Music Blog

It looks like the future of Planet Rock is secure

At long last I’m delighted to be able to announce that Planet Rock’s future is now secure. We have been purchased by life long rock and radio fan Malcolm Bluemel and his consortium supported by our very own Tony Iommi, Ian Anderson , Gary Moore, and Fish, saving Planet Rock from certain closure.

In a deal finalised earlier today Malcolm takes control of the station with immediate effect, there will be no break in transmission or changes in programming

I’ve got the station on at the moment, and they do seem to be playing a slightly more eclectic selection of material rather than the same old rock standards.

I would suggest that seeing the last name in the consortium ought to imply that not to play a certain York-based band on the station because their lead singer is his ex should be considered an act of gross unprofessionalism

What’s been on the CD player the last few days:

Pure Reason Revolution, The Dark Third.
This is one of these albums I keep forgetting how good it is until I play it again. Pure Reason Revolution may have been a bit of a pastiche, a sort of prog-rock version of The Darkness, but unlike the Lowestoft bunch, their album seems to have lasted. I’ve has random bits of ‘Dark Third’ have been stuck in my head all morning at work. It is a bit repetitive in places, but I find it just works as one continuous of music with recurring themes and motifs; very ‘prog’.

Led Zeppelin, In Through the Out Door
Recently picked this one up for a fiver on CD, as the only Led Zep album I still only had on vinyl, and therefore hadn’t heard for years. Conventional wisdom suggests LZ ended with a whimper rather than a bang, with Jimmy Page AWOL at least in spirit half the time, but while it’s clearly no “Physical Graffiti” it’s actually not a bad album. Songs like ‘Hot Dog’ might be throwaway fluff, but I’d forgotten that ‘Carouselambra’ is actually a little bit more than just a poor man’s ‘Achilles Last Stand’. And ‘In the Evening’, ‘All My Love’ and ‘I’m gonna crawl’ are pure class.

Yes, Fragile
Nothing quite like some classic 70s prog. “Sharp! Distance! How can the wind with so many around me, I feel lost in the city“. I’m sure this song is about Jon Anderson’s former day job as a milkman. It’s a pity this band are judged by the mainstream on what everyone but their fanboys accept is one of their worst albums, the overblown “Tales from Topographic Oceans”, rather than albums like this one.

Panic Room, Visionary Position
At the Breathing Space+Mermaid Kiss show a week and a bit ago, Jon Edwards (who was playing keys for MK) personally thanked me for my review of the album. I should have thought to thank him for recording it. It really is that good.

Porcupine Tree – Lightbulb Sun
Every time I dig out a PT album, I immediately think “This is their best one”.  I think that’s one of the great things about Porcupine Tree – all their albums are quite different, but all have their strengths.  This one catches them as their moved away from ambient soundscape prog towards psychedelic pop, but before they went metal.  I love the sarcastic Britpop pastiche “Four Chords That Made a Million”.

Coming up – Mostly Autumn at Bury Met tomorrow night, followed by Breathing Space supported by Mermaid Kiss in Mansfield the following night. There’s an outside chance of a third gig on Sunday, in which case I’ll need the bank holiday Monday to recover.

There won’t be any pictures (at least none of mine), because my camera died at MA’s gig in Leicester, which looks like CCD failure. At the moment I don’t know if the camera is worth repairing, or whether I’ll need to shell out for a new one

Howard Sparnenn, father of Livvy Sparnenn of Mostly Autumn and Breathing Space fame, passed away last Sunday.

A true larger-than-life character, his was a familiar face at a great many gigs by Breathing Space, Mostly Autumn and Odin Dragonfly.

I first met him at the Heart Full of Sky launch party in February last year.  I got chatting to him outside the pub after the gig, and at first I didn’t realise he was the father of a member of the band.  Since then I’ve met him at a great many gigs, and he always took the time to say hello. 

As well as a devoted father, he was also an accomplished drummer.  I only saw him play the once, at the Roman Baths in York, when he was filling in on drums for Breathing Space while they searched for a permanent drummer.  He told me he thought it wasn’t fair on his daughter drumming for her band; having her dad on drums would cramp her style.  He was still a very fine drummer.

Fantastic bloke, who left us well before his time. He will be missed.

“Wild West Heroes, they change the world, they make it shine. As you ride the ice, between the heavens, leave a trail for us” – Mostly Autumn, Tearing at the Faerytale.

In a dark, dark town, there was a dark, dark street.

In that dark, dark street, there was a dark, dark building.

In that dark, dark building, there was a dark, dark room.

In that dark, dark room, there was a dark, dark corner.

In that dark, dark, corner, well…

The gig was a double headliner, featuring Jump, and the band I’d gone to see, Panic Room.  I’d seen Panic Room’s debut gig a week earlier, and they’d been exceptionally good, especially when you consider it had been their first ever gig.  On the final date of the tour I wouldn’t have been surprised to have seen them reach greater heights. 

The vibe was really good before the gig started; I saw a few familiar faces when I first arrived at the venue, and met most of the band in the bar beforehand; Gavin Griffiths in particular is a great bloke.

To be honest I’d rather have seen Panic Room play a full-length headline set rather than the truncated one-hour 20 they were allocated following Jump.  I wasn’t that familiar with Jump’s music; I thought the first couple of songs were a bit average, although the third (or was it the fourth) number was a bit more impressive.  Just as they were getting into their stride, the power failed, not only silencing the band, but plunging the room into darkness.

