Piece

(Photo of Piece by Dennis Brown - November 2007)

The post the other day of the complete recordings of Turkey Bones & The Wild Dogs was inspired by recently meeting a bloke who it turned out was from Perth in Scotland.
When I was told this I casually mentioned that the only people I knew from that part of the world were the members of Turkey Bones (Scotty-vocals, Arab-bass, Herman-drums and Piece- guitar).
Dennis then mentioned that the last time he had been back home he had run into Piece at a Rezillos gig and you can see the resulting photo above.
I was trying to think when I first met Piece and it must have been 1977 or 78. From memory I seem to recall that he was a gas fitter and the house that I was living in at the time needed some work done.
At the time I was living right beside Alexandra Palace in North London and was hanging with a bunch of crazy guys who were mostly from Scotland and Liverpool who were all living in Muswell Hill.
I remember that Piece was sharing a house with Nik (from Alien Sex Fiend) and Razzle who would go on to drum with Hanoi Rocks before being killed when he was in a car that was being driven by Motley Crue's singer Vince Neill crashed.

TBC

Epic driving fail

John Martyn & Danny Thompson - Couldn't Love You More (OGWT 1977)

John Martyn - I'd Rather Be The Devil (OGWT 1973)

John Martyn & Danny Thompson - Big Muff

John Martyn - Small Hours (Live 1978)

John Martyn - Bless The Weather (Live 1978)

John Martyn - 1948 - 2009 R.I.P.

John Martyn passed away yesterday apparently from pneumonia.
Story from the 'BBC' here.
More John Martyn here and here and this will give you one of his best songs.

".....was just in the kitchen at lunchtime eating a sandwich with ben, when the news came on radio 4 that john martyn had died today....now this couldn't truly be said to be "shocking" news, in the true sense of the word, but still, what a sad day....i remember the first night i met ben, over in the student union building, and we had a few drinks in the bar and then went back to his student bedroom....and of course the first thing i did was to rifle through his record collection, and discovered that we had precisely TWO records in common (vic godard, and the durutti column)....at which point he pulled out an album i had never even heard OF, let alone heard, and it was john martyn's solid air.....ben had only arrived in hull earlier that afternoon, same as me, but he'd already re-arranged his room to suit his preferences....the desk, that item you might imagine being central to a student's bedroom, if not very existence, he had stashed away safely out of sight on top of the wardrobe, and in its place now stood an old, battered trunk with a record deck on top, and to either side a huge pair of speakers, the like of which i hadn't seen before....on went solid air, and it filled the room, and that was that.....the first record we listened to together, cheers to you john martyn, bless you and the weather....xx"

(Tracey Thorn)

Turkey Bones & The Wild Dogs

"GOLDFISH/ZOOLOGY"
1983 Anagram Records
ana 10

"PURPLE NOISE SANDWICH"
RAYMOND/AIRCRAFT CARRIER/HELICOPTER MAN
1984 McKechnie Gramophone Records
MAC 1/12

"NO WAY BEFORE THE WEEKEND"
FEEL THE PURPLE HILLS/PLANE CRASH/SNAKE/CHEROKEE NATION/SHAKE/MOTORBIKE
1985 ace records
Ned 13

Bart Simpson a scientologist?

Story from 'The Huffingfton Post' here.

44 degrees yesterday 44 today 43 tomorrow - too hot!!!

UPDATE: Was just walking home with son # 2 and we came across a bat that was on its back in the middle of the road. A stick was got and it was put in a quiet place after it was given a bit of a cooling down with water.
My Bindi Irwin moment (apologies Bella!)

Lykke Li - I'm Good, I'm Gone

Joe Henry - God Only Knows (Live Paradiso Amsterdam 12/02/08)

The Beach Boys - Wouldn't It Be Nice

Obama: U.S. not your enemy

President Obama in his first formal interview since coming to power with the Dubai based Al-Arabiya Network.
Story from 'Politico' here.

Interesting comments from 'FP' here.

British OiNK users sentenced to community service

Story from 'Pitchfork' here.

