Interesting interview with Chantel McGregor, Life as a female rocker, in The Daily Telegraph. Though it’s publised in the “Women’s and Lifestyle” pages, it’s still more about music than half the stuff published in The Guardian’s music pages nowadays.
Chantel explains one reason why there aren’t as many female lead guitarists as their should be; many electric guitars are designed by and for men, and are an awkward shape. As she says, “My guitar’s squashed my boobs for as long as I can remember“.
Marillion guitarist Steve Rothery has announced the final two Steve Rothery Band shows of 2016 before Marlllion begin their world tour in April.
The dates are Montgomery Hall in Wath on Saturday March 5, and The Junction in Cambridge on Sunday 6th. Titled “The Ghosts and Garden Parties”, they’ll be playing his instrumental solo album “The Ghosts of Pripyat” and Marillion’s “Misplaced Childhood”, which he has previously played in full with Martin Jakubsk from the tribute band Stillmarillion on vocals.
With former Marillion frontman Fish also touring Misplaced Childhood, finishing at Islington Assembly on 20th April, the coming months will see a classic album peformed by two different bands, both of which contain one original member of the band that originally recorded it. Has that ever happened before?
Some strong words from Maajid Nawaz on how left-wing identity politics plays into the hands of the far right. He’s sounding like a stuck record, but he’s going to keep saying this until people listen.
In the name of their own ideological experiment driven by identity politics, the anti-fascists not only ignore, but wholeheartedly defend the stranglehold Islamists have over Europe’s Muslim communities. Theocracy and illiberalism are disguised as diversity. Multiculturalism is institutionalized across Europe. And people are petrified.
Free speech has suffered the terribly. Populists will abuse it to incite hatred of Muslims. Islamists will simultaneously argue for it, and against it, depending on whether the topic is the right to advocate theocracy or ban cartoons. The Regressive Left’s answer is typically authoritarian, preferring to silence debate rather than think uncomfortable thoughts.
Last week, exhausted by moderating the trolls, the Guardian announced that it has decided to shut down comments on its now ironically named ‘Comment is Free’ opinion page for the three topics of Islam, race and immigration.
Meanwhile, Vice revealed the existence of a private company that maintains a for-profit secret blacklist of Muslims it arbitrarily labels as terrorists. I am named on this list.
Reasonable conversation around Islam, race and immigration has become impossible.
You should pay attention to what Maajid Nawaz says, even if you don’t agree with him. And if you think his ideas are wrong, even dangerous, the onus is on you to explain why you think he’s wrong. Don’t hust try to shut down the conversation by claiming it’s actively harmful to marginalised minorities to have the conversations you don’t want to have.
A few pictures of The Deen Street Brothers, the six-piece band who supported Chantel McGregor at Dorking Halls. Continue reading
Viola Beach weren’t remotely my kind of music. But it’s still heartbreaking to see their Twitter feed still showing automated tweets advertising gigs this week that will never happen. Like the Bataclan massacre hack in November, their tragic deaths in a road accident struck close to home.
There are many, many musicians I know who’s routine includes driving long distances back from gigs at the opposite end of the country and arriving home at four in the morning because their budget won’t stretch to staying in the cheapest of B&Bs. Many of them must be thinking “That could easily have been us”.
Rest in Peace, Viola Beach. You weren’t part of my particular musical tribe. But music is bigger than the any one tribe, and the loss of lives so young is a terrible tragedy.
Along with the likes of Knifeworld, Purson and fellow Finns Jess and the Ancient Ones, Finland’s Hexvessel bring the weird and wonderful world of late 60s psychedelia into the 21st century. Song titles like “Transparent Eyeball” and “Cosmic Dreams” make it clear where they’ve coming from, even if calling a song “Mushroom Spirit Doors” does sound as though they’re taking the piss.
The illicit substance inspired song titles would mean little if the music wasn’t up to snuff, but Hexvessel more than deliver on that front. “When We Are Death” goes from space-rock to psychedelic folk, with swirling organ, fuzzy stoner-rock grooves, gothic atmospherics, and the occasional Motorik beats and garage-rock riff.
Some bands mining this musical seam have ended up with albums sounding rather one-paced, but Hexvessel avoid this trap by keeping it varied. After the hypnotic grooves of “Transparent Eyeball” and “Earth Over Us” with its evocative Doors-sryle electric piano, the pace changes completely with the melancholy ballad “Cosmic Dreams”, a strong highlight of the album. The sinister psychic drama of “Mirror Boy” is another gem, and isn’t the only song that recalls the gothic atmospheres of the short-lived 1990s goth-proggers Ordinary Psycho, if anyone remembers them.
Other standouts include the “Drugged Up On The Universe” with a combination of fuzz-toned guitar and Hammond organ that comes over as a cross between Black Sabbath and Uriah Heep, and the doom-laden slow blues of “Teeth of the Mountain”. Perhaps the only song that doesn’t quite work is the aforementioned “Mushroom Spirit Doors” where awkward time changes mean it fails to achieve lift-off. But that’s the one weak song on an otherwise strong record.
British-born singer Mat McNerney impresses a lot; there’s a touch of Jim Morrison, Nick Cave and Ordinary Psycho’s Tony Gulvin in his style. On the instrumental side it’s Kimmo Helén’s keyboard textures that stand out, adding an extra dimension to every song.
Hexvessel have done a great job at invoking sixties psychedelia with a touch of nineties goth, with influences all over the place fused into a coherent whole.
Is there a word for an earworm that’s a combination of two different songs? I’ve got one with the verse of Suede’s “I don’t know how to reach you” flips into the chorus of Karnataka’s “Tide to Fall”,
Today’s political landscape looks less and less like “right” versus “left” and more like something multidimensional.
