My most treasured piece of vinyl

My 1966 , gold Parlophone label, mono pressing of Revolver by The Beatles (of course).
It still plays without a jump, bit scratchy though. Finest!

"Hey Jude" The Beatles on The David Frost Show

They were the best, they still are the best and always will be the best. The Beatles on The David Frost show in 1968. David's a bit lost as John chants David Frost at him while the rest of the boys generally do what they like. This footage is priceless, the song itself, the crowd singalong, Paul's vocals, Ringo's lime green suit, George's Fender 6, the old guy in the uniform and the girl in the white dress standing beside Paul, the eye contact between John and Paul and John's obvious enthusiasm as he sings a strums along...timeless and utterly joyous.

The Nazz - "Open My Eyes"

Pop psych freakout from The Nazz, featuring a very young Todd Rundgren on magnificent form, playing a beautiful "Gibson Flying V". Featured on "The Nazz" and the first Nuggett's L.P. You have to go to YouTube to watch it for copyright reasons...

Jerry Leiber & Mike Stoller Tribute by Bob Stanley

Jerry Leiber & Mike Stoller

Bob Stanley pays tribute:
The Abbey Road medley is often cited as the perfect career closer: “And in the end, the love you make is equal to the love you take” sums up the warmth, generosity and unbroken circle of the Beatles’ story. Mind you, a pair of furrow-browed, smirking, razor-sharp writers called Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller might have raised an eyebrow at the notion – “Yeah, yeah” they’d sneer, proving there is such a thing as a double positive: “So you haven’t you heard Is That All There Is?”

Leiber and Stoller wrote songs that were as indebted to Vaudeville as they were to their beloved R&B, and in the process they created a catalogue that nailed the recklessness, teendom and irreverent giddy joy of classic Rock’n'Roll. They were born just six weeks apart in 1933, grew up on the east coast, and finally met in 1950 when both their families relocated almost simultaneously to LA. It was fate. They were soulmates, they clicked, and began writing songs together immediately. But they were quite different people. While Mike Stoller was a beatnik, very laid back, with a penchant for classical music (the strings on the Drifters’ game-changing There Goes My Baby were his idea), Jerry Leiber was a motormouth. He wasn’t interested in any music that you couldn’t dance to. He had wild red hair and, like David Bowie, he had one brown eye and one blue: his passport listed his eye colour as “assorted”.

Doing deliveries for his mum’s grocery store in Baltimore, he had come across blues and boogie woogie on black customers’ radios, “music I never heard anywhere else”. In LA he developed a taste for “jazz and pigs’ feet and dark meat, if you know what I mean.” He and Mike “used to argue which one of us was the blackest.” Who won the arguments? “*We* did!” They would write five songs a day and, by the time Big Mama Thornton cut their Hound Dog in 1952, had their schtick down pat. Nothing was taken too seriously; their songs were skits – Love Potion No.9, Yakety Yak, Smokey Joe’s Cafe – that were smart and funny and snorted at sentimentality. They were a blast.

Leiber/Stoller were maybe the first names I noticed cropping up over and over in brackets under the titles of songs I loved, on Elvis’s 40 Greatest and The Very Best Of The Drifters. They started the Brill Building pop machine almost singlehandedly, moving there in 1958 when it was still the province of Irving Berlin and pre-rock publishers. They became godfathers of the scene, the hugest inspiration to Goffin and King, Mann and Weil, and especially Greenwich and Barry. As a team Laura Barton compared them in the Guardian to Morecambe and Wise, but I see them more like Statler and Waldorf, cynical birds bouncing one-liners off each other who would sniff at ‘pop’ acts one minute, then be drawn in and end up writing a classic for them: this is how they ended writing such unlikely but great songs as Tommy Roe’s The Gunfighter and Jackson for Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood.

