More Unseen Hell's Angel Images...

These images were taken by LIFE photographer Bill Ray back in 1965, for an article on the outlaw biker gang the Hell's Angels, written by Joe Bride.

One of the images from the 1965 LIFE magazine article.

Rolling Thunder
From Jesse James to Tony Soprano, outlaws have always held a singular if ambiguous place in America's popular imagination: we fear and loathe their appetite for violence, yet we envy and covet their freedom. In early 1965, LIFE photographer Bill Ray and writer Joe Bride spent several weeks with a gang that, to this day, serves as a living, brawling embodiment of our schizoid relationship with the rebel: the Hells Angels. Here, in a gallery of never-published photographs, Ray and Bride recall their days and nights with Buzzard, Hambone, Big D, and other Angels (and their "old ladies") at a time when the roar of Harleys and the sight of long-haired bikers was still new, alien, and for the average, law-abiding citizen, simply terrifying. Above: Hells Angels, 1965 -- the one previously published image in this gallery. None of the pictures that follow have ever been seen before.
To see the full set of images follow this link: 
http://www.life.com/image/ugc1129811/in-gallery/47471/never-seen-hells-angels-1965 

Tim Buckley...

A brief over view of Tim' life and work. Words from Mojo on line article...

 
TIM BUCKLEY IS OFTEN SEEN as the last of Elektra's great "folk" signings in the connecting line from Judy Collins, Tom Paxton, Fred Neil and Phil Ochs. He appears to bridge the era of acoustic folk and the influence of rock from Los Angeles, but really he never belonged in either camp.
Born in Washington, DC, on Valentine's Day 1947, Buckley was raised in New York. His family moved to Orange County, California, when he was ten years old and at 17 he joined a Country & Western outfit, Princess Ramona & The Cherokee Riders. But his musical spirit would never be so easily channelled and two groups he formed with friends from Buena Vista High School - the pop-flavoured Bohemians and the more esoteric Harlequin 3 - pointed the way forward. Buckley, drummer Larry Beckett and bass player Jim Fielder played the LA clubs, where the Mothers Of Invention's Jimmy Carl Black brought them to the attention of Herb Cohen, who arranged an audition at the Crescendo, on the Strip.
"The band did a set of five or six songs," said Cohen, who died in March this year. "Tim was phenomenal. He looked great, and the voice was special even then. But Larry was not really a drummer, and Jim Fielder was nowhere near as good a musician as he would become. I brought Tim to Elektra."

Elektra boss Jac Holzman was smitten by Buckley's otherworldly voice after hearing a six-song demo. "There was a mysterious, almost ephemeral quality about Tim," he says today. Holzman signed him during the summer of 1966, and the debut album, Tim Buckley - recorded in LA by Paul Rothchild - was released in December that year, beating out the first Doors album by a month.
Holzman felt the album, as interesting as it was, served merely as an introduction to Buckley's talent. "It was an exercise in learning the studio and introducing Tim to its possibilities. The first album was training wheels for what followed. Some songs are really good - Wings, Song Of The Magician, perhaps Grief In My Soul - and there were moments of daring."
Buckley worked hard to promote his album, playing festivals, concerts, clubs, and campuses. Holzman: "Live, he was cotton candy for the girls. His songs reveal a sensitivity that women pick up on earlier than men, but they were the first [fans] he would lose later with his more ambiguous work."

