1. My Generation [December 1965]

Well well, what a very good record!

Because they were at this point part of the same British R&B movement, comparisons with the earliest Rolling Stones material are irresistible. Or I couldn't resist them anyway, but I found this first Who album much more convincing.

To be fair Mick, Keef and friends had already put out three albums in eighteen months by the time the debut Who long player arrived and the times they were a changin' pretty quickly. But this record is so much more powerful, so much more dynamic, so better endowed with catchy hooks and most of all so much more original. The earliest Stones albums consist mainly of covers whereas most - and mostly the best - of the songs here were written by Townshend.

The throbbing, driving bass, the rattling, insistent drums, Daltrey's big, throaty vocals, the crashing, stabbing, ringing rhythm guitar - it all adds up to what must have been a pretty devastating statement of intent for 1965. But it's not only powerful, it's tuneful as well - there are some lovely vocal harmonies and memorable melodies. It hints at power pop as well as R&B.

It's not a sophisticated production job by any means but it's well recorded. The copy I listened to was remastered for the Japanese market straight from the master tapes supposedly; it sounds big and full.

To the best of my knowledge I'd only ever heard My Generation and The Kids are Alright, famously banging tunes of course. But I also especially liked The Good's Gone, which reminds me of The Byrds and the sprightly, uptempo A Legal Matter which Pete sings, and which to be fair borrows from the Stones' The Last Time.

I must say Daltrey's impersonation of a black soul singer on Please, Please, Please is uncanny. You'd honestly think it was James Brown or Little Richard.

Nicky Hopkins tinkles the ivories on one or two tunes, to great effect - including the remarkable The Ox, named for Entwistle of course, an instrumental piece. Hard to know how to categorise this one but whatever it is it's rock music of a sort. Not R&B. Prototype heavy rock over a hyperactive tribal drum part. Townshend's manic, feedback-laden, growling, distorted anarchic guitar predates the first Hendrix and Cream recordings by over a year. Remarkable.

.. if so, is it usually a quartz analogue? A quartz digital? Handwound? Automatic? A smartwatch? Or do you just prefer to use a phone? Or something else? Or do you typically just use a clock occasionally?

https://www.aston.ac.uk/latest-news/aston-university-researchers-send-data-45-million-times-faster-average-broadband

Aston University researchers have sent data at a speed that is 4.5 million times faster than the average home broadband.

The rate is the fastest ever sent by opening up specific new wavelength bands that are not yet used in fibre optic systems.

As part of an international collaboration, the academics transferred data at a rate of 301 terabits or 301,000,000 megabits per second, using a single, standard optical fibre.

.. so in a sense that would be 37.625 terabytes of stuff going down the wire every second, but - not all of that would be "payload" or actual transferred data, some of it is protocol overheads. Another consideration is the speed of the hardware attached to the network, I have to wonder how much data they sent across. Even the fastest regular commercial computer memory has data rates measured in GB (not TB) per second. You certainly can't transfer information to a storage device at even a tiny fraction of that speed on a conventional computer.

I also wonder what the length of the fibre cable was; one end of a lab to another probably.

Even so - absolutely staggering.

It's not often I know what I was doing 50 years ago exactly, but half a century ago exactly I was watching Eurovision '74 with my mum and my little brother, as we had done for years. Certainly since Sandie Shaw won in 1967.

The UK was represented by Olivia Newton John, but I was so blown away by the Swedish entry - Waterloo of course - that as soon as they'd appeared, I was rooting for them to win. Which of course they did.

Shamefully, the UK jury did not award any points to Sweden.

ABBA released a new album a few years ago and it was huge news in the popular music world. Only two years ago the ABBA virtual reality concert experience opened in London and it's still a huge money spinner. The trailer for it on YouTube got more than four million views.

The BBC have shown the entire 1974 Eurovision show tonight I believe, originally broadcast from Brighton and introduced by David Vine. I didn't watch it because I've just got back from a birthday party at a club in Ibstock. The DJ played Queen's Don't Stop Me Now toward the end of the evening and two girls in their 20s were dancing their hearts out to it - and what's more they sang along to every word. Yet it's a tune that charted in the '70s.

Imagine music from the 1920s being so current in the 1970s. Kids dancing to it at parties, concert halls selling out tickets for it. It's impossible, isn't it? What happened to popular music culture; why has it stopped dead in its tracks and stagnated for decades?