EPIC fail!

From Failblog via 'I Am Fuel You Are Friends'

The Folk Implosion - Natural One

Two songs by Lou Barlow

Lou Barlow

'Easy'
The Folk Implosion

Said I wouldn't do it, leave it alone
Tried to ditch it, followed me right back home
After a while I don't resist
I'm alive with a purpose
My way down looking for it
That's what I'm afraid of

When I finally hold it, arrive on the scene
The doors are open I can hardly breathe
And like every guilty feeling
I've forgotten before
Three hours later, I'm hungry for more
That's what I'm afraid of
I don't have the will to change
Not when it's so easy, to be easy

Resistance is low when I'm feeling bored
What I thought was fun isn't fun anymore
Gravity pulls neither wrong or right
The moon is full and we're out of our heads
Let's do it again and feel allright
The fight is over for now
The fight is over

'Too Pure'
Sebadoh

Is something missing in my touch, a tension tugging at my smile?
If there's a right thing to say, I'm sure I missed it by a mile
Swallowed in some detail, heavy in my blood
I wanna hold you close, but I can't lift my arms up
Is there a reason for this distance?
More than the drug that floats my days
A nervous bug in my system, it keeps me edgy and ashamed
I've got a saint, never ever will forgive
That never understood me but still tells me how to live
It fits when I stretch and I stretch because I can
I stretch until I'm sore and then I open up for more
I do it out of habit, not addiction
And if I give it up, clean out my blood
Will I still feel bored and disconnected?
If I do it all for love, will I ever give enough?
'cause you can never be too pure or too connected
You can never be too pure or too connected
You can never be too pure

'Trout Mask Replica' amongst albums in the White House record collection

Story from 'Rolling Stone' here.

I is seriously shocked!

Leonard Cohen - The Future (Live 'Later with Jools Holland')

Review: Leonard Cohen 'A Day On The Green' Coldstream 24/01/09

(Photo by Simone Maynard.)

Michelle Griffin
'The Sunday Age'

January 25, 2009

Leonard Cohen
Day On The Green
Rochford Winery, Coldstream

LEONARD Cohen is like a horse whisperer, only for women. Even at 74, the dapper rogue could provoke sighs from women in the audience at Rochford Winery last night with his courtly songs of sex and regret. When he growled his sleazy 1988 classic I'm Your Man, women leapt from their picnic blankets to yell: "Yes, you are!"
At his first Australian concert in 24 years, Cohen seduced 7000 people — women and men — with an act polished by a year's touring and a lifetime perfecting his pitch: he charmed us, he moved us, and then he broke it to us gently. "I tried to leave you," he sang at his third and final encore.
Cohen is a funny man. The jokes may be bleak but he tells them with a rueful smile. "It's been a long time, about 15 years since I was on stage," he told the crowd. "When I was 60, a young kid with a crazy dream."
He may look frail, but Cohen put paid to his morose reputation with a vibrant set that lasted almost three hours. He certainly didn't perform like a man forced out of retirement to sing for his pension fund. Dressed like a preacher in three-piece suit, string tie and fedora, he literally skipped on and off stage between sets, swung tight-fisted like Sinatra during musical interludes, and performed a "white man dance" to whooping applause.
Cohen's baritone is, as he cheerfully admits, a rough diamond. His martini-dry vocals are complemented by a nine-piece band of accomplished musicians and singers, led by his long-time musical director, bassist Roscoe Beck. Folk classics Suzanne and Chelsea Hotel #2 were presented simply, but many highlights came from more recent songs, such as the witty Everybody Knows, soaring Anthem and wry calling card Tower of Song (featuring Cohen's one-handed synthesiser solo!)
Hallelujah came halfway through the second set. Cohen fell to his knees to wrest his best-known song back from all the artists who have covered it — Jeff Buckley, Rufus Wainwright, UK Idol's Alexandra Burke — and rediscovered its wild, black heart. Later, Cohen ceded control of lovely hymn If It Be Your Will to the angelic voices of the Webb sisters. Then he roared back into focus with the song of the night, a rocking and timely rendition of his 1992 number Democracy Is Coming to the USA.