Elvis was the ultimate case in point. Once Hound Dog had made them rich Jerry and Mike were asked to write something new for him. They didn’t like what he’d done to Hound Dog, thought it too fast and nervy sounding, so they came up with the (in their eyes) mewling, sarcastic Love Me. Of course, Elvis turned it into a sensual classic – listen to what he does with “I would beg and steal, just to feel, your heart beating close to mine” – that Leiber and Stoller had never thought possible. After that, with new-found respect, they gave him the valley-deep Don’t and large chunks of the King Creole and Jailhouse Rock soundtracks: Leiber/Stoller/Presley, the perfect R&R combination. Unsurprisingly, they stand up as Elvis’s best movies.

They knew how to make records, but never quite worked out how to sell them. Hooking up with inveterate gambler but proven record company stalwart George Goldner in 1964, they formed Red Bird records and its more soulful subsidiary Blue Cat. Straight away they scored a number one with the Dixie Cups’ Chapel Of Love: “I hated the fucking record!” sulked Jerry. Red Bird put out a higher percentage of mindsnappers than maybe any label before or since, but Jerry Leiber stayed in the back room most of the time. Once in a while he chipped in with a floorfiller like the Shangri La’s’ Bull Dog. When Red Bird folded, under the weight of Goldner’s personal debts in 1966, Leiber and Stoller pretty much bowed out of pop. They loved Rock’n'Roll, pure and dirty and true, and they weren’t built for the solemnity of the psychedelic era. When Peggy Lee cut Is That All There Is in 1969, it was the perfect curtain to fall on their career: death, destruction, busted
marriages… so what?! It won them a Grammy. It’s also the perfect funeral song.

Leiber and Stoller were inseparable – they wrote together, produced together, even had three marriages each. And apparently they were writing a biography together – I can’t think of another joint autobiography that isn’t by a married couple. Let’s hope Mike Stoller can finish it on his own.

The list of their achievements could (and hopefully will) fill a book, but just for starters… Stand By Me, King Creole, I Who Have Nothing, Searchin’, There Goes My Baby, Poison Ivy, Lucky Lips, Where’s The Girl, Some Other Guy, Drip Drop, Spanish Harlem, Bossa Nova Baby, Kansas City, Trouble, Tricky Dicky… I feel a party coming on. It’s the best way to pay tribute to Jerry Leiber.

He’s gone, but don’t be a blue cat.

Jerry Leiber, 1933 – 2011

Talking Pictures...It's a kind of Bonzo Dog Band Documentary

Dazzling, surreal, audacious, brave, stupendous, hilarious, frightening, bizarre, goonish, catchy, childish, handsome, ugly, technicolour DADA...a few words to put in a sentence about The Bonzo Dog Band for your English homework. Still Britain's second greatest pop band off all time, and you can take that to the bank, but they wont give you money for it. Don't believe me, watch this rarefied collection of true British eccentricity in full speed ahead action painting, action man, action lights, action cameras, action music... Action. They are The Beatles on laughing gas, I think.


   

Sweet Essence of Giraffe...Viv Stanshall at 68

Victor Anthony Stanshall, known as Viv or Vivian for most of his adult life, was born in Shillingford, Oxford on March 21st 1943. The story goes that after his birth the nurse brought three babies into his mothers room, two with small, neat heads and one with a huge head wearing a shock of wild ginger hair. His mother tried for one of the other babies, but there was no getting away from Vivian.

Viv and his mother lived in Shillingford while her husband, Victor (1909–1990) (a name he had adopted in preference to his own christened name of Vivian), served in the RAF.  Vivian wolud later tell his wife, that this was the happiest time of his life. When the war ended, his father returned, and with him the happiness came to an end.The family moved back to Walthamstow. The return of Victor Stanshall was a turning point in the young Vivian's life. With only him and his mother, life was ideal. With the addition of a stern, pretentious father, Stanshall's life took a serious downturn, followed by a further shock at the arrival of a new brother, Mark Stanshall, born in 1949. They were six years apart, an age difference that apparently put a certain amount of emotional distance in their relationship that was never resolved.

