Author Archives: Tim Hall

Memories of Woodstock collapses in a Heep

Posted on August 1, 2009 by Tim Hall

The Memories of Woodstock festival scheduled for next weekend in Shrewsbury has been cancelled.  The promoter had put together a very strong bill for lovers of progressive and classic rock, including Asia, Uriah Heep, Barclay James Harvest, Jethro Tull, Mostly Autumn, Wishbone Ash, Jefferson Starship and Curved Air. Unfortunately the chosen weekend clashed with both the Cambridge Rock Festival and Fish’s fan convention in Leamington Spa.

Some people had doubts about the promoter after another event at the same venue headlined by Fairport Convention was cancelled at very short notice due to poor ticket sales. Things started looking dicey when a number of bands pulled out a couple of weeks ago, most citing “circumstances beyond our control”.  Uriah Heep were a little more forthright.

Uriah Heep has withdrawn from headlining the Memories of Woodstock festival, 7 August 2009, after concerns emerged about the intent and the ability of the festival to deliver public safety, financial viability or the basic logistics needed to present a festival of lofty ambition.

We are advised that all ticket purchasers are entitled to a refund as the festival terms and conditions do not allow for changes of artists.

This led to a war of words in the press, with the promoter complaining about false accusations and threatening legal action. Since that quote is still on front page of Uriah Heep’s website, I can assume that no legal action has materialised, so it’s safe to reproduce it here.

Uriah Heep have since been added to the bill for the Cambridge Rock Festival, replacing Jefferson Starship, who’d also withdrawn from MoW, and whose UK visit was no longer financially viable for only one appearance.

On Friday, Jethro Tull and Mostly Autumn both pulled out. An email from Jethro Tull’s management circulated widely on the forums of various bands pulled no punches.

“Tull are now officially out of the MOW festival due to the promoter being 2 months late with the deposit (not to mention the balance)! Despite many extensions of payment dates from our end and the offer to reduce the artist fee this week, Brian Davies (promoter) has just told me that he cannot pay. I believe that it is due to terrible sales and his lack of financial planning.

Please can you pass this e-mail onto anyone that you think might benefit from knowing. He assures me that he will reimburse buyers back if they so wish. His phone number is on his New Dawn Events website.

We at the Tull camp are very angry at Brian Davies for stringing this along for so long. We are sorry for all those fans who were expecting a whole weekend of great bands, most of whom, have now pulled out for the same reasons”.

By now the writing was pretty much on the wall, so it was hardly surprising when this appeared on the New Dawn Events website

“Its with a very heavy and sad heart that due to certain people telling blatant lies these festivals have been cancelled. It is a sad case of affairs when people think of money before love and peace” – Brian Davies

It is with huge regret that we have to notify that the Memories of Woodstock event and Crathes Castle event are now Cancelled.

The Memories of Woodstock  project  was the brainchild of Mr Brian Davies who wanted to celebrate the 40 years anniversary of the best music festival in history. Unfortunately there are people in this world who do not share this vision.

Rumours that had been put out and circulating regarding this festival were completly fabricated and scurrilous which resulted in poor ticket sales and eventually led to the cancelling of this great event.

During the current economic climate we felt that we should give the public a festival that would give absolute value for money, however, it  is obvious there are people out there who do not wish this to happen, but we will strive forward on a mission to give the public what they should always have and that is…   “Great music at a great price with no hidden extras”.

I don’t think there are any winners in this sorry tale, with the possible exception of the Cambridge Rock Festival, who are now offering discounted entry for holders of MoW tickets.

Posted in Music | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Last.fm needs to fix the disambiguation problem

Posted on July 29, 2009 by Tim Hall

I’ve been a user of last.fm for a while – most of the time it’s a great way of getting to hear new music.  It works by ‘scrobbling’ whatever music you’ve been listening to on your computer, and then allows you to stream a personalised internet radio station with songs similar to the sorts of things you’ve been listening.  I’ve discovered several bands, including Pineapple Thief and Alestorm

Unfortunately there’s one big thing wrong with it.  They’ve made a major database design screwup, in which they defined the unique identifier for an artist as being the artist name. This may work perfectly well for major label artists, but once you get into the “long tail” it’s more common to find multiple bands sharing the same name, often for bands in different countries, or bands sharing the same name as a long-defunct outfit.  This has now happened to Panic Room, who now find themselves sharing a last.fm page with an Italian nu-metal band.

