So, as this years party season draws to a close (ending with the Drunken Two Fat Ladies Birthday Bash sponsored by cloudhands - bringing you quality reviews of obscure films and singularly failing to report on the unifying theory of everything, whatever the weather), I have found myself revisiting the concert list I had been compiling and last reported on here.
I joined last.fm a bit ago but have only just discovered that you can add events to it along with reviews and photos. I had been wanting to set up a website to do exactly this for some time, so now I don't need to bother.
My results to date can be seen here.
So, I have been adding the gigs I have attended and uploading any photos I took onto flickr so they can be displayed on the page for that event. While I was doing this I was able to correct a few errors in my original listing and more importantly add details of quite a few gigs that I previously hadn't been able to pin down.
The most recent one was the Associates gig at the Hacienda in Manchester. I went to this one with Simon Walsh. We had both been huge Associates fans for ages and this was teh first chance we actually got to see them (and unfortunately also our last). I have been trying to find out when this gig was for years without luck until earlier this week I managed to find this site.
After clicking on most of the links on the site I finally found a very well hidden gigs page and that meant I now had found details of 63 of the gigs I have been to.
The ones I am still to find out details of are:
Gordon Giltrap, Sheffield City Hall - this was probably in 1976, it was my first ever gig (I think)
Magna Carta, Hampswaite Village Hall - this was when I was in Cloud 9 and I went with the other members
Everything But the Girl, Harrogate International Centre
10CC, Harrogate International Centre
Clannad, Harrogate International Centre
Donavan, Somewhere in Manchester - not much of hope tracking this one down
Penetration and John Cooper-Clarke, Leeds Polytechnic
Here and Now, Leeds Polytechnic
ABC, Leeds Warehouse
Buzzcocks, Sheffield City Hall
999, Leeds Fan Club
The Revillos (or Rezillos), Leeds Fan Club
God Squad, Harrogate Cairn Hotel - used to have a tape of this, but it was lost some time ago
God Squad, Harrogate Royal Baths
Neural Circus, Annabellas nightclub, Harrogate - I think it was called Anabellas, it was above the station, they borrowed my Korg MS-10 for this one
Neural Circus, Adelphi Hotel, Harrogate
So that is all the ones I can remember, but it is quite possible there are others that I don't even remember going to.
So that would make a grand total of 79 gigs, and The Cure next year will make it an even 80. This, of course, doesn't include all the gigs I have played and, so far, I only know the date of one of those.
STOP PRESS: Just after posting this I got an email from someone who runs a really comprehensive Human League website and this has led me to find the date I saw them at the Top Rank nightclub in Sheffield in 1980. I have updated the above numbers to take this into account.
fredag, november 23, 2007
Dag 1390: Party fears two
tisdag, november 20, 2007
Dag 1387: lost+found
I have been getting more and more obsessed with that period of my life that encompasses a couple of years either side of 1980 (though I'm sure no one would have realised from anything I have written here recently).
I found myself thinking about some of the things I used to own. I knew that I had disposed and/or lost some of them over the last 25 years, but I decided to have a search and destroy mission (but without the destroy bit) on Sunday to see what I could recover of the things I thought I should still own from that period.
I used to buy a lot of records, mainly albums, but also bought quite a few singles around that time and some of those are pretty valuable now. Unfortunatley, I can remember taking them to a record fair some time ago and selling up my complete singles collection for the princly sum of £100, without me doing any haggling. That was a pretty large sum when I sold them, though now I suspect some of those singles may well be worth that amount on their own. I seem to recall I spent the money in Sheffield on a sony recordable walkman (£96) with clip on microphone, with the intention of using it to record concerts. Unfortunately I never actually used it for recording anything and just used it as a standard walkman. If only I had kept the records instead.
This bunch of singles included:
Siouxsie and the banshees - Hong Kong garden with gatefold sleeve
Soft Cell - Mutant moments ep
I'm so hollow, Clock DVA, Vice Versa - 1980 the first 15 minutes e.p. (this was always one of my favourite singles and I have no idea why I ever decided to part with it).