A Thousand Kisses Deep
('A Day On The Green' - Coldstream 24th January 2009)

Bonus:
From the last time Leonard Cohen played in Melbourne nearly 25 years ago, I give you a 'new' song 'Hallelujah' as well as 'Democracy' live in Glasgow on the night Obama was elected.

It goes without saying that you should not do this

Go here to find out everything you need to know to change the message on those roadside signs.
(Via 'boingboing'.)
Very funny comments thread here.

Schoolly D - King of New York

Day of Shame, Day of Triumph (The Age 26/01/05)

Australians have a responsibility to acknowledge the first peoples of this land. It cannot be shirked, writes David Day.

For some years now, Australia Day has seen commentators berating us for not making a greater celebration of the day that marked the beginning of our nation. Other commentators berate us for celebrating the day that also marked the beginning of a tragedy for Aboriginal peoples. Both sides are right about the historical significance of January 26, 1788. It does mark the beginning both of Australia's shame and its triumph. This partly explains the muted way in which we tend to celebrate the day, for there is much to be ambivalent about.

When Captain Arthur Phillip and his officers splashed ashore at Botany Bay, they believed they were bringing civilisation to what one of the officers described as "a remote and barbarous land". But it was not an act of selfless charity. They had come to conquer. They had not come to live in an Aboriginal world but to dispossess the Aborigines of their land and compel them to live in a British world.
Phillip had been sent by the British government to take possession of the eastern half of Australia. The bold move was designed to give Britain a strategic presence in the Pacific, allowing it to challenge the tottering power of the Spanish and secure the sea route to China. Little thought was given to the incidental consequences for the Aborigines.

With the peremptory act of raising a flag at Sydney Cove and reading a proclamation, Phillip blithely made one of the greatest land grabs in history without even a token attempt to negotiate or compensate the traditional owners. Had they been invited to Phillip's ceremony, and realised its significance, the Aborigines might have made a more determined attempt to resist. In that first year, they certainly had the numbers to bring the half-starved colony to a premature end. But there was little sustained resistance, and even less after an outbreak of smallpox wiped out much of Sydney's Aboriginal population.

We continue to watch passively as Aborigines die from preventable diseases and as their societies are ravaged.

Laid waste by disease and alcohol and the disruption of their traditional living patterns over the succeeding decades, or killed outright by punitive expeditions, the Aboriginal population seemed set by 1900 to be headed for extinction. A population of a million or more had been reduced to about 60,000. In the minds of the colonists, there was a sense of sad inevitability about it all, along with a quiet sense of satisfaction that the eventual Aboriginal demise would remove any lingering feelings of uneasiness about the legitimacy of the British occupation. But the nature of our national origins clearly concerns us still.

Indeed, the shadow cast by Phillip and his officers, as they stood beneath the flag toasting the imposition of British authority, continues to darken our national life. Still unconfident in our relatively short-lived occupation of the continent, we shrink from undertaking those symbolic acts that would acknowledge the historic wrongs visited upon Aboriginal people and adequately recognise their status as first peoples. Just as in the past we took many of their children in an unsuccessful attempt to make Aborigines disappear from view, so we continue to press for them to blend into white Australia and become one people with us, thereby ceasing to pose a moral challenge to our occupation of their continent.

We continue to watch passively as Aborigines die from preventable diseases and as their societies are ravaged by the physical and psychological consequences of their historic dispossession, while comforting our consciences with the mistaken belief that they are the authors of their own misfortune. Rather than mobilising our resources to provide adequate medical, educational and housing facilities, we now compel outback Aborigines to wash their faces in return for the provision of a petrol bowser, thereby implicitly reinforcing the 18th-century view of the Aborigines as child-like savages who have to be civilised.

