Author Archives: Tim Hall

Nightwish – Élan

Posted on February 14, 2015 by Tim Hall

First taste of the new Nightwish album, with Floor Jansen on vocals and lots of Troy Donockley.

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45 years ago today, on Friday 13th Feburary 1970, Black Sabbath released their eponymous debut album. Just like King Crimson’s “In The Court of the Crimson King” a few months earlier, it was an album that sounded quite unlike anything that had come before, and launched a whole new genre of music. Has any album remotely as groundbreaking as those two been released in the past decade?

Posted on February 13, 2015 by Tim Hall | Comments Off

Five of my Favourite Bridges

Posted on February 11, 2015 by Tim Hall

Liberal England is trying to resurrect the old fashioned blog meme with “Five of my Favourite Bridges“.

Not that it’s easy to pick just five, but here are five that have made an impression on me over the years.

Photo by Geoff Shepherd/Wikipedia
(Photo by Geoff Shepherd/Wikipedia Commons)

The Royal Albert Bridge

We’ll start with Brunel’s famous bridge across the Tamar linking Devon with Cornwall. Because the approach spans are on a tight curve with a 15mph speed limit you get a good view of the bridge from the train window while crossing it, and the low speed does make it feel like you’ve crossing into another country.


(Phoro by E Gammie/Wikimedia Commons)

Barmouth Bridge

Back in the late 1970s the timber viaduct across the Mawddach estuary was being eaten by worms, and the cost of repairs was used as justification to close the Cambrian Coast railway, which was said to be losing too much money. But wiser councils prevailed, the bridge was repaired, and it’s still possible to travel by train up the top left-hand corner of Wales. Crossing the bridge at high tide it feels like you’re on a boat rather than a train.

The Globe Inn in Lostwithiel, viewed from across the river in the evening light.

Lostwithiel Bridge

The only non-railway bridge of the five. This medieval pack horse bridge across the river Fowey links the railway station to the pub, neither of which existed in the 13th century when the bridge was first built. But what more can be asked of any bridge?

A pair of BLS

Tellenburg Viaduct

Switzerland is full of spectacular railway engineering, and this graceful viaduct is a faviourite of mine. It dates from 1915, built to carry the Bern Lötchberg Simplon main line across the Kander valley a mile south of Frutigen. The rather more utilitarian concrete structure alongside is a later addition, built in the 1970s when the railway was doubled to cope with increasing traffic.

Castlefield Viaduct

Castlefield Viaducts

This is not one bridge but several, and the combination of railway bridges at multiple levels and canal basins forms a kind of Victorian spaghetti junction. Some of the railway viaducts are still in use, one has been reused to carry the trams of Manchester Metrolink, though the most impressive one visible in the background has been disused since 1969, and now has trees growing on it.

What are your five favourite bridges?

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Misguided Busways and their Moonbats

Posted on February 10, 2015 by Tim Hall

Misguided BuswaySo the Institute of Economic Affairs are yet again proposing converting British commuter railways to busways, using reams of dubious statistics gathered from third-world countries that can’t afford rail-based commuter networks to try and make their case.

The one case of a former railway converted to a guided busway in Cambridgeshire is widely considered to be a costly failure, providing none of the benefits of light or heavy rail while sharing all the drawbacks.

Crackpot ideas for converting perfecly good existing railways into private roads have been swilling around in right-libertarian circles and their tobacco industry funded “think tamks” for many years. Back in the 1980s British Rail spent a lot of time and effort refuting their technologically-illiterate nonsense, when there a serious worry these moonbats had the ear of a notoriously rail-hating Prime Minister.

Yet despite being throroughly debunked at the time, much like young-earth creationism, the bad idea stubbornly refuses to die.

Can they seriously never have noticed the public’s reactions whenever the words “Rail replacement bus” are heard?

What is it about these cranks? It makes you wonder if these people have never quite got over not getting a train set for Christmas when they eight years old. Or perhaps they used to get beaten up by train-spotters at school?

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Mostly Autumn announce first live dates for 2015

Posted on February 7, 2015 by Tim Hall

Some gig announcements from Mostly Autumn.

More dates are to be announced later in the year.

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Anoraknophobia

Posted on February 7, 2015 by Tim Hall

AnoraknophoboaIt’s only a couple of months until the UK Marillion Conventional in Wolverhampton. As has become the established format for these events, two of the three nights will centre on an album played in full. One will be the near-universally loved “Marbles”. The other will be 2001′s “Anoraknophobia”, an album that still divides opinion more than a decade after its release. As with “Holidays in Eden” at the 2011 event and “Radiation” in 2013, it gives an opportunity to reassess an often overlooked album from their back catalogue.