Destroy all monsters - destroy all monsters
Genesis - Twilight Alehouse
David Bowie - Ashes to ashes complete with stamp set
The prefects - Going through the motions
Television - Marquee moon 12"
Various TG singles
Plus plenty of others I can't remember
I also had the Neural Circus exit e.p. but I am pretty sure I would not have sold that as a) I bought it from Liam when they first brought it out and b) as it was a self financed e.p. I wouldn't have thought many people would have heard of it so I wouldn't have thought it was worth selling.
So I climbed up through the attic trapdoor and hacked my way through the cobwebs to see what I could find.
The answer was not a lot. I found my collection of LP records and had a look through those. They consisted mainly of Peter Hammill and VDGG records, but I also found a couple of bootlegs in there that I didn't remember owning, which was a nice surprise. I couldn't find any sign of my Neural Circus single or any other singles. I did find a forgotten collection of photo albums that dated back to my wedding, but there were none from before that. I used to have a photo album containing photos I took at some of my early concerts and it also contained a number of autographs. The most precious of these was an autograph of Siouxsie and the Banshees. I seemed to remember taking that one out and putting it in a photo frame, but I could find no sign of this photo album or the frame containing the Siouxsie autograph.
I eventually gave up and moved onto the garage. After much rummaging around I still couldn't find that photo album, but I did find an old green photo frame with 3 signatures on a bit of fading/yellowing creased paper. I can't remember when I had last seen this, but it left me with a great feeling of relief, as I had been beginning to think that I had lost all my old treasured possessions.
The three signatures are Siouxsie, Steven Severin (who plays bass) and John. At first I assumed the John to be, the late, John McGeoch (who had previously been guitarist with Magazine). He was in Siouxsie and the Banshees from 1980 until 1982 so I guessed this must have been signed within that period.
However, once I looked at the front of the flyer I was able to get a bit closer to the truth.
The flyer gives dates of a few gigs and, unfortunately, no year, but it did tell me that October 29th was a thursday and a quick go with the old unix cal command showed me that October 29th fell on a thursday in 1972, 1978 and 1989. I knew it couldn't be 1972 or 1989 so it must have been 1978 and therefore the John must have been John McKay (who was guitarist until the 1979 tour).
A quick look here showed me that they played in Leeds on the following occassions around this time:
10th November 1977 - Leeds Polytechnic
6th December 1977 - Leeds Fan Club
12th April 1978 - Leeds Fan Club
21st October 1978 - Leeds University
So from the other gigs listed on the flyer I would guess this was probably signed at the Leeds University gig, though I guess I can't be 100% sure.
The other gigs shown on the flyer (in case you can't make them out) are as follows:
Thusday 16th October - Wayne County and the Electric chairs + Agony Column
9th November - The Skids + Sheeny and the Goys
16th November - Penetration + Xpelaires
Dec 2nd (at Hofbrauhause) - Wilco Johnson’s Solid Senders
torsdag, november 15, 2007
Dag 1382: my room waiting for wonderland
This is the view from the room in which I spent most of my formulative years (which included the rather crutial 1982).
This what I remember it containing:
- 1 bed in the corner with its legs removed
- 1 piano which I had stripped and painted yellow
- The walls and radiator were also painted yellow (and maybe the skirting board too?)
