...to attend Flying Vinyl no.5.
Our next Flying Vinyl session on November 24th will feature, just after the time of its 50th birthday, the final LP The Beatles recorded, Abbey Road. Produced at a time when personal and business relationships within the band were coming under strain, musically they were never stronger and more collaborative (all four band members feature on lead vocals and writing credits) which resulted in one of their very finest albums. We'd love it if you could join us and celebrate a significant anniversary of a milestone LP.
So here I am watching coverage of the 1979 general election coverage on the BBC Parliament channel (which includes the news read by Richard Baker right at the start, which is worth the price of admission alone), and the complete Eighventiesness of it reminded me of this ghost sign that I noticed in town on Saturday. A more recent shop has closed, removed their signage and uncovered this. Funny how there are a certain subset of high street shops that have now completely disappeared. Did you rent a television? My parents did right up until the beginning of the 1990s. There were all the big hitters here in Newark: Granada (where ours came from. The televisions were always modelled as Granada Finlandia. As the name suggests they were manufactured in Finland, I think possibly by a name that would become ubiquitous in the 90s and 2000s, Nokia), DER and the above mentioned Radio Rentals. I also think that electrical retailers Wigfalls (where you could also buy records) and Rumbelows rented TV sets. We had them all here, long gone now of course. Even Dixons/Currys no longer have a presence in the town centre.
Renting electrical items hasn't gone away though. I was watching television the other night (a Panasonic 32" HD smart TV purchased from, ahem, Sainbury's, if you're interested, most definitely not rented) that the online electrical retailer AO are now offering rentals for low-income households on washing machines with a view to rolling the service out to other electrical goods. As it happens Mrs Ambassador found a receipt yesterday for her grandparents' television which was purchased in 1990 for £300, about the same amount you'd pay today for an equivalent set. The more things change, the more they stay the same, eh?
A few months ago I was asked by the people who run the Charity Shop Classics show on a Manchester community radio station called All FM if I'd like to be a guest presenter for their show. Charity Shop Classics is a show I've been listening to for quite a while now and it's fair to say that I love the concept of the show and the music we hear which is presented by good people. So I took it as a great honour that I was asked to contribute with my USP being that every track played, bar one, was purchased from my local Oxfam Books & Music store in my hometown of Newark. It took a few months to get together, what with one thing and another but the results were on air yesterday. My links at times leave a bit to be desired but I enjoyed doing it, which is kind of the point. You can hear the results in the link here: https://www.mixcloud.com/CharityShopClassics/charity-shop-classics-show-202-listeners-choice/
We watched a film over the Christmas period called Sound it Out. If you've not seen it, it's a film made by Jeanie Finlay about the last record shop in Teeside called, erm, Sound it Out. The main thrust of the film concerns the owner, Tom, and the customers who come into his shop. Tom is exactly what I would look for in a record shop owner: knowledgeable, friendly to your face, wide range of taste. The customers are all, what I would call, 'good people' They aren't the sort of people who cause trouble. They're the sort of people who know what they like and are prepared to talk about what they like with other people. we often hear this ridiculous term 'Broken Britain', watch Sound it Out and you realise that most people are inherently good. Friendly, even.
The stars of the film, apart from Tom and his shop, are Shane (a rabid Status Quo fan who didn't have the best start in life but doesn't let that hold him back) and Gareth & Sam (a couple of metal freaks who make their entrance into the film by announcing that they like any music "as long as it's suffixed with the word 'metal". A bit of a double act, these two). What these, and others in the film show, is that music is the best form of escapism. It really is, as someone once said "The dog's bollocks".
The film is tinged with sadness as we all know that record shops have died a death. We're all to blame, we all got our heads turned by cheapo internet deals and downloading songs we liked off the radio. I know I did. The only place I can now buy records in my town is in a supermarket or Oxfam or a wonderful old hippy who has a market stall on a Friday. Even as little as 15 years ago there were four stand alone record shops in my town as well as record departments in Boots, WH Smith and Woolworth's. Sad times. Nothing could beat going in to my favourite, R & K and looking to see what the latest metal releases were. The owner, Richard (who looked, and spoke, like a dark-haired Mike Nolan off of Bucks Fizz) was a metal fan, so he was always well stocked. Just browsing a shop is much better than entering a search on Amazon, you never know what you'll find when you do a proper browse; we went into a branch of Fopp just before Christmas to buy a DVD for someone's present - £80 later...
