Scene-ius

(via the treffynnon telly archive at YouTube)

classy fellow

Quite a life, veteran broadcaster and writer Ray Gosling, whose specialty was reporting on the quirks and oddities of British life.



I knew him mostly as a radio voice - remembering in particular a short program for Radio 4 he did about Julie Burchill. Which featured a first-time-hearing for most everybody of her voice - unexpectedly soft, high, fluting and West Country accented, more like Sophie from Detectorists than the formidable and intimidating print persona as NME 's resident punk ideologue.

The Ray Gosling Archive - and judging by the shots of him in his office, nearly buried in papers, clippings, folders, books, newspapers, and what not, he was quite an archivist in his own right.

Did not know that he was a gay rights activist, an anarchist (I don't know if literally, in the CRASS sense - by temperament most likely).

The alcohol intake seems par for the course for writers of that era and type.

Somehow I bracket him in my head with J.B. Priestley - both Northern, left-wing, insanely prolific (a book or more a year in Priestley's case, plus innumerable essays and articles, many plays, etc) and with wide-ranging interests.

musica de boca (license to shrill)

Fátima Miranda-Concierto en Canto (28''54' Resumen del Concierto) from Fátima Miranda on Vimeo.

stiletto stridency

love the stiletto stridency of Julie C



feminist rock going on just before and just after punk, ignored by the rock press

cover of a song by alice cooper of course

really she was a folk-rocker



produced by Joe Boyd with John Wood

line up is UK folk rock all stars almost

Backing Vocals – Andy Fairweather-Low, Gary Travers, Ian Matthews*, Trevor Lucas
Bass – Willie Weeks
Cover – Lila Mann
Drums – Andy Newmark
Guitar, Backing Vocals – Richard Thompson
Keyboards – Neil Larson*
Saxophone, Soloist [Solos] – Plas Johnson

odd bods of the postpostpunk Eighties (1 of ???)

Somewhere between The Residents and Prefab Sprout

Between 10cc and Ghost Box

(More  precisely - between Godley & Creme and The Advisory Circle).

Dave McCullough was a supporter (here's his interview with the band for Sounds) and may have been instrumental in Sudden Sway signing to Blanco Y Negro.

Although they'd be exactly the kind of thing Mike "El" Alway would get behind too

Well,  I was looking around for info about them, or some kind of considered take, or act of memorialisation, and not finding much at all bar an old ILM thread - and what do you know, there's a proper - and proper brilliant - piece about them written by none other than Phil Knight, over at the old Eighties collective blog Faces On Posters Too Many Choices, in part because he hails from the same town as the group - Peterborough.

That'll save me the bother of trying to write about them.

They were very much not where my head was at in the mid-Eighties - I do remember certain Melody Maker colleagues going all gaga about Spacemate and doing some kind of feature that involved a guided audio-tour of  wandering around the city wearing headphones with the record on... so I never paid them much mind at the time... but of course now they seem rather intriguing and perhaps an interestingly peculiar flowering of late postpunk or New Pop gone prog...

ghost stories

should be on your "must watch" list



rescored with Bush

mouth music (the Ruth the whole Ruth and nothing but the Ruth)

nadirs of rockpop music (2 of ????)

nadir criteria = not so much active badness (which as per blog strapline slogan up above can be oddly stimulating in its piquant rankness - and sometimes food-for-thought) but more like nothingness