beside the venue?(not just a normal school though, PM me if you wanna know) But overall was amazing and so far no unnecessary incident happen.

-Number of people. I dunno how should I describe it. Kinda disappointed actually. There were still empty seats left. But I pretty much understand it why. Not all of people know who PILE is. You cannot expect a large fanbase to turn up if you did a concert on a secluded areas. You wont get the right answer if you ask some random aunts in Malaysia whether they know who is PILE. Good thing her japanese fanbase were here too though but still not enough. Somehow, I thought something not great inside PILE’s mind during her appearance last night based on her face. It really troubles me for awhile but the least I could did just giving my best in cheering her up. I hope that she didn’t cry or disappointed because of us. We have done our greatest to spread the word but...*sigh*  

-The dark thing about marketing field Personally I prefer for PILE to sing her song ONLY. I want to watch PILE as...PILE. I’m kinda sad to hear some people just came hoping for Love Live songs. This happened to other artist and other countries as I received a rumor of certain LLiver sent email to certain organizer stating that he/she was quite disappointed because of lack of LL songs. I wish I can hit you somehow. I understand that Maki helped PILE in her music industry. She was the one who helped her to raise back up after falling for quite some time. But again like I said I want to see PILE as PILE. But in the end, it all depends on the marketing strategy, fans and PILE herself. I still enjoyed the LL songs like usual though. You guys don’t want to see me in LLiver mode though...kinda scary. She sang Darling(not Daring), それは僕たちの軌跡、愛してるばんざい(updated) and Snow Halation and yeah we did the usual light stick switching from white to orange.

-PILE’s fashion sense and her dancing skill I...I don’t know what to say but dang PILE really has A very good fashion sense. Also those dancing skill...you just made my heart skipped a bit YOU KNOW THAT?!?!? And when she dance infront of me...*fainted* www

And that’s all for the coverage. This post was especially made for @emitsunosaurus-rex but anyone can come to read but remember to take it with a grain of salt. Now back to weather...

EXTRA: I asked PILE to make a kiraboshi pose(my polaroid pic there) but...she didn’t know. It makes me sad T_T Google up for the anime Star Driver if you millennials don’t know too.

P/S: I’m very sorry. This is my first time making a coverage that involved big stuff like this. Please don’t kill me. I’m very sorry though...like really. But I like it because it shows some of my weakness here. I’LL DO MY BEST ON THE NEXT ONE!! Again I’m sorry, truce? If there’re something that makes you uneasy, just let me know okay.

Credits/sources; Que Innosenzo Poh Huai Bin Welcom Music iME Asia Animax Asia emitsunosaurus-rex me

[viewfromthedrumstool]

View From The Drum Stool #54

USA and Canada ‘18

We pick up the tale in Port Huron, Michigan where our band of intrepid musicians find themselves on the I-69 headed west to a soundtrack of Glen Miller.

This is my third US tour. The first was with Man Without Country back in 2013 and the second being the Saint Etienne ‘Home Counties’ tour of 2017 (all documented in detail here on VFTDS!). Both were dominated by epic road journeys and it’s easy to forget how conveniently proximous major cities are back home in comparison to the spacious lay of the land out here. We’ll clock up a cool 400 miles today - the equivalent of driving from London to Glasgow - and that’s by no means a long one.

But it’s a beautiful country to travel in; the pastel tarmac, green fields, colourful outbuildings and blue sky...

In Kalamazoo, we check in at the Best Western (in true American fashion the rooms are obscenely huge and feature a kitchenette) and head straight out to the finest Italian this side of town: Erbellis!

We enjoy a round of radioactive Catalina Margaritas and contemplate the menu...

With easily hundreds of dishes to choose from there’s lots of contemplating to do and options include ‘Be Careful Not To Choke Pepperoni Shocker’, ‘Meat Monster Mania’ and ‘The Rhino’ which contains SEVEN different types of meat. (I can barely name seven different types of meat.)

I opt for the calmer sounding ‘The Greek’ (feta, tomatoes, olives etc.) on a Chicago style crust. What I’m presented with might be better described to an Englishman as a pie, only with pizza base instead of pastry and a topping of marinara sauce in place of the gravy. It’s as ambitious as it sounds and a more typically American experience than an authentic Italian one.

Nonetheless it’s an experience and in search of more of the same we head straight to the nearest bowling alley! Revel and Roll in Kalamazoo is a modern affair with half-price drinks and a scoring system that incorporates photographs of each players face into funny little animations between frames. It’s hilarious and a welcome palette cleanser after the gigs and travel so far.

Tour manager and bassist Joe opens the strongest taking victory in the first game with a decent score of 125. It’s only a shame he couldn’t stay for a second as I know he would have been proud to witness my impressive followup: a courageous score of 128! Three whole points more than his 125! Thus I win overall, and beat his best score.