As a teenager, Stanshall secretly joined a gang of teddy boys, attracted both by the rock'n'roll and the clothing. Even among such dandies, though, he was a bit of an oddball. About this time, the Stanshall family moved to the Essex coastal town of Leigh-on-Sea. To put aside enough money to get himself through art school (his father having refused to fund such goings-on), Stanshall spent a year in the merchant navy, where he made a very bad waiter, but a great teller of tall tales. He enrolled at the Central School of Art in London. Here, Stanshall and his fellow students, including Rodney Slater, Roger Ruskin Spear and Neil Innes, who was studying art at Goldsmiths College, came together to form a band.

The Bonzo Dog Dooh-Dah Band
The name of the band came from a word game which Stanshall played with art school peer and future Bonzo member Rodney Slater, involving cutting up sentences and juxtaposing the fragments to form new ones. One of the combinations that came out of this exercise was "Bonzo Dog/Dada". The band initially performed under this name, but soon grew tired of explaining what Dada meant. Thus they became the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band — later abbreviated to The Bonzo Dog Band, or just The Bonzos.

In these early days they were a very loose assemblage, consisting of the core members mentioned above, plus just about anyone else who felt like joining in. At times there were as many as 30 of them, with gigs often featuring more people on stage than in the audience. Their act at this time consisted of anarchic re-workings of old British novelty songs, found on 78 rpm records bought from flea markets, spiced with improvisation and a variety of bizarre machines assembled from junk, with at least one explosion per gig.

The Bonzos might have continued in this way, probably disappearing into obscurity, had it not been for a nasty shock: the 1966 chart success of a winsomely arch number called Winchester Cathedral by The New Vaudeville Band — a band comprising session musicians created by songwriter Geoff Stephens, whose musical style was uncannily like the Bonzos' own. As soon as the record became a hit, Stephens and his record company needed a band to present themselves as The New Vaudeville Band. Bob Kerr, a Bonzo member, was asked by his friend Stephens to become the band, and he tried convincing the others that they change their name to achieve greater commercial success, but the advice was rejected...at this point Kerr left the band. Several weeks later, the band appeared on Top Of The Pops performing the songs in clothes exactly like the Bonzos. An emergency meeting was called and the band decided to wear whatever they wanted. The Bonzos realized that if they were to make a mark for themselves, they would have to forge a new path.

According to the band's manager Gerry Bron (brother of the actress Eleanor Bron), Vivian Stanshall was given several weeks to produce songs for the new professional Bonzo Dog Band. When people arrived at his studio they found he had not written a single thing, focusing instead on building a variety of rabbit hutches.

"Canyons of Your Mind" on Colour Me Pop

From here on, they started writing their own material and dropping it into the act alongside the old novelty numbers. With Stanshall now liberated from his original role as tuba player and firmly established as the front man, the act became more sophisticated, more daring, satirical, and original.  For a while the band existed as a semi-pro outfit playing the college circuit, but it wasn't long before they acquired a manager, went full time, and found themselves booked on the working men's club circuit mainly in the north of England. The band dominated their lives, traveling to low-paying gigs in an old van crammed with any number of musical instruments, an assortment of props, and prop robots.

In 1967, they appeared in The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour television special playing Vivian's song "Death Cab for Cutie" during the strip club scene, and this was followed by a slot as the house band on Do Not Adjust Your Set, a weekly TV revue show essentially for children, also notable for early appearances by David Jason and various future Monty Pythons.

The Bonzos on "Do Not Adjust Your Set"


In 1968 the Bonzos scored a surprise top ten hit with a number called "I'm the Urban Spaceman" (produced by Apollo C. Vermouth aka Paul McCartney), after management wanted them to "play the game" as Innes put it, to try for a hit single. The band toured incessantly and recorded several albums, which led to a tour of the United States. This was so successful that they were booked for another US tour soon after. Neil Innes remembers that the band were reportedly stopped by a local U.S. sheriff and asked if they were carrying any firearms or drugs. When they denied both, the officer asked how they were going to defend themselves. Vivian piped up from the back of the minibus, "With good manners!"

