Blog

Went to see Bruford last night at Hormsey library. He wasn't playing but talking about his career & flogging his autobiography. Seems like a nice chap, free wine too. I was mainly hoping of course to hear about Crimson but there wasn't much said on that topic. At least not 70's KC. He played a little clip of the french performance of Waiting Man that you can see on Youtube (the one that starts with him & Belew playing the Simmonds drums together) & he obviously really liked playing that. When the beat kicks in it's like a serious whack in the face - pretty fantastic.
I'm not sure myself whether or not his idea of the computer-based music of today being a bad idea is really worth much. I feel the computer is just another tool to aid you create. Bands still have to go out & do the grind as he did when Yes were starting out. He didn't sound bitter but some of his patter seemed slightly patronising to me. You can tell he's done some teaching in the past. It's a shame he's retired so I'll never get to see him play Red with Fripp et all.

We have some new Heads T shirts up tonight. Having donw a deal with Steven Richards photography to use some of his fab pictures we've done some great images celebrating their greatest era - ie - mid period. Hope you like them.

I sometimes wonder to myself why it is I like It Bites. I mean, I really like them. I was at work the other day & 'Screaming On The Beaches' came on & I had to stop and listen to it. It's weird, they came along around the same time that Marillion had split with Fish and when IQ & Jadis and all that lot were trying to go kind of commercial. None of them had the weird prog-pop thing so well down.
Dunnery is quite a poor lyric writer, a fairly OK singer. The rest of the band are OK too - but they ain't Rush, they ain't Genesis, they're not Yes but they still make music that I want to listen to more than those guys. Dunnery's guitar is obviously a high point, there's something to be said for artists who can play their shit off and still make unboring and moderately commercial material. Level 42 is a case in point. Anything up to and including World Machine has an awesome amount of musicianship encased within it, but without Jazz Fusion's tendency to rub your face in it's musical mess. If you take Yes - there's a whole heap of muscial hubs to bite into. Everything from Jon's daft pixie voice to Rick's live curry eating & on to the mathematical drumming & Rickenbacker stylings of Fish-man, Bites just don't have the same nub-ness - but it doesn't matter.
When Bites' last album - 'Eat Me In St Louis' came out, I initially was not impressed. In the slightest. It was again plumped full of cringeworthy lyrics (Murder Of The Planet Earth anyone?) but somehow now I love it. What is wrong with me? I'm obviously not a journalist (as you can tell by now) but if anyone could email & let me know I'd find life a little easier to cope with. I have the questions - no answers.

I was listening to Something's On The Move by Jethro Tull last night (from the Stormwatch album). It's a great song, probably the best on that album (which isn't a great Tull album by any stretch of the imagination). It was released in 1979, the end of the line for old-skool 70's production & musicianship values. From here on in technology would take over - becoming the fall-back resource for every rock band in the studio. Albums suddenly needed to take 4 years to be released rather than 2 (one year getting a good snare sound, one looking for fashionwear for the video etc). Tull managed to get around the worst aspects of this by letting technology take them over completely. No DX7 twiddling in the background - it was full on Linn drum & synth programming for the band that only a few years before had gone totally folk-rock (around Heavy Horses..). The Under Wraps album (1984) sounded so bizarrely un-Tull that I think it's really good. Broadsword & the Beast which came two years before sounds light years away by comparison.
Tull however were in a minority when it came to bands of the 70's finding their place in the 80's. Nearly everyone thought that the law commanded them to employ a synth programmer and that unless their drums sounded like they were recorded in a cathedral using a demon with parkinsons as a mixing engineer then they wouldn't get into the top 40.
The bigger chaps did find something to grab onto though. Yes somehow managed to make 90125 - mainly due to their employment of a younger guitarist (Trevor Rabin) - and the production of old vocalist Trevor Horn. Drama, the Horn album released three years before got to number 2 in the UK but was frankly crappy. 90125 however showed that synths & silky production could bring older bands up to date without making them sound totally out of water. It's a great album, I even love the follow up Big Generator but I guess that's just coz I was around at the time & it holds quite a few good memories in it's huge-snared grooves.
Rush embraced the tech too. Alex Lifesons guitar sound became a chorus-laden sonic cathedral, Geddy abandoned playing bass through half of the set to play of load of dodgy 80's keyboards and Neil's drum kit became even larger, in fact it became two drum kits. I like much of their 80's material. The first two albums Permanent Waves & Moving Pictures being their best ever. Then they seemed to lose track a bit, the playing & songs were still great but the studio technology seemed to take the edge off somehow. By the time it got to Hold Your Fire they really sounded weighed down by the chiming chords & lumpen sequencers. They've never really recovered & are now slowly drifting into greatest hits tour territory.
So there were winners & losers. I'm not sure there was anyone who really came though that period totally unscathed. It took the next generation (Talking Heads, Devo - well most new wave bands, dare I say it - Level 42?) to actually do something interesting with studio technology and the 70's bands did take notice - but age does tend to take it's toll on creativity......Wives, mortagages, car crashes, the tax man, they all take time out of the songwriting schedule.....

