Where Worlds Collide

… was my first ever ‘proper’ gig, the 1980 Reading Rock Festival. Headliners were Rory Gallagher, UFO and Whitesnake, with special guests Gillan, Iron Maiden and Def Leppard. Highlights (for me) were Gillan, Maiden and the barnstorming comeback performance by, of all people, Slade.

I’ve seen two artists this year who were on that bill 27 years ago, Ian Gillan, now back with Deep Purple, and Magnum. Both look a lot older and wrinklier now, but can still cut it live even after all those years.

25 years ago, at the 1982 Reading Festival, was the very first time I saw Marillion, a fact that marks me as ancient amongst Marillion fandom (One even said “I didn’t think there was anybody alive who’s heard them play ‘Grendel‘) . I don’t think it occurred to me that I’d still be a fan of theirs a full quarter of a century later.

While I’ve seen quite a few bands more than once on the same tour this year, this is the first time I’ve ever seen the same act on two consecutive nights in completely different cities.

Friday night at Fibbers was on Odin Dragonfly’s home ground of York before an audience made up of an equal mix of hardcore Mostly Autumn fans and friends of the band, which made for a tremendous atmosphere; an awful lot of familar faces, and one of those gigs that’s more like a big private party that a regular concert. It’s the first time I’ve been (literally!) dragged to the pub afterwards by the support act and made to drink beer. ’twas one of those nights.

Saturday was at The Fly in New Oxford street, a very small and intimate venue, probably one of the smallest venues I’ve been to this year. With the low stage in one corner, only the front few rows could actually see much of the band! The sound was still excellent, though.

Support at Fibbers was half-hour sets from the excellent harpist Sarah Dean, who I’d seen supporting Odin Dragonfly before, and Aimee Ryan. Aimee’s set was rather spoiled by far too much audience chatter while she was on stage, especially when everyone had kept quiet during Sarah’s performance.

The support at The Fly was the excellent Anne-Marie Helder, who I’d seen supporting Mostly Autumn back in February. I recognised several of her songs from theat Astoria show; as I said back then, a solo acoustic set requires a powerful voice and strong material; Anne-Marie has both.

As I’ve come to expect from them, Heather and Angie put on a great show both nights. I still find it amazing that they can produce such a rich sound with just the two of them on stage, with nothing more than acoustic guitar, piano, flute and two voices. The setlist this time around was made up of the “Offerings” album played in order, plus a lot of the usual banter between songs. So much banter, in fact, that the York show started running considerably over time, and “Caught in a Fold” had to be dropped. They manage to fit all twelve songs in the time allowed at The Fly.

It’s just impossible to single out any highlights, there were just too many. There was Angela’s fantastic flute playing on the cover of Jethro Tull’s “Witches Promise”. There were the two beautiful renditions of “Magnolia Half-Moon”, one of my favourites from the album. Their cover of the unreleased Stevie Nicks song “Forsaken Love” comes over really well live too. But so does everything else; there really weren’t any weak spots on either night.

If anyone had told me a year ago I travel a couple of hundred miles to see two shows by female acoustic duo, I wouldn’t have believed them. But they were well worth seeing.

I’m off to see Odin Dragonfly in York tomorrow night, and again in London on Saturday. I’m expecting both to be the sort of gigs where I recognise at least half the audience, which always results in a great atmosphere. I’m really looking forward to these two gigs.

And speaking of Odin Dragonfly, Planet Rock have been playing tracks from Fish‘s new album, 13th Star. While my feelings about the man himself are well-known to anyone that reads this blog, I have to say the songs they’ve played have been the strongest I’ve heard from him for many, many years; dark and powerful with a very strong emotional charge. Hardly going to be comfortable listening, especially as I know who the songs are about. There’s no way I’m going to be wearing any Fish t-shirts to either Odin Dragonfly gig.

A meme being propagated by The Psycho Chicken. In which you must name your ten favourite songs beginning with a letter chosen by whoever you picked up the meme from. I my case, Psycho Chicken gave me the letter “H”.

I don’t really have time to go through my entire CD collection and listing everything beginning with H (I don’t have an iTunes library that can do it in a flash!) So there are bound to be some glaring omissions. But I can recommend these ten.

• Hallowed Ground - Paradise Lost
• Harvest Moon - Blue Öyster Cult
• Harvest of Souls - IQ
• Hasan I Sabah - Hawkwind
• Heaven and Hell - Black Sabbath
• Heroes Never Die - Mostly Autumn
• Hey Hey, My My (Out of the Blue) - Neil Young
• Hollow - Mostly Autumn (But played live by Breathing Space)
• Hotel Hobbies - Marillion
• How I Feel Today - Odin Dragonfly

I’ve tried not to include the same artist more than once. Yes I know counting “Hollow” as a Breathing Space song is cheating, but it’s my blog, and nobody else is going to rules-lawyer me! For the record, Half a World, Half the Mountain, Heart Life and Helm’s deep were all in the short list.