Last.fm’s hopelessly broken solution is to treat multiple artists as if they were one, and all the songs and photos are jumbled up with no indication as to which ones belong to which band. Sometimes one band is vastly more well-known than the other, so it doesn’t matter except for the other band which gets marginalised.  But when you get two very different artists of roughly similar popularity, it creates a lot of animosity, with energy wasted in pissing contests between fans of the two bands over who’s first in the wiki, who’s photo is shown first, etc.

Last.fm have got to get their finger out and fix this – and I’m sick and tired of hearing excuses as to why it can’t be done. I work in IT, I’ve got a lot of database design experience – I know full well that they’re bullshitting when they say it’s “impossible”. If it requires a major database redesign, then so be it. They really can’t afford not to.

Even if the fix isn’t perfect, and might take some sort of manual intervention to determine which ‘new’ tracks belong to which band, anything is preferable to the present mess. I’m sure find fans will be prepared to spend time and energy if there’s any manual disambiguation required.

If last.fm doesn’t fix this, and fix this soon, then people are going to be abandoning last.fm for rival sites.

Posted in Music | Tagged | 2 Comments

The Future of the Past

Posted on July 27, 2009 by Tim Hall

Phil Masters visits the Dan Dare and the Birth of Hi-Tech Britain exhibition at the Science Museum in London, and ponders the associated social history.

The problem for an exhibition like this, I fear, is that it has to deal with the persistent scent of failure that hangs over its subject-matter. The Hi-Tech Britain of which this exhibition speaks meant a motor industry whose management and workforce alike were all too stuck in old ways; it meant Comet airliners which crashed, and lost us that crucial lead to Boeing; it meant shiny new diesel and then electric trains, running on essentially Victorian tracks. There was some brilliance there, but too much of it was necessary ingenuity, improvisation around ingrained habits, bad decisions, and the problems of a country still recovering from its involvement in an expensive war.

Harold Wilson’s “White Heat of Technology” from the sixties now seems terribly, terribly dated, especially when people use imagery from that era decades later. I remember a logo in the 1980s featuring a stylised image of an electric train passing the Jodrell Bank radio telescope. It was meant to promote industry and modernity, but left me with an impression of an organisation stuck two decades in the past. The worst irony was the locomotive, one of the unsuccessful first-generation machines from the 1955 modernisation plan, which turned out to be hopelessly unreliable and destined for the scrapheap after a relatively short life.

Phil concludes that Dan Dare himself wasn’t so much a man of the future as a man of the recent past:

But not only is Dan Dare not flying the spacelanes in our defence, he’s never going to, whatever may happen in space research. We’re unlikely ever to see his sort again, and perhaps a big symptom of Britain’s problems in the 1950s was the idea that the hi-tech future would lie with a square-jawed pilot who wouldn’t have been out of place in the Battle of Britain, backed up by a comedy Yorkshire sidekick and a gruffly paternalistic staff officer.

Read the whole thing.

Posted in Science Fiction, SF and Gaming | Comments Off

The Electric Train from Platform 5 is Running 25 Years Late

Posted on July 23, 2009 by Tim Hall

So they’ve finally announced the decision to electrify the Great Western Main Line. And they’ve going right through to Swansea rather than stopping at Cardiff, which is a sensible decision. No mention of Plymouth or Penzance, although keeping the wires up on the sea wall might be an engineering challenge!main

While I have to applaud the decision, I do have to ask why this wasn’t done 20 years ago. The last major electrification project was the East Coast Main Line, which British Rail completed in 1988. So why did they disband the electrification teams rather than carry on with the next project.

