Author Archives: Tim Hall

Manchester Blogmeet this Tuesday

Posted on March 8, 2009 by Tim Hall

For those of you living in Manchester, there’s a blogmeet, organised (again) by Kate of  The Manchizzle

I’ve sorted things out for our blogmeet. Unfortunately Trof NQ couldn’t give us a dedicated space that would be big enough, but Centro can give us their whole basement area. Centro is on Tib Street towards the northern end heading away from the city centre.

We’ll be meeting there on Tuesday, March 10 from 7-9pm. Just come downstairs. They do very nice beers and drinks as well as coffees and non-alcoholic bevvies. They don’t do food as far as I know, so maybe grab something nearby (Hunters BBQ?) beforehand if you’re coming straight from work. I’ll bring the nametags.

I’ve missed the last couple of blogmeets due to clashes with holidays, gigs or just having the wrong date in my diary.  May see some of you there.

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Mostly Autumn, Manchester and London, Feb 27th/28th 2009

Posted on March 7, 2009 by Tim Hall

Although I’ve seen Mostly Autumn nearly thirty times now, this is actually the first time I’ve seen the band two nights in succession in two different cities. Both the Manchester and London shows on the 27th and 28th of February were rescheduled from September last year due to Heather Findlay’s maternity leave.

Mostly Autumn had not played Manchester since a low-key date at Jilly’s Rockworld back in 2004, which happened to be the very first time I ever saw the band. This time they played Academy 3, on a stage where I’ve seen the likes of Michael Schenker, Paradise Lost, It Bites and Blue Öyster Cult over the past years.

A big surprise when the band took to the stage was that Gavin Griffiths was back behind the drumkit, replacing Henry Bourne. I’d always liked Gavin’s drumming with his previous stint with the band in spring 2007, and while Henry was in many ways an ideal drummer for the Mostlies, if anyone could replace him, it was Gavin. And he didn’t disappoint.

Unfortunately Heather had caught a very nasty throat infection the day before the Manchester gig, and although she managed to sing for something like two thirds of the set, backing singer Olivia Sparnenn stood in on lead vocals for a few songs. It’s a tribute to this band that they can still put on a highly enjoyable show despite having their lead singer partially incapacitated, and hats off to Livvy for standing in at virtually zero notice. If it wasn’t quite one of the best Mostly Autumn gigs I’ve ever been to, it was certainly one of those for the Mostly Autumn history book.

Saturday’s showcase gig at Shepherd’s Bush Empire was their first London appearance for more than a year. With fans descending from all parts of the country, including a busload from York, there was a real buzz of anticipation before the gig, and a lot of faces I hadn’t seen for a long time. Nice to meet baby Harlan, who gave me an enormous grin! I met up with a couple of gaming friends who were seeing the band for the first time. I decided it was wise not to mention Heather’s vocal problems of the night before to anyone before the gig.

While I love the intimate atmosphere of many of the small clubs I see the band play, it’s great to see them on a big stage before a sizeable crowd. And they rose to the occasion with an absolute barnstormer of a performance. Heather’s voice turned out to be in far better shape than the previous night, with little evidence that she was suffering from any throat problems at all. And the rest of the band were also on superb form. This was as tight and powerful a performance as I’ve ever seen them do, and at least as good a show as from any band I saw last year. From the now-traditional opener ‘Fading Colours’, the energy level barely dropped for the next two and a quarter hours. The only glitch was the rattling snare drum on ‘Above the Blue’ forcing a second take of the song.

The setlist contained a few surprises, with oldies like ‘Winter Mountain’, ‘The Last Bright Light’ and ‘Half the Mountain’ which haven’t featured in the live set for several years. ‘Winter Mountain’ was especially powerful live propelled by Gavin’s drumming, as was “Passengers” favourite ‘Answer the Question’. The rest of the set was pretty familiar to those who’s seen the band at the tail end of last year, Glass Shadows songs ‘Flowers for Guns’, ‘Unoriginal Sin’, ‘Above the Blue’ and ‘Tearing at the Faerytale’, alongside perennials such as ‘Nowhere to Hide’, ‘Evergreen’, ‘Spirit of Autumn Past’ and of course ‘Heroes Never Die’ (That flute intro always gives me goosebumps). The final encore was unexpected, a cover of Genesis’ 1980 hit ‘Turn It On Again’, and I have to say Heather is a far better singer than Phil Collins.