Quite tempted by one of these:




I do already have a headless guitar (a Steinberger) but I'm especially intrigued by the fanned frets on these - which presumably improve the intonation as well as making chords a bit more comfortable.

The basic headless concept is not a gimmick - having the tuners on the body is a much more stable proposition. And it looks like these use a clamping system at the end of the neck, so you don't need to buy special strings. I don't really like the zero fret, though.

I'll be taking the site down at 2pm this afternoon for a snapshot prior to installing a new forum feature - a dislike button. This has been under testing by the developers for several months and there's now a beta version. It's free to use, so I thought we'd give it a try.

The really impressive thing is that it ties into the forum suspension / ban system, so that anyone receiving six dislikes over a minimum of three disliked posts submitted in any four day period will have their account suspended for a week automatically by the software. Ten dislikes over a minimum of three posts in four days will cause a ban but I can reverse this manually if appropriate.

For full disclosure I should say here that administrator dislikes count double, but please be assured I will use this judiciously.

I listened to Different Stages for the first time in many years while out on a bike. This was quite a nice experience in a way, because I had very little idea what was on there so it was a bit like being at a gig, when you don't know what the band are going to play next.

It's a good live album in some ways - well recorded and has a decent live atmosphere, unfolding like a concert. But, understandably for its place in the Rush timeline it contains a lot of the '90s material, which in large part is lukewarm corporate rock. All of the first five tunes fall into this category for me, which is obviously not a great start.

But - I loved hearing the live version of The Trees. Although recorded in 1997, it took me right back to that small proportion of my teenage years that I spent at Newcastle City Hall.

The long version of 2112 similarly is great, even allowing for Geddy's vocal melody detours. It was of course understandable that he wasn't going to hit the high notes by this time. It's a shame Alex chose to play a little instrumental piece in lieu of Discovery, which is supposed to represent experimenting with a guitar.

Much more good stuff on the second disc. The live version of Test for Echo is very good and the clunkers are fewer in number than on the first disc. But I really could have done without Resist and the drum solo.

In general Alex' guitar sounds a bit fizzy and cheesy at times on these '90s recordings. I'm not fond of the overdubbed backing vocals (or backing tapes) that are audible here and there.

The third CD, recorded on the AFTK tour really sounds very good - so much so that I wondered if some of it had been redone in the studio, but it does sound very authentic. I really liked the bass sound especially and the guitar sounds so much better than the toppy fizz that's sometimes evident on the other two discs.

In the end - it's just the wrong time in the band's career for a really good live album. The stuff that was current mostly isn't great, and the stuff that's really good was already available elsewhere.

Going anywhere nice? We spent a long weekend in Pembrokeshire (a few pics below). Back to Montenegro in September. A weekend in York in August.

I find myself oddly fascinated by this news story about the collapsed bridge. In an odd way it reminds me of the Concorde disaster in 2000 .. I can't stop thinking how unlucky the folks who were caught on it were, to be on a bridge that had stood for nearly half a century at the moment when it collapsed.

All done now

The debut Rush album was released on Moon Records on 18th March, 1974.

Strictly speaking the band's recording career had already started a few months earlier when Not Fade Away / You Can't Fight It was released as a single; nonetheless those early tunes were quickly forgotten in the scheme of things, whereas some of the first album songs held down a spot in the band's set for their whole touring career and are undoubtedly classics.








The album had a difficult birth but I'm sure everyone reading this knows all about that.

It was the last of the studio albums that I got round to buying after becoming a fan. I listened to it for the first time on Christmas Day 1979, even though I'd already seen them seven times. Music was more expensive than concert tickets, in those days. I was very familiar with some of the tunes from All The World's A Stage, of course.

To me it's the shorter, punchier tunes that are most successful - Finding My Way and What You're Doing especially.

You'll recall that Giles Martin used AI demixing software to separate the instruments on the Revolver master tapes, so they could be polished and remixed.

Well .. that technology is now available to the masses. Perhaps a gimmicky stereo mix on an old Beatles tune, with John's voice in your right ear and the drums in your left annoys you. You can fix it! Maybe you don't think the guitar is loud enough on Signals. Or perhaps you'd like to take the voice off an old Abba tune to make a karaoke mix.

Judging by the video the results are very clean. I foresee lots of fan remixes of all kinds of music.

Greenwich

I live too often for the past, I know she'd say.
But I return there anyway.
A ghost from the future, in 1996.

The view has changed. And so has she. She's long gone
But I don't ever change. I stay the same; it's what I do.
I don't move on.