In retrospect, the answer is simple: Privatisation happened.  Because of the ideologically-driven need for short-term profits, it was no time for long term investment projects. So Britain continues to lag behind the rest of Europe, with a significant proportion of main line trunk routes operated by diesels.

The other electrification project announced is the George Stevenson’s Liverpool to Manchester line, opened in 1830 as the first main line in the world.  At first glance this is an odd choice; the only trains using it’s entire length nowadays are a handful of local trains; even the Liverpool to Manchester expresses use another route. But at Newton-le-Willows there are connections both north and south with the main London-Glasgow line. These connections will enable electric to run directly between Liverpool or Manchester to Scotland, and serve as a diversionary route between Liverpool or Manchester to London when the more direct routes are closed for engineering work.

So hopefully we’ll see the end of the class 185 “Lardarse Express” diesel trains operating under the wires for 90% of the journey on Manchester to Edinburgh services. Although seeing Virgin Trains using diesel Voyagers 100% under the wires between Glasgow and Manchester doesn’t exactly convince sceptics of the value of electrification.  Neither does the percentage of freight on electrified routes hauled by diesels.

Posted in Travel & Transport | Tagged | 2 Comments

Sausage of the Year Award

Posted on July 22, 2009 by Tim Hall

Why do people still take the Mercury Music Prize seriously?  In it’s early years it may have picked a few innovative and creative acts, but recently it’s become nothing more than an extension of the music industry PR machine. The shortlist makes depressing reading with it’s over-hyped usual suspects and entirely predictable absence of entire genres.

As commenter Jonana puts it:

Anyway, what are you talking about, other genres of music? I thought nothing outside timid electronica and ‘indie’ pop-rock, with a token folk presence, was produced by anyone anywhere ever.

Naturally the sheeple don’t realise there’s anything else out there than what’s spoon-fed by mainstream media. This is falsely presented as ‘real music’ in opposition to Simon Cowell’s gunk. They don’t seem to realise it’s another product from the same sausage factory.

Sometimes I wonder who are the Mercury judges are.  I’m guessing they’re Jo Whiley, Conor McNicholas, Simon Cowell, Michael Eavis and one randomly-selected 11-year old.

Posted in Music | Tagged , | 9 Comments

Summer Stabcon 2009

Posted on July 7, 2009 by Tim Hall

I’ve lost count of the number of Stabcon’s I’ve been to now.

Stabcon is the twice-yearly games convention now held at the Britannia Hotel in Stockport.  It’s small enough that I recognise all the regulars year after year; in that respect it’s almost like a Mostly Autumn gig. Come to think of it, it’s a very similar demographic…

Although the emphasis is on board games, there are also plenty of RPG sessions over the weekend. The organisation is very informal, with nothing booked in advance.  GMs put prospective games up on the notice board, players sign up to them on a first-come-first-served basis. This does mean that popular games tend to fill up by the Friday night, but there does seem some form of self-balancing between players and GMs over the weekend.  I see very few games fail to run for lack of players, and additional games always seem to appear on the board whenever all the other games are full.  This year I ended up playing four RPG sessions over the weekend, more than I have done in many conventions.

Friday night’s game was GURPS Reign of Steel.  The setting was a Terminator-style near-future; the robots had won, and the survivors of humanity are either fighting a guerilla war, or just lying low and hoping the robots ignore them. The plot had the PCs as members of the SAS, the last surviving military unit serving the last surviving government in Europe, and involved Frenchmen stealing Britain’s last remaining nukes, the Channel Tunnel rail link, and this exchange:

GM: The robot manages to dodge the combine harvester.
Me: I’ll turn and try to ram it again – I guess it will take a couple of rounds to circle round.
GM: It’s a cinematic game!
Me: OK them, make that a handbrake turn…

Saturday, after a few card games, was another GURPS game, this time a Diskworld dungeon adventure, run by Phil Masters. I played the stereotypical Hubland barbarian, as we hacked and slashed our way through sewer-slugs and skeletons. The last fight seemed to go on for ages as we had yet another example of my appallingly bad convention die rolling, although my biggest criticism of GURPS nowadays is that fights sometimes go on for too long.