(I’m not saying that I like to gloat but I’ll admit I posted a printout of the scoresheet under the door of his hotel room...)

The following morning and riding high on the sweet taste of my bowling victory by three points (“The real winner here is bowling” I lie), we reconvene in the hotel lobby and drive into Kalamazoo centre for a spot of brunch (at the Studio Grill - classic American diner fare albeit lacking a huevos rancheros).

Our next stop is the very reason we even chose Kalamazoo as a destination in the first place. (It’s not the longest train curve in America, although I hear it’s a big pull.)

As many musicians know, Kalamazoo is the birthplace and spiritual home of Gibson Guitars! We drive a few blocks over to the original factory, located beside a railroad on the northeast side of town.

Orville Gibson founded the company here in 1894 and originally specialised in building mandolins. The Les Paul, 335, Explorer, Flying-V and SG all followed and in the 80’s, having inevitably outgrown this original facility, they relocated to Tennessee. The few employees who didn’t fancy the move stayed put, founded Heritage Guitars, and still operate out of a modernised portion of the original factory to this day.

The majority of the building is now abandoned and boarded up however. But despite the dilapidated appearance it doesn’t feel like a sad place and it’s magical to think of the great impact on rock ‘n’ roll - nay popular culture as a whole - that the instruments which have emerged from this factory have had.

Alas one of Michigans lesser-celebrated fames is the poor quality of its roads and the journey to Chicago is at best bumpy, and at worse skull-shaking. Eventually, with a final rattle and jolt, we cross the state line - pick up Central Standard Time, gaining an hour - and moments later pass by Michigan City itself ... which strangely happens to be in Indiana.

Entertainment on-route is provided by the billboards of the I-94, my favourites including one for a strip club (’All the liquor, none of the clothes’) and another for a vasectomy clinic (’Buy one testis, get the other free’).

Eventually we roll into the beautiful Park End West venue just as Via Chicago by Wilco finishes in my headphones - what could be more appropriate.

We played here on the last tour, I loved the venue then and I love it still. The crew are friendly and professional, the gear is great and the comfortable backstage is packed with fresh rider and cool beers. It’s the perfect venue to catch a gig too with room at the front for those who wish to stand and dance, booths in the middle with waitress service and stools up by the cocktail bar. I could happily bed down here for a year, get a job on the bar and befriend all the locals.

(Pic by James)

A few weeks back while playing Victorious Festival in Portsmouth with Gaz Coombes, I got chatting to one Paul Von Mertens. Paul is Musical Director and wind player with Brian Wilson and mentioned that he was from Chicago. We chatted for a while, I told him I’d shortly be in town with Saint Etienne and he said he’d love to come. True to his word he came to check out the show and was kind enough to regale us with tales of life on the road and in the studio with Brian, Wilco and many others. (Appropriately the title of the Good Humor album that we’re touring was inspired by a picture of Brian Wilson...)

The following day we spend traveling and our party takes a plane down to San Francisco ahead of our penultimate show of the tour at The Chapel. The route takes us over the Rockies and the view through the window is another mesmerising one. I’ve said it before but America is one beautiful country from the air…

While the Northeast, Deep South and Midwest of America all have their charms, none quite compare to California for me and in particular the sparkling vibrant glorious dazzling sunlight which comes beaming through the cabin windows as soon as we descend below the clouds.

We check in at the La Quinta Inn & Suites in South San Francisco and dive across to Denny’s - it’s busy on a Friday night but they now serve beer so the wait is bearable. James and I fancy a nightcap and fortunately there are drinkeries just a couple of blocks north. Unfortunately - given the American tradition of driving everywhere - they’re totally un-walkable so we have to take a 90 second Uber instead…

The Armstrong Brewing Company are a friendly bunch but their output doesn’t amount to much and we found only one of their 10+ beers vaguely palatable. Most of their creations lack subtlety and are often far too strong to be enjoyable, although they more than make up for it in friendly hospitality and are eager for us to stay even after closing time.

Show day in San Francisco! I’m on the hunt for huevos rancheros once again and have high hopes for California based on reputation, past experience and proximity to Mexico. Once in the Mission District I head to San Jalisco on the recommendation of some Saint Etienne fans. It’s certainly an authentic experience - the food isn’t paired down for our taste and half the clientele is Mexican. There’s even a guitarist who provides an authentic soundtrack, though he’s not exactly Santana. Thanks for the suggestion folks.

I walk off the large lunch around the streets of the Mission District enjoying the glorious Californian light with my film camera. I’m not the only one and when I stumble come across our venue for tonight I find an elderly gent wandering down the street bearing a very old looking 16mm camera. His name is Nathaniel Dorsky - I later learn a much celebrated experimental filmmaker who has exhibited his unusual silent films around the world. We both have a love for film and share an inspiring conversation right there on the street that will stay with me.

