OK - this is completely random…

This is Hazel 15 years ago on the bed in our flat on Adelaide Road shortly before we moved into Studley Grange Road.

Some things never change…except the trousers.

Ken turned me on to Miracle Legion and I picked up a CD of Me & Mr Ray at an indie record shop in Epsom and over the next months filled in a collection. This is probably my favourite though (actually…no…thinking about it now Surprise Surprise Surprise is much, much better) , probably because it was the first album I’d heard and because it was just Mark and Mr Ray when we saw them that first time being supported by The Breeders.

It’s another album (and this series is filling up with them) that has slipped off my radar so it was quite peculiar going back to it - it still sounded good but Mulcahy’s delivery grated after a while. The songs I remembered liking first time round, “Ladies from Town” and “If She Could Cry” I felt less comfortable with than I had back then but “You’re the One Lee” and “Old and New” still sounded exceptional (although the woo woo woos at the beginning of the latter had me leaning for the skip button).

Brian recorded the demos for the first album “Understand” in a crappy house just off the Hanger Lane Gyratory System (as it was called back then I think it might just be a “junction” or a “roundabout” now) we set up all the equipment in the damp smelling living room and while Ken and Niall pulled together the songs my task was to try and get the hang of the Tascam Portastudio, Alesis Quadraverb and a drum machine proficiently enough to get decent enough recordings onto cassette.

One long afternoon/evening session descended into farce as Niall and Ken started bickering over the intro to a song that hadn’t been written - one (and I can’t remember which one) of them wanted to have a spoken intro like “If She Could Cry” has (”Shall I tell you how it is?…I’ll tell you how it is…) the other didn’t and what started as one of them voicing a half-baked idea descended into bickering, shouting, storming-off to the kitchen, long charged silences, more storming off…

Eventually we withdrew to LA Pizza and laughed at the idea that a band could fall apart over the intro to a song that hadn’t even been written. At that moment I was, as Ken would later often point out, Brian’s Derek Smalls - I was the lukewarm water between them.

When Understand was finally released there was no song with a spoken intro and Niall (Nigel Tufnell?) was no longer a part of the band.

As if the wait hasn’t been unbearable enough Touch and Go have been putting out occasional “teaser trailers” which just make clear that 30 seconds of The New Year just isn’t enough. Here’s the proof…

09/09/08 still seems too far away…

…and they’ll be over here in November - that’ll get me off my lazy arse…

…and at the Luminaire…it just keeps getting sweeter…

I loved From Our Living Room to Yours when I first got hold of it…so much so that I made a web page dedicated to The American Analog Set. In those early days of the Web that was a legitimate way of declaring love…well it was for me anyway

I remember listening on headphones to the adorable opening of Magnificent Seventies and being totally sucked in. But I stopped listening to Amanset - I kept buying the albums but stopped listening to them, I stopped updating the website and when Amanset finally called it a day it was frankly a bit of a relief. It turns out that I probably never really loved them at all - and maybe all I really, truly loved was the first 9 minutes of this album…and even that at a push…lets say the first 4 minutes…

And listening now I’m beginning to see why, I’m fond of drone and (clearly) not averse to gentle pace but something is missing, something that could pull this out of “nice” and into “gripping” something that could prevent the word B-O-R-I-N-G from popping into my head…but it keeps popping in. Maybe sometimes it almost pulls me back in but then it lets me go again and I drift away thinking of other things and not really hearing the music anymore.

Maybe it’s me, maybe I don’t have the patience and skill required to enjoy this music anymore.

This is me holding Scrapper - the first and only dog I was ever given - like I suspect many of my age (what am I 10??) the idea of having a puppy (the playing and the loyal friend) was more interesting than the reality (the walking on cold mornings and the cleaning up poo) - eventually Scrapper was given a more cat-like life, wandering around the village at his leisure and terrorizing the local farm life.

After threats from a local farmer Scrapper was “given to the laundry man” which Helen and I assumed was a euphemism for being put down and it was only many years later that we discovered that he really had been given to a laundry man!

Yesterday we visited Ju and Mary to meet the kitten that would become our new family member in a few weeks time. Penny will have a cat-like existence by default and Hanwell doesn’t have too many farm animals to terrorize.

Hazel meets Penny
originally uploaded by grange85

More pictures of Penny and her family on Flickr

Mayo Thompson of Red Krayola is a funny guy - he wandered on stage dressed like an undertaker and spent a couple of minutes trying to attach his set list to the mic stand, he eventually gave up and placed it on the floor and then reached into his pocket to get out his specs - I felt empathy given the state of my eyesight recently and it made me laugh - as did most of the set. The band was a Mayo, a drummer, a (British) singer who (mis-)read her lyrics from sheets of paper and a saxophonist who used his leg as a mute. Baffling and bizarrely brilliant.

Joanna came on stage in a(nother) silly billowing dress (I really wish she’d dress in jeans and a t-shirt because a dress like that would flatter no one). She played alone opening with Bridges & Balloons and then playing Emily, Sadie, Colleen at which point she moved from the harp to a piano where she played a few new songs (and an old one - Inflammatory Writ) before heading back to the harp for the finale Peach, Plum, Pear, Cosmia and a beautiful finish of Clab, Cram, Cockle Cowrie. No encore - probably too cold and maybe a bit too close to curfew but the crowd were yearning so it was a disappointment when the courtyard lights came up.

While the venue was interesting I’d have preferred to have been indoors, without the smokers, the bells, the seagulls and the cold. There was no Sawdust & Diamonds - which had been so astounding solo at the RAH - and that was a disappointment but all told it was a good show and will tide me over until she’s hopefully over with a new album soon.

All the good pictures of my dad are currently out of reach so this one will have to do - this was taken 10 years ago but he hasn’t changed that much.

Happy Birthday Dad! - and here’s your pressie…

Adam has his Grade 4 piano exam on Saturday this is by way of a good luck wish and to show that, like the insanely ambitious parents we are, we started him off at a very young age

I’ve always claimed Overkill as my favourite Motorhead album, the opneing (title) track is as pure Heavy Metal as it’s possible to be - and it’s a song about listening to Motorhead and the best thing about the band is being immersed in their music so the best Motorhead song has to be about nothing more or less than that. Listening now I’d have to say this is unquestionably the greatest metal track ever…by a country mile. Knowing that the album isn’t going to get better ought to be a problem but strangely isn’t. The rest of the album is patchy but there’s enough to maintain its top of the stack position…

Tear Ya Down is a love song - I’m not quite sure how the title reconciles, I’m guessing it must just be a euphemism for sex (as I suppose “rip you limb from limb” is later) and as such is unpleasantly aggressive but I love the idea that the protagonist has put effort into this relationship - “I was talking to you all night long, every line was a favourite song” and the “I’ll give you supernatural powers” ending is just lovely - who knew Lemmy could be so tender?

The angry/bitter/get-out-of-my-life songs are more traditional Motorhead fare and are variable - I Won’t Pay Your Price is pedestrian and possibly the worst track on the album (although the distasteful Damage Case is certainly the most unpleasant), whereas No Class is funny and clever and a classic - “no buddy I can’t spare a dime” or “I know you ain’t got the brain, to come in out of the rain”. It’s clear that pissing off Lemmy is not something you’d want to do.

Motorhead’s albums have always been a muddle of smart, angry, other-worldly, unpleasant and childish and Overkill is an album with a decent proportion of the good bits. This and the awesome live Golden Years EP define Motorhead for me, and define the time in my life when music became more important than anything else…