Although the band had intended to release the recording of Shepherd’s Bush as a live album, the band have decided that although the gig itself was great for those present in the hall, the recordings aren’t quite good enough to release as an album. So they’ve postponed the album and plan to record a few dates on the upcoming spring tour. With the band on great live form, with what might just be their best ever live lineup, the tour will be one to see.

Posted in Live Reviews, Music | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Alan McGee – My part in his Downfall

Posted on February 16, 2009 by Tim Hall

I sometimes wonder why I bother with The Guardian Music Blog.  While Readers Recommend is always fun, and there is the occasional good article, they also publish an awful lot of complete drivel.  And in response to this drivel, the comment section all-too-often turns into Usenet on a bad day; the fact that far too many ‘articles’ are little more than trolls doesn’t exactly help.

Alan McGee’s weekly column is one of the worst offenders.  Very occasionally he’ll come up with a meaningful re-evaluation of a neglected artist from the 60s or 70s, but all too often he spoils what might have been an interesting article with provocative hyperbole – “ELO were better than The Beatles” was an infamous one. Far more often he’d go on about some mediocre landfill indie band with hype turned up to 11. His lastest is a ridiculous puff piece bigging up Oasis (yet again), which naturally gets shredded by the commentators.

Of course, he will never respond to any comments, failing to recognise the essential two-way nature of blogging.  Instead, he comes up with pearls of wisdom like this twitter,

i mean you work in the fields i live in the mansion that’s the way it rolls guardian blog readers.xoxoxoo

Oh yes, that really epitomises The Guardian’s left-of-centre ethos, doesn’t it.

Four pages into the comment thread, a commenter calling himself “Kingspark” comes up with this:

On “Twitter” you invite people to apply to clean the toilets in your mansion. Is that the best you can come up with? Look through the comments. Apart from Paul Brownell’s myriad of aliases – avatthecat, heavytrash, marycigarettes, DoubleDeuceDalton – you’ve only got one fan, Elaine S. She seems like a nice lady. And at least Paul Brownell will always back you up, he’s your employee, isn’t he? He helps you write the blogs and tells you about groups you’ve never heard of and tries his best to make it seem like you’re not completely out of touch.

And I ought to mention that several of those sock puppets have made repeated often unprovoked ad-hominem attacks on myself and others, often in completely unrelated threads (which to The Guardian’s credit have always been removed by the moderators for violating the rule against personal abuse).  I consider sending an employee to post under multiple aliases to make it look as if he’s got some supporters isn’t exactly professional behaviour. Using those sock puppets for personal abuse is simply beyond the pale.

Assuming “Kingspark” is correct about those usernames he mentions (and the similarity in writing styles for those aliases  he mentions gives me no reason to doubt him), then I don’t think McGee has an awful lot of credibility left.  If I was the Guardian Online editor, I would definitely think twice about continuing to employ this man as a contributor.

Posted in Music, Music Opinion | Tagged , | 8 Comments

RPG plotting by Prog!

Posted on February 12, 2009 by Tim Hall

My online game, KLR has reached a point where I need to introduce some new plot elements. We’ve just seen a major villain taken down in a battle with exploding airships and artillery duels across the city.  While there’s some mileage in dealing with the aftermath and fallout of this, the game needs a but more than that to keep the game going.

So, to try and get the creative juices flowing, I decided to select half-a-dozen random songs, and seek inspiration from the lyrics.  Since I haven’t ripped most of my CD collection onto my PC, I selected the songs by rolling assorted oddly-shaped dice to determine shelf, CD on shelf and track within CD.

This gave me the following six songs:

Rush – Red Lenses

Here we have a lot of imagery associated with the colour red; sunsets, blood, dancing shoes, the Soviet Union. The nearest analogue to the Soviet Union in Kalyr is probably the Konaic Empire.  They are the morally unambiguous villains of the setting.

