While Chantel McGregor has made a name for herself playing guitar-shredding electric blues-rock, there’s also a gentler acoustic side to her music. Here’s her beautiful cover of Bruno Mars’ “Grenade”, a version which will be familiar to anyone who’s seen her play live recently, since it’s been a regular feature of her set.
Chantel has also launched a new blog.
While the later air-conditioned Mk2 stock have been available for many years, the earlier non-aircon coaches have long been one of the most significant gaps in the N-gauge coaching stock roster. The long-awaited Graham Farish models go a long way towards filling that gap.
Graham Farish have chosen to model the Mk2a variant, introduced in 1967 for use on principle express routes. Unlike the first Mk2s, they were air-braked only, and could not run behind some of the older diesel classes that were only ever fitted with vacuum brakes. The prototypes had long service lives. Though ousted from front-line services by later Mk2 builds relatively early on, they continued on secondary services all over the UK for many years. The last ones survived until the early 2000s, outliving some of the later Mk2 builds by the best part of a decade.
The three models represent the TSO (Tourist open second), FK (First Corridor) and BSO (Brake Second Open) with Eastern Region running numbers. There is no BFK (Brake First Corridor), perhaps slightly disappointingly since BR built more than twice as many BFKs as BSOs. They’re initially available only in BR blue/grey, the livery they carried for the first two decades in service. Hopefully Network Southeast and Regional Railways liveries carried in later years will follow in due course.
They certainly are very impressive models, with an excellent semi-matt finish, close-coupling mechanisms with NEM sockets, and fully-detailed interiors including seats and tables in the correct colours. They certainly capture the distinctive look of the Mk2 extremely well.
One quibble is the height doesn’t quite match that of Graham Farish’s Mk1s. It’s not a huge difference, but it is noticeable from certain angles if you mix Mk1 and Mk2 stock in the same train. Without a micrometer screw gauge I have no idea whether it’s the Mk2 or the Mk1 that’s slightly under or overscale. Saying that, the difference isn’t enough to be jarringly obvious and probably acceptable to all but the most fastidious.
A few years back, British-outline N-gauge models were the poor relation to continental and American models, with a lot of crudely-detailed models that were years if not decades behind the best models released by Kato, Fleischmann or Roco. But since Bachmann took over Graham Farish and a competitor entered the market in the shape of Dapol, things have improved out of all recognition. These Mk2s are possibly the best British-outline coaches released to date, and I think they are on a par with state-of-the-art continental models.
Within a few days of losing Jack Vance, another of my all-time favourite authors, Iain Banks, has passed. While he had made it public that he was terminally ill back in March, his death still comes as a shock.
He had feet in two literary camps, writing mainstream fiction as “Iain Banks”, and science-fiction as “Iain M Banks”, possibly the most transparently obvious pseudonym in literary history.
Everything he wrote was larger-than-life. His science-fiction novels are filled with five-mile long starships carrying many millions of people, massive set-piece scenes, baroque cultures and dramatic villains, and ask deep questions about violence, war and what it means to be civilised. I’ll never forget my first introduction his his work, the novel “Consider Phlebas”. The opening chapter reading like a Traveller adventure run a particularly sadistic GM. Then followed a whole series of set-pieces, each more spectacular that the last, ending with the train crash inside a nuclear bunker on the dead planet of an extinct civilisation.
“The Culture”, the galactic civilisation at the heart of much of his SF have become one of the iconic SF settings. It says something about his skill as a writer that he could take a hugely advanced benevolent utopia as his central setting and still use it to tell compelling stories. If you’ve read his SF, then his mainstream novels have a very similar style; the scale isn’t as vast, but the characters, the imagination and plotting are strongly recognisable.
Much as I love his science-fiction work, my two favourites of his have to be two of his “non-M” books, “The Bridge” and “Espedair Street”. The former probably counts as so-called “slipstream”, where elements of speculative fiction enter a supposedly mainstream novel, with much of the narrative taken up with the dreams of a man in an induced coma after a road accident. The latter has to be the best fictional rock biography I know of. I won’t say exactly which band Banks’ creation “Frozen Gold” remind me of most strongly, but it is said that the central character, bassist Daniel Ward was based on Fish.
I still have yet to read his first and most infamous work, “The Wasp Factory”.