As an add-on to this, I heard Paul Gambaccini on the radio last week saying that Steve Jobs was the 'saviour of the record industry'. Nonsense. Steve Jobs was the saviour of making money for Apple. How else do you explain why Macbooks are now coming without CD drives? No CD drive, no ripping CDs into iTunes = more money for iTunes Store. If Apple can't make any cash off it, they'll get rid of it. I like to have something physical in my hand when it comes to music, I still buy CDs and records. I might be old-fashioned but I like looking at sleevenotes, I need to know who engineered track 6, I need to know who played marimbas on track 12, I need to know who made the sandwiches during the recording sessions (in the case of Motorhead's Iron Fist, it was Katy). Which is why I will never fully embrace downloads or Spotify, I want that sense of ownership of something, I want something tangible. And that is slowly being taken away from us.
Hopefully people like Tom or the excellent Unknown Pleasures in Edinburgh or the equally excellent Swordfish Records in Birmingham or even that daft old Krautrock-loving hippy on the market can ride the storm for people like me. They said vinyl records, turntables and cassette tapes would all be gone by now, well they're still all here and hopefully there'll be some record shops left too in thirty years' time.
Have a look at the 'Lost and Found' section of that photograph. People who've been reading this garbage for an awfully long time will know how much my local paper gets on my wick. But every now and again there's something in it which makes me pull up short.
When I originally saw that ad I thought to myself "What a fantastic citizen that person is, they've found this photo and they've gone to all the trouble of putting an ad in the paper, at some considerable expense, to try and find the owner of it. And looking at that dialling code they must be from miles away, that's not a local dialling code that I know."
Then I looked again and I'm left with the impression that the ad has been put in by someone who's lost the photo. Is it really that valuable? And if they're such a fan of the Crafty Cockney then how come they can't spell his name correctly? And if they knew they'd lost it outside 99p Stores then why didn't they go back for it? Does this person prize this photo so much that they carry it around in an inside pocket, next to their heart, and have to keep pulling it put every few strides to make sure it's there? So as they walked along in the precinct they pulled it out at Wilkinson's and still had it. Pulled it out again at Julian Graves, still had it. Pulled it out at the travel agents, still had it. Pulled it out at Claire's Accessories, still had it. Pulled it out at 99p Stores, still had it. Pulled it out at Marks and Spencer's, SHIT WHERE'S IT GONE? IT MUST HAVE GONE WHEN I PULLED IT OUT AT 99P STORES!
To be honest, I can't really see a photo with Eric Bristow in it being all that valuable either. And if they loved it then why not keep it safe at home? I guess there are some things in life that just remain a mystery.
I know John Medd's already blogged about this but I can't let it go without mentioning it. The Boat That Guy Built really is turning into one of my favourite telly programmes. Ever. If you've not seen it it's about 'world famous' (so 'world famous', in fact, that I'd never previously heard of him) motorbike racer and HGV mechanic (!) Guy Martin doing up a narrowboat. But Guy can't just go to the chandlers and B&Q and do up his boat, no, he has to do everything from scratch. Like build a mini foundry to make a kettle, go to Wedgewood's in Stoke to make a mug, make his own baked beans, blend his own tea, learn how to make a steam pump to power the shower, render some animal fat to make soap and weave his own sheets. In fact the bloke's so down to Earth he was prepared to admit on camera that he thought cotton came from a sheet.
