Where Worlds Collide

November always seems to be crazy for gigs, but this year, it’s just getting silly. My diary is getting full, and it’s only March!

First, the Marillion tour:

• Saturday 8th November Inverness
• Sunday 9th November Glasgow
• Monday 10th November Newcastle
• Tuesday 11th November Bristol
• Thursday 13th November Leeds
• Friday 14th November Manchester
• Saturday 15th November Bournemouth
• Monday 17th November TBC - UK
• Tuesday 18th November Nottingham
• Wednesday 19th November London Forum

Then Fish, supported on many dates by none other than The Reasoning

• Tuesday 11th - Runcorn, Brindley Theatre - support Stone Soul River
• Wednesday 12th - South Shields, Custom House - support SSR
• Friday 14th - Penzance, Acorn Studio - no support
• Saturday 15th - Frome, Cheese and Grain - support The Reasoning
• Sunday 16th - London, Shepherds Bush Empire - support The Reasoning
• Tuesday 18th - Bolton, Albert Halls - support The Reasoning
• Wednesday 19th - Pontadarwe, Arts Centre - support The Reasoning
• Thursday 20th - Norwich, The Waterfront - support SSR
• Saturday 22nd - Glasgow, Academy - support The Reasoning
• Sunday 23rd - York, Opera House - support The Reasoning
• Tuesday 25th - Telford, Oakengates Theatre - support SSR
• Wednesday 26th - Buxton, Opera House - support SSR

I’m going to have to think long and hard about which ones to go for in this lot. I’ve already got Mostly Autumn at York on the 28th Nov (Seat B14 booked!). Marillion at Manchester is pretty much a definite, but which Fish/The Reasoning one to go for is still an open question. Bolton is the closest, London would have been a definite had it not been straight after Marillion in Manchester. York GOH might be fun (Security will be confiscating bows and arrows at the door at that one!)

Decisions, decisions….

Panic Room are one of three new bands formed from the ashes of the original incarnation of Welsh celtic/prog band Karnataka, made up from Jon Edwards (keys), Paul Davies (guitar), Gavin Griffiths (drums) and Anne-Marie Helder (vocals and flute) from that band, plus Swansea bass virtuoso Alun Vaughan on bass. Their debut album has been three years in the making, and has finally appeared.

With four members of the old lineup of Karnataka in the band, comparisons are going to be inevitable. But while there are plenty of echoes of the previous band, this is certainly no simple pastiche of Karnataka’s music. It’s an awful lot more varied, for a start.

High spots are many. The rocky opener “Elektra City” takes just a couple of listens to become a serious earworm. Then there’s the brooding atmospheric “Endgame”. “Apocalypstick” with guest musician Liz Prendergast’s eastern-sounding electric violin centre-stage reminds me more than a little of Hawkwind’s “Hasan-I-Sabah”. And the arrangement of the traditional folk ballad “I wonder what’s keeping my true love tonight”, again featuring Liz Prendergast’s violin, is absolutely gorgeous.

The playing and production on this album are perfect; it certainly sounds like they took their time getting it right. There’s plenty of sweeping keyboard soundscapes from Jon Edwards, Paul Davies’s distinctive guitar is used sparingly but effectively, and Gavin and Alun make an incredibly tight rhythm section. And Anne-Marie Helder proves she’s a great lead vocalist in her own right; having seen a couple of her acoustic solo sets live I’ve never really doubted that, but this is the first time I’ve heard singing lead backed by a full band. The often complex multi-layered songs makes me wonder how on earth they’re going to reproduce all this live.

This album is definitely worth the three year wait.

The limited edition of the album is only available from the band’s website, www.panicroom.org.uk (warning! Flash only!). If your browser can’t cope with Flash, the band tell me you can also get a copy by posting a cheque for £11.49 (inc. £1.50 p&p) made out to “Firefly Music Ltd” to; Firefly Music Ltd, 3 Talbot Street, Gowerton, Swansea, SA4 3DB

I’ve finally got hold of the long-awaited debut album by Panic Room, “Visionary Position”. Because I’ve been away from home over Easter, the whole of teh internets (or at least the whole of the girlyprogosphere) has been going on about how wonderful it is. And all the time it had been sitting on my doormat when I couldn’t listen to it!

Full review when I’ve had the chance to give it a few listens.

Arthur C Clarke was buried today.

Of the trinity of golden-age science-fiction writers (the other two being Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein), I believe he was the greatest of them all, and it’s his writing that’s stood the test of time the best. His style to me was the very definition of “Hard SF” with completely believable physics and engineering, often centre-stage as important elements of the plot, yet still populated by human characters. And he lived long enough to see many of the technological marvels he wrote about come reality.

One of the greats indeed.

Almost all the lineup for this year’s Cambridge Rock Festival on 17th-20th July has now been announced. Sunday’s bill just about makes me fall off my chair in amazement. With Marillion topping the bill, this is looking like an incredible day.

• Marillion
• Mostly Autumn
• The Reasoning
• Breathing Space

The entire festival runs for four days, and there seems to be a theme for each day (Friday is 70s pub-rock, Saturday is blues-rock with the current incarnation of Bad Company topping the bill). And Sunday is definitely prog day!