Iommi/Hughes – Don’t You Tell Me

Am I a sacrifice?
Am I too blind to see?
I’m not a vagabond
I know what is, is meant to be
There is a better way
There comes a time I do believe
There’s a price to pay
I know where you’ve been

Don’t you tell me you don’t know

Seems to be about a betrayal, the exact nature of which isn’t specified. There’s definitely some plot potential there.

Marillion – Easter

The original song, written in 1989, is about the troubles in Northern Ireland.  Made more general, a pointless death in a long-running conflict which needs to be resolved.

Pink Floyd – Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2

OK, so I can’t really fit teachers and education very well, but ‘We don’t need no thought control’ works in a setting where telepathy and mind control are common powers.

Breathing Space – Shades of Grey

There’s no need to pretend now
We all come in different shades of grey

Moral ambiguity – the protagonists of the story arc aren’t flawless, and the bad guys aren’t necessarily irredeemably bad either. But when I’ve got Nicki Jett as a player character, the first bit of that goes without saying, really.

And finally:
Uriah Heep – Time to Live (from Salisbury)

Well I spent twenty long years
In a dirty old prison cell
I never saw the light of day
…
They say I killed a man
But I never told them why
So you can guess what I’ve been through
So for twenty long years
I’ve been thinking of that other man
What I saw him do to you

There’s definitely an NPC with a significant back-story in that song.

Let’s see what I can come up with with that lot.  To go into any more detail would be entering into spoiler territory!

Posted in Games, Kalyr RPG, Music | Comments Off

Breathing Space, Lowdham, 7-Feb-2009

Posted on February 9, 2009 by Tim Hall

Another weekend, more long-distance gigging.  This time I found myself making a three hour train journey across the snow-covered east midlands countryside to see York’s Breathing Space play in the Nottinghamshire town of Lowdham, for what turned out to be the first sold-out gig I’ve been to for more than a year. I’d booked a room at the B&B attached to the village pub, where I found many of the usual suspects in the bar. Yes, it was going to be one of those evenings

The Village Hall in Lowdham isn’t your typical rock venue. In fact, it was probably one strangest venues I’ve been to.  I’ve known other gigs that have been seated with tables, but never with an pre-arranged seating plan.  In this case the organisers put everyone with non-local postcodes down the front, on the basis that we were the hardcore fans who had travelled a long way.  The village hall lacks a licenced bar, although they were providing coffee and biscuits.  However, they did have a rather splendid arrangement with the pub over the road with excellent selection of real ales, whereby you could bring your pint into the venue provided.

With a venue that’s not associated with rock bands I wondered what the sound would be like. I needn’t have worried, the acoustics of the hall were excellent, and the sound engineer, perhaps because he’s more used to folk acts, resisted the temptation to turn the PA up to heavy metal volumes. Breathing Space always sound their best when mixed for clarity rather than volume, especially given the power of Olivia Sparnenn’s voice.  Those big soaring ballads don’t work so well when turned up to eleven.

Breathing Space delivered a superb set, as good as I’ve seen them play. They had to rearrange a few songs following the recent departure of sax and wind synth player John Hart, mostly with Mark Rowan filling the gaps on guitar. There seemed to be a few other subtle changes; I thought Iain Jennings used a lot more Hammond organ sounds that at previous gigs.  The setlist was much the same as last year, but included a couple of new songs which will appear on the third album due in the middle of the year. The slightly proggy ‘Butterflies and White Feathers’, which they first played towards the end of last year gets better and better each time I hear it, and the newer ‘Below the Radar’, which I’d not heard live before, is a powerful hard rocker. They closed, as usual, with a powerful version of the old Mostly Autumn classic, ‘The Gap Is Too Wide’, which always brings out the goosebumps.

All this was enthusiastically received by an audience that wasn’t made up of existing fans, wasn’t a ‘prog’ audience, and quite possibly wasn’t really even a rock audience. Which all goes to prove there’s an audience out their for Breathings Space’s brand of progressive-tinged classic rock if people are aware of their existence.

Posted in Live Reviews, Music | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Make Your Own Bus Slogan

Posted on February 4, 2009 by Tim Hall

 A web-based bus slogan generator to make your own version of the infamous “atheist buses” you can see in the UK.  Unfortunately the full lyrics of Marillion’s “This is the 21st Century” don’t fit.