If you want me to choose you a letter, leave me a comment!

I was wondering why I wasn’t getting any hits from Google for recent posts. Turned out I had a bug in my .htaccess file that caused the web server to return a 500 error rather than a 404 when looking for robots.txt, which meant that the Google spider skittered away rather than indexing my site.

I’ve fixed it now. The above may be complete gobbledegook to non-technical people, but it does mean this weblog is now the #1 search result for the string “Stoat eyed acolytes“. Which it wasn’t before…

I’ve added the Subscribe to Comments plugin to this blog. If you ask it nicely (by checking the checkpox when you post a comment), it will email all subsequent comments for that post.

I’m still on the distribution list for Fish’s email blog thingy. Today’s email contained this line:

I still had most of the afternoon in my hands and headed back into Soho past the pub we slid into after the Astoria show. Memories rallied - ‘stolen smiles across a crowded mews, desperate eye contact, lingering looks, polite interrogations from whisky breathed, drooly bearded, stoat eyed acolytes with beer bellies stretching black t-shirts as they wait on the bus and the trek back north with the troops pillaging their last orders for the knock out blow to take them painlessly home’

I presume this must be Mostly Autumn’s Astoria launch party back in February. I’m probably the only person there that managed not to recognise him. I’m trying to work out who these “whisky breathed, drooly bearded, stoat eyed acolytes” might be. I can think of at least one candidate

Visiting my local model railway emporium (Waltons of Altrincham) on Saturday, I noticed a new item I hadn’t expected to see; a beautiful-looking N gauge Fleischmann model of the Zurich S-Bahn Re450 push-pull locomotive with matching driving trailer. And they also had the two intermediate coaches in stock. Naturally, with a price tag to match. The whole train would cost about as much as my recent weekend in Edinburgh!

But when modelling Swiss outline, I’m into the trans-Alpine main-lines, not the Zurich commuter belt.

But part of me keeps saying “It’s a superb model, you know you want it”. I’ve already got a 4-car NPZ set, and those two trains could form the basis of a Swiss suburban terminus, a sort of continental version of ‘Minories’. I’ve even got as far as sketching a a track plan; it would all fit quite nicely on a 6′ by 18″ plank. A nice contrast to the British “Restormel” layout that’s beginning to take shape on the old baseboards from “Wöminsee”.

I managed to avoid temptation so far. All I bought was a Bachmann 04, which is itself a nice model, and not much more than a tenth of the price I’d pay for the Zurich S-Bahn set.

But, as Mr Walton said, it’s the last one they’ve got left in stock, and he doesn’t know if he’s going to get any more…

A post in The Guardian Music Blog sets up a challenge. It’s based on a late-night pub discussion where Guardian journo Jon Wilde was challenged by Noel Gallagher and Paul Weller to name his ten favourite songs in just one minute. He wondered if he should include his real favourites, or list what he thought those two would like. Not that I would have considered them to the ultimate arbiters of taste in the first place.

This is the list I came up with. I expect that Weller and Gallagher would think as much of this list as I think of the music of Weller and Gallagher.

• Led Zeppelin - Immigrant Song
• Yes - Parallels
• Blue Öyster Cult - Astronomy (1977 live version)
• Rainbow - Stargazer
• Pink Floyd - Comfortably Numb
• Fish - Plague of Ghosts
• Marillion - This is the 21st Century
• Karnataka - Talk to Me
• Mostly Autumn - Carpe Diem
• Porcupine Tree - Anaethetize

My list seems to be equally divided between the 1970s and the 2000s (well, almost. Plague of Ghosts is from 1999), with nothing from the two decades in-between. Not sure what that says about me.

(Psychochicken has also had a go at this, and let it loose on the Blogosphere)

Slacktivist looks at the sort of organisations making use of Microsoft’s Powerpoint, from bat-crazy heretical fundamentalist churches to corporations run by the pointy-haired boss out of Dilbert.

In evangelical churches, Bill Gates’ computerized Colorforms has supplanted the flip chart and the overhead projector (as well as, disastrously, the hymnal).

The slide here is taken from a PowerPoint presentation from the site Last Days Mystery. It covers the very same territory Bruce’s presentation does, the “seven seals” of judgment from Revelation 6, except it uses spiffy bullet-point lists. You can find lots of similar PowerPoint presentations on other “Bible prophecy” Web sites.

This is the ideal technology for this task because, as Edward Miller notes, “PowerPoint … can give the illusion of coherence and content when there really isn’t very much coherence or content.” This is, for many PowerPoint enthusiasts, a feature, not a bug. The illusion of coherence and content is precisely why PP is the preferred technology in corporate America and among Bible prophecy “experts” (and why it was used almost exclusively in Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon).

At some point in the far, far future, historians will recognise the release of Power Point as the point where Western Civilisation went into terminal irreversible decline.