Hats off to Jump’s singer for keeping the audience entertained for the best of half and hour; we heard some funny stories of their exploits supporting Marillion, we had a singalong of “Script for a Jester’s Tear” (And I could remember the words after all those years!). 

As the darkness grew longer the venue stuff discovered it wasn’t a blown fuse in the building.  Not just the street, but the entire neighbourhood was without power.  Eventually Mick the promoter gave the accouncement we’d been expecting for some time; the power was likely to be out for the rest of the evening, and it was “match abandoned”.  It will be rescheduled, but probably not until the beginning of next year.

So I never got to see Panic Room play.

What saved the evening from being a total loss for me was meeting Heather Findlay, which was completely unexpected.

On the Readers Recommend Overspill blog, poster DarceysDad has a disturbing realisation

More seriously, Abahachi’s comment (about new genre discovery and subsequent borderline-obsessive catching-up) got me thinking, and I’ve been hit with a freighttrain-sized realisation: Any band/genre that I believe I discovered for myself is likely to still be right up there in my all-time faves. Anything I can specifically remember being introduced to by someone is much more likely to have fallen away again in my estimation (or at least in the frequency of plays). This is REALLY scary, and not a little conflicted: random picking of songs I hear via radio and magazine covermounts thus appear to mean more to me than the considered opinions of my friends! Am I some kind of anti-social loner, musically? A cooler-than-you snob? What the f???????

I don’t think that’s true of me; I find there’s little correlation between how much I like any artist and how I first ‘discovered’ them.  It’s a random mix of recommendations from offline and online friends, radio, reviews in the media (usually the least reliable), covermount disks, seeing them live at festivals or as support acts, or in one case, through being invited to a gig by an actual member of the band.

I’ve thought about some of the bands I’ve really been into over the years, those for whom I’ve got most or all their albums, or seen live many times.

• Rainbow: I’ve mentioned this one before, but they were the very first hard rock band I ever got into, and it was hearing ‘Eyes of the World’ on Nicky Horne’s late night show “Your mother wouldn’t like it”.
• Pink Floyd: Blame Nicky Horne for this as well; he played “The Wall” more or less to death.  That was actually the first album I bought.
• Deep Purple: The natural follow-up from Rainbow.  In my case I bought an album more or less at random from a secondhand record shop for a couple of quid.  It turned out to be the classic “Made in Japan”.  Pity there was a bad scratch right across ‘Child in Time’.
• Blue Öyster Cult: This was was the first one I can definitely track down to a personal recommendation – it was a college friend who played me ‘Astronomy’ from the live album “Some Enchanted Evening”.
• Black Sabbath:  Hearing “Heaven and Hell” and “Children of the Sea” on the late Tommy Vance’s “Friday Rock Show”.  As soon as I heard those two slices of operatic metal melodrama I knew I had to get that album the day it was released.  Even to this day I prefer them with Dio than with Ozzy.
• Marillion: They were the first completely new band that I got into right at the start of the career.  I remember hearing their demo on the Friday Rock Show, then seeing them at the 1982 Reading Rock Festival.  I bought their debut single and album on first release, and saw them blow Black Sabbath off stage a year later at Reading in 1983. And I’ve followed them (and Fish’s solo career) ever since.
• Porcupine Tree: The Porkies (as they’re known) sort of crept up on me.  I bought “The Sky Moves Sideways” largely out of curiosity after hearing Steve Wilson’s work on Fish’s excellent “Sunsets on Empire”.  I followed up with “Stupid Dream” and “Lightbulb Sun” on release, which got a few plays but never really became favourites.   Then NRT told me in a blog comment that they were playing at Manchester Academy, and I decided to go along.  On seeing them live, their music suddenly made sense.
• Mostly Autumn.  You might not have guessed if you’re a regular reader of this blog.  But like Porcupine Tree, they’re a band that didn’t happen overnight with me.  It started with the cover mount disk on “Classic Rock” containing ‘Half the Mountain’. That encouraged me to buy the album “The Last Bright Light” which became a regular in the CD player.  I bought “Passengers” when it came out, but just like Porcupine Tree, it all made sense the first time I’ve saw them live, a low-key gig at Jillys in Manchester that I only found out about by pure chance. 
• The Reasoning.  Again, this started with a covermount disc.  Not The Reasoning themselves, but Rachel’s previous band Karnataka, with the superlative ‘Talk to Me’ from their live album “Strange Behaviour”.  Before I got the chance to see them live, Karnataka imploded.  I joined TheStorm yahoogroup to find out what on earth had happened.  I found that nobody was willing to say what happened, but I did find it was an quite an interesting discussion list, which was where I first heard of the formation of The Reasoning, and of their first ever gig in Swansea, which made the journey down to.
• Breathing Space. I said that I got into one band by being invited by a band member.  Breathing Space was that band.  The occasion was the launch party for Mostly Autumn’s “Heart Full of Sky” in London.  The gig finished at a ridiculously early time of half past nine, and Anne Marie Helder invited the entire audience to pub round the corner, which wasn’t actually that large a place.  That’s where I first met Livvy Sparnenn, Mostly Autumn’s backing singer, who also sings lead for Breathing Space.  She was very persuasive when it came to their gig in York the following weekend