Buckley's most obvious USP was that voice, which New York Times critic Robert Shelton described as "not quite a counter-tenor, but a tenor to counter with". However, within a year of his tantalising debut, Buckley was preparing something more challenging and sophisticated. He and Larry Beckett, now writing poetic lyrics, had a solid notion of how they wanted to shape Buckley's second album, Goodbye And Hello. Folk maven Jerry Yester - soon to join The Lovin' Spoonful - was assigned as producer.
"The first time I met Tim," recalls Yester, "was at Herbie Cohen's house. He played for Judy Henske, Fred Neil, and me. He sang with Jim Fielder on bass. Right out of high school, Tim was wearing a suit, a maroon tie, and his hair was slicked back. He was painfully shy. Fred Neil was his god, and I'm sure he dreamed his voice could have dropped an octave to sing like Fred. He emulated Fred's tragic side, too."
Yester fondly recalls a simpatico relationship with Buckley and Beckett.
"They just tickled me. They weren't about to let anyone screw them over. Firm in their ideals, they had that album all worked out, even down to the track sequencing. I would make suggestions - some they would take, others they wouldn't, but they were open-minded. My role was to bring Tim out, his uniqueness and the clarity of his vision."
At its best, such as the dramatic, impassioned Pleasant Street or the mood-shifting Hallucinations, Goodbye And Hello scores high, justifying Holzman's belief that the album was "a fully realised gem, a miracle." Buckley appears most at ease on the two mellower, more laidback songs: Morning Glory, with its wonderful understated arrangement, and the simple, dreamy Once I Was, inspired by Fred Neil after Buckley visited the sessions for Neil's recording of The Dolphins.
The album marked a turning point for its author. "It was very hard for me to write songs after Goodbye And Hello because most of the bases were touched," Buckley said in 1974. "That was the end of my apprenticeship for writing songs. Whatever I wrote after that wasn't adolescent, which means it wasn't easy to write after that, because you can't repeat yourself. The way Jac had it set up, you were supposed to move on artistically, but the way the business is, you're not. You're supposed to repeat what you do, so there's a dichotomy there."
Buckley guitarist Lee Underwood observed the dichotomy that the singer had identified. "Tim's approach was very much at odds with the laidback troubadour image. That image fit him during the early days, when he was a teenage folkie, but quickly became irrelevant and inappropriate as he matured."
Bruce Botnick, who was the engineer on the first three Buckley albums for Elektra, saw him change before his eyes. "You couldn't contain Tim Buckley's talent - a reflection of all the different sides of his personality. There were quantum leaps between his albums and an intellectual growth that's the mark of a great artist. It's never really conscious with someone like Tim Buckley or Bob Dylan - these people don't slice themselves up into pieces, it's all very instinctive, they have a vision."
Buckley toured Goodbye And Hello with a pool of musicians who were now exploring jazz roots rather than folk. It was this intimate group of players - featuring Buckley's own 12-string, Lee Underwood on lead guitar, and Carter C.C. Collins on congas, plus acoustic bass and vibes - who entered the studios to record what became Happy Sad.

Simply letting the tape roll, the musicians improvised minimalist tapestries around six of Buckley's new songs, of which two stretched beyond ten minutes. Elaborate poetic metaphors and intricate arrangements were out, and experimentation replaced the blithe romanticism of Goodbye And Hello. It would prove to be Buckley's defining album and his highest-charting, even if it only made 81, and it remained in the charts for three months after its release in April 1969.
Yet Jerry Yester has less than fond memories. He was in the middle of an album with Pat Boone when Buckley asked him to produce Happy Sad. Yester was now working in a production team with Zal Yanovsky, who had left the Lovin' Spoonful (and whom Yester would replace). Buckley's musicians ridiculed them for working with the straight-laced Boone but there was one bizarre consequence. The Pat Boone album Yester was producing - Departure - includes the first ever released version of one of Tim Buckley's most renowned compositions: Song To The Siren, unrecorded by Buckley till Starsailor two years later.
"After the rewarding and enjoyable experience with Goodbye And Hello, this was oil and water," says Yester. "Not so much with Tim, but with the band. He really didn't need any input from me on arrangements. The band was leading him at times, and I was there to help make it sound as good as possible."
Buckley had a different recollection. "I really loved doing that album. It was really a break-out time for me musically, and we had a ball doing that. The trick of writing is to make it sound like it's all happening for the first time. It took a long time for me to write that album, and then to teach the people in the band, but they were all great people so it was really a labour of love - the way it should be."
The music always came first for Buckley, as Holzman knew from the start. "He never felt any desire to be famous. He was purely musical and he wanted people around him who could facilitate his music. He was motivated only by a need for self-expression. When Happy Sad made the shift from Goodbye And Hello, the audience he had acquired began to drift away. You go to Lorca and Starsailor, and that process escalates - and he wasn't adding any new audience to compensate for the loss. Tim never cared about the numbers. Just the music.