Between the tours, however, something brought about a change in Stanshall's personality. There were rumours of a bad acid trip in the States, but Vivian never confirmed nor denied this, instead explaining it as a panic on stage which destroyed his confidence and inevitably his life. None of his fellow Bonzos claims to know just what happened, but by the start of the second tour he was taking very large doses of tranquillizers prescribed by a private doctor ostensibly to treat stage-fright, which in reality was crippling agoraphobia and panic disorder. This led also to Vivians increasingly large in take of alcohol in order to self medicate himself for the symptoms of his illness. Nevertheless, the workload never let up. The band had a punishing schedule, often playing more than one gig per evening. The band got sick of the whole touring scene, and decided to split still as friends. In 1970, after six years of mounting exhaustion, they broke up.

Post Bonzos and the Emergence of Sir Henry Rawlinson...

Stanshall went on to form various short-lived groups including The Sean Head Showband, Bonzo Dog Freaks (featuring the guitar talents of the rotund Bubs White) and BiG GrunT. At one point, he even went into teaching art and drama at a boys' secondary modern school in Surrey. By now, his life was dogged by alcoholism and panic attacks, which he tried to control with Valium; he would have these problems for the rest of his life. He had several spells in hospitals in attempts to stop or control his drinking, but they never worked. He was also still being prescribed larger and larger doses of Valium, which, he later reported, made things worse by adding another addiction. Even so, he continued to write music and tour. 

The Rawlinson family had been populating Stanshall's imagination for quite a while, their first appearance (in name, at least) being on the Bonzos' 1967 number The Intro & The Outro: "Great to hear the Rawlinsons on trombone".

An LP, "Sir Henry at Rawlinson End", which reworked some of the material from the Peel sessions, appeared in 1978. A sepia-tinted black and white film version, starring Trevor Howard as Sir Henry, and Stanshall as Hubert, followed in 1980. It was also based on the Peel recordings, with many variations from the LP. Some of the film's music was provided by Stanshall's friend Steve Winwood. A book of the same title by Stanshall, illustrated with stills from the film, was published by Eel Pie Publishing in 1980. Nominally a film novelisation, it was distilled from all the various versions of the story, including a good deal of material that was not used in the film.

A second Rawlinson album, "Sir Henry at Ndidi's Kraal" (1983), recounts Sir Henry's disastrous African expedition, but omits the rest of the Rawlinson clan. According to Ki Longfellow-Stanshall, his widow, he regarded this recording as sub-standard and it was released without his knowledge and against his wishes. He was ill when making it, and the record company issued it as quickly as possible. Stanshall was often drunk and/or depressed during production, which took place on The Searchlight, a house boat he bought from Moody Blues and Wings' Denny Laine and moored between Shepperton and Chertsey on the River Thames. He lived on it from 1977 to 1983. Converted from a Second World War era submarine-chaser, it was forever taking on water and sank with all his possessions aboard. Almost all of them were retrieved, some the worse for water damage.

After Sir Henry and So To The Big Sleep... 

Stanshall collaborated on numerous projects including Robert Calvert's Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters, Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells where he is the Master of Ceremonies, breathily announcing the buildup of instruments in the finale of the first side of the album, appeared with Grimms and The Rutles, as well as occasionally working with The Alberts and The Temperance Seven.

While living on the Searchlight, Stanshall composed and recorded Teddy Boys Don't Knit, and wrote and recorded Sir Henry at Rawlinson End. There, he also wrote and filmed the film of the same name for Tony Stratton-Smith's Charisma Records company. At the same time, he co-wrote with Steve Winwood the songs for Winwood's Arc of a Diver and wrote some of the songs he later used for Stinkfoot, a Comic Opera, the musical comedy he wrote with his second wife Ki Longfellow.