The promoter at The Chapel is charming and not only does the epic rider contain some swanky desert pieces (and later cocktails), she’s even brought her dog along to help out! Some of us also receive a generous gift from a fan called ‘Adam’. Wherever you are, whoever you are, Adam I thank you for the four bottles of aftershave. I smell sensational.

San Francisco is always a great show for Saint Etienne and tonight is no different. The venue is packed out and the stage time is put back on numerous occasions because half the audience are still queueing up at the merch stand. When we eventually make it out, the crowd are rabid and one eager fan (is it Adam?) leans over to chat, shake hands and generally hang between every song. Which would be much more welcome if I weren’t in the middle of an indie dance show...

As per last year’s Home Counties US Tour, our final stop is Los Angeles and the Henry Fonda Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. It’s an easy journey down by air and we’re back at the 101 Coffee Shop on Franklin Ave in time for lunch.

Their huevos rancheros are probably my favourite on the tour too. The 101 was the diner that first turned me on to the dish and it’s fitting finale fare for the final day of the tour.

Chuck E Weiss is in the house too, favourite of Tom Waits and the muse to the classic Rickie Lee Jones song ‘Chucks E’s In Love’. Listen out for the iconic drum part from Steve Gadd...

Back to the Fonda Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. A familiar setting with a familiar crew, gear and backstage too. It’s a wonderful joyous gig and the crowd brings top energy to help us over the line.

As some may know, I periodically play drums with Gaz Coombes and as it happens a number of his band - including numerous VFTDS alumni - flew in this evening ahead of a TV appearance later in the week! The aftershow party was not just a celebration of the tour but also a reunion with familiar faces from both home and away. This Is Your Life!

Shout out also to Dan and Mike who not only attended the Chicago, San Fran and LA shows but did so in their homemade Home Counties suit jackets! Having seen them down the front every night it was great to finally meet them for a quiet and civilised chat...

While the rest of the gang head home (business class, naturally) I’m staying on in LA for a few days. Thanks for the good times USA! You’ve been great as ever. The gigs have rocked, the band has been great and the crowds buzzing with no exceptions.

I’m off to watch the Dodgers with some pals… see you soon!

Mike

[velveteenau-blog1]

Is Your Song Record-Ready?

Reading Time 7-8 Minutes

5 steps to check yourself before hitting the studio.

What does Record-Ready mean?

Much like all things in music and art, there are many ways to describe this concept. Personally, I would describe record-ready material as being effective in intent, emotive in nature and thus ready to be completed in the studio and released out into the world for your audience to receive.

You wrote it, so it should express something you’d like it to express. It’s art, so it should also elicit some sort of response from people (positive or negative, engagement is never a bad thing), and not just “It’s amazing!” from your Mom (Hi Mom!) or best friend.

Before going any further, the answer is YES. The question (in the back of your mind) is to do with overthinking things and just recording the material:

Of course there are times when the music just courses through you; when the muse and the elements align to send you songs that are already perfect. Realistically however, 98% of the music that 98% of us write could do with a once-over, or one last look before your studio sessions. That is, there is often still some necessary and important work to be done.

Do you have a Good song or a Great song?

The difference between art that is good and art that is great is miniscule, to be honest. Some songs are just hits from the moment they are conceived, and the reasons can vary from trendiness to your artistic image. One unmistakable trait of a truly great song is that it consistently continues to attract listeners.

This point is a lot to do with honesty, with/to yourself and from others. You should be prolific with your writing (or your band’s writing, as it may be) because it’s statistically impossible for every song you write to be great. You need to write consistently and often because songs #49 and #50 are going to be objectively much better than song #11. Hand in hand with that, you should not be reclusive: art is a constant feedback loop, and at a certain point everyone needs an outside perspective to bounce ideas off.

Whether it’s another artist friend, a collaborator or co-writer (You don’t do that? Then get into it) or even a mentor (Don’t have one? Then get one), you have to be able to open up to someone comfortably, and that someone must be one whose opinion you value and trust. This person (or people) has to be 100% truthful without sparing your feelings at times. They should be able to tell you that the main hook for your Tropical House track is 100%  the 2nd chorus to Pippin (Hey, it could happen) or derivative somehow without you getting defensive. That way, when they tell you that this latest song is probably the best you’ve written, you can take it at face value.

Is the song in the correct key (for the Vocalist)?

Let’s be real: if you write songs that feature vocals, that will be the central focus of the listener’s experience. Thus, doesn’t it make sense to spend some (or a lot) of time working on something as fundamental as the key of the song to make sure that it’s in as perfect a spot as possible?

Depending on your own workflow, there are a couple of ways to approach this:

If you are the singer and also an instrumentalist, move the chord changes around and get a feel for what the different sections sound like in various parts of your vocal range. Some sections will be mellower, lighter or more vulnerable, while others will be gritty, maybe more aggressive or emphatic. Figure out (or remind yourself) what your intent is with the song, and what is most effective and emotive in getting your message and emotions across.