"Happy Sad disappointed me at first," continues Holzman, "because I expect things to take off and go up, not to take off and go nowhere. In retrospect, that was tough for me to understand. Tim was drifting into a looser style, much jazzier, but there are fine, fine songs: Buzzin' Fly, and Love From Room 109 At The Islander (On Pacific Coast Highway) are compelling. It was something I didn't expect, and I realise more now that it was also very, very good. I did not see the perspective then; I do now."
Herb Cohen, who would continue to manage Buckley into the '70s, was just as rueful: "Tim committed artistic suicide in a way - certainly commercial suicide. Of course he did some stuff that was really good, strange as it was, but he wanted to develop something, and I don't know that he really knew what that was or whether he felt he had ever got there. There was no way that people could relate to albums like Lorca and Starsailor. People do now, and they try and figure out what that music was and where it was going, but the world at the time wasn't prepared for that. People would come to see him because of what they heard from the first two albums and they couldn't understand what he was doing any more. And they would stop coming."

During the autumn of 1969, Buckley recorded the near-instrumental Lorca - his final record for Elektra - and what became Blue Afternoon, plus part of his sixth album, Starsailor. Holzman gave Buckley his release, knowing he already had a potential new home with Herb Cohen's DiscReet label. Holzman hadn't heard Lorca in 40 years, but returned to it recently and realized "I totally blew it with Lorca. Even for me, so into evolution in music, I was not ready to accept Tim's streams of self-expression and the lack of modality on Lorca. Nobody Walkin' astonishes me in the way Tim uses his voice. If that's the last song he recorded for Elektra, he went out in flaming glory. How he got those voices on that album I can't imagine. Hearing it in 2010, I'm proud it is on Elektra. And it is on Elektra through no credit to me."

Those Strange Victorians and Their Unusual Hobbies...

This is quite unlike anything I have ever seen before. My favourite is "The Lower Five's drinking den being raided by the police". Them rats sure do look like the're having a good time of it...

From The Telegraph Newspaper.
A bizarre collection of stuffed animals that was broken up and sold around the world seven years ago has been reassembled for a one-off exhibition. The eccentric works of Victorian taxidermist Walter Potter, in which stuffed animals mimic human life, were sold for more than £500,000 in 2003. Celebrities including comedian Harry Hill, photographer David Bailey and artist Peter Blake snapped up pieces from the 10,000-item collection in Mr Potter's eerie Museum of Curiosities. For more images go to:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/howaboutthat/8059876/Walter-Potters-Museum-of-Curiosities-bizarre-Victorian-collection-of-stuffed-animals-goes-on-show-again.html

The Kittens wedding from Walter Potters Collection.

The great fashion crimes of the Irish Republic...

Back in 1975, when Northern Ireland was up to it's eyeballs in blood and thunder, it seems the fellas in the Irish Republic were fighting their own heroic struggle, only their fight was with the twin evils of prog rock and glam fashion!!! Looks like the bass player has lost his particular battle...it's The Horslips of ...course. The snakes were obviously frightened out off Ireland by the flute players trousers and platform shoe combination! A nice piece off music and all that...

The La's

The La's only official release

The La's were a group from Liverpool, England. Noel Gallagher was once famous for saying that Oasis, or rather he was going to finish what The La's started (or words to that effect). Sadly the Mancunian mouth doesn't even come close. I'm not knocking Mr. Gallagher here, don't get me wrong, the guy's written some nice tunes, but Lee Mavers and his scouse mates were always in a different league, musicaly, melodically, lyrically and philosophically.

The La's released one self titled album in 1990, which every home should have,  a handful off brilliant singles, some BBC sessions and since their demise, a hodgepodge of compilations, lost recordings, rarities, alternate takes and live stuff. 
Lee Mavers has become somewhat of a living legend, a sort of scouse Brian Wilson, reclusive, mad cap, inconsistent and always seemingly on the verge of a brilliant come back with threats of a new and even better LA's long player. But unlike Wilson he has yet to deliver. That doesn't take anything away from the perfection of the first album. 
The LA's were also a great live band. I saw them twice in their touring heady in the late 1980's and on both occasions were brilliant. I wish the same could be said for the likes of The Stone Roses who somehow eclipsed the LA's as the great saviours of British guitar music back in 1989.

"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.

"Chelsea Girl" – Nico

"Chelsea Girl" released in 1967

Angi by Davy Graham

This tune by Davy Graham is considered the well spring for all other 'folk blues' tunes that came after it. Every guitar player who ever wandered down the road of finger picking, folk guitar has mastered his own version.
Bert Jansch famously recorded it after Davy Graham's version, twisting it and turning it into his own tune. Paul Simon was so taken by the tune that he not only recorded it himself, but borrowed the majority of the tune's structure and turned it into "We've got a groovy thing going Baby" for Simon and Garfunkel. And now my attempt. I'm more or less influenced by both Davy and Bert's versions, taking elements of both to turn out my own version of this classic, ageless tune.
The film I made to accompany it is largely culled from the Peter Whitehead film, "Tonight let's all make love in London". I've chopped it up a bit and added some of my own footage. I want to convey the feeling of urban movement that the song conjures up. Buildings, bridges, traffic and human traffic. A city at night, a city on the move, people going places, anonymity in the crowd. The heartbeat of a city.

