Added: since writing and publishing this my perspective has shifted somewhat. Stay tuned for further thoughts 🙂
Rush is a band that has never done much for me. I recognise the quality of the musicianship but the music itself has never grabbed me. I have several of their CDs, the ones the hardcore fans talk about, that I bought cheap some years ago and every so often I put one on to see if I like Rush yet and the answer is always no.
I mention this because Rush are making waves with a reunion tour with Anika Nilles taking the drum seat left by the death of Neil Peart in 2020. Despite my general feelings towards Rush, I enjoyed the first appearance of the ‘new’ Rush (which includes Loren Gold on additional keyboards) at the Canadian Juno Awards (embedded below) and have been dipping into fan footage of the first shows of the tour.
The musicianship is evident as is the fun and joy on stage. Anika is a force of nature and made the vacant chair her own on the first night of the tour proper; judging by the big cheesy grins on the faces of Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee they know it too. A lot of the footage has been of them playing Tom Sawyer which, although this is a cliché, is one of the few of their songs I like – musically at least, I have no idea what is going on in the lyric. I’ve also embedded the performance of the song from night 3 of the tour and it is evident at the very end just how much fun they’re having; Lifeson’s face (around 5’16”) in particular is a picture of happiness.
Anyway, two things have come out of this. The first is that I checked out the prices of their Glasgow dates next March thinking it might be nice to tick them off the list of bands I’ve seen. I looked at the numbers then put my credit card away again. The second is that I had another listen to one of their popular albums: I was part way through track two when I turned it off. Still no.
Added: since writing and publishing this my perspective has shifted somewhat. Stay tuned for further thoughts 🙂
I intended to have a dry-ish January, not out of any fashionable health concerns but because of very real health concerns and an attempt to be as healthy as possible when the radiotherapy starts next week. And I have – mostly – stuck to my intent until the last couple of days.
On Sunday I was at True and Bold, a tribute night for Dick Gaughan, a grand show with far too many highlights to list. I met up with some old online friends beforehand and beers were had. Prior to that I’d wandered along Argyle Street to Glasgow Cross and noticed an intriguing 12-string guitar in the window. The shop was closed and unlit so I couldn’t see detail, I just lodged it in my memory.
The day after the show I did something I haven’t done for a while; an inner voice said the time was right: I took my Martin 000-15 guitar out of it’s case and, despite protesting fingertips, reminded myself that I can still play a little and that the muscle memory is there.
Then yesterday I spent the afternoon with an old friend. Once again, beer was implicated. Brian and I have several things in common, including encounters with oncologists. Something that is heavily promoted in cancer care is meeting others in the same situation and talking with them; Maggie’s and Macmillan do good work around this. It is fair to say, though, that it is better when you’re talking with a friend and you can mix the serious stuff in with a right good laugh around common memories and interests – and we certainly had a right good laugh while also talking about diagnoses and dark nights of the soul, conversation that felt right though might have sounded irreverent to any civilian listening in. I’m happy to insist that, as the cliche has it, laughter is the best medicine.
Another thing we have in common is guitars. Brian has a more accomplished semi-pro background than me but we have similar interests. One thing led to another and we’re giving serious thought to working up a set and trying a secret gig at an open-mic night at a convenient spot, possibly in Dundee. I’ve been thinking about potential songs all day; one or two of them would benefit from a 12-string guitar …
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Three videos: Dick Gaughan and his long-time set opener; Gaughan again with 5-Hand Reel, the first I ever heard him, and Simon and Garfunkle.
Friday night was Nearly Dan at the Liquid Room. They were great last year, off the chart this year, delivering a joyous show from start to finish. I ended up with a crocked back from dad dancing and a hoarse voice from singing. Roll on their next visit.
Last night was East Kilbride for an old friend’s 65th, another good night with some people I hadn’t met with for a very long time, remembering things I’d forgotten. Photographs and memories, as they say.
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As you know, I don’t watch much TV, but the return of Andor (Disney) for its second and final season is a must-watch. The Star Wars universe is full of possibilities, some of which are better realised than others. Andor is at the complex, grown-up end of the spectrum: there are no prominent Sith or Jedi or even, so far at least, Force users, but there is plenty of moral ambiguity in both Empire and Rebellion.
I noted previously that one of George Lucas’s achievements in Star Wars (1977/8) was to gull a generation of Americans into supporting the Vietcong in their uprising against the evil Empire. Andor casts a more focused eye on something similar, on oppression and radicalisation. It also picks up on the Canto-Bight sequence in The Last Jedi, looking at the role of the Empire’s elites in scenes reminiscent of The Godfather. The tone is reinforced in a conversation in episode 1.11 between Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker) and Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård) regarding a sacrificial gambit – allowing fellow rebels to go to their deaths because to do otherwise would alert Imperial intelligence to a mole.
