Nine Feet Underground

The day begins with the mystery of the disappearing plastic jug.  The carer, K, and I search high and low, but no sign of it.  The jug is used by the carers to give E her water via the PEG.  Very strange. Having searched upstairs and downstairs, I have decided to shower.  I'm sure it will appear later. After my shower, I foolishly opened my emails.  My energy supplier reminds me that my fixed-price deal comes to an end on the 1st of December. I followed the link to see what my choices are. Flippety flop!!! I though the bill might be doubling, but I wasn't prepared for what I found. I will have to phone them, but as today is the twin's birthday, I will forget about it until tomorrow. Can't change it anyway, not unless we have a general election. Nationalisation is on my mind. I can't understand how people earning less will manage. This is crazy. The second set of carers found the jug. It was in the bed with E, Sunday night's carers having been in too much of a hu...

This will be a post about Monday, but in reality it's a continuation of Sunday, at least until early afternoon. On Sunday night I went out for a meal with a friend, before re-routing some wine to the sea, via a fairly circuitous path, though a more direct route would, of course, be accompanied by considerably less pleasure. After an unusually relaxed morning, I headed back for home feeling recharged.  It occurs to me that when I am home, I am never able to fully relax as I am always in a state of orange alert.  This probably has untold impacts, not least of all on my sleep (Sleep? What is that?) After putting it off for several weeks, one of my first tasks on arriving home was to file the paperwork and letters that have arrived since I last did filing. I always have the good intention of filing things as they arrive, but somehow the reality and demands of everyday life get in the way and, several weeks later, I seem to find myself with a pile of paper to sort into the shr...

Gotta put 2019 behind me!  This will be the final post on last year's music - despite the fact that I keep discovering new things I'd missed (WaqWaq Kingdom, anyone?) and also questioning my final top 10, which admittedly I was doing at the time I compiled the list. Inevitably this will omit many things of note: no doubt I could keep writing until words were written about every album I liked in 2019, but that ain't happening. 2020 is here, and we're all off to hell in a handcart. Looking back is ultimately futile - there is only now and now plus one. It's time to move on, new music is already appearing in 2020 - thank you, Wire, for getting the year off to a great start - gigs are getting booked, starting with Julian Cope, who has a new album, 'Self Civil War', due out in February, and, from what I've heard so far, it's his best in while.  With that in mind, f or the final time then, let's wind the clock back to 2019 and just see what el...

A dubious category, if ever there was one: best box sets of 2019? Sounds like something made up as an excuse to shout about some musical peccadillo that doesn't fit into any other category, if you ask me? You betcha, mate! Now, without wishing to start a religious war or equivalent, I have to start by saying that, in general I am resistant to the idea of the box set.  It seems to me it's no different from buying books by the yard to populate a library in a house where none of the books is actually read. The less said about that, the better. Box sets often suffer from two problems. For starters they often collect together everything by an artist, regardless of merit, and let's face it there is no artist, I would argue, that produced album after album of equal brilliance.  (No, not even those four blokes, so leave it out!) The other failing is that they are the musical "five yards of books", a sort of coffee table "look at this, I'm really cool...

Steve Hillage live twice in the same year?  You spoil me... ...not only that, but  a chance to see Gong live playing their own new songs as well as playing as Steve Hillage's band is an opportunity not to be missed... ...and so it was, on a cold and wet Friday evening in November, I began the 35 mile drive North to Aylesbury in the rush hour. After a meal with a good friend it was off to the Waterside Theatre, a venue I'd never visited before, to the gig hosted/promoted by the legendary Friars Aylesbury music club. Seated at the back row in the circle provided a perfect view of the stage: question is would the sound be any good? Bang on 7:30pm Gong took to the stage, fronted by Kavus Torabi, and from the off any doubts about the acoustics were dispelled - the sound was clear and sharp. Kavus even remarked on how impressed they were with the acoustics when they set up and rehearsed earlier that day. Kavus made it clear this wasn't going to be a Gong nos...

The last time I saw Steve Hillage play live it was in December, the 4th December to be precise. This wasn't in London, though, it was in Leeds, and it wasn't six months ago, it was almost 43 years ago.  Back then, in the winter of 1976, Steve was touring to promote his then new album 'L', produced by some bloke called Todd Rundgren and I was a wide-eyed student amazed by all the bands that played within 5 minutes walk from where I was living. During that intervening forty-two and a half years a lot has changed in both our lives: Steve's cut his hair shorter, and, mostly, ditched the guitar-based rock in favour of a mix of ambient / techno in the band he formed with his partner, Miquette Giraudy, System 7. System 7 have been big on the Ibiza club scene and also in Japan, but they are not such a far cry from Steve's roots as you might imagine: a common vibe to both is peace and love, the main difference being one crowd trips out on Ecstasy the other on...

Even after the announcement in February that Daevid Allen had terminal cancer with no more than 6 months to live, it still came as a shock to hear of his death on 13 th March 2015. Daevid Allen was a one-off – someone who embodied the most positive aspects of the late 1960’s hippy vision and dressed it up in his own singular world vision – the planet Gong. Whilst his songs often encapsulated this vision with serious messages about the way we are treating the planet or the iniquities of capitalism, he never took himself too seriously. Briefly a member of Soft Machine – he only appears on their very early single ‘Love Makes Sweet Music’ – he went on to form Gong with his partner Gilli Smyth and others.   Gong has never had a fixed line-up – there are even albums released under the name Gong on which Allen does not appear – but for many the line-up that truly represents Gong is the one that recorded the three albums known as the Radio Gnome Invisible trilogy: ‘Flying Te...