Davy Graham

How to Record an Album With a Blown Mind...

The majesty of Alexander 'Skip' Spence's late 60's ragged folk/ psych masterpiece "Oar".

Oar by Alexander 'Skip' Spence.

Before 'Oar'
The road to 'Oar' for Skip had been exciting, joyous, manic, unpredictable, dangerous, dark and eventually plain old insane.
Skip's first brush with fame came in the original line up of San Francisco psychedelic stalwarts Jefferson Airplane. Skip not only played drums but co-wrote some of the best early airplane songs including the gloomy psych folk hit "Blues From an Airplane" and wrote "My Best Friend" released on the groups "Surrealistic Pillow" L.P. He was fired by the autocratic Marty Balin for missing an Airplane gig.

After leaving Jefferson Airplane, Skip joined Moby Grape, the greatest almost-rans of the late 60's West Coast scene. During the recording of the groups second album "Wow" in New York, Spence, who had always been fond of altered states, seems to have gone right out of his mind and flipped over to the dark-side. After putting a fire axe through his band mate Don Stevenson's door, he headed downtown to the studio where the rest of the band were working, in his pajamas, axe in hand seemingly to finish the job he had started. After being apprehended, Skip was arrested, booked and shipped off for a six month stay at New York's notorious Bellevue Hospital.

It's here where the story of 'Oar' really commences. Skip was released from Bellevue with nothing more than the clothes on his back and a head full of songs, however he was still under contract to Columbia records. After being given a guitar by Fender, and playing his songs to record producer David Rubinson, Skip bought a chopper with an advance from Columbia and headed to Nashville where he wanted to record his record, presumably away from anyone he might run into from his not too distant past, and, so it was that Skip arrived in early December 1968.

Skip during his time with Moby Grape.

'Oar'

Skip recorded 28 pieces of music in six days between December 3 and 12 and by the 16th was back on his chopper and gone, West to California and oblivion. He alone handled all the vocals, played bass, drums and acoustic and electric guitar; and produced the finished album with the help of Mike Figlio, a Columbia staff engineer. 

The simple instrumentation upon which Skip hung his transcendent and ghostly vocals, was partly due to the constraints of recording on an old three track machine at Columbia, and partly due to Skips one man recording band ethos. And it's these factors along with Skips extraordinary songs that combined to make Oar sound like nothing else at the time and almost nothing since. Writing for Rolling Stone in 1968, Greil Marcus described the L.P. thus, "Much of Oar sounds like the sort of haphazard folk music that might have been made around campfires after the California gold rush burned itself out – sad, clumsy tunes that seem to laugh at themselves as Spence takes the listener on a tour through his six or seven voices..." He goes on to compare Spence, somewhat erroneously to Wildman Fischer and the album to Bob Dylan's "Basement Tapes".

"Little Hands"

The original album, opens with a gentle strum of acoustic guitar followed by a stab of  electric guitar against marching band drums, liquid bass and the glorious, folk gospel off "Little Hands". Skips snake guitar wraps around his strange, shimmering vocal.
"Cripple Creek"

The dark and eerie "Cripple Creek", written about a cripple in his wheelchair and sung in a baritone equal parts Johnny Cash and Leonard Cohen, fizzes with Spence's rattling acoustic rhythm and pretty, flamenco like flourishes. 
"Diana"

"Diana" is both sung and growled by Skip in an otherworldly, broken and pained voice, hung on rattling disjointed acoustics, fractured drumming and faraway soaring electric fills. It's a spooky unnerving song, not a million miles from Arthur Lee & Love. 
"Margaret – Tiger Rug"

This odd song is held together by a disjointed, clanking bass and more military drums with a strange lyric influenced it seems by his time in Bellevue. Skips vocals are delivered in a half sung, half spoken, off key, almost jokingly shambolic manner. Childlike would be the accurate word. The song  staggers to it's conclusion before cutting dead. 
"Weighted Down (The Prison Song)"