So I sit there on the grass, and I can see
The corpse of summers past, looking back, right through me.

I have become a cluttered box of orphaned dreams,
Forever left unspoken.

If I could touch them, hold them in my hands
Each wretched one of them would still be broken.

And I'm too bitter now to face the memories I pursue
I still can't live with what she did.
And what she didn't do.

₁₉₉₈

Advice For the Young at Heart

James found himself sitting at the edge of a double bed, in a small bedroom. He was dreaming. He knew he was dreaming, but for a moment, he didn't know where he was.

The glow of dawn through curtains behind him filled the room with a subdued, soft light.

Markfield.

His unconscious mind had brought him to his old bedroom in Markfield, the village where he had lived thirty years earlier.

His eyes scanned around the room, from the white, flat-pack wardrobes with the grey handles to the old FM radio standing on the crude bedside table. Cassette tapes were scattered on the slightly threadbare carpet. Next to the bedside radio lay a book titled Philip K Dick Is Dead, Alas.

Everything was exactly as he remembered it. He'd had lucid dreams before, but this was something else; remarkable in its detail. Somehow his sleeping brain had brought to life details he'd forgotten about; the pile of music magazines next to the wardrobe, the stack of vinyl records on the chest of drawers.

He looked down at the bed and smiled as he remembered the old red quilt cover that he hadn't seen for a couple of decades. But he only smiled for a moment.

Someone was lying in the bed. A man, roughly his own size and height, but younger. The sleeping man stirred, took a deep breath and sat up.

Stay calm, James told himself. Don't wake up. Stay here for a while, in your past. The words "explore your dream's creation" filtered into his thoughts. Were they from a song?

James stared at the younger man. He was looking at himself, exactly as he must have appeared when he slept in this room, thirty years earlier.

And in the diffused, dawn light, thirty-years-younger James was staring right back at him. Nonetheless, he seemed calm.

"I know I drank too much last night", Younger James said. "But this is the weirdest dream I've ever had. You look exactly like me, but about forty years older".

"Thirty", older James laughed. "But I believe this is my dream, not yours".

Then his heart sank as he absorbed the circumstances of the time and place to which his dream had transported him. He looked around the room again, then he spoke softly to the younger man.

"It's 1990?"

"Yes", the younger man replied, quietly. He looked sad, now. Haunted, even. James knew why.

"What month is it, Jim?"

"June, I think. I'm not certain. I'm sure I could tell you if I was awake".

"June, 1990. She's gone, then."

The younger James lay back on his pillow and glanced wistfully at the empty space in the bed beside him.

"Yes. She's gone".

Older James said nothing for a few moments. Then he said: "You'll be fine, one day. Not for a long time. But you'll be OK, I promise".

Younger James said nothing.

Older James paused, then continued: "You know this is your own fault, don't you? I know you feel betrayed, and abandoned. But you've mostly done this to yourself".

Why James was lecturing a figment of his unconscious imagination, an artefact of this unusual dream, he wasn't entirely sure. But he felt genuine compassion for his younger self. He knew that young James was going through the worst time of his entire life.

Older James stood up, turned round and looked out through the gap between the curtains. Markfield. Chitterman Way, just as he remembered it. Amazing that every detail was stored in his brain somewhere, ready to be projected like a virtual reality game, in a dream.

Then he turned toward the bed again and sat back down on the edge, carefully avoiding his own legs.

"I know how you feel. I remember. Very well. But I'll tell you something, James. There will come a time when you don't regret that Sara left you."

Younger James stared at him incredulously. "What was I drinking last night? It must have been very good stuff", he wanted to know.

Older James smiled, sympathetically. "Supermarket whisky, probably. They don't pay you much at Rolls-Royce, do they? But you get promoted to section leader two years from now".

Younger James seemed disinterested at this optimistic news. And certainly, having delivered it, Older James wondered if it wasn't perhaps a little superfluous in the circumstances.

The older man sat in silence for a moment, eyes wandering around the room, scrutinising every detail of this place where he had lived in a warm, fulfilled contentment, then existed in a hollow, lonely grief, thirty years earlier.

The Artex ceiling. The faded pink curtains. The radio-cassette player on the bedside table. Finally his eyes came to rest again on his younger self. He looked impossibly young, with thick, light brown hair and smooth, taut skin. But he looked improbably miserable, as well. And he looked bitter.

Older James spoke again. "You know what your problem is?"