If you are a producer or songwriter, or a singer/songwriter with some technical facility, make basic MIDI demos of your songs. Whether you are using the stock instruments in the DAW of your choice, or your favourite sample libraries and an arsenal of gear, you have the ability to transpose keys for complete arrangements in no-time so as to workshop the song with your vocalist(s).

If you play an instrument, you probably have favourite keys or positions you write or play in (Guitarists, I know how much we all love riffing in E), and that’s not a bad thing. Just consider that writing, recording and performing music is a team effort, with your vocalist’s instrument playing a vital role in your overall success, and for that purpose you may need to stretch out and explore unfamiliar (to you) keys for those killer riffs.

Think of this: “Hotel California” is an iconic song, it’s safe to say. It once used to be a good song that Don Felder wrote on guitar. After Glenn Frey and Don Henley crafted some great melodies and lyrics to it, they found that the original key (E minor) was not in a great range for Don Henley’s voice. They chose to work at it in the studio, lowering the key progressively down to B minor where the vocal felt the best and the rest, as they say, is history.

Does the song get your message across?

I know, I know, your song transcends earthly trappings and art is all subjective anyway.

However, there must be something that compelled you to write the material, correct? And when you sing/perform there must be some place that you draw your emotions and energy from.

There is some reason or compulsion that makes you do what you do, whether it’s introspection, self-examination, criticism, joy etc., and an effective song gets through to your audience with some of that feeling. Whether you like to spell things out, or leave much to the listener’s imagination, a great song will be something that your audience relates to and relates to you through.

You should expect that your audience (or a listener) can get the jist of your material on the first listen. If that isn’t the case, don’t fret; there may be something you can do that makes your song simply more effective at getting through to people.

Don’t despair: Getting ideas through effectively to people is a mystery and art in itself, and we can only get better at it by creating more often. Read through the lyrics - could they be streamlined in any way? Can you place or shift emphasis on certain words or ideas? Maybe that third verse could actually be the opening verse. Are all of the musical/melodic elements supporting the lead vocal? Could there be too many elements fighting for the listener’s attention at crucial times in the song? Is your chorus clear and concise?

There are many reasons why the intent of your song could become lost within the process. Ask yourself some or all of the questions above and move ahead.

Does it elicit a response from listeners?

The above point dealt with the specifics of your art and the nuances of creative expression. This is titled “...eliciting a response”, and not “...the correct response” since audiences express their sentiments differently.

What you should be doing at this point (presuming that you have gone through the previous items) is getting your music in front of people so that you can see what they do in response to it. You should play people a demo (Oh yeah, demo your songs, and often!) and watch them. I mean it: look at them while they listen to your song. Do it in an unobtrusive and non-creepy way so that they can relax and sincerely connect with the music itself.

Do they nod their head? Tap their feet? Does their breathing change? Do they smile or frown? These may seem like obvious things, but being able to gauge another person’s response is invaluable to your process. Think of this as using a focus-group, as is done routinely in advertising. If you play in a rock band, throw a new song into the middle of a set and see if the audience is responsive. If you are an acoustic performer, playing demos for people might be the best approach. If you write EDM or any music that is supposed to get people moving, get your DJ friend (don’t have one? Make one!) to spin your track and see if the dance floor erupts when the drop hits.

The point is not to change what you do and who you are based on audience feedback (or the above suggestions), but to make sure that who you are and what you do always comes through in your art and in the way that you intend it to.

Keep Writing, Make Decisions & Move on.

Hopefully the above points have, at the very least, been food for thought, or inspired you to actually look over your last batch of songs and get them ready to track and release.

The best thing you can do as an artist is to keep creating. The more consistently you do it, the better you will be at it. Use the the above steps as part of your process if you wish, but always keep moving forward!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Arjun is a Producer, Recordist & Mix Engineer currently based in Canada and Director Of Education at Power Station At BerkleeNYC.

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[alive-drumming]

Alive Drumming's favourite Frequently  Asked  Questions  (FAQ)

We have hand-picked some of our favourite  F.A.Q.s about Alive Drumming and Song Rhythm Tracks.

Why do these Song Rhythm Tracks sound so great?

They do, don’t they! And for a number of reasons:

Great Recordings of Great Drummers – Song Rhythm Tracks are arranged from careful studio recordings of excellent drummers.  They are not constructed from midi files fitting together “samples” from single drum hits to form a mechanical style but rather multiple longer-form full recordings by top studio drummers, lasting from up to 8 bars at a time where you hear subtle drum rolls, variations in ride cymbal taps, complex fills and more.  The rhythmic style comes from talented drummers that are very experienced in that particular style be it Reggae, Salsa, Bossa, Rumba, Tango, Rock, Country, Jazz, Pop, Celtic, Praise & Worship, Blues, and lots more!