After the Searchlight, the Stanshall family lived and worked on the Thekla, a Baltic Trader, which was sailed 732 nautical miles (1,356 km) from the east coast of England to be moored in the Bristol docks. Ki had bought the Thekla in Sunderland, and converted her into a floating theatre called The Old Profanity Showboat. Vivian joined her when the doors opened to the public for the first time in May 1983. In December 1985, the ship saw the debut of their production, Stinkfoot, a Comic Opera.

Stanshall wrote 27 original songs for Stinkfoot, sharing book and lyric writing with his wife. The show involved bizarre characters that they imagined living under a seaside pier as well as characters taken from Longfellow's early tale for children called Stinkfoot. It proved a success, with people coming from all over Europe and even the Americas to see it. It was revived in London some years later with Peter Moss as musical director, but was not a critical success.

"Vivian Stanshall's Week" Documentary

There is also a 28-minute film of Stanshall currently inside the BBC vault: One Man's Week, dated 1975, looks at a week in his life and includes footage of him at The Manor Studio recording studio playing music with Gaspar Lawal, Mongezi Feza, Anthony White and Derek Quinn. This film also shows him talking about his turtles and playing his 'Phonofiddle'.

Stanshall's voice won him several commercial voice-overs, including a campaign for Cadbury's Mini Eggs which involved a reworking of the Bonzos' song Mister Slater's Parrot, under the title of Mister Cadbury's Parrot.

Vivian was married twice: in 1968 to fellow art student Monica Peiser (they had a son, Rupert, that year, and were divorced in 1975); and on 9 September 1980, to novelist Pamela "Ki" Longfellow. They had a daughter, Silky, born on 16 August 1979, named after a racehorse called Silky Sullivan, her mother's childhood favourite.
In late 1988, after Fish had left Marillion, the band considered using lyrics Stanshall had written, but in the end decided to hire John Helmer instead.

In 1989, his short interview with John Wesley Harding was released on Harding's God Made Me Do It: the Christmas EP.

In 1991, Stanshall made a 15-minute autobiographical piece called Vivian Stanshall: The Early Years, aka Crank, for BBC2's The Late Show, in which he confessed to having been terrified of his father, who had always disapproved of him.

A later programme for BBC Radio 4, Vivian Stanshall: Essex Teenager to Renaissance Man (1994) included an interview with his mother in which she insisted that his father had loved him, but Stanshall was mortified that his father had never shown it, not even on his deathbed.

Death

Stanshall was found dead on 6 March 1995, after a fire at his Muswell Hill (north London) flat; coincidentally, this was one hundred years to the day after the death of (the original) Sir Henry Rawlinson. Stanshall often smoked and drank in bed and even set fire to his long ginger beard, to the frequent concern of his wife and friends, however the fire was later attributed to faulty electric wiring.

Captain Beefheart – January 15, 1941 – December 17, 2010.

Beefheart is an utter original if not some kind of genius...(R. Christgau).

Beefheart design: A. Monaghan

Don Van Vliet, better known as Captain Beefheart, who has died aged 69 of complications from multiple sclerosis, was one of the most influential American musicians of the 1960s and 1970s. His status was always cult rather than commercial, and for most of his career he was broke.

Yet he remained a hero to most of the musical avant garde: the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and the Mothers of Invention in America; Roxy Music, Hawkwind, Jethro Tull, Family and Edgar Broughton in Britain. He was one of John Peel's favourite artists, and the DJ did much to promote Beefheart by playing his records when no other radio programme would touch them.

In 1964 Beefheart formed the Magic Band, the first of many lineups under the name. They sounded pretty discordant, but due to Beefheart's mesmeric presence, a four-and-a-half octave vocal range, his eccentric ability with lyrics and his inexplicable one-liners to interviewers, the band was unforgettable.

