Author Archives: Tim Hall

Floor Jansen to stay with Nightwish

Posted on October 9, 2013 by Tim Hall

Nightwish confirm on their Facebook Page that Floor Jansen is to stay as the band’s singer.

Ms. Floor Jansen is a keeper.

Also, we will be a six-piece band from now on, as Mr. Troy Donockley (uilleann pipes, low whistles, vocals) will become a full-time member of NIGHTWISH.

Originally we were going to wait until 2014 to make a decision about the future line-up of the band, but the past year has clearly shown us that Floor and Troy are perfect matching pieces to our puzzle, and we are really grateful of the bond that has grown between all of us. We love you guys.

Given the way Floor nailed material from both Tarja and Annette on tour, and the way she was warmly received by fans, it’s difficult to imagine Nightwish making any other decision.

It’s also very interesting to see Troy becoming a full member. Does this indicate the celtic-folk elements from the last couple of albums will become a stronger part of the band’s music in future? It will be very interesting to see what the new six-piece Nightwish comes up with on their next album.

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Panic Room Tour News

Posted on October 8, 2013 by Tim Hall

Panic Room at Sound Control in Manchester

Anne-Marie Helder has posted on the Official Panic Room Facebook Group about progress on the new album (it’s almost finished) and forthcoming tour dates.

As Anne-Marie explains, the band had originally hoped to play a far more extensive tour in November, but things were overtaken by events, specifically the need to recruit a new guitarist. So the band have put back the tour into the new year, leaving the two already announced dates as the only remaining live appearances by Panic Room this year.

Those are on November 24th at Shildon Civic, with Winter in Eden supporting, and their annual Christmas show at Bilston Robin 2.

The Shildon one is an interesting one, with doors at 4pm, and finishing by 9pm, and with a very strong support it promises to be a spectacular evening. With the new album due for release in the new year, these two shows will be the first opportunity to hear some of the new material. It will also mark the debut of the band’s new lead guitarist, Adam O’Sullivan.

The band have announced the first couple of dates for next spring, including a visit to Norwich and a return to the Netherlands. There are more shows still to be announced.

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White Wizzard: Is this an Umläut LARP?

Posted on October 7, 2013 by Tim Hall

Metal band White Wizzard look as if they’re playing a live-action game of Umläut: The Game of Metal, and somebody has just played “Split” on them:

On the band’s facebook page:

White Wizzard want to release a brief statement on singer Joseph Michael. Last night in Cardiff Wales, Joseph Michael left a crowd of fans sitting in the venue waiting to see White Wizzard, sat in a pub across the street and refused to perform the show for extremely selfish reasons. The band soldiered on with Peter Ellis and Jon Leon handling vocals. It was hugely unprofessional on his part. Due to these actions, we have secured another singer for mainland europe named Giles Lavery. Sadly, due to this any many other problems over the past several months, it is without question we must move on and immediately make a change. Joseph is making very false and erroneous claims on his facebook site unfortunately about Jon and the band, but without getting into a war of words we will just simply say he is lying and making a desperate attempt to hurt the band and Jon to cover up his very unprofessional actions. The rest of us are determined to move on, and we all assure you we are united and everything is fine within the rest of the group. We will do our best to move on. See ya out there! Thanks for all the fans support last night and beyond.

As the old saying states, there are always two sides to every story, and Joseph Michael’s own page has a rather different version of events:

Here is the real story on White Wizzard

Jon has been stealing money from us . From indie gogo fund and out on tour and i called him out on it.

He then fired me last night on the night off…

Then announced that i was refusing to sing… It’s all lies…

I was fired and he couldnt find someone to sing so he begged me 5 minutes before they went on…

Jon Leon is a Con man and has not honored one word he has said since i have joined this band… After i sang on White Wizzard – Devil’s Cut he threatened to forbid Earache Records from releasing it with my vocals if i didn’t sign a new contract giving no rights and a far worse deal..After the work was done…

If it wasn’t for Will Wallner and Jake Dreyer Standing up to this criminal he would have left myself and filmmaker Don Adams stranded in the middle of nowhere…

Jon Leon has paid for nothing on this trip and has acted a child the whole time. Please Do not Let him rip you off if you Purchased From Indie Go Go… Goodnight

The war of words isn’t abating, and the whole thing’s turning into a bad car crash you can’t look away from. This is a band who have (to date) had seven lead singers, seven guitarists and three drummers. You can draw your own conclusions from that…

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Every time I see someone use “Punk” as a metaphor for something that has nothing to with music, I always hear the sound of a middle-aged music bore looking back at their their adolescence through rose-tinted spectacles.

Posted on October 7, 2013 by Tim Hall | Comments Off

Westerns!

Posted on October 2, 2013 by Tim Hall

Dapol and CJM Westerns

Dapol’s blue N gauge “Westerns” have arrived! Just like the limited edition Desert Sand “Western Enterprise” it’s an excellent model of an iconic locomotive. Along with the earlier Dapol class 22s and Hymeks, and the Farish Warship, all the major BR Western Region diesel-hydraulics are now available in N gauge, which ought to spawn a few 60s/70s WR layouts. The only missing loco is the short-lived D600 class, and I’m not sure a five-strong class that spend much of their short lives confined to Cornwall would be popular enough to warrant a ready-to-run model.