We’ll start with the rather obvious H.P.Lovecraft version

One for this Saturday’s gig in Lowdham

 And finally, the obligatory gamer one:

Posted in Games, Music, Science Fiction, Travel & Transport | 2 Comments

Panic Room, Swansea and London

Posted on February 2, 2009 by Tim Hall

I started my live music for 2009 with two gigs on two nights by the same band, in two completely different cities.

While Friday night’s gig in Swansea was really a warm-up for the high-profile London show the next day, it also featured a one-off guest appearance from violinist Liz Prendegast, who’d played on several songs on the album “Visionary Position”.

The Garage is quite a nice little venue; capacity of perhaps 200, although it was nowhere near full. Unfortunately the gig did suffer from a disappointingly high level of background chatter which was noticeable during the quiet bits. And everyone hung at the back of the room despite Anne-Marie Helder trying to persuade people to move forward.

Panic Room’s set suffered badly from technical glitches, the worst of which was Anne-Marie’s microphone not being switched on at the very beginning, resulting in a false start to ‘Electra City’. But the band managed to rise above the gremlins, and played an entertaining and varied set lasting not far short of two hours. While they played some  favourites from their debut album, such as the atmospheric epic ‘Endgame’ and the arabesque ‘Apocalypstick’, those amounted to something like a third of the set.

Some of the newer material they’d been playing at the end of last year have already become live favourites, such as the spiky guitar-driven rocker ‘Go’ and the industrial-sounding ‘Black Noise’, and they added another couple of brand new songs for their first live airing; of those ’5th Amendment’ was the most impressive.  Anne-Marie did her customary mid-set acoustic solo spot, of which the a cappella ‘Hadditfeel’ was the highlight. They ended with their groove-orientated cover of Led Zeppelin’s ‘No Quarter’, including a few bars of ‘Kashmir’ for good measure. When she joined them on stage, Liz’s electric violin added an extra dimension to the sound, especially on the ‘Apocalypstick’ and ‘No Quarter’. I’d love to see her accompany the band for a whole tour.

Saturday’s gig at The Peel was the replacement for the show in April cancelled due to power failure, and this rescheduled gig attracted the largest crowd I’ve seen at a Panic Room gig to date, while I don’t think they quite sold out, the place was pretty much full. Support was prog veterans Jump, who delivered a highly entertaining set; a band I’m getting to like more and more every time I see them. John Dexter Jones is a great frontman; while he looks a bit like Morrissey,  he sounds more like Fish; you can certainly hear the influence of both Marillion and Fish’s solo material in their sound.

Panic Room then delivered the best performance I’ve seen them play to date. Playing a shorter set than the previous night, they went pretty much full tilt all the way through, high energy levels, fantastically tight, and hugely appreciated by the crowd.

What I love about this band is that while they’re all clearly virtuoso musicians, they always play exactly what the songs need and no more; they never descend into the sort of self-indulgent noodling that ‘prog’ is all-too frequently accused of.  And I think the fact that I’ve got several of their new songs stuck in my head means they’re capable of writing memorable songs that ought to appeal to mainstream audiences. And after many years as a backing singer to Rachel Jones in Karnataka and Heather Findlay in Mostly Autumn, Anne-Marie Helder proves she’s in the same league as either of them when it comes to fronting a band herself.

Their next gig is in Stocksbridge near Sheffield in March.

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It’s that time of year again.

Posted on January 26, 2009 by Tim Hall

Yes, it’s the time where all the model railway manufacturers announce their releases for the forthcoming year.

1zu160 lists the new releases from a lot of continental European manufacturers – although the text is in German, you can tell what things are by the pictures, and the class numbers and the alphabet soup of wagon codes are equally comprehensible (or incomprehensible) in any language.

I’m interested in Swiss-outline, and Fleischmann are doing three new versions of the SBB Ae6/6; the early green livery with the chrome stripes as fitted to the first 25 locos, the later red livery without the chrome stripes, and the most recent red and blue “SBB Cargo” colours which to my eyes doesn’t suit this classic traction at all.