There is natural variety promoted over the repeats.  That is a number of recordings of, say, a fill or shot are taken and selectively chosen while sequencing and engineering the final audio.  This provides the natural variety one gets with drummers.  It helps prevent the drumming becoming monotonous and repetitive.

The drummer is spelling out many aspects of the song’s form as (s)he plays.  This might have a larger contributor than one might imagine.  It is what real drummers do, but drumming software rarely does.   The drumming is indicating

When you are returning to the ‘top of the form’ again

When your sections are ending and starting again

When you are starting or finishing a bridge section

Whether you are playing a middle chorus or, alternatively, the first or last chorus.   This not only helps you keep place while you are playing but it makes the whole experience so much more enjoyable to listen to, or play along with.

All this takes a lot of careful preparation and curation, huge storage, and sophisticated algorithms.   We feel this cannot be achieved on mobile devices themselves which is why our solution involves our cloud servicesworking with the mobile App.

Could you give me some examples of Song Forms?

Song Forms for a number of songs are here

Your drumming audio is dry! Will Alive Drumming, or can I, add reverb?

Alive Drumming’s Song Rhythm Tracks  are supplied without  reverb (aka “dry”). We are endeavouring to make our iOS app Apple inter-app audio (IAA) compliant.  When it is, you will be able to use other, 3rd party app’s to add reverb to the audio.  See this youtube video for some of them in action.

Is Alive Drumming supporting my country or region?

globe

Alive Drumming aims to cover all regions, countries, languages, and cultures, embracing a wide diversity of rhythms is what we are all about.  If we haven’t adopted yours yet, we almost certainly aim to in the future.  If you want yours to be supported now, why not contact us at marketing@alive-dumming.org

What song forms does Alive Drumming support?

We support all the popular, essential song forms by name – 12 bar blues, 16 bar tunes, 32-bar A1A2 and 32-bar AABA, and about 30 other less common also by name.    The list is increasing!  We also support selecting these same song forms using stick notation instead of names.  This simply specifies section lengths in bars, for example, ‘8|8/8|8’, where ‘bridge‘ sections are preceded by a ‘/’ instead of ‘|’. Additionally, we support users defining their own forms via stick notation, including repeats, and concatenation of up to four (4) parts.  This allows for a truly huge flexibility, enough to describe any song’s form.   See this user guide for more information,  Song Rhythm Tracks.

What rhythms are available for Song Rhythm Tracks?

The app currently supports about 60 different distinct rhythm categories, which includes about 250 distinct rhythms.  Of these, most are available with differing instrumentation such as ‘rim’ shots or, say, wooden blocks, and many at multiple tempos.  In all over 3,700 different rhythm track recordings are available that can be applied to a song form.   The app makes selection of one of these 3,700+ recordings easy by providing filtering on a musical meter (say 4/4 or 3/4 time), and feel (even or straight, 8th or 16th notes). Here is a tiny sample of the styles represented:

Jazz, swing, straight 8th, modern, sophisticated, old-time

American Country styles, including Nashville

American Blues, shuffles, hard shuffles, old-time, slow, fast

Salsa, Samba

Bossa, Jazz Bossa Brushes, Latin Bossa, bongos, percussion

Techno, various forms

Rock, hard rock, heavy

Pop, straight 8th, straight 16th, slow, medium, fast

For a full list of all rhythms and sub-rhythms see the page catalog-rhythmic-styles.

How can I use the Song Rhythm Tracks? What’s my licence?

Alive Drumming grants license to remix its tracks.  That is, you can take the Song Rhythm Tracks audio, mix with your own content, and sell that mix as your own work without paying a fee to Alive Drumming. Alive Drumming prohibits resale or redistribution of its un-mixed, original Song Rhythm Tracks.  You cannot sell or give away these tracks unless you mix them into a new creative piece of work. Alive Drumming appreciates artistic attribution but does not require attribution in your remixed works.  You do not need to attribute Alive Drumming for the rhythm track in your remixed original work but if you wish to please add, “rhythm track supplied by Alive Drumming (c)” and include a reference to this website.

How can I get these Song Rhythm Tracks? Are they available on Amazon or iTunes?

The tracks are available via Apple iOS mobile App and will later be available via an Android mobile app. The huge permutations of song forms and rhythms available means the traditional audio file distribution channels of iTunes and Amazon do not fit this new medium of Song Rhythm Tracks. In particular, Amazon and iTunes do not accommodate the additional assistance that is required for musician’s to select the appropriate track. Alive Drumming has no plans to market these tracks on legacy media such as Audio CDs or DAT tape.

Who is Song Rhythm Tracks for?

All Musicians!   New Musicians;    Experienced Musicians;     Great Musicians; Really, any musician including Pianists, Guitarists, Horn Players, Singers and even Drummers. The tracks can be used for practice, performance and cutting a release. To learn more about their benefit in practice, using the Song Rhythm Tracks app, see the news articles, “When to work on your rhythm?”