The Dapol loco is the one in the foreground. The locomotive behind hauling the milk tankers is an old CJM respray of a Poole-era Farish model. It actually stands up remarkably well considering how old it is. It’s nowhere near as detailed, and with innacurate bogies due to re-use of the class 50 chassis, but I think it’s still good enough to run on the same layout as the new Dapol model. A tribute to Chris Marchant’s skill as a modeller.

Given how many of my older Farish locos have died due to split years, it’s a pleasant surprise to find it still runs.

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When Empires Fall announce new album

Posted on October 2, 2013 by Tim Hall

News from When Empires Fall, the band put together by former Stolen Earth and Breating Space bassist Paul Teasdale, from their Facebook page.

When Empires Fall are proud to announce that the debut album is now on it’s way to mastering, and will be with you all very shortly. The final play list is as follows:

New World
Almost
On My Skin
Seisemic Vibes
Journey To The Sun
Call To the Night’s Watch (ft Aleksandra Koziol)
Under No Illusion (ft Mark Rowen)
We Are The Future
Rest
Barricade
Moonbeams (ft Joanne Wallis)

A nice playing time of 49 minutes, and a tear for some excellent tracks which unfortunately did not fit the ‘flow’ of the album (coming soon to a soundcloud channel near you!)

Stay tuned!

Paul wrote the bulk of the music for Stolen Earth’s excellent “A Far Cry From Home”, so this album is something to look forward to.

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Shutdown

Posted on October 1, 2013 by Tim Hall

The United States of America is trying to run the applications needed to support a modern nation on a 200 year old legacy O/S with far too many unpatched vulnerabilities.

So it’s not surprising that a group of black hats called “The Tea Party” have taken the whole thing down.

And it’s all because the far-right hates Obama’s healthcare reforms

Their supporters and useful idiots prattle about self-reliance versus dependency, but I suspect one of the big reasons the right hates these reforms so much is that they threaten to weaken the essentially feudal relationship between employers and employees. When healthcare is dependent on continued employment, employers have far more power over their staff, and nobody likes giving up power.

I’ve heard plenty of stories of people trapped unproductively in jobs they hate, because pre-existing conditions make personal health insurance unaffordable. Surely that’s a drain on the economy just like the vastly inflated costs due to the inherent inefficiency of the present system.

Sadly those who profit, directly or indirectly, from the present system can afford a lot of lobbyists and media pundits.

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The Inevitability of Formulaic Writing in Literary Fiction

Posted on September 30, 2013 by Tim Hall

Got to love this. Nick Mamatas reviews what seems a rather formulaic piece of “mainstream” fiction, written as a parody of the way Literary Fiction snobs routinely dismiss genre fiction.

As is well known, literary fiction is not taken very seriously by superior readers because the form is essentially formula. The protagonists are stock characters, a small handful of dramatic situations are raked over time and again, innovation is despised and mere competence celebrated (literary writing is even called “a craft”, along the lines of cabinetmaking or macramé), and all of the other elements of fiction are subsumed to tedious moral lessons suited primarily to the adolescents and arrested adolescents that read the stuff.

Read the whole thing, and it restates the case that “literary fiction” is as much a genre as science-fiction, romance or crime. It even identifies the genre’s defining tropes, one of which seems to be “Nothing apart from adultery happens until the very end of the book”.

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Congratulations to Morpheus Rising for hitting their Kickstarter Target for their long-awaited second album with nine days to spare.

Posted on September 29, 2013 by Tim Hall | Comments Off

Godwin Strikes Again

Posted on September 29, 2013 by Tim Hall

It’s Godwin’s Law season again. Here is AIG’s CEO Robert Benmosche spouting the sort of nonsense that reminds me of the pre-revolution French aristocracy.

“It’s a war,” Schwarzman said of the struggle with the administration over increasing taxes on private-equity firms. “It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”

I was in an off-the-record meeting with top Wall Street folks where similar comparisons to Nazi Germany were tossed around. It really was a meme on Wall Street that the singling out of the wealthy for criticism — and, more to the point, taxation — had a direct historical precedent in Nazi Germany, where the Jews were first demonized, then taxed, and then, well, you know. The sense was that the rich in general, and Wall Street in particular, weren’t just being criticized, but that they were being turned into a dangerously despised minority.

Robert Benmosche, if you want World War II comparisons for the pushback against the elites, how about the Normandy landings? With you in the role of the occupying Germans?

Meanwhile, back on this side of the Atlantic, up pops David Blunkett to remind me why I don’t vote Labour

Drawing a parallel with Germany before the rise of the Nazis, he suggested a loose moral climate had fed the paranoia and fear that had allowed Adolf Hitler to flourish.

“In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Berlin came as near as dammit to Sodom and Gomorrah. There was a disintegration of what you might call any kind of social order.

“People fed on that – they fed people’s fears of it. They encouraged their paranoia. They developed hate about people who had differences, who were minorities.

I’m going to propose a corrollary to Godwin’s Law. “Anyone who makes totally inappropriate comparisons with Nazi Germany is closer to the Nazis than their opponents“

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