By the evening, things started to get very silly, with InSpectres, which is basically Ghostbusters with the serial numbers filed off.  I’ve played this game at Stabcon before; a very rules-lite system designed to encourage player creativity, and played strictly for laughs, of which there were many; when we had player characters with combat origami, our ghost containment device was a wet paper bag, and our vehicle was a mutant hybrid of a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost armoured car and a bendy-bus. You get the idea?  We had to deal with a demonically-possessed teddy bear, four escaped tigers (due to an accident with the rocket launcher), and how to dispose of a dead elephant stuck half-way up the stairs.

Paranoia on Sunday was the only way to top that. Paranoia is one of those games I’ve always wanted to play, but up until now nobody had ever run at a con I’d been to.  The Computer is your friend! Denounce your comrades as Commie Mutant Traitors!  You do not have security clearance to eat blue M&Ms!  And are you questioning the skills of R&D with the L-shaped gun for shooting round corners?  Report now for termination!

The next Stabcon will be the first weekend in January 2010. I’m already paid and signed up.

Posted in Games, SF and Gaming | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Breathing Space, Mansfield, 27-Jun-09

Posted on June 29, 2009 by Tim Hall

Olivia Sparnenn at The Intake Club, Mansfield
Olivia Sparnenn

On Saturday June 27, Breathing Space returned to The Intake Club in Mansfield, their third gig since Liam Davidson replaced Mark Rowen on guitar.

Although the gig was advertised as an 8pm start, thanks to a long tailback on the M1 delaying one member of the band it was almost ten before Breathing Space finally hit the stage.

Liam Davidson at the Intake Club, Mansfield
Liam Davidson

Changing just one band member has transformed the band’s sound far more that I’d expected. Mark Rowen’s economical jazz-tinged playing was a major element of Breathing Space’s sound, and Liam has a very different style. With Mostly Autumn he’s always very much in the background, but I’ve always thought he’s a far better guitarist than many people realise. Given the chance in the spotlight shows just how good he can playing lead. He doesn’t try to copy Mark’s solos note-for-note, instead using the basic structure as a template for solos of his own.

The result is a far rawer and rockier band. Many of the big soaring ballads and jazz-rock jams that epitomised “Coming Up for Air” have been retired from the set in favour of guitar-driven hard rock numbers, turning the overall energy level of the set up several notches. A surprise was the Mostly Autumn standard “Never the Rainbow”, which I’d not heard Breathing Space play live before.

The set included several new songs from the forthcoming album “Below the Radar”. The title track has been in the setlist for a while, but the standout of the new numbers has to be the encore, “Questioning Eyes”, a huge soaring epic in the same league as Iain’s “The Gap Is Too Wide” or “Carpe Diem”.

Posted in Live Reviews, Music | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Genres of Popular Music, Explained

Posted on June 24, 2009 by Tim Hall

Simple guide to musical genres:

  • Pop: The singer can’t hold a tune in a bucket, so the producer fixes it with auto-tune. When they tour, all the vocals are lip-synched.
  • Indie: The singer can’t hold a tune in a bucket, so sings completely out of tune both on record and live. Because that’s “for real”.
  • Rock: The singer can’t hold a tune in a bucket, so gets sacked from the band before they get past the toilet circuit. They keep auditioning replacements until they manage to find someone who can actually sing.

Or am I just getting cynical in my old age?

Posted in Music | 7 Comments

Those Noisy Americans

Posted on June 11, 2009 by Tim Hall

The train company formerly known as EWS seems to have got itself in a bit of bother over noisy coal trains.

The Falkirk West SNP member said analysis carried out by Falkirk Council showed the night coal runs by freight company DB Shenker were creating a substantial vibration problem.

He said the average vibration level for DB Schenker trains was 0.075 millimetres per second and could reach up to 0.091 mm per second.