It looks like The Astoria is doomed

“The construction of Crossrail means that the Astoria can’t be saved”, the mayor said. He added that a new, plusher concert venue would be included in the new development in Tottenham Court Road. Mr Livingstone said: “It wasn’t at the cutting edge of modern comfort”.

Ken Livingstone really doesn’t get rock and roll, does he?. The ‘plush new venue’ will be inevitably be as corporate and soulless as the political party he belongs to, with ticket prices to match. Rock venues are supposed to be hot and sweaty with beer-stained walls and floors. The best ones have character and history, with some of the essence of all the bands that played there imprinted in the building.

While The Astoria isn’t my favourite London venue, I’ve been to some great gigs there over the years, most recently Mostly Autumn’s Christmas show last year. It will be missed.

Charlie Stross mixes E Gary Gygax with the US presidential election, and gives us D&D 1st edition Monster Manual stats for the three principle characters:

John McCain (Demon Prince of Republicans.) (Lesser God.)

FREQUENCY: Very rare
NO APPEARING: 1
ARMOUR CLASS: -7
MOVE: 3″ (72″ per flight sector on the campaign jet)
HIT DICE: 200 hit points (But first you have to defeat 4d8 Secret Service Agents)
% IN LAIR: 0%
TREASURE TYPE: All your NATO base are belong to us!

And it gets a lot better after that. Go and read the rest of it!

The Guardian’s Michael Hann invites readers to nominate your favourite flop follow-up albums

So, fellow pop snobs - and don’t lie to me, you’re out there - which are the commercially disastrous follow-ups to smashes that set your pulses racing? And no nominating the Stone Roses’ Second Coming, which was a bigger hit, I am told, than its predecessor. Bonus points for anyone who nominates Quiet Riot’s follow-up to Metal Health. Bonus points, in fact, to anyone who even heard Quiet Riot’s follow-up to Metal Health.

I thought of a few, like Diamond Head’s ‘difficult second album’ “Canterbury”, too off-the-wall and experimental for many fans of their major-label debut, and saw the band dropped and subsequently splitting after it failed to sell. And then there was Marillion’s “Brave”, regarded by many fans as their definitive masterpiece, but which failed to sell in anything like the quantities expected by EMI, and marked the beginning of the end for their major-label career.

But if the theme is attempts to defend albums that mark the point where a previously successful band went down the commercial and critical toilet, Black Sabbath’s 1983 album “Born Again” checks all the requisite boxes.

Three years earlier Black Sabbath had successfully reinvented themselves by replacing the burned-out Ozzy Osborne with Ronnie Dio, and produced two classic albums. But when Dio departed due to a clash of egos (what do you expect from someone who’s stage name is Italian for “God”?), they replaced him with … Ian Gillan.

The tour was rightly dismissed as a bad joke; There was that gigantic fibreglass Stonehenge that provided the inspiration for Spinal Tap. Ian Gillan wore the same stage outfit as he’d worn when fronting his own band a year earlier and looked totally out of place. He butchered Ozzy’s songs to the point of unrecogisability, and didn’t even attempt any of Dio’s stuff. And the new songs, well, at the 1983 Reading Festival I remember a guy next to me sadly shaking his head and muttering “It’s not Sabbath”. The consensus was that special guests Marillion totally blew them off stage.

But… Ignore that awful cover and listen to the album. While it’s no “Sabotage” or “Heaven and Hell”, it still has it’s moments. If it’s ‘not Sabbath’ (and a lot of it isn’t), it’s still a worthwhile member of Ian Gillan’s canon. ‘Trashed’ is quite Purpleesque, and there are echoes of ‘When a Blind Man Cries’ in the title track. And ‘Zero the Hero’ with it’s menacing growling riff is one place where the alchemy finally worked.

Actually, a rather old quote from The Phoenyx that I must have missed the first time round

Are Mostly Autumn prog-rock? (pause) Oh, yeah, they have an album of songs inspired by LOTR. They must be.
- Carl Cravens, as quoted by Karen

Now, as we should all know, it’s only really prog if those 12 minute songs about hobbits are in 7/8 or 9/8 time…

As reported by The Associated Press

Gary Gygax, who co-created the fantasy game Dungeons & Dragons and helped start the role-playing phenomenon, died Tuesday morning at his home in Lake Geneva. He was 69, and had been suffering from health problems for several years.

While I might have outgrown Gygax’s numbers-heavy style of gaming, it’s probably true that the RPG hobby as we know it today would not have existed without him, either in the pencil-and-paper form, or the hugely popular multiplayer online games. Without his pioneering efforts, others who came later would have had nothing to build on.

I had the priviledge of meeting him once, at Gen Con UK in Manchester back in 2000, where he was a guest of honour. I remember him as a spectator in the Steve Jackson Games demo room, where I was playing In Nomine. It was only afterwards that I realised who he was.

Update: Ken Hite reminds us that not only has Gygax given the world RPGs, but also introduced a lot of people to the writings of the great Jack Vance.

Steve Jackson adds this comment:

Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson didn’t just remake a hobby. They impacted all of Western culture. Fantasy fiction would still be a backwater had not D&D built an audience and a new generation of writers. Lord of the Rings would be something taught in college English classes, not a blockbuster movie trilogy. And consider: The direct lineal descendant of D&D is Worlds of Warcraft, which is, all by itself, what? A billion-dollar business now?