Following on from their very successful showcase event at The Underworld in 2012, Esoteric Recordings put on another event at The Borderline in London, again featuring Sanguine Hum and Tin Spirits, who’d played at that earlier show.
Opener was Esoteric’s most recent signing, solo looping maestro Matt Stevens. He’s made quite a name for himself supporting the likes of Panic Room and Barclay James Harvest over the last couple of years, as well as playing lead guitar for The Fierce and The Dead. His distinctive instrumental act sets him apart, using a single acoustic guitar and and a set of looping pedals to build a big, layered sound far richer than you’d expect one man to produce on his own. He’s an innovative and talented musician, and a larger-than-life character with a strong stage presence. It will be interesting to see how his career develops now he’s “signed”.
At last year’s showcase event, Sanguine Hum didn’t really impress. Though by all accounts they were a great band on record, their live act needed a lot more work, though to be fair the running order, which saw their set sandwiched between The Reasoning and Panic Room didn’t do them any favours.
A year and a bit on, and they are much, much improved. No longer like rabbits in the headlights, they’re orders of magnitude better, far more self-confident, far tighter, and playing with a lot more energy. With a set largely drawn from their new album “The Weight of the World”, they showed good use of dynamics and atmospherics, with touches of Porcupine Tree, Pineapple Thief and mid-70s Zappa. The stagecraft and presentation still has room for improvement, but they’ve come a long way in a short space of time.
Tin Spirits, featuring one-time XTC and current Big Big Train guitarist Dave Gregory are always an entertaining live act, and their set was no exception. Unusually for a prog band they don’t have a keyboard player, relying on the twin lead guitars of Dave Gregory and Daniel Steinhardt for all the atmospherics and textures. Bassist Mark Kilminster makes an engaging frontman, supported on vocal harmones by the rest of the band. They display a love of vintage guitars, with Dave Gregory’s Rickenbacker and Daniel Steinhardt’s Gibson Flying V alongside the more common Les Pauls and Telecasters.
The set drew largely from their début album “Wired to Earth” with a couple of new songs thrown in for good measure, some material with a laid-back jazz-rock mood reminiscent of Steely Dan, other moments recalling early Wishbone Ash, though despite the awesome virtuosity of the musicians they never descended into self-indulgent noodling. Every time I’ve seen this band they throw at least one classic prog cover into the set, this time it was a mesmerising take on King Crimson’s “Red”. They ended with a progged-up version of XTC’s “Towers of London” to end a great evening.
A lot of media speculation on the future of the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry, and The National Railway Museum in York, hit by spending cuts as part of George Osborne’s misguided austerity programme. Christian Wolmar writes in The Independent:
The fact that there is even the remotest possibility that the National Railway Museum in York, along with the two other less well-known museums in Manchester and Bradford, could be closed is a scandal that must be nipped in the bud.
Jonathan Schofield in Manchester Confidential:
Maybe in the end this news from the MEN is shock tactics by the Science Museum Group; a call-my-bluff tactic of pure brinkmanship. Maybe they want to force the government’s in to giving them more money, or an attempt to push the museum onto the city council’s hands. Since the latter can’t even keep open Heaton Hall that is a non- starter. What is certain is that proposing something as blatantly unfair and desperate as closing all the Science Museum Group’s northern properties while keeping on the equally struggling London one looks shocking.
They must know this, unless they are absolute idiots.
I find it difficult to believe that either museum will actually close, although the introduction of admission charges is probably highly likely.
But given the out of touch sociopathy of this government, more interested in preserving the bonus culture of their cronies in the city than with the quality of life of ordinary working people, anything is possible.
It’s now several years since Fish has embarked on proper tour with an electric band. Since the end of the lengthy “Clutching at Stars” tour in 2008, he’d toured extensively with an acoustic trio, followed by a handful of full-band gigs at festivals, and rather strange co-headliners with Glenn Hughes.
Fish had originally planned to have the new album “Feast of Consequences” in the can by now. But the writing of the album too longer than anticipated, so the first leg of the “Moveable Feast” tour became an extended road-test of the new material, with the band heading into the studio at the end of the tour to record it. The five-piece band has a couple of lineup changes since the last time Fish toured, with Steve Vantsis returning on bass, and Robin Boult, who’d been a part of Fish’s band in the early years replacing Frank Usher on guitar.