Skip's soul laid bare and accompanied by that beautiful, mournful baritone and his lightly strummed acoustic. The feeling is dread, doped and heavy, but also a weary kind of comfort and release. Skip's words come to us like some old time spiritual salvation hymn. The weight of the delivery saturates the listener and pulls us into Skips broken down world. 
"War in Peace"

Skip guides us from the depths of his soul to the heavens with the gloriously stumbling and tripped out "War in Peace". Skip's delivery is a high pitched whistle of a whisper, heavily delayed and reminiscent of some of the late Syd Barratt's solo work. Full 'band' here with Skip taking the song to task with double lead guitar, chugging rhythm and great bass and drum interplay. All topped off with Skip's strange bird whistles and ethereal whispers. He finishes off with a nod to Cream's "Sunshine of Your Love' in the closing guitar run. 
"Broken Heart"

"Broken Heart" comes on like some lost Hank Williams hymn from the mid 50's. But Hank never wrote lyrics as off the wall as this.
"All Come to Meet Her" 

This is Skip at his most fragile and most beautiful. Soaring wordless harmonies that morph into lyrics. Skip's elastic twang of guitar echoes the vocals throughout, all set against the bony, skeleton bare rattle of Skips drums. Unnerving but gorgeous, heart warming as some ancient and lost gospel hymn.
"Books of Moses"

This cracked biblical epic is seeped in the same kind of fear and dread conjured up by the murder ballads of Robert Johnson and Leadbelly. With it's strained, demented vocal and dark twanging acoustic guitar set against a radiophonic workshop of rain, thunderstorms and howling wind, it's a 50's B Horror Movie set to music. The results are chilling, until it segues straight into the up beat and comedic "Dixie Peach Promenade (Yin for Yang)". It echo's the Moby Grape track "Just Like Gene Autry (A Fox-trot)". This however, would be it's slightly deranged, sex starved, hillbilly cousin after too much moonshine and not enough beaver!
"Lawrence of Euphoria"

The strangeness continues to grow with the jocular, bouncy and defiantly unhinged "Lawrence of Euphoria". Skips great, thumping, strummed bass carries the song along against a willfully, out of tune yet triumphantly strident one chord guitar accompaniment. Again, Skips vocals are half sung half leered into the microphone.

"Grey/Afro"
The albums closer is the meditative, prayer like "Grey/Afro". Skip is in strange, swampy and alien waters, swimming in a heavily phased and swelling mix of strummed bass and splashing drum fills. It's hypnotic, spoken in tongues atmosphere comes on like a lost ship at sea being tossed around in a tempest of sound. Skips voice comes and goes like the wind, a lost soul crying out from beneath the stormy, boiling sea of sound.

After 'Oar'

Oar, unsurprisingly sold little on it's initial release, and was resigned to the lost classic bin. Skip headed West and continued to play throughout his downward spiral into schizophrenia. He joined various line ups of a reformed Moby Grape over the yeas. He contributed a track to the 1996 X-Files album, recorded with old friend Jack Cassidy. The track was never used, deemed to weird for the sci-fi programme. 


30 years after it's release a tribute album was releasedt. It featured among others, Robert Plant (who'd always been a champion of both Skip and Moby Grape), Beck, Wilco and Robyn Hitchcock. 

Sundazed released Oar in an expanded edition which included the lost second half of "Grey/Afro" titled "The Time has Come". And a further nine tracks, some incomplete from the original Oar sessions.


Skip passed away on 16th. April 1999 after living for some years with his girlfriend in a trailer park in Santa Cruz, California.  Keep on clapping, little hands, and shine on, shine on, shine on.


All authors own work.

Thelonius Monk...

I can't really say enough or get enough really, of this great, great musician who was born in North Carolina in 1917, but will forever be associated with New York, The Five Spot, Bop and of course the piano.

Thelonius was an outsider, an on the edge artist, Thelonius was underground! and way ahead of his time and his peers. No one looked like Monk, no one played like Monk and he was largely ignored for the early part of his career.  After losing his licence to play, due to him having the notorius Bud Powell in his motor vehicle and getting busted for possession of narcotics,  and after a residency at the Five Spot, a small restaurant in New York City, Thelonius finally started to get the recognition his talent was due. Through it all Monk seemed oblivious, always dancing (quite literally) to a different drum. The man lived to play.

And his playing was lyrical,  full off air but totally on the edge, as if at any moment he may fall off and crash land, but never did. Monk was a true individual, and a great artist.