It’s no “Brave” or “Season’s End”, but Anoraknophobia is still a personal favourite for me. It was the album that bought me back on board and made me a Marillion fan again. I’d been slowly drifting away as a fan for several years. I hadn’t actually seen them live since the Holidays in Eden tour, where I witnessed a rather lacklustre gig at Hammersmith Odeon that seemed to lack the old magic. I’d kept on buying the albums, and loved “Brave”, but a few albums later they were losing their magic for me on record too. “Dotcom”, the album before Anorak was and still is my least favourite Marillion album.

In retrospect Anoraknophobia feels part of a trilogy along with Radiation and Dotcom; those three records represented the period where the band were looking for a new direction and trying to adopt a more contemporary sound. DotCom didn’t work for me; much of the album sounded too much like generic rock/pop which diluted Marillion’s strengths.

Anoraknophobia too was as much a departure from the classic sound with its elements of trip-hop, dub and indie-rock, but somehow the album seemed much more in the spirit of Marillion. Songs like “Separated Out” and “Between You And Me” rocked out. The ambitious “Quartz” merged a dub bass riff with some archetypal Steve Rothery guitar textures. The sprawling album highlight “This is the 21st Century” with it’s hypnotic rhythms and extended dreamy solo is miles away from the neo-prog of their 1980s heyday, but is still one of the finest songs.

The tour was also the first time I’d seen them live in a decade. I’d just moved to Manchester, and saw them on the tour at Manchester Academy. What I experienced seemed a completely different band from the one I’d seen a dozen years earlier; the same self-confident and coherent band that we’re familiar with today.

Anorak isn’t flawless by any means, and was eclipsed by “Marbles” when the band finally found the magic formula, but Anoraknophobia remains a personal favourite, and still seems to represent the moment when the band turned the corner.

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Kiss’ “The Elder” is not regarded as one of their finest albums. But although even the band themselves consider it a failure, they should be applauded for at least attempting something outside their comfort zone. Far too many bands don’t; they find a successful formula and stick with it. Experiments don’t always work, but you wonder what a band like Iron Maiden might achieve had they ever attempted something radically different.

Posted on February 7, 2015 by Tim Hall | Comments Off

Cloud Atlas on Bandcamp

Posted on February 7, 2015 by Tim Hall

Cloud Atlas are now on Bandcamp, and you can download their excellent album “Beyond the Vale” for the very reasonable price of £7

Here’s “Stars”, one of the standout songs from the album.

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Rotten Boroughs

Posted on February 7, 2015 by Tim Hall

The Government report into what’s been going on at Rotherham is damning stuff.

Casey, the government’s lead official on troubled families, said the council lacked “the necessary skills, abilities, experience and tenacity within either the member or senior officer leadership teams”.

Concluding that the council needs a fresh start, Casey’s 154-page report said: “The council’s culture is unhealthy: bullying, sexism, suppression and misplaced ‘political correctness’ have cemented its failures.

“The council is currently incapable of tackling its weaknesses without a sustained intervention.”

She also criticised the council’s deep-rooted culture of suppressing bad news and ignoring hard issues, writing: “RMBC goes to some length to cover up information and to silence whistleblowers.”

There’s a lot of blame to go round, but one root cause of these rotten boroughs is an electoral system that results in single party fiefdoms in any party’s heartlands, especially those of Labour. Don’t be distracted by the fact there are currently ten UKIP councillors in Roherham; they were only elected in 2013 after the scandal broke. Before that it was a monolithic one-party state run by the Labour Party.

You might assign some of the blame to an electorate who vote in local elections on national issues along tribal lines, without paying enough attention to what the people they elect get up to in office. But the bigger villain is the first-past-the-post electoral system, deeply flawed and anti-democratic at national level, and utterly unfit for purpose at local level. Even if Rotherham had remained firmly in Labour control, it’s difficult to believe the presence of a viable opposition group on the council would not have bought these terrible problems to light earlier.

The 2015 general election is likely to produce a second successive hung Parliament, in which the distribution of seats will bear little resemblance to the distribution of votes. Electoral reform for parliamentary elections is likely to be high on the political agenda. Does Rotherham make the case for parallel reform of local government even more important?

Electoral reform is sometimes dismissed as a pastime for political anoraks. But Rotherham demonstates why it does actually matter.

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Lonely Robot – God vs. Man

Posted on February 5, 2015 by Tim Hall

A track from the forthcoming album “Please Come Home”.

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