Guy and his mate Mark are just a couple of lovely blokes doing stuff. That's all it is. Not much happens but it's just nice to see two blokes happy in each other's company dicking about. I like to see nice people doing nice things. In fact I did some research on Guy just to find out a bit more about him. Turns out he's got a film coming out. In 3D an'all, if you please. It's about his motorbike racing. Apparently in the world of road racing he's quite big news. Road racing's like the Isle of Man TT type stuff, no gravel traps or tyre walls. It's brick walls, manhole covers and telegraph poles that these fellas have to contend with. There's a lovely bit on the end of the trailer (see below) where Guy says "Some lads love going to the pub, some lads love shaggin'. I don't mind it but different people are into different things. I like doing this" Which I find incredibly refreshing. In fact we could tell how relaxed Guy is towards sex when a lady signwriter did some work on his boat on this week's TBTGB and it was clear she fancied him. I'm, not an expert in lady signals but I'm sure the fact that she kept asking if they could 'go below and make a cup of tea' wasn't particularly a request about hot beverages. Guy wasn't really listening though, he only had eyes for the roses he was painting on to the boat. I was screaming at the telly "Guy! She's bloody choking for it!" Bless him. Anyway, it's the last one next week and some of it was filmed in Newark. Hurrah! According to this week's Newark Advertiser, "Guy enjoyed filming in Newark and he says he 'had a good laugh'" Which is what it's all about really, isn't it? Good old Guy!
Oh, and he sounds like me when he talks.
Anyway, something else I've been enjoying just recently is Friday Night Dinner. It's one of the rare comedies these days that actually makes me, ugh, 'LOL'. It's got some famous people in it. You know, her off of Black Books, the lad off of The Inbetweeners and Jim Rosenthal's kid. It's incredibly well observed about family life. It revolves around a Jewish family meeting on a Friday night for dinner. We used to do the same when Mum and Dad were alive on a Saturday afternoon ('Getting your bottle filled' is how my brother-in-law used to describe it. Go figure). And it's the same set-up, an aloof dad whose always pottering and a mum who finds him exasperating but is still mad about him at the same time.
It also reminds me of the relationship I had with my sister. You may have grown up but when you go back to your parents house you regress back to childhood. I thought we were the only ones who carried on sitting on each other, tipping salt into each others drinks, eating Spiller's Shapes dog biscuits, trying to trip each other up and do a special thing whenever the other came to sit next to us (and I'm not going to tell you what that is because you'll talk about me) when we were in our twenties and thirties
It's the last one of them this week too, but the good news is that it's been recommissioned. Hurrah! Again!
Celery leaves are poisonous and are not to be consumed under any circumstances. I never questioned why celery was sold with the leaves still attached if that was the case. And something in the back of my mind told me to not to eat celery leaves until I saw Nigella put them into a pot roast chicken last week. Mind you, perhaps that's Nigella trying to get rid of us and create her own super race of North London-dwelling gastronomes. My sister tried to pull the same trick with the last bit of tea or coffee in a mug but I never bought that one. What do you take me for? She still leaves the last bit of tea or coffee in a mug, which didn't sit right with me when I bought her an expensive coffee last week and she left a quarter of it.
That Brian Clough lived in a big white house set on a hillside near the train line between Newark and Nottingham. My mother used to tell me this when we went on shopping trips to Nottingham. It wasn't until I was in my twenties and after Mr Clough had been found sleeping in a ditch 'near his home in Derby' (the same home he'd lived in for years) that I realised she lied. When I questioned her about it she said that it "broke the journey up to point out landmarks, even if they weren't real."
That drinking pop directly from a can caused your tongue to get trapped in the hole and they'd have to cut your tongue off. I never thought that if this did happen (and to date I've never heard of it happening), then they'd just cut the can off.
Swallowing chewing gum or bubble gum makes it wrap around your intestines and slowly kill you. I think what she was trying to say here is that she hated gum and didn't want me to have it.
That the clown who used to roll the credits on at the end of Camberwick Green was actually my dad. I never questioned why Dad went to work, completely altered his appearance and dressed as a clown. This was given more weight when I once watched Camberwick Green with some cousins and, at the end, they pointed to the screen and shouted "There's Uncle Roy!" So someone else was telling them that Dad worked for Gordon Murray productions on a part-time basis.
The Daddies Sauce bottle used to feature a neck band with a photo of a generic smiling dad that used to say underneath it "My favourite!" I was led to believe that was our Uncle Phil, as were most of the cousins in my large extended maternal family.
I've been into town just now, and it's awash with, what I believe are called 'charity muggers'. Now, I'm a fairly generous person, I think. I donate to charity regularly (though like Smashie and Nicie, I don't like to talk about it), what I hate though is being bullied into it.