I sometimes think, you know, where did these guys come from, I mean what dimension!! Thelonius Monk, John Coltrane, Bud Powell, Ornette Coleman? All very different and all individually brilliant. What was it in the early part of 20th Century American history that produced these men and their music, these magicians, these shamen of sound? Well I don't rightly know, but the evidence of that magic, that 'altered musical reality' is here in spades in this great documentary. Mo Monk please...

Glengarry Glen Ross Speech...

Alec Baldwin's great speech from "Glengarry Glen Ross". Coffee's for closers!!

coloured balloons

Happy Birthday Penguin Books...

1970's Penguin Design

Penguin books is, are 75 years old  ( BBC World Service). The world wide publishing company was founded in 1935 by the late (Sir) Allen Lane, 1902 – 1970.

His mission was to provide high quality, paperback fiction and non-fiction to the mass market. Essentially this meant that the great unwashed could buy and own books of their own. Literature, poetry, non – fiction and plays were emancipated from the classroom, the library and the University and the man in the street had the chance to educate himself. The books were a great success, so much so that by March 1936, ten months after the company's launch on 30 July 1935, one million Penguin books had been printed.

History
From the outset, design was essential to the success of the Penguin brand. Eschewing the illustrated gaudiness of other paperback publishers, Penguin opted for the simple appearance of three horizontal bands, the upper and lower of which were colour coded according to which series the title belonged to; this is sometimes referred to as the horizontal grid. In the central white panel, the author and title were printed in Eric Gill's sans serif and in the upper band was a cartouche with the legend "Penguin Books".

The initial design was created by the then twenty-one-year-old office junior Edward Young, who also drew the first version of the Penguin logo. The colour schemes included: orange and white for general fiction, green and white for crime fiction, cerise and white for travel and adventure, dark blue and white for biographies, yellow and white for miscellaneous, red and white for drama; and the rarer purple and white for essays and belles lettres and grey and white for world affairs.

Between 1947 and 1949, the great German typographer Jan Tschichold redesigned 500 Penguin books, and left Penguin with a set of influential rules of design principles brought together as the Penguin Composition Rules. Tschichold's work included the woodcut illustrated covers of the classics series (also known as the medallion series), and with Hans Schmoller, his eventual successor at Penguin, the vertical grid covers that became the standard for Penguin fiction throughout the 1950s.

New techniques such as phototypesetting and offset-litho printing dramatically reduced cost and permitted the printing of images and text on the same paper stock. In May 1960, Tony Godwin was appointed as editorial adviser, he sought to broaden the range of Penguin's list and keep up with new developments in graphic design. To this end, he hired Germano Facetti in January 1961, who was to decisively alter the appearance of the Penguin brand. Beginning with the crime series, Facetti canvassed the opinion of a number of designers including Romek Marber for a new look to the Penguin cover. It was Marber's suggestion of what came to be called the Marber grid along with the retention of traditional Penguin colour coding that was to replace the previous three horizontal bars design and set the pattern for the design of the company's paperbacks for the next twenty years.

By the end of the 1960s, Penguin was in financial trouble. Ultimately, the company was bought out by Pearson Longman in August 1970, some six weeks after the death of Allen Lane. A new emphasis on profitability emerged and, with the departure of Facetti in 1972, the defining era of Penguin book design came to an end.

Controversy
Just as Lane well judged the public's appetite for paperbacks in the 1930s, his decision to publish Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence in 1960 boosted Penguin's notoriety. The novel was at the time unpublished in the United Kingdom and the predicted obscenity trial not only marked Penguin as a fearless publisher, it also helped drive the sale of at least 3.5 million copies. Penguin's victory in the case heralded the end to the censorship of books in the UK. In the same tradition of courting controversy, Penguin published Deborah Lipstadt's book Denying the Holocaust which accused David Irving of Holocaust denial. Irving sued Lipstadt and Penguin for libel in 1998 but lost in a widely publicised trial.

Penguin by Design: A Cover Story 1935-2005
More recently, the design element of the Penguin paperback, was celebrated in the 2005 publication "Penguin by Design: A Cover Story 1935 – 2005". The book looks back at seventy years of Penguin paperbacks, and charts the development of British publishing, book cover design and the role of artists and designers in creating and defining the Penguin look.