“How to practice, then how to jam”

“Why songform with rhythm tracks?”

Would Alive Drumming include this extra rhythm?

If we don’t already include a particular rhythm, we would like to work with a drummer to include it.  This involves making high-quality audio recordings of the drumming at multiple tempos including multiple shots and fills used in turnarounds.   The audio recording will be analysed to identify where the various aspects occur and the preference level of each occurrence.   This is the basis for Alive Drumming to incorporate additional rhythms into their Song Rhythm Tracks.    If you are a drummer and have a rhythm you’d like to be represented please email feedback@alive-drumming.org

What’s Alive Drumming’s policy on privacy?

Alive Drumming takes personal privacy very seriously.  We are committed to proactively protecting the privacy of our customers by not storing any personal information unless it is absolutely required, and should that be the case, it will always be protected by strong encryption.  We will never sell or otherwise disclose any personal, private or confidential information we hold on others.

How can I learn about song form?

Song form is based on the concept that every song has been composed around a musical form or structure.   Popular song often chooses simple forms as a basis for a song but forms can be more complex as well. A good reference on song form (structure) is the Wikipedia article,  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_structure

Alive Drumming wants to provide you with the easiest and most reliable methods to describe song form. Song Form may be selected using both (i) traditional names such as ’16-bar Tune’, or (ii) the  ‘stick notation’ equivalent of ‘4|4|4|4’ if that is what you prefer. For full information on Alive Drumming’s Song Rhythm Tracks mobile app and it’s flexibility in identifying Song Forms see the page, Song Rhythm Tracks

You may describe any Song Form with “user-defined” Song Forms in the mobile app, and for popular tunes, searching for a user-contributed Song Form for that song, again within the mobile app.   There are now tens of thousands of these being shared.

Song Rhythm Tracks

are a new type of backing track composed entirely of rhythmic backing (no melody or harmony) arranged to the musical form of the song — it’s “songform”. These tracks are complete performances like one gets from a professional drummer. They have a count-in, introduction section, choruses and characteristic endings, framed by fills showing where sections start and end. Even musical bridges and middle choruses have higher intensity where appropriate to the style. All this without a typical arranger’s interface thereby keeping it simple. One can select a track in under 30 seconds — under 15 seconds once one gets the hang of it.

The App’s player has tempo adjustment and a facility to sequence the tracks for your gig or jam session. It is for musicians of all abilities. New musicians use the App to provide an accompaniment to songs. They get a rhythm that is sympathetic so they learn to keep time, get into the groove and internalise the song’s musical structure – All this while enjoying engaging and inspiring rhythms. Gigging musicians catalogue their backing into setlists and use it to guide performance. Having quality rhythmic backing, with a setlist facility and a musician’s player, all in the one App is so convenient one finds oneself using this rhythmic backing more and more.

Song Rhythm Tracks are truly high-quality rhythmic backing that is convenient to select and play. You are not going to get tired of these backing tracks. You are not going to have to sequence anything. You will find that the player and setlist’s user-interface encourages continued use. You will get to appreciate the form of your songs more and you might include these tracks into your own single and album releases.

Whether you are learning a new tune, jamming, gigging or cutting your latest album, this Song Rhythm Tracks provides a solution.

Check out samples of the audio at Alive Drumming’s Samples page

Check out these articles from Alive Drumming that give further insights into the thinking behind the product –

“When to work on your rhythm?”

“How to practice, then how to jam”

“Why songform with rhythm tracks?”

Download the Song Rhythm Tracks App on the Apple App Store

Try Alive Drumming’s sampler apps to sample previously arranged tracks of popular tunes. It is then easy to use the app to adjust these to your practice and performance requirements. All the sampler apps are the same Song Rhythm Tracks app but with the included sample tracks.

Jazz and Blues Sampler

Afro-Cuban Sampler

Country Music Sampler

  First Published on http://alive-drumming.org/our-favourite-frequently-asked-questions-f-a-q/

[happymetalgeek]

Local bands are gathering to honour a popular Mid Ulster swimming instructor, the late Gary ‘Bapper’ Morris’ with the outdoor festival Bapper’s Gig: NI Rock N’ Roll Festival on Saturday 4th August at The Hill of The O’Neill in Dungannon with a headlining performance from his favourite local band Blackwater Conspiracy.

A big, one day Rock N’ Roll festival was something that Bapper often talked and dreamed of in his lifetime for The Hill of The O’Neill, so his close friend and fellow avid music lover David White decided to make that dream a reality this summer. Having received a nod of approval from Gary’s wife Oliva, David got together with Gary’s niece Erin Foy and Ciaran Campbell of SD Entertainment and they put the plans in motion. What originally was to be a rock gig on the hill has turned into be a large one day festival with ten bands scheduled to perform.