"I think so, yes", Younger James replied, before he could continue. "I've lost the only person in the world that I really care about. The life I waited for, for years, has been cancelled a few months after it started, by the one person I thought I could always count on, no matter what."
"And I've been left alone, in an empty house, in a part of the country where I have no friends and no family. And even the idiots I work with are all 20 miles away in Derby."

As he spoke, Younger James had started to cry, silently.

Older James felt a profound pang of pity. Certainly he hadn't forgotten about all this. He would never forget it. But it was a long time in his past. He reached over and placed his left hand over Younger James' left hand, motionless on the quilt cover. He squeezed it, reassuringly. He looked carefully at the two hands. They were exactly the same hand, except that one of them wore a wedding ring.

He spoke softly. "Your problem is that you aren't actually a person. You're half of something that is broken. It's gone. You have to reinvent yourself. And you will".

Tears were streaming down Younger James' face now, but he didn't seem to have listened to a word. Instead he was staring at the older man's left hand, holding his own.

"So – you're me, but thirty years older – is that right?"

Older James nodded.

"And you're married. I get married". He looked incredulous.

"Yes", replied Older James. "In 2007. Enjoy the next 17 years while you can. Actually you will, mostly. Not all of them. Not the next two or three. But you will."

"And where do I .. did you – meet her? At work? Is it someone I know now? It's not Tracy from accounts is it?"

Older James smiled. "No. You buy a house in Derby next year. But you leave Rolls-Royce in four years' time. Then you live in London for seven years. Then you move back to Derby, because you keep the house there while you're living in a flat in London. Then four years after that, you meet someone on the Internet, you get married and you buy a house together six miles from here."

Older James laughed. As a summary of the previous thirty years of his life, it seemed to work well enough. But Younger James seemed preoccupied by something.

"Sorry, the Inter-what?"

Younger James was an IT specialist who had never heard of the Internet. It seemed astonishing, yet Older James couldn't imagine that the purpose of his dream was to explain SMTP, DNS, HTTP and the rest of it, let alone the social and cultural implications of the World Wide Web – so he didn't reply. Instead he said "Stay there, I'll be back in a minute".

He rose from the bed and pulled open the bedroom door. It creaked slightly, exactly as he anticipated. He stepped quietly down the stairs in the early morning light.

He entered the kitchen at the bottom of the stairs. It was all as he remembered it. The fake wooden beams, the old electric cooker. The wooden table and chairs. A cassette tape labelled 'PREFAB SPROUT R1 1984' lay on the table, next to a copy of 'Q' magazine.

He remembered an early evening in February 1990. He was making dinner for both of them in this same place, waiting for her to come home. He was often home first. It was dark outside. The kitchen radio was playing Advice For The Young At Heart by Tears for Fears, as he stirred amateurishly at a risotto. He was sure it was a risotto because thirty years later, it was still the only thing he knew how to cook.

"Soon, we will be older". So apt. Every time he heard that song, he was reminded of that same prescient advice radiating from a kitchen radio in the winter of 1990, a few short weeks before his world crumbled to dust.

The keys to his old Talbot Sunbeam were lying on the kitchen table, and for a moment he thought of opening the front door and driving home to Ravenstone, six miles away. But his house wouldn't have been built there yet, and whatever he saw there would be pure imagination. He had never seen Ravenstone until 2009. Besides, he would surely be awake soon.

A pity. Part of him wanted to stay here, and live the next thirty years one more time.

He climbed the stairs again and pushed the bedroom door open softly. Younger James was sitting up in bed, staring at the duvet cover in front of him.

"Still awake?" Older James asked.

"No, still asleep apparently, and having a very weird dream. But I suppose anything's better than being awake".

Older James sat on the edge of the bed again, and said nothing for a moment. Their eyes met and he felt a curious mixture of pity and envy. The young man had so much to look forward to. But he would suffer an aching loss, weaponised by an unimaginable, hollow disillusion, for quite some time to come. He knew that Young James missed his partner acutely and to his surprise, as his eyes glanced around the bedroom they had shared again, he missed her himself for a moment.

"James", Older James said, "if this were real and I could leave you with just one thought, it's this. One day you'll be grateful to Sara that she did this. Yes, it was grotesque, I know. But she's young, younger than you. And as impossible as I know it is for you to understand or accept now, things work out better for you than they would have if you'd stayed together. And maybe even for her, too."

He didn't actually believe that last part. Perhaps he was arrogant. But what did it matter now?

"No. I'll always love her". The younger man's reply was almost matter-of-fact. He sounded resigned; defeated.