That is in contrast to Freightliner Limited trains who also use the route to transport coal to the Fife power station. Tests revealed they created a vibration level of just 0.025 millimetres per second.

Mr Matheson said the different readings could be attributed to the speed of the trains and the different coal wagons used by the companies.

The DB Schenker (ex-EWS) trains use coal hoppers delivered shortly after privatisation to replace life-expired wagons dating from the 1960s. EWS, charismatic leader Ed Burkhart decided to ignore decades of rail experience developed for European conditions in favour of doing everything The American Way. So these new wagons had ‘more economical’ American-style heavy cast bogies rather than the lighter designs favoured up to then in Britain and Europe for a very different rail environment. He didn’t take into account the extra punishment they inflicted on tracks that carry heavy passenger traffic. And I wonder how much environmental noise was ever considered – after all, in America the rails always run though the worst bits of town inhabited by poor people whose opionions tend to be ignored.

Freightliner’s more modern wagons use far more technically sophisticated bogies designed to minimise track wear. And they also seem to be a lot quieter.

Posted in Travel & Transport | Comments Off

Where do we go from here?

Posted on June 8, 2009 by Tim Hall

Where do we go from here?
Where do we go from here, where do we go from here?
Where do we go from here, where do we go from here?

They boarded up the synagogues, Uzis on a street corner
You can’t take a photograph of Uzis on a street corner
The DJ resigned today they wouldn’t let him have his say
Surface scratched where the needles play, Uzis on a street corner

Where do we go from here

Terror in Rue de St. Denis, murder on the periphery
Someone else in someone else’s pocket
Christ knows I don’t know how to stop it
Poppies at the cenotaph, the cynics can’t afford to laugh
I heard in on the telegraph there’s Uzis on a street corner

Where do we go from here, where do we go from here

The more I see, the more I hear, the more I find fewer answers
I close my mind, I shout it out but you know it’s getting harder
To calm down, to reason out, to come to terms with what it’s all about
I’m uptight, can’t sleep at night, I can’t pretend everything’s all right
My ideals, my sanity, they seem to be deserting me
But to stand up and fight I know we have six million reasons

They’re burning down the synagogues, Uzis on a street corner
The heralds of the holocaust, Uzis on a street corner
The silence never louder than now, how quickly we forgot our vows
This resurrection we can’t allow, Uzis on a street corner

Where do we go from here, where do we go from here

We buy fresh bagels from the corner store
Where swastikas are spat from aerosols
I sit in the bar sipping iced White Russian
Trying to score but nobody’s pushing
And everyone looks at everyone’s faces
Searching for signs and praying for traces of a conscience in residence
Are we sitting on a barbed wire fence
Racing the clouds home, racing the clouds home

We place our faith in human rights
In the paper wars that tie the red tape tight
I know that I would rather be out of this conspiracy
In the gulags and internment camps frozen faces in nameless ranks
I know that they would rather be standing here besides me
Racing the clouds home, racing the clouds home

You can shut your eyes, you can hide it away it’s gonna come back another day
Racing the clouds home, are we racing the clouds home
Racing the clouds home

- Marillion, White Russian © EMI Music Publishing, quoted in full with permission

65 years ago was the D-Day landings.

65 years later, 943598 British voters chose to insult the memories of those who gave their lives on that day by voting for a party who represent exactly the same values as the enemy they died fighting.

Some people claim it’s just a protest vote; a way to say ‘up yours’ to the political establishment in response to the scandals about MPs expenses. How many of these voters have actually stopped to think what they’re endorsing?

I count many of black, Jewish, gay and transgendered people amongst my friends and acquaintances. This vile party is fundamentally opposed to their very existence; they want to herd them all into concentration camps. They’ll deny it in public, of course, but they’ll be lying. You have to be pretty stupid not to see these neo-Nazis for what they are. It’s the non-white, non-straight, non-Anglo-Saxon British citizens that a BNP vote really says ‘up yours’ to.

And their use of British WW2 imagery, when their leaders idolise Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, really sticks in my throat.

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