God it's irritating what the Zappa family trust have done in the past few years. What kind of shit are they playing at. I always thought that the obvious thing to do was to employ someone to organise the vault & plan monthly releases of gigs as per King Crimson's site. Have a members club where you could download mp3's etc. Yet they seem hell-bent on releasing some of the crappiest parts of Frank's career & not even making them that easy to get hold of. Let's examine what we've had so far. Joe's Domage & Corsage & Xmasage are all totally poo. Ignore them and you'll be happy. Buffalo is a great gig - no questions there - more of that please. Trance Fusion is a collection of boring guitar solos from a period where even Frank himself said he wasn't that good. His solos basically went downhill throughout the 80's. He was still greater than almost anyone else but the band didn't have the power of the 74-80 golden solo era......Petit Wazoo is very poorly mixed, Imaginary Diseases is boring. FZ OZ is great in parts - but the strangely small band means the music only just hangs together in many places & Andre Lewis' keyboards can hardly be heard.
Maybe there really isn't that much stuff in the vault worth hearing? Are we all being strung along?
As to the video releases - jesus! I mean Frank kept hinting that he thought he was some kind of cinematic innovator but has there been any film made by him that's any good? No, there isn't.
That said, he is god. All you have to do is listen to One Size Fits All as loud as possible after a glass of wine and all your doubts about the other stuff will just melt away.
Don't get me started on the Zappa plays Zappa gigs - ugh!

Thought it might be good to talk through some of the shirts we've got on the site and see if I could annoy as many people as possible by offending their album collections etc.

Warren Zevon is a funny chap. I haven't actually found very many songs that I can get a grip on. He's not Randy Newman, he's not the Eagles, he's not Jackson Browne. He's a kind of falling between a whole load of stools kind of guy. Werewolves Of London is the track everybody knows but as usual it's not representative of the rest of his oevre. Great Fleetwood Mac rhythm section on that & Excitable boy. When it comes down to some of the other albums I find the vocal really grates. Some vocalists take a while to get your head around (Wetton / Anderson / Geddy etc) but Warren really has a quite irritating rasp. Jackson Browne is almost as bad but I usually fall asleep before any of his songs have finished so I don't normally last long enough to have a problem with his voice.
Anyway. That was a really rambling & barely coherent opinion. Let's hope there's more where that came from. Bet you can't wait.

So, the Old Skool Hooligans site is up and running. We hope to bring you as many obscure & anal T shirts as we can over the coming months / years. It's taken a while to get the site ready & working properly but here it is. In all it's glory.
Old Skool Hooligans is basically me, James. All the shirts on the site are my designs - except for the odd bit here & there (you'll know which). If you have any ideas for possible future designs then they would be gratefully received. We're tending to focus on the 70's as that's frankly the only decade that matters when it comes to rock. Maybe we'll move on to the 80's but there's a deep 70's seam still left to mine. Enjoy it...