I was 14 when Sweet Baby James came out, and 15 when I bought it. 1970-72 was always the very best period for music, in my opinion, and I can’t help but feel a bit sorry for friends I’ve met who weren’t around at that time – I just wished happy birthday to a friend who was only just born when the first Throwing Muses album came out!

I can pretty much plot out my life in terms of the music that was around at the time – some of which I liked and bought, some of which I disliked, most of which I ignored, and some of which I discovered and bought retrospectively. And there are almost always classic albums that last forever – like Sweet Baby James. And some songs that just have to go in my Desert Island Discs list (which runs to several hundred).

Anyway, that lyric came to mind just now in a rather poignant way. A few months ago a ‘gobby, giggly alto’ bounced into Tottenham Community Choir and brightened up rehearsals (not that they weren’t already bright) – and also my Twitter feed. And now she’s leaving us to go to Australia. And I just found out I won’t see her again. And that’s sad. Just thought I’d let you know.

So this post is for Sarah.

“Happy trails to you, till we meet again
Happy trails to you, keep smiling till then”
(Roy Rogers via Quicksilver Messenger Service)

Well, nowhere. It’s always been around, just not here. I decided to move the content of my other blogs ‘Choir Wars’, ‘Stroke My Little Pony’ and ‘My High Horse Approaches’ from hosted by WordPress to hosted by me. Gives me a bit more control. The posts previous to this one have all been imported from one of those three blogs.

My other blog, ‘Good Job I Kept My Turntable’, is still there and will remain so until and unless I can find a way to import all the posts, comments and images from Blogger (hosted by Google) – and anyway Blogger blogs are useful to have for SEO purposes.

But from now on this will be my main blog. It will contain stuff imported from the now-deleted ‘Choir Wars’, ‘Stroke My Little Pony’ and ‘My High Horse Approaches’ blogs but ‘*not* the posts from ‘Good Job I Kept My Turntable’.

See you soon.

If you’ve been following me for a while on Twitter or Facebook, or before that on MySpace and one of my other blogs, you’ll know that I have a number of high horses that I leap on from time to time. So expect more of the same here – rants about stupidity (religion, homeopathy, smoking), moans about bad spelling and grammar, raves about whatever great music happens to have shuffled onto my ipod recently, comments on my choir, and so on. No apologies for that, if you don’t want to read it then why the hell should you. But because I’ve been spilling out over the Internet for several years now, and it’s hardly a novelty to me, posts here may be infrequent and unpredictable – often just me killing time on my commute.
So on we go.
I’m on one of my Grateful Dead jags at the moment, and if you’re not familiar with their music then I’m sorry for you. I’m not going to reccommend any particular album that you should listen to as an introduction but if you think Sergeant Pepper was groundbreaking in 67, just check out Anthem Of The Sun from a year earlier.
One of the things about GD is that – a bit like Pink Floyd – the studio albums are only part of the story. They state the basic song structure and allow you to get familiar with the words or the themes but they really don’t show the potential of what can be done with them in a live environment. For that you need to be at the gigs (never saw GD live but saw Floyd several times in around 70-72) or to immerse yourself in the bootlegs. Not the commercially available ‘live’ albums like Ummagumma,

Victoria Line buggered so travelling in overground on District Line and main line. Enjoying the remastered Spunk Rock (Greasy Truckers) in the sunshine.
Much as I adored the ManBand, they really couldn’t have done it without the mighty Terry Williams on traps. And one can’t help but admire and respect Martin Bass for just sitting on the root in 4/4 for 20+ minutes. I’d have been all over the bloody place.

My god it’s a great day for the old ipod shuffle. Not content with Spunk Rock I’ve had Spirogyra ‘Western World’, David Crosby ‘Cowboy Movie’, The Church ‘Shadow Cabinet’, Tyrannosaurus Rex ‘A Daye Laye’, and more to come before I get to work.

Hmm. Was listening to Renaissance ‘Things I Don’t Understand’, pressed something by accident, suddenly it was Mud and Tiger Feet. Great, of course, just… Different.

Not a great deal to say today apart from that last night was a very sad occasion for because I turned off ‘Being Human’ halfway through. Couldn’t bear to watch it any more. I was glued to and gripped by the first three series, but this one is just crap. Well made crap, sure, but it’s turned into Doctor Who. I tried my best to enjoy the latest episode but the MySpace joke was the last straw and a bit of a desperate and feeble ploy. I just thought ah feck I can’t be bothered with this any more. I no longer care enough about the characters to be able to accept the basic premise.

Christ, I miss Mitchell. And George. And Nina. And Being Human.

This is my fifth or sixth blog on the web – my primary one was http://witchseason.blogspot.com – this is where I posted MP3 rips of various albums that I had on vinyl and that weren’t – as far as I knew – available for purchase as CD (or anything else). It went well for a while, had quite a few hits & lots of compliments and thanks, but then I ran out of albums to rip and also of time to update it. My kids got bigger & demanded more of my time, I changed jobs & had less access to the Web, all sorts of reasons why it’s now an ex-blog. I haven’t taken it down and occasionally post a sentence or two to let people know that I’m still alive and will – occasionally – respond to requests to repost something. But it is no longer my main blog.

So I had a couple of others (http://highestofhorses.blogspot.com/ and http://littlestofponies.blogspot.com/) that I created as repositories for some of my longer Twitter rants but they’ve also fallen into disuse – there’s a limit to how many times I can sound off about religion, homeopathy, smoking, organic hairdressing, bad spelling, and people who are paid to make announcements but can’t speak English.

Then there’s the Tottenham Community Choir blog (http://tottenhamcommunitychoir.blogspot.com) – but that’s not mine – and my own Choir blog where I lift the lid and blow the whistle, but nowhere for me to just splurge and outpour for the hell of it. Until now.

I’m implementing a WordPress blog for my work Web site (I’m the webmaster there) and so I need a place to experiment. Welcome to that place.

>Anybody with a couple of free hours this afternoon could do a lot worse than come to Gladesmore School, South Tottenham, between 4 and 6 for the TCC winter concert featuring Artcha, PanNation, and the Gladesmore choir. See http://www.tottenhamcommunitychoir.com/ for full details

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>Blatant plug for Tottenham Community Choir. We have a few nice gigs lined up over Xmas and New year, check out http://www.tottenhamcommunitychoir.com for further details.