"Yes, you will. Sort of. You'll always love her memory. And you'll be glad you have it. But you'll end up in a very happy place. An even better one. I promise. And those memories won't hurt."

He continued. "And you'll never forget what you owe her, either. She was the reason you went to University and got that degree. She's the reason you have a career. And no-one ever gave you more love and support".

Younger James looked confused, for a moment. "I didn't go to University", he said.

Older James smirked. "Oh yes, I'd forgotten. You went to Teesside Poly. But in two years' time it becomes a university, and after that you'll always say you went to Teesside University".

"Well", the younger man replied, "that sounds like me, I must admit".

And certainly, it did. James had been known to claim that he had "read Computer Science at Durham" on the grounds that he'd studied for his exams in Hartlepool.

Older James realised that he was tired. It was getting lighter in the room. Rays of sunshine had begun to penetrate the curtains. He closed his eyes for a moment. But when he opened them he was looking sideways at a digital clock on a bedside table.

He was awake.

For a moment he felt disoriented, and a little shocked. What a vivid, lucid dream he'd had.

It was a Saturday morning. He lay in bed thinking about his dream and let his mind drift back to the summer of 1990, hesitantly and carefully. His wife was still asleep when he got out of bed, to make coffee and toast.

Two hours later, something was nagging at his memory. He went to a bookcase in his study and beside a book labelled Philip K Dick Is Dead, Alas, he found his old Filofax diary, from 1990. He opened it with some reluctance, because there were memories in there that were painful to him. Toxic, even.

But he thumbed through the pages until he found an entry from June 16th.

James stared at the words on the page and shuddered. A coincidence? Or had a long-forgotten diary entry somehow bubbled to the top of his unconscious memory, to provoke a dream?

    Bizarre dream. I was visited in the bedroom by
    myself, thirty years older. Like a time traveller.
    Strangely comforting. But I woke up with another
    hangover.

He felt unsettled, but put it out of his mind.

A week later, James found himself dreaming again. He was lying in bed, in his own time. His wife was lying asleep beside him, her leg resting against his. But he knew he was dreaming, because an old man was sitting on the edge of the bed, in the dim, first light of a new day.

The old man's hair was thinner, and almost white. The jawline was a little less firm. But James recognised him immediately. He had the same warm, brown eyes, though the wrinkles that framed them were deeper.

The old man smiled. "Hello", he said.

James smiled, too. "I've been expecting you", he replied.

The old man put his left hand over James' left hand. He squeezed it, reassuringly. James looked carefully at the two hands. They were exactly the same hand, with the same wedding ring.

_{January 2021}

This is brilliant, a 3D map of the Earth and artificial satellites updated in real time. Choose from Starlink, Oneweb or GPS at the top left. As you'll see if you zoom out, the GPS satellites are very high (about 12,500 miles up, amazing when you think you can receive data from them with a watch).

There are 5,504 Starlink satellites in orbit.

https://satellitemap.space/

Drones that can do 300+ kph and keep up with an F1 car. Like science fiction, isn't it?

Actual footage at 6:14 in.

My favourite London landmark is (what I shall always know as) the Post Office Tower. When I was a kid I think it was much more well-known as a landmark than it is now, because it had just been built, and was at that time the tallest building in the country.

The first time I visited London in 1969 I went on a sleeper train from Hartlepool. In the morning I stuck my head out of the window and I could see the tower in the distance. Quite a thrill. I think the following image must have been captured at a similar time.



I've just read that the tower has been sold off to be used as a hotel. Presumably all the communications functions are now handled by terrestrial cabling, or antenna / dishes located elsewhere.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-68352275

I've always wanted to visit the revolving restaurant floor, but it was closed in the early '70s after the IRA set off a bomb on one of the upper floors. Perhaps that'll be possible again.

https://www.space.com/spacex-launch-im-1-private-moon-landing-mission

Launched early this morning and due to touch down near the Moon's south pole in a week's time - if successful, this will be the first time a lander has been deployed on the Moon by a private company.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-68287707

Really sad news. I was never a huge fan but I did listen often in the '80s and noughties, and occasionally since. Just a part of the fabric of our national life.

I've seen some hilarious comments on social media recently, and I thought it might be worthwhile to compile some of them for laughs.

Here's a lady called Janice, corresponding with Andrew Bridgen a few hours ago:



https://twitter.com/JaniceW78256134/status/1757388233682436193

Please do post 'em if you got 'em.