Headliners Blackwater Conspiracy are five individuals wanting to fully express themselves musically while playing in a band and entertaining the masses. Following performances across the UK including Download and Ramblin’ Man Fair festivals last year, this performance will mark their biggest hometown gig to date – given three of their member are from same area. Songwriters Phil Conalane and Brian Mallon take a refreshingly free-form approach to their songs, thus allowing all this individual expression to take place. The result is a breath-taking panorama of material – from rich bluesy slide guitar rock to achingly delicate confessional country; from galloping radio friendly rock ‘n’ roll to late night dark corner whiskey blues.

Speaking at the recent photo call, guitarist Brian Mallon spoke of his delight at headlining Bapper’s Gig “It’s an honour to have been invited to headline Bapper’s Gig. Bapper was a great friend of the band and supported us from day one.” Adding further “It’ll be a great day of music for the Mid-Ulster area and all for a very good and worthwhile cause”

All bands taking part at Bapper’s Gig are all performing for free as a tribute to Bapper and his family whilst aiming to raise as much funds as possible for Northern Ireland Chest, Heart and Stroke. Fellow music lovers can also expect sets from The Pat McManus Band, A Little Bitter, Rusty Jacks along with a selection of locally known bands like Kalibur, Craic Horses, Smoking Gun and more.

The Crafty Crows

Craic Horses

Rusty Jack

Bad Boy Boogie

Past McManus Band

Blackwater Conspiracy

Crowds from all over Northern Ireland are expected to gather up at the Hill of The O’Neill Site in Dungannon. A large scale production is currently in the works to really make Bapper’s ultimate dream and vision a reality. Facilities on site will include toilets, a fully licensed bar, hot food, merchandise stalls and for those who wish to continue rockin’ into the early hours can enjoy an after party at Hagan’s Bar with even more music, free of charge.

Tickets for Bapper’s Gig on Saturday 4th August at The Hill of The O’Neill, Dungannon are priced at a family friendly rate of £10.00 for Over 16s, Under 16s £5.00 and Under 8s Go Free. These can be purchased from The Hill of The O’Neill & Ranfurly House – Tel: 028 87 728 600, also from Stewart’s Music Shop, Dungannon – Tel: 028 87 725 286, Dungannon Leisure Centre – Tel: 028 87 720 370 and online from www.Dungannon.info. Additional information can be accessed from Facebook.com/BappersGig.

The excellent @BlackwaterConsp to headline rock festival 'Bapper’s Gig' in aid of @nichstweet @dungannonarts @sdentire @MetalPlanet72 @BelfastMetal Local bands are gathering to honour a popular Mid Ulster swimming instructor, the late Gary ‘Bapper’ Morris’ with the outdoor festival 

[listening-through-the-lens]

Violent Femmes headline a MONA free Block Party in 2018 to remember

  Over One Thousand Onesies

Gripping Laser Lights

Bold Performance Art

Experimental Sonic Forms

Interpretative Dance And Movement

Edgy Engaging Live Music

Artisan Food and Beverages

It’s the MONA Block Party!

  Images by Jim Jacob

Words by Rob Dickens

  MONA

Since its establishment in Tasmania, Australia in 2011, the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) has quickly established itself as a style and artistic magnet.

The museum is located on a picturesque wine estate and is the largest privately funded such facility in Australia.  Its visionary owner David Walsh has filled the architecturally awe-inspiring Museum with his personal. extensive collection (over 400 items).  But the influence is anything but geographically or culturally-specific.  Many events in its home town of Hobart and northern cousin Launceston spill out into many areas with brilliant celebrations of art, theatre and performance.

  MOFO

MONA hosts the outdoor MOFO festival, and the wintertime Dark Mofo, with an exciting range of live performances and art exhibitions.  Brian Ritchie, bassist for the Violent Femmes, is musical curator for these events.

  MOFO 2018

The MOFO program for 2018 runs over eleven action-packed and eclectic days from 12-22 January.  Featured overall are Gotye, Canada’s Godspeed You! Black Emperor, The Launceston Block Party (headlined by the Femmes), The Femmes Again, this time with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, USA’s Jamie’s Woods and Moor Mother, Brian Jackson and the Southern Gospel Choir and Mayhem (Norway) – plenty of diversity.

  Block Party 2018

The Courtyard of the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery used to be the Launceston Rail Yards. The area has been either beautifully developed or thankfully left as is and we are surrounded by reminders of days past – blacksmith shops, fitter and turner sheds (where, incidentally my late father used to toil decades ago) and unused heritage tracks and sheds.  Throw into this a brash modern event and somehow it works beautifully.

Admission was free.

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  Music On The Day

The day’s music line-up was eclectic and interesting.

Evan Carydakis Quartet provided a saxophone, drums, guitar and bass tribute to John Coltrane’s seminal album A Love Supreme, which Coltrane created after experiencing a spiritual epiphany.