Of course, there is nothing to be gained by simply reproaching ourselves about the shameful acts in our past. Instead, we need to understand and acknowledge our history in all its complexity, from the grandeur to the genocide. We need also to situate our history within a wider context and understand that we are far from alone in dispossessing indigenous people of their land. Societies across the world, from Japan to Peru and Israel to Indonesia, live on land taken from indigenous inhabitants. The process of claiming and occupying those lands has helped to shape the nature of those societies, as it has shaped ours over the past two centuries. However, just because many other societies share our situation does not absolve us of our shameful neglect.

On this Australia Day, then, it is fitting that we acknowledge the historical importance of Arthur Phillip's foundational enterprise. Despite being dogged by ignorance and ill-luck, the first colonists overcame considerable obstacles to establish the beginnings of one of the great cities of the modern world and one of the most diverse and tolerant societies. But it is equally important to acknowledge the tragic outcome for Aborigines of the British invasion.

That tragedy continues, and it will persist as long as we push ahead with Phillip's original project of dispossession and refuse to recognise that we have reached an important point in the prolonged process, initiated by Cook and Phillip, of making this continent our own. After more than 200 years, and with a population of 20 million, the fear of ourselves being dispossessed has been largely allayed.

We should be confident enough now to recognise Aborigines as the first peoples of this land and to accord them the rights implicit in such status. It has proved to be a bounteous land. Its riches deserve to be shared more generously with those from whom it was taken. It is inevitable that Australians will be held to account if that responsibility continues to be shirked.

David Day is the author of Claiming a Continent: A New History of Australia.

For Michele (in Wonderland)!

SS Maton up for auction

The guitar boat built by Maton for Josh Pyke's video 'Make You Happy' is up for sale.
Full story here.

PETA protest Hong Kong January 20th 2009

13 year old Sara plays drums to Rush's YYZ

Rush?
Can we do the parents for child abuse?

The tee and the tag

From 'animalnewyork' here.

Gottle-o-gear!

Gone partying!

My friend's bub turns one tomorrow.

Me and the Spacebubs will be there.
Back tomorrow no doubt hyped up after lots of red things!
UPDATE: (...like strawberries...new world record set by Spacebubs for amount of strawberries consumed at one sitting!)

Obamania hits Japan

The Dead - Uncle John's Band (Mid-Atlantic Inauguration Ball 20th January 2009)

Mick Harvey quits Bad Seeds

(Photo of Mick Harvey at Mt. Buller ATP by TimN)

For a variety of personal and professional reasons I have chosen to discontinue my ongoing involvement with Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds.
After 25 years I feel I am leaving the band as it experiences one of its many peaks; in very healthy condition, and with fantastic prospects for the future.
I’m confident Nick will continue to be a creative force and that this is the right time to pass on my artistic and managerial role to what has become a tremendous group of people who can support him in his endeavours both musically and organizationally.
It was a fantastic experience to finish my touring days in the band with the recent shows in Australia and the unique events that took place in conjunction with All Tomorrow’s Parties, especially Mt. Buller, which was one of the many highlights of my involvement with the band throughout the years.
I shall continue working on the Bad Seeds back catalogue re-issues project over the coming year and look forward to the new opportunities I shall be able to accommodate as a result of my changed circumstances.

– Mick Harvey, 22nd January 2009

Obama retakes Oath of Office

Following Tuesday's SNAFU, Justice Roberts & President Obama redo the oath at the White House.
Already some of our right wing friends are saying that as it was done in private (and possibly not redone at all) then Obama is still not legitimately President.
The photo above is of course a 'shoop'!

X - Bazooka

Don't forget that the wonderful illustrations of Kiki & Loulou Picasso can be found at their blog here.

Liverpool Street Railway Station London 15/01/09 11AM

Ad for T-Mobile UK

Keef by Sebastian Kruger

More from his blog here.

Obama calls Abbas

The new US leader told Abbas that the Palestinian president was the first foreign leader he called since taking office, said spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeina."This is my first phone call to a foreign leader and I'm making it only hours after I took office," he quoted Obama as telling Abbas.

Story from 'AP' here.