Libertarians have long advocated a political compass with the individualism-collectivism and cultural-economic axes, because it highlights the differences between themselves and traditional conservatives. But culture and economics are both really about power, and the recent rise of an authoritarian cultural left leaves it looking out-of-date. When one of the four quadrants best describes two totalitarian ideologies from the second quarter of the 20th century that have both been completely discredited, is it really relevant?
So as an alternative, what about axes of individualism-collectivism and egalitarianism-elitism instead? That make better sense of explain the fundamental split on the liberal left.
On the top right-hand corner we have traditional conservatives, who stand for order through established hierarchies. They consider the existence of a ruling class as part of the natural and proper order of things, though they do accept democracy as a means to keep those elites honest. Conservatives are prepared accept slow and gradual social change, but only when they’d obviously be on the wrong side of history if they didn’t.
On the top left-hand corner we have libertarians. They reject order and stability in favour of disruption and change, and favour the individual over the collective. But they don’t reject the concept of elites, only opposing the existing elites. Libertarians are unique in their distrust and sometimes outright rejection of democracy, because they fear the tyranny of the majority threatens the freedom of the individual.
In the bottom right-hand corner we have what I will call progressives. Progressives believe in collective action to counter established power hierarchies, and strongly support democracy as a means of empowering the people against the establishment. The belief in the collective over the individual means progressives can sometimes see dissent as an undermining of solidarity.
Finally, in the bottom left-hand corner we have liberals. Liberals share progressives’ opposition to power hierarchies, but reject their emphasis on the collective over the individual on the grounds that it can become an oppressive power in its own right. Likewise, liberals share libertarians’ belief in individual freedom, but reject their embrace of inequality and love of power. Liberalism could be considered as a centrist position between the two, but it’s more than that; a belief than egalitarianism and freedom are not polar opposites makes it a distinctive position in its own right.
Like any model, this is a simplification. They are spectrums of opinion rather than four distinct and separate political tribes, and mainstream political parties are by necessity big tents; there are both progressives and libertarians in the Liberal Democrats, for example. But just as the distinction between conservatism and libertarianism became apparent a generation ago, the distinction between liberalism and progressivism is now becoming apparent in the increasingly bitter culture wars over identity politics and freedom of speech.
The discussion on RMWeb has moved on from Modernisation Plan diesels to the legacy of the first Chief Mechanical Engineer of the newly-nationalised British Railways, Robert Riddles.
Riddles is best known for his BR standard steam locomotives, 999 locomotives of 12 different classes built between 1952 and 1960. With the benefit of hindsight, these new designs should never have been introduced; short-term needs for steam power could have been met with additional builds of “best of breed” big four designs. But Riddles wanted to go down in history alongside Stanier and Gresley, so there had to be a fleet of locomotives associated with his name. Even if they had such short working lives that many saw less than a decade in traffic.
Riddles was an opponent of diesel traction, hence his successful advocacy of large-scale steam construction so late in the day. He reportedly even tried to halt the ultimately very successful early 50s introduction of diesel multiple units in Cumbria, West Yorkshire and East Anglia in favour of a new build of push-pull steam trains.
As for the locomotives themselves, there’s little dispute that the best of them were fine locomotives. The Britannia pacifics, the 9F 2-10-0, the “Standard Five” 4-6-0 and the “Standard Four Tank” 2-6-4T all acquitted themselves well in service, though the last two were merely updated versions of tried-and-tested LMS designs. But some others were only built in penny numbers, just thirty class 3 2-6-0s and a mere ten “Clan” light pacifics, and it raises questions over whether so many different types should have been built at all. Was there really a need for three different sizes of 2-6-0? Or so many of the smaller locomotives at all?
I do like the suggestion by one commenter that Riddles should have designed a “one size fits all” heavy mixed-traffic 2-8-2 and built them in quantity in place of the Standard Fives and the 9Fs. That would have been an impressive locomotive and makes a very interesting might-have-been.
Thanks to Dai Woodham, the Welsh scrap dealer who bought hundreds of redundant steam locomotives for scrap only to store them for years rather than break them up, many of the actual locomotives have survived. They’ve become workhorses on the steam tourist railways up and down the country, and some of the bigger ones get taken out for the occasional spin on the main line. Most of them spent two or three times as long rusting away in that Welsh scrapyard as they did in main line service, so in terms or wear-and-tear they are almost new.
Reb Donaghue has an interesting post about the 7th sea RPG, for which he’s enthusiastically backing the Kickstarter for a new edition. But this one’s not about the things he liked about the game and why he’s backing it. It’s a list of things that were very, very wrong with it, which he hopes they fix in the new edition.
It reads like a litany of everything that was wrong with the RPG industry in the 1990s.
First, the utterly goofy setting, which he rightly describes as “Europe for dumb Americans”. There’s the obvious one about the heavy emphasis on pirates, despite the fact the setting has no Atlantic trade and no Mediterranean, which means there is no reason why pirates should exist. Each nation is an analogue of an actual European nation described in such a clichéd and stereotyped way that even European straight while males start complaining about “Cultural Appropriation”. Donaghue rightly points out that it’s a good thing there was no fantasy Africa in the game; its potential awfulness is best not imagined.
Then there was the curse of 90s games, the metaplot, an abomination that always made game designers look like frustrated novelists rather than designers of games to be played. In 7th Sea’s case essential information about the setting was dribbled out across multiple supplements, with the occasional Big Reveal that was almost guaranteed to fatally undermine some people’s campaigns. Why did anyone ever think that sort of nonsense was a good idea?
Much as I’ve been critical of The Forge, 7th Sea represents precisely the sort of thing it was a reaction against.