Beefheart once described his thing to an uncomprehending radio interviewer as "music to dematerialise the catatonia". His style was rhythm and blues-based but completely unorthodox in its approach to structure, rhythm and key. Magic Band musicians had names such as Winged Eel Fingerling, Zoot Horn Rollo, the Mascara Snake and Rockette Morton. They wore a ragbag of cloaks and the Captain wore a hat, usually a topper, which became his trademark.

Van Vliet was born in Glendale, California, an only child who showed artistic talent. He claimed he was producing respected sculpture at the age of five. When he was 13, his family moved to the Mojave desert, an atmosphere that was to have an enormous influence on him, and particularly his painting, and a place where he lived on and off all his life.

In 1959 he was offered a place at Antelope Valley junior college as an art major, but instead he hung out at home with his schoolfriend Frank Zappa, listening to old r'n'b records and planning various projects. One was dreamed up sitting stoned in a car ("Not Zappa," recalled Beefheart, "Frank never turned on") in the desert in 1962, to shoot a film called Captain Beefheart Meets the Grunt People. The film was never made, but the name stuck.

From their early teens, Beefheart and Zappa developed a love-hate relationship which became lifelong, mainly based on Beefheart's resentment of Zappa's success. Despite briefly moving to Cucamonga in California in the early 1960s to be with Zappa, intending to form a band called the Soots, Beefheart remained in the desert while Frank, an astute businessman, moved to Los Angeles and founded the Mothers of Invention.

Beefheart's early albums remain the most original: Safe as Milk (produced by Bob Krasnow and Richard Perry, 1967); Strictly Personal (completed in a week, produced by Krasnow, 1968) and two albums for Zappa's Straight label: Trout Mask Replica (1969) and Lick My Decals Off, Baby (1970). For Trout Mask Replica, Beefheart locked the Magic Band in a house in Woodland Hills for eight months, continually rehearsing the songs. Virtually broke, they often had nothing but bread to eat, but when they finally got into the studio they recorded the double album in four and a half hours.

Although they admired him, other musicians found Beefheart exasperating. The guitarist Ry Cooder played on the first album and was due to appear at the Monterey festival in 1967 with the band, but left in a temper after Beefheart had a panic attack during rehearsal and walked off the back of the stage, landing on top of his manager.

It was Beefheart's stubborn refusal to conform that invariably lost him the big bucks. And he was not indifferent to money. He loved fast cars and owned variously a Hudson, Corvette and Jaguar, drank brandy alexanders, and always wore the best shoes he could afford.

In 1974 Beefheart was signed to Virgin Records. Richard Branson also desperately wanted to sign Zappa, but it was during one of Beefheart's hate-Frank periods. Despite being warned never to mention the name, virtually the first words Branson uttered to Beefheart were about how great it would be when he had also got Zappa on to the label. It was a fateful and uneasy start. Yet when, as invariably happened with Beefheart, the relationship between artist and record company soured, it was Zappa who rescued Beefheart and took him on tour. Beefheart responded by filling a series of huge sketchbooks with angry drawings of Zappa.

Despite having no formal training in art, Beefheart drew and painted throughout his music career. His first exhibition was in Liverpool at the Bluecoat Gallery in 1972, while he was touring in Britain. He executed 15 black and white paintings in situ. In 1982, on the advice of the New York art dealer Michael Werner that he would never be taken seriously as a painter unless he gave up music, Beefheart turned to art and gained a reasonable reputation.

He married his wife Jan in 1970. She cared for him through his debilitating multiple sclerosis until the end.

• Don Van Vliet (Captain Beefheart), musician and artist, born 15 January 1941; died 17 December 2010

For a great re-assesment of his work go to...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2010/dec/22/captain-beefheart-back-catalogue?intcmp=239

Strawberry Fields Forever, Penny Lane & All You Need is Love...