      Bassekou Kouyate and Ngoni Ba Proto wowed us with psychedelic rock and blues from Mali.  Bassekou is a maestro of the ngoni, an ancient West African lute, and singer Amy Sacko gave us some hauntingly sublime vocals.

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  Medhanit Barratt is a talented local, Launceston indie-pop singer-songwriter.

      And favourites of mine, Slag Queens who, according to the official program are “Queer gals from regional Tassie playing post-punk, garage and pop slop. They like feminism, glitter and pizza, and pride themselves on not being able to play their instruments very well”.  They were bitingly effective.

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  Milwaukee’s legendary acoustic punk rockers Violent Femmes ripped it up.  Last time I had sighted them on stage was so long away I can’t remember where or when.  The joyful songs came soon flooding back, bringing smiles to the band members (singer, guitarist and songwriter Gordon Gano, bassist Brian Ritchie and drummer John Sparrow, plus the latest recruit saxophonist (and actor) Blaze Garza who provides some horn muscle).  The crowd was in a rapture, singing along with glorious gusto.

The Femmes put the P in Party today.

Some of the glorious tunes were “Blister In The Sun”,”Prove My Love”, “Love Love Love Love”, “Country Death Song”, “Gone Daddy Gone”, “Gimme The Car”, “I Held Her In My Arms” and the languid closer “American Music”.

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  Other Performers On The Day

Dispossessed Adele Varcoe Damien Barbeler and Anna McMichael Disrepute Dylan Sheridan Emma Agelsey Extemperaneouslea Jason Whatley Quintet Jon Rose Jon Rose and Julia Reidy Robin Fox Stompin

    Violent Femmes headline a Block Party to remember

MONA’s Block Party 2018 Violent Femmes headline a MONA free Block Party in 2018 to remember

[sixstringnation]

The Summer Academy

For many years now, principal Andy Vandyke (pictured, second from left) – with help from dedicated staff – has been running a summer academy at Toronto’s George Harvey Collegiate Institute. It’s a chance for middle school students about to enter the “big leagues” at Harvey to get familiar with the facilities, the academic focus and the culture of the school. It’s not for credit so you know that the students who are there really want to be there to get a leg up on the coming year. And as Andy explained to me, nearly 70% of the students at Harvey have been in Canada 5 years or less so there are many layers to the students’ desire to build that sense of belonging. And for that reason, teacher Susan Novak (pictured, third from left), who’d seen my presentation a few years ago at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, thought it would be a good fit for the summer academy.

The parking lot for the school is a little bit hidden so I went around the block a couple of times before I found it but had it not been for the particular placement of a large bin, I would have recognized it from the three students waiting there to greet me and usher me in to the school. I got set up in the library pretty quickly and had a chance to peruse the nearby shelves, where I found Herb Carnegie‘s book, “A Fly in a Pail of Milk” about his experiences as the first black pro hockey player. I had met with Herb a couple of times at the senior’s residence in my old neighbourhood where he lived back when I was doing my original research for the Six String Nation project – hoping I might be able to include something of his. Sadly, even with the help of Herb’s daughter trying to track something down, he had no memorabilia from his hockey career that we could make use of. In hindsight, I wish I would have accepted just about anything she and Herb might have given me since his career as a business leader, youth mentor, author and public speaker was just as significant. And I was glad to hear that he had spoken at Harvey several times before his death in 2012. I also discovered as I poked around the halls and library, that George Harvey C.I. was the alma mater of NFL and CFL wide receiver Tyrone Williams, who is the first player to win a Vanier Cup championship in Canadian university football, a Super Bowl championship (2 actually, in 1992 & 1993) AND a Grey Cup championship. These days, the focus at Harvey is more on technology, ESL, post-secondary prep and basketball and gets occasional visits from various Toronto Raptors.

The students were awesome during the presentation and they were well served by the staff during the “performance pocket” at the end of the presentation. Math teacher Daniel Marinelli (pictured, left) warmed things up for English teacher Dave Watkins (pictured, holding Voyageur) , who played an original song titled “Going Back to Montreal”. Dave, it turns out, has some pretty interesting Canadian history in his own family: his father, Howard Watkins, joined the police force in Windsor Ontario as a constable in the 1950s and worked his way up to become the city’s first black police detective. Sadly, he died of a heart attack at the too-young age of 40 in 1968, when Dave was just 4 years old.

And to complete that family circle, Dave’s son, Isaiah Watkins (pictured, right), currently on a basketball scholarship at Furman University in South Carolina and rated by ESPN.com as one basketball’s top 5 Canadian prospects, dazzled the audience with a rendition of that favourite of gymnastic guitarists, “Classical Gas”!

Thanks to all the staff and students at GHCI Summer Academy and I hope to see you all again when school starts in the fall. Until then, enjoy the rest of summer and thanks for having me.

The Summer Academy was originally published on Six String Nation