These charity muggers today were from the British Red Cross, a worthwhile organisation, I'm sure you'll agree. Today though I really didn't want to set up a standing order for £5 a month to go to them. I don't really like entering into contracts, apart from my employment contract, which is the reason why I refuse to have Sky telly, contract mobile phones etc. The thing is, they must have worked out that they could afford to blitz a town centre with these muggers today as the money they pay the muggers they must be able to recoup and then some. I mean, I take it they're getting paid for doing this as they all look like students. I think I must be an easy target - they see me approaching, floral print shirt, nice jeans, Converse All Stars. "Ah" they must think to themselves "This stocky, balding James Mayalike is just the sort of middle class bloke whose conscious will get the better of him - this is as good as in the bag." Think again, Student Grant, I encountered three, and these are the conversations I had:
Lady Charity Mugger: "Good morning, sir!
Me: "Morning!"
LCM: "Can you spare a couple of minutes for a chat?"
Me: "No"
She made a mistake, if she'd said "Morning, sexy!" then yeah, I may have stopped and indulged in some mild flirting before walking off without opening a standing order and she would have though to herself "Saddo thought he was in with a chance" well, that's her loss.
Next one looked like Hair Bear off of The Hair Bear Bunch:
Hair Bear Charity Mugger bellowing from a hundred yards away: "Morning sir!"
*I look over my shoulder in a mock 'are-you-talking-to-me-manner'*
HBCM: "Yes, you sir, the chap who looks very nice! Have you go time to chat, sir?! I'm not asking for money!"
Me: "No"
Next one approaches after I've stepped out of the music shop to drool over the drum kit I want and had a chat with the proprietor, with a copy of Kerrang!* and a practice pad under my arm.
Charity Mugger: "Morning, sir, have you got time for a chat?"
Me: "What, are you going to buy me a pint to go with it?"
CM: "Ho ho, no sir!"
Me: "Then I haven't got time 'for a chat.'"
Ha! That told him.
So what did I do then? I stepped into the Oxfam books and record shop where charity mugging of another kind was going on. What they hell are they doing with the prices? They had a vinyl copy of Dark Side of the Moon. "Oooh" I thought to myself "I wonder if that's still got the stickers and postcards which came with 1970s pressings?" I was disappointed, there was a card attached to the front which read "Late '70s pressing. No stickers or postcards. Plays okay, just slight jump during Brain Damage." Do you know how much they wanted for it? £9.99! That's nearly ten of your English pounds! What a rip off! Hardly a rare album is it, not when they've sold thirty million of them. If it had stickers and postcards? Yes, then they could have had my £9.99 and that would have made it four times that I'd bought the bloody record.
To compound this, in with the records was a Q magazine guitarists' photo supplement. I used to have that and binned it, now they want a tenner for something that was given away for free!
Compare that with the Oxfam in Nottingham a few months back which had every Q mag from issue 1-50 for sale for £90. I bloody wish I'd bought it now. No, scratch that, I wish I'd not thrown out my Qs which I collected religiously from 1988 to 1997.
I'm not being tight-fisted here, but Oxfam would get a lot more of my business if they looked into their pricing policy, so, in the long run, they've lost out. I mean, a vinyl copy of Blondie's Parallel Lines for £7.99 when you can buy it on CD from Sainsbury's for less than a fiver,? Do me a favour...*wonders off, muttering*...
Anyway, have a good weekend. If, like me you're going out for a picnic, with family, then note these wise words. Oh, and apologies for the 'screamers', went a bid mad with them, didn't I?:
*Yeah, I buy Kerrang every now and again. What are you going to do about it? Besides, this week's has got my four thrash metal heroes on the cover - together at last!
I've noticed that the BNP have had a stall on Newark market place now for about the past four Saturdays. On most of the occasions I've spotted them they've been pretty much left to their own devices and nobody appears to be stopping to talk to them. Apart from last Saturday where some old codger had stopped and I could hear him saying "The trouble with these European things is you don't know who you're voting for and you never see them after the election." This worries me, he's exactly the sort of person they'd target. The BNP reps probably tried to sell their party to him as one that puts Britain first and is looking to get out of the EU. They'd have got him, and, as it says in that article, all that's needed is a low turnout and for a few people to vote for them and they're in. When they get MEPs they're entitled to all sorts of subsidies and have to be taken seriously by the media.