Judy. By John Renbourn

Ken Russell 3 July 1927 – 27 November 2011

Original Film Poster

Ken Russell's adaptation of Aldous Huxley's "The Devil's of Loudon", is in my mind one of the greatest English film's ever made. The director, who died this week dared to take it where no one else dared to go. Not only is the film itself a masterpiece in film making, but also, the set design, casting, musical score and screenplay work together in such a way as to create a dizzying phantasmagorical and utterly compelling account of this infamous chapter in the history of the Catholic church in France. Oliver Reed and Vanessa Redgrave give the performances of their careers, and the film was banned in Italy by the Catholic church. Well, that's the least you can expect from Ken!


For a full obituary and short film about his work follow this link to The Guardians obituary of this film making force of nature. http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/nov/28/ken-russell-cinema-dies

He was larger than life in every way, and this was always reflected in nearly everything he was involved in.Ken Russell, film maker, documentary maker, writer and larger than life individual, 3 July 1927 – 27 November 2011.

Fairport Covention Maidstone 1970...

At last the whole concert has been uploaded to YouTube, all be it in frustrating 4min segments?!! Brilliant musicianship and songwriting from the strongest Fairport line up post Sandy Denny. Once Sandy had gone, you really had to think of them as a different band. The dynamics changed considerably with the mercurial Dave Swarbrick stepping into the fore to almost become the band leader. The material changed too once Sandy had left to join Fotheringay. The band started to delve more and more into the traditional folk song genre which had started with the classic "Liege and Leaf" album. The highlight for me is the live 9min version of "Now Be Thankful". The rest as they say is musical history. What puzzles me is all the hype around Bumford and Sons, or whatever they're called. It's been sitting ready to be listened to in the shape of Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span and all for the past 40 years!!

"Now be Thankful" Maidstone 1970

Blackwaterside

Taught to Bert Jansch by Anne Briggs, who wrote the original song, but the tune was probably influenced by a traditional English folk tune, stolen by Jimmy page and presented to the world on Led Zeppelin's 1st album as Black Mountainside complete with sitar and finally to me by way of Bert Jansch's version. Drop 'D' tuning, capo 2nd fret.

11 Moustachioed Daughters...Viv Stanshall and The Big Grunt

This from 1970 I think, The Marty Feldman something or other. If this isn't on of the most disturbing pieces of television, then I don't know what it is. Brilliantly insane, Roger Ruskin Spears inventions, Viv Stanshall's eye's and who the hell is that little fat guy on the guitar, and more to the point where did Viv find him? Good God the seventies were a strange time...

billy childish - sunday painter

Documentary look at the world of the multi talented Billy Childish...Let the film and the man speak for themselves. Far too prolific to sum up at this time of night...

Billy Childish Documentary...

Oliver Postgate and the story of Small Films...

Oliver Postgate was and will always be a giant of children's television/animation/film and fantasy. He created hundreds of hours of food for young minds in the shape of the various projects, programmes and characters under the Small Films umberella, and what's even more amazing is that he did it with the help of only a handful of like minded enthusiasts in his tiny studio come barn.

They didn't call it Small Films for nothing. The company consisted of Postgate and Peter Firmin, and between them they cooked up among others, Ivor The Engine, The Clangers, Bagpuss, Noggin The Nog and The Pogles.

Oliver Postgate wrote the scripts, narrated most of the voices, did the sound effects, created the characters and took care of all the animation filming and sound production, while Peter Firmin drew and built the characters, made costumes and scenery and painted the sets. So, with cardboard cut out characters, often coloured by their children, elastic bands, string, sellotape, blue tack, cotton wool and other odds and ends they conjured up the magical worlds of Ivor, Noggin and all the other wonderful characters that transformed the lives of legions of school children, for five minutes each weekday evening during the 1970's before the boring world of grown ups and the six o'clock news.

Behind the scenes, Oliver Postgate called in Anthony Jackson to help with some of the voices. Peter Firmin's own daughter played the role of Emily in the unbeatable 'Bagpuss', while the characters where brought to life with the aid of Meccano, brass tacks, magnets, fuse wire and the timeless magic of stop start animation.

Simpler times, in a simpler world. Watch this affectionate documentary and re-live the magic that was Oliver Postgate and Small Films. Ivor the Engine of course is back in all new episodes made for BBC Wales, and even though most of the animation is now created using computers, none of the magic is lost. Thanks Oliver for enriching and shaping my childhood and my imagination.