Jaz Coleman, from his Quietus bakers-dozen-LPs interview:

"The Sensational Alex Harvey Band – Faith Healer

I know all the band would agree with this one, it’s one track that everyone gives a resounding yes to. It defines everything about rock music. The track 'Faith Healer' on its own, on its own, kinda inspired Killing Joke. Yes, massively, it inspired a young [Geordie] Walker and it’s the only song by Alex Harvey I really like, but it’s got to be one of the greatest pieces of rock music ever

yeah i can see that connection



a fantastic piece of controlled tension, i can't think of any other piece of rock like it

and K Joke did "tension music"

other Jaz choices (Ligeti to Chic, PiL to Wagner) interesting and revealing

he does have quite a high estimation of himself though don't he?

gotta love the Joke though

this is like two songs in one song

each great in their own way

hated this



it grew on me

robo-glam

RIP Cedric Sharpley

drummer in Tubeway Army



who lived in Berkhamsted

who I saw in the High Street once or twice

handy with the sticks he was





Tubeway Army - a proper rock group they were

heavy

the other Sixties



Engelbert is singing this year's UK entry for the Eurovision Song Contest, making him the oldest male contestant ever

"les bicyclettes de belsize", one of his smaller hits of the late Sixties... theme song of this, not actually filmed in Belsize

in awobopaloopabopbamboom aka pop from the beginning, nik cohn writes so excitingly about pj proby's as ultracharismatic superpopstar, singer and performer, that it was a shock to find out what a shlockmiester he was







but then much later on, after the US-born but big-in-UK star's career had crashed (for a while he lived in northcurch, which is half-a-mile up the road from berkhamstead where i grew up, but i never knew that at the time), Proby was adopted in the late Eighties by this deviant/transgressive-specialising label/publisher Savoy out of Manchester and embroiled in a series of bizarre records











as i recall these releases had their supporters among my colleagues at melody maker, the same sorts as were fans of el records

anyway he's 73 now and living in Doncaster and just been cleared of benefit fraud, so i read in the paper -- http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/mar/16/pj-proby-benefit-case-dropped

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/mar/16/pj-proby-benefit-case-dropped

must have passed this LP a hundred times in piles of used records... flicked past it in $2 boxes and thrift store stacks... worn and scuffed and frayed around the sleeve edges... sometimes ringed with that disc shape impression through being crammed in with so many other unwanteds, although a big record in its day...

next time though i'll be picking it up

what Jon Savage calls the "meridian" vibe - 1970 - rock at a kind of Ancient Mariner like standstill - an exhausted lull

another song on that vibe