I'm torn about the BNP. Obviously I find their views totally abhorrent, but, as a believer in free speech, I think they should be allowed their say, no matter how horrid I find it. And I think that you should always know your enemy.
And Newark's exactly the sort of town where they may get something of a sympathetic ear. There's a huge distribution centre here for Curry's and food factories that both employ a lot of migrant workers. Prime 'they're taking our jobs and driving down wages' territory. And you only need a few fuckwits to get these people elected. I mean, look at last time, they elected Robert Kilroy Silk around here...
Thanks to a heads-up by the mighty Woo, I've just been listening to this. It's a great listen, fucking hilarious in fact.
What I loved was his disdain for Long Eaton. All small East Midlands' towns must be like that, I know it's the same here. The way he says that nobody wants to do anything is spot-on. If I go out into town for a drink on a weekend you see the same faces that I saw when I first started going into town drinking in the late 80s.
And the whole "Luke 'Aines!? Oo the 'ell's ee when ee's at 'ome?" kind of attitude still exists too. I told my family members I was going to see The Mighty Boosh live and that was "The Mighty Boosh!? What the 'ell's that when it's at 'ome?"
And I've just had a woman on the phone who was looking for my business to service my car call me 'ducky' at the end of the conversation. "Thanks, ducky". Er, shouldn't that be "Thanks Mr Ambassador?" (Even though that isn't my real name, clearly, but you worked it out, right? I mean, you're not from Newark).
It makes my head want to crumple inwards like a slowly deflating balloon.
While browsing Statcounter just now I notice that someone's come to this blog by putting 'steve wright fat bastard' into Google. Which reminded me of this story I saw in the Mirror this week. Is that why his three hour daily twatcast is called The Big Show? I also notice that someone's come here by Googling 'play van halen on ukulele', which makes my heart sing. In other Statcounter news, I'm still getting the usual Diane Keen pervs desperate to see her knockers and some misguided fool who thinks that Kate Thornton's started advertising yoghurts.
I had a letter published in the local paper today. Yes, I knew it would happen sooner rather than later that I'd start writing letters to the paper. Mind you, having said that, I actually know someone who writes letters to TV listings magazines complaining about the amount of swearing on TV and the amount of violence in Eastenders, and they pay him to do it. Bah! Unfortunately, such is the crapness of the Newark Advertiser's website, they only put a selection of letters online, and mine didn't make the internet cut. It was in the paper under the heading 'No one knocks', so I'll leave it up to your imagination what it was about. They did seem fit to omit mine and put a letter in where some old fart, currently living in Spain, was reminiscing about Newark in the 60s and 70s.
Have a good weekend, and here's someone with too much time on their hands playing Van Halen's Eruption on the ukulele.
I see that Robert Kilroy-Silk is appearing in this year's I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here! Now, Mr Kilroy-Silk, as I'm sure you're aware, is an electedMEP. He's an MEP 'representing' the East Midlands i.e. where I live. He was elected in 2004 whilst a member of the UK Independence Party; a party who were supposed to be against Britain's membership of the EU and, as such, against any sort of involvement in British affairs by a parliament based in Belgium. Apparently they stood for election to the European parliament in order to destroy it from the inside. Well, these days Mr Kilroy-Silk turns up once a month to vote. If you don't turn up to vote, you don't get paid. So, as a public servant, claiming tax payers money, he turns up, votes and sods off again. That's really destroying the European parliament and sticking it to those on the Brussels gravy train, isn't it? Not. I wish he'd go to Brussels to sort out some kind of EU funding for the dualling of the A46 between Newark and the other side of Nottingham. Oh no, how silly of me , he's currently eating insects on a vacuous 'reality' show with a load of otherfuckwits.