Support was the duo of vocalist Lu Cozma accompanied by Steve Askew on acoustic guitar and rhythm loops. Acoustic acts can sometimes be a bit hit-and-miss, but this duo came over very well through a combination of Lu Cozma’s strong vocals and some memorable material, with a great cover of Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” thrown in for good measure.
Fish opened with two brand-new songs, the dark, brooding “Perfumed River” followed by the more rocky title track of “Feast of Consequences”, before going right back in time with a really intense version of “Script for a Jester’s Tear”. That set the tone for the rest of the set, previously unheard new songs mixed with crowd-pleasing oldies, all delivered with a huge amount of energy.
The new material came over very strongly, with the three-song excerpt from the extended “High Wood Suite” an obvious highlight. Another strong one was the Rolling Stones style rocker “All Loved Up”, its lyrics a blast aimed at the whole X-factor fame game. He instroduced stripped-down acoustic “Blind to the Beautiful” with the words “If you’re on anti-depressants, take then now”, making him a sort of prog Leonard Cohen. The older songs encompassed both the Marillion songbook and his early solo albums, with songs such as “Family Business”, “He Knows You Know”, and an extended medley comprising “Assassing”, “Credo”, “Tongues” and the closing section of “Fugazi”.
It’s always taking a chance in playing so much unknown material live, but such was the quality of the new songs that the risk paid off. You could hear a pin drop during the new songs, while old favourites were rapturously received.
Fish was on superb form, with no trace of the vocal problems that had plagued him on earlier tours. True, he doesn’t have the upper register of twenty years ago, and a few of the older songs needed to be reworked. He remains an enormously charismatic frontman, interspersing songs with the stories behind them, ranging his day job at the DSS introducing “He Knows You Know” to the harrowing stories from World War One introducing the songs from the High Wood Suite. Even the predictable shout from the crowd for “Grendel” turned into a sales opportunity for his convention DVD on which said epic appears. This had to be one the best gigs I’ve seen him do for something like twenty years.
The album is planned for release in late summer, after which Fish hits the road again, a couple of UK dates preceding a two-month tour of the continent with a final end-of-tour party at The Assembly in Leamington Spa.
The Daily WTF is always an amusing site for anyone involved in software development. Many of the stories are grisly coding horrors, but since I haven’t been a developer for many years, I find the best stories are the tales of project management trainwrecks. A reminder than no matter how bad the worst project you ever worked on, someone, somewhere has had it far worse.
This one, featuring “The Colonel” is a classic tale of how putting someone with no knowledge or understanding of how software is created can go horribly, horribly wrong.
The project started out on the wrong foot, with something that happens all-too-often with statups.
As for their problem: The Colonel and his sales team told prospects that the prototype was their core product, and managed to sell a handful of licenses for it … To ensure that programmers were focused on programming, The Colonel cut out a lot of the unnecessary parts of the software development process like system design and testing.
As the whole thing goes pear-shaped it shows the failure mode of authoritarian command-and-control management.
To no one’s surprise, the crackdown didn’t quite help morale or increase business in the least. It did lower expenses quite a bit; by the time this next email was sent out, twelve of the staff had resigned:
While The Colonel sounds like a textbook case of an ex-military type unable to cope with the civilian world, I can’t help feeling he would have been equally disastrous leading troops on the battlefield.
Great post by Jonathan Calder on Liberal England in response to the appalling front page of The Guardian following the Woolwich murder, and the equally awful coverage by the BBC.
Almost as depressing as the Guardian front page was the discussion of the Woolwich murder on Newsnight yesterday evening. One participant, the impressive Maajid Nawaz, spoke of the need for a Western narrative to challenge the world-view of Islamism. But you only had to look at the people with him to see there was little chance we would hear it last night.
There was John Reid who, as a Communist while the Soviet Union was the greatest tyranny on this planet, never bought into the Western narrative in the first place and is now employed by the security industry – though Newsnight never reminds of us during his frequent appearances. And there was Alex Carlile, a Liberal Democrat who long ago threw in his lot with the most repressive elements of Labourism.
It seems that the so-called liberal media is not giving nearly enough airtime to defending the values of western liberal democracy, instead giving a soapbox to people like the ridiculous Anjem Choudary or the totalitarian thug John Reid. While at the same time the usual suspects ranging from white supremacists to militant athiests are using the whole thing to peddle their predicatable message of hate.
It’s all very depressing.