On the intermodal front, Fleischmann are doing the six-axle articulated Sggnos intermodal flat, which duplicates the existing Hobbytrain model.  I’m not really keen on duplication where so many intermodal types are yet to be modelled, but given the patchy availability of Hobbytrain’s models, at least the Fleischmann model should be easier to get hold of.  Minitrix meanwhile are doing a 5-wagon set carrying Hangartner swapbodies and semi-trailers.  This is a bit of a compromise – the wagons are the now obselete Sdkms piggyback wagons, where the prototypes are, ironically, Sggnos’s.  Fleischmann are also doing a 3-wagon set of SBB Cargo’s newish high-capacity 2-axle vans.

Minitrix are also doing another run of GM Nohabs, in Belgian, Hungarian and epoch III Danish maroon.  With an all-new Hobbytrain model of this iconic locomotive on the horizon, I’m not sure who really wants to buy this long-in-the-tooth model any more.  Perhaps it will be a budget price model, but you never know with them.

Given the current state of the economy, it’s anyone’s guess when (or even if) all these models will eventually appear.  But provided I still have the money to spend by then, I can see myself getting at least some of the above over the course of the year.

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Which 70s and 80s bands deserve a critical rehabilitation?

Posted on January 25, 2009 by Tim Hall

This is prompted by some comments deep within the comments thread of a rather silly Alan McGee post on The Guardian Music Blog by Jasonaparkes and Jforbes, which speculated as to which half-forgotten or critically maligned acts deserve a non-ironic critical rehabilitation.

Not that I’m talking about mainstream critical opinion here, not the opinion of actual rock fans.

  • Dire Straits: If you don’t come from Britain you’ll probably be amazed at the way Dire Straits have acquired the critical pariah status they have.  They tend to get lumped in with Phil Collins as the music people who bought two or three albums a year listened to, while all the self-described cool people were busy listening to jangly indie. While it’s true that, at least around the time of the mega-selling “Brothers in Arms” that they did attract the attention of very large numbers of annoying people called ‘Kevin’, that’s not a fair way to judge the actual music.  While their music suffered from the occasional lapse of taste, a distressing proportion of which got released as singles to be lapped up by the Kevins, most of their albums, especially “Love Over Gold” stand up well; some very witty lyrics and fantastic guitar playing.
  • Supertramp: I have to confess all-but forgetting this band until I recently picked up their live double “Paris” a few months back.   Seventies soft-rock has never been the most fashionable of genres, but I’d forgotten just how good they were.   Another band for which their commercial singles don’t really represent what they were about; it’s the prog epics like “Crime of the Century” and “Fools Overture” where they shine.
  • Styx: Another band I had to completely reassess recently.   When I saw them supporting Deep Purple a couple of years back their barnstorming live performance completely blew the headliners away. Sometimes big vocal harmonies and hard rock guitars go together well.  The 70s production values of their albums sound a bit tame now, but as they showed live, the songs themselves stand up.
  • Journey: Yes, I’m talking about the 80s commercial version of the band rather than the early 70s jazz/prog outfit. Yes, some of their power ballads descended deep into Camembert territory, but they could also be a great hard rock band when they want to, another case of listen to the albums, not just the single. And Neil Schon is an incredible guitarist – his jazz-metal shredding sound like no-one else.

Posted in Music | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments

I’m succumbed to the dark side and joined Facebook

Posted on January 25, 2009 by Tim Hall

I’ve finally got fed up with the increasing levels of crud on MySpace, and decided to investigate Facebook after being prompted by Scott, along with semi-regular nagging from members the #Freaks crowd who had already abandoned MySpace in favour of it months ago.

Facebook does allow you to search for people before you actually sign up, and I found a whole load of people I know are already members.  Not just the same crowd that I had as friends on MySpace, but loads of past work colleagues, and members of my old gaming group who I’d really lost touch with since moving to Manchester.

So far I’ve got 36 friends in less that 24 hours since signing up, which doesn’t seem like bad going.  And that’s all people I know, either face-to-face or online, not random strangers.

I won’t be deleting my MySpace profile quite yet, but I can’t see myself spending much time on that site except to check band’s sites for song samples and gig dates.

Posted in Miscellaneous | 2 Comments