While he was on the 2004 election campaign, Kilroy-Silk came to Newark to drum up support. I happened to be in town that day myself, a Tuesday afternoon, as I recall. I saw him and his hanger-on (a man so useless that he hadn't bothered to do any research as to when the market days in the town were, so his man would have found a huge increase in the amount of flesh he could have pressed. Which, in turn, Lead to Kilroy-Silk booming at him "Where are all the people!?"), they approached me, Kilroy-Silk with his arm outstretched ready to shake my hand. I carried on walking towards him, and didn't make any eye contact with him at all. Still with his arm outstretched he said to me "May I introduce myself...", now, I'm not usually rude, but I knew who the twat was and just carried on walking. I was quite proud of myself that day. I hope I never clap eyes on the oily, tanned, xenophobic, controlling turd again.
I wrote last week about my affection for Brady Haran, the Australian 'video journalist' off of my local news programme. After doing a bit of digging, I can show you my favourite film of his, shown earlier this year and made in a village close to Newark. It's about a chap called Dennis and his History of Farming display in his back garden. It breaks my heart to watch it. Yes, this thing he's done isn't the best exhibit in the world, but who cares? It's his handiwork, which he's put years into and nobody, he thinks, wants to go and see it. Although to be fair, listening to him speak, his family have hardly encouraged him. What I love is the way he's used any old models he can get his hands on. He Man is seen messing around in some straw, one of his Masters of the Universe chums sits astride a tractor while a Pippa doll is completely out of scale on a giant horse riding through a farmyard. What I also love is the way he blows his nose whilst speaking to camera. And he pronounces the word 'make' quite correctly as 'meck'. I feel like crying at the end when we see Dennis walking off into the distance. You see, underneath this cold, hard exterior beats a heart of marshmallow. I really hope we don't see this on Russell Brand's Ponderland.
I just thought I'd have my two pence worth on this Jonathan Ross/Russell Brand thing. Isn't it funny how 'over 10,000 people have now complained'? They mean 10,000 people have now complained since reading about it in the Mail on Sunday and have probably never even heard the broadcast. Indeed, by the time they'd have read about it, this week's broadcast would have superseded last week's on podcast or online.
Not that I'm condoning what they did. If I went to work, rang people and left smutty remarks on their answerphone, I'd be severely reprimanded, and quite rightly so. I think these two should be made an example of. Are they both such powerful figures within the BBC that they'll be allowed to get away with this? I mean, who's going to miss Brand's Saturday night show? His audience should be out of a Saturday night anyway. There was some Brand fan bleating on the radio this afternoon that 'controlling comedy is wrong and if you don't like Brand then don't listen to him'. Yeah, well, making salacious remarks about someone's granddaughter when they haven't got a chance to answer back is also wrong. Tosser.
Anyway, in further news, I've started walking to work. I've put my bike away as I don't like riding in the dark. Walking's murder on my ankles. What I have noticed whilst walking is that one of my neighbours is the proud owner of an Aston Martin, and that one of the houses en route has changed its name from the original Buena Vista (it's etched on the brick gate posts) to Orchard House; Buena Vista is Spanish for 'pleasant view' apparently. They probably changed its name because the view now is of the factory where I work, a factory which makes cream cakes for every supermarket going, the largest distribution centre in the UK and the largest sugar processing works in Western Europe. Not a very 'buena' view these days, clearly.
I hate my local newspaper, but sometimes they put a story in there that makes me spit crisps all down my front. Take this week, there was a story under the heading 'Outraged by alfresco sex'. The gist of it was that a married couple, walking through the park near the castle, at 9.50pm on a Saturday night were 'horrified' at the sight of a couple having a bonk. Apparently the married couple thought there were two people fighting, so decided to go for a closer look. The couple who were at it then finished, had a break on a bench (no doubt with a shared gasper and some 'how was it for you?' banter) and then had sex again, all under the watchful gaze of our concerned Newarkers. Apparently one of the accused had drunk seven pints, but 'wasn't drunk'. I'm surprised after that much ale he was still fit for purpose. This is the killer bit for me, from Miss Sarah Neale, one of the couple's defending solicitors: 'Miss Neale questioned whether the couple who saw them were truly outraged "the couple who saw them were so outraged that they stayed watching and following them for half an hour" she said'. Clearly a solicitor with a sense of humour. The case was adjourned until October 13th.
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