- 1 pedal harmonium which I found in a junk room at school and they said I could keep it
- 1 Korg ms-10 synthesizer
- 1 Carlsbro valve amp head
- 1 cabinet containing a 15inch speaker
- 1 upside down old television painted in various bright colours
- 1 bedside light that hung from the ceiling and was shaped like a giant light bulb
- 1 full length mirror with dark wood frame
- 3 parrots on the wall
- 2 candles on the window ledge
- 1 small desk with:
- 1 sinclair spectrum/later replaced with 1 atari st/later replaced with an amiga
- 1 hifi system (seperates) consisting of record deck, cassette deck, amp and warfdale speakers (I later added a cd player -much later)
- 1 shergold meteor guitar (was swapped out for the above sinclair spectrum)
- 1 Soundmaster cr-88 drum machine
- 1 old 35 mm pentax SLR camera with seperate light meter and 2 extra lenses which was used to take the above photo, which was not an intentional double exposure, if I remember correctly
- a couple of my photos framed on the wall above the harmonium
- 1 open brick fireplace with no fire in it
- 1 wooden box containing all my tapes (painted yellow)
- 1 yellow wooden slatted wooden blind in the window (rolled up and out of site in this photo)
- 1 cat called Dinah
- my blue book that I used to write down song lyrics and such stuff (that I still use to this day)
Things I remember doing in this room include:
- Taking quite a lot of photos in this room (which I still have)
- Recording the backing track for the Strange Devotion gig at the 1982 Folk and Blues
- Recording some tracks with Liam from Neural Circus and John Robson. The tape survived, but at some point I had taped over the first couple of tracks and so our version of Silver Machine (including lyrics sung by Liam which included the line "I've got a pink pussycat called Simon, you can take him home if you want to") was lost forever
- Learning to play Pictures at an Exhibition on my yellow piano (I should add I learned some of it not all of it)
- Playing Dungeon Master, and many other computer games whose names are long forgotten
- Having loads of friends back to listen to music and hang out
There are obviously other things that we don't need to go into here.
All in all this was a good room to live in and I would recommend it to all potential occupants.
onsdag, november 14, 2007
Dag 1381: The post that's burnt the most
I normally like mine pretty well done, but not even I would fancy eating this one.
tisdag, november 13, 2007
måndag, november 12, 2007
lördag, november 10, 2007
Dag 1377: Tickets please!
Steve Hackett - june 1979
onsdag, november 07, 2007
Dag 1374: Snowblind and Pepsiburst
Once when I was in a bar in France I ordered a Coca Cola. What I actually received was a Cacolac, which is a milky chocolatey drink. I am not particularly fond of milky drinks, especially chocolate ones, but I didn't dare ask for another Coca Cola incase I got the same again.
Mr Dent: "Is that a can of coke you have there, Butler?"
Mr Butler: "No it's Pepsi, Dent."
tisdag, november 06, 2007
Dag 1373: The Blue Meanies
Once upon a time on the evening of 2nd December 1979 I watched an episode of Shoestring. Hapless Eddie Shoestring was a DJ with Radio West and in this particular episode, entitled Find the Lady, he is asked, by the singer of a new wave band, to investigate the disappearence of an ex band member who was convinced the band's manager had murdered his girlfriend. The singer happened to be Toyah Willcox and during the show we saw her playing some songs live.
I thought these songs were fantastic and wanted to find out more. I fired up my Macbook Pro, but the internet hadn't been invented yet so it was some time before I was able to find out who she was and that it was actually her real band playing some of her real song in the episode. I remember buying her first album, Sheep farming in Barnet as soon as it cam out and it was my favourite record for ages. I even put newspaper clipping and picturtes of her up on my bedroom wall.
When her second LP came out (The Blue Meaning) I bought it on cassette and I still have that copy in my old cassette collection. Although I mostly liked it, I didn't think it was anywhere near as good as the first album and, unfotunatley, by the time the next studio album was released (Anthem) I felt she had sold out to the world of pop and my musical tastes had honed themselves in other directions, though I still liked her early stuff and always have done since.
This is the title track from her second album.
Later on I discovered she had recorded an album with members of King Crimson called Ophelia's Shadow. I bought it on the strength of the cover and musicians and thought it was great - not a myschtery in sight. I later found a cassette by Sunday all over the world and found that very similar and equally as good.
I have never seen Toyah live, which is a shame, but she has an album called "In the court of the Crimson Queen" due out next year, so there may still be a chance yet.
Let's heal ourselves.