Years from now, when we are all dust, these clips will still be three of the strangest bit's of music put to film, although All You Need is Love isn't really music put to film as they sang live in the studio, but it's still very odd.

There something so unreal about The Beatles at this time, that they were so huge globally, universally even, yet their music and themselves seem so personal and familiar, like they are singing and playing to us, each and everyone individually.

The movie clips themselves are noteworthy for their very oddness, strangeness and at times down right sinister quality. You have the fab four wandering around some God forsaken autumnal moor or heath, in balaclavas and furs, jumping from an impressive height, walking around backwards, drip painting and deconstructing some kind of butchered piano and all under a very witchy looking tree that I for one wouldn't hang around under after dark ..very strange.

John Lennon striding against the human traffic on a Liverpudlian high street and then the four of them meeting like some street gang, then even odder, The Beatles on horse back in some street which cuts to a decrepit ruin in the country, the four beatles decked out in red hunting jackets ride cryptically past a stage set up with drums and amps to a table where they are waited on by what look like four footmen before John Lennon upends the whole thing.

And the last clip...The Beatles elevated above a crowd made up of their musical peers including Keith Richards, Donovan, Marianne Faithful and Keith Moon, demi Gods in their own domain, Dons to the whole 60's pop gangster family, gazing down upon their minions and postulating about love and other weirdness while Mick Jagger sings and claps along looking like a sheepish schoolboy...what were these people on?

Strawberry Fields


Penny Lane


All You Need is Love

What is this...? A convention!!

Phil Spector, pre porridge duty, Boyce and Heart and on drums, backing vocals and cello Genie on an episode of I dream of Genie. Where's Hagman?  American T.V. doesn't get stranger or cooler than this...

"Room Full off Mirrors" Jimi Hendrix Experience...

Not the widely known version from the Rainbow Bridge soundtrack. This version, which to my mind is far superior, is a lot darker with a real sense of brooding and malevolence. Jimi's vocal are on top form, and the guitar break is searing and concise. Hope you enjoy this one from the vaults. The film was made as a tribute to the great man, and in honour of the 40th anniversary of his parting with this life.

The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band

I've just recently got into this act from the late '60's. They seem very eclectic but interesting if a little patchy. I'll write more once I've investigated them a bit further. In the meantime...



I made this film to go with this insanely great little track "Roger the Rocket Ship", from the album "Markley, A Group"..."Look out for me I'll tear you apart, look out for me I have no heart". Very Charlie Manson lyrically and a little bit disturbing. Got that west coast 1969 spook to it. Just Fab!

The greatest B-Side of all time...

Of course it's "Rain" by The Beatles.



and this version was recorded for the Ed Sullivan show. The Beatles look ghostly.It sounds massive, must be something to do with the re broadcast. It's sounds wildly distorted and much washier. Cool!!!

Happy Birthday to "The Quiet Beatle"

Quiet? I never really got that but then again I wasn't born until 1970 so what do I know. Born incidentally on the same day George Harrison celebrated his 27th. birthday, 25th. February 1970. So here's to you George. As a kind of tribute I've listed my favourite tracks by the great man. Feel free to agree, disagree or add as you please...
1. I need you
2. You like me too much
3. If I needed someone
4. Think for yourself
5. Taxman
6. Love you too
7. I want to tell you
8. Within without you
9. Old brown shoe
10. It's all too much
11. Only a northern song
12. The inner light
13. Here comes the sun
14. Something
15. Long, long, long
16. While my guitar gently weeps
17. Badge (with Eric Clapton, performed by Cream)
18. Savoy Truffle
19. My Sweet Lord
20. All thing's must pass
21. Wah, Wah.
22. Bangladesh (live at the concert for Bangladesh)
23. I, me, mine.
24. Sour Milk Sea (Sung by Jackie Lomax)
25. Not Guilty (Beatles version, Anthology 3)
26. Give me love