‘For the greater good.’
‘Call it what you want.’
‘Let’s call it war.’
Dedra sees your childish euphemisms and judges you harshly
Star Wars, in fact.
One interesting thing arising from episode 2.03 is the reaction, from some quarters at least, to the attempted sexual assault on one of the core characters by a slimy Imperial functionary. There is a cadre of online commentators who find this ‘problematic,’ to the extent that they are unable to to utter the word ‘rape,’ preferring the TikTok-inspired substitution ‘grape,’ as if the correct word cannot be said or written in case the least mention invokes discomfort by some kind of sympathetic magic; this is infantilisation. No doubt some of them are the same people who objected to the excellent The Acolyte as too woke.
The thing is, although Andor was written and filmed some months ago, and certainly before the 2024 US election, it dramatises a familiar dynamic. The attempted sexual assault anticipates the man who, during that election, said of women, their bodies, our choice. I sometimes wonder if the commentators have any grasp of the ways in which fiction and art interact with the real world.
A solo trip into town last night to the Liquid Room for The Orb and Ozric Tentacles. I’m not especially keen on the Liquid Room as a venue, but I found a spot in the middle of the ground floor and settled in. I’d seen the Ozrics before but not The Orb.
The Orb did their thing. A lot of happy people melted into the beats and enjoyed it a lot; I was not one of them. The Orb’s thing is not my thing – I prefer melody – but that’s OK. There was one really weird moment, though, when it felt like all of existence was reduced to my senses being pummelled by sound and light. It felt strange and somehow important and not, as you might expect, disorientating; it was nice to have that weird sense of being even if my overwhelming feeling during most of their set was please make it stop!
I escaped to the upstairs level where the sound wasn’t so intense and was amused to see the sound man ignoring what was happening and checking his phone messages. Quite a few people were obviously only there for the Orb because they left before the Ozrics came on. Their loss.
Ozric Tentacles bill themselves as Europe’s premier psychedelic trance band and that is as accurate as it can be. Last time I saw them they were on a double bill with Gong and their music swam in the same pond as Gong; this time, with a slightly different line up and Saskia more prominent, they came on like the unholy lovechild of Gong and the Chemical Brothers. It occurred to me quite early on in their set that they were doing everything that the Orb did but with actual musical instruments, played by people. Dear reader, I have to report that your Cosmic Surfer dad danced a lot.
I had another of those moments during the Ozric’s set, and I promise that I had only had one beer with my supper. This time it was longer-lasting and more affirming, with a greater sense of what Jerry Garcia called the form beyond chaos. It pointed toward something other that I thought I understood at the time but didn’t note down and have now, 12 hours later, quite forgotten. Maybe it will come back to me, maybe it won’t; maybe the memory of the meditative moment happening is sufficient of itself.
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Different drummer and bass player, but here’s the Ozrics last year
Lindsay and I were at Barrowland this week to see Public Service Broadcasting on the opening night of their latest tour. This was the third time I’ve seen them at Barrowland (the sixth time I’ve seen them overall since 2017) and, in a sign of changing times, this show was sold out, and tickets went fast. It goes without saying that it was a great gig – I don’t recall ever seeing a bad one from them. The first time I saw them, playing The Race For Space in it’s entirety at the Usher Hall as part of the Edinburgh Science Festival, was excellent and they manage to get better with every tour. They spent an hour and forty-five minutes on a selection from across their history, all played with skill, confidence and energy, and bolstered by a ‘lively’ crowd.
The inestimable Peter Ross, author of the excellent Steeple Chasing and A Tomb with a View amongst many other things (and a fellow devotee of Half Man Half Biscuit) was there too: his Guardian review is here:
I’ve embedded the video for Night Mail, which Peter mentions, at the foot of this post. It’s one of PSB’s earliest recordings and remains a setlist staple. I’ve also embedded ‘Progress’, by turns ironic and optimistic (the voice over is from a film about progress in the UK mining industry.)
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I watched David Olusoga’s new A House Through Time: Two Cities At War, rapt. I saw the first episode on telly (for which I often need my hearing aids these days) and the other three episodes on iPlayer with noise-cancelling headphones. The hyperlink is to iPlayer which you might not be able to access outside of the UK. This series was narrowly focused on two apartment blocks, one in London the other in Berlin, and deftly used the central conceit of researching the lives of the residents to follow a broader social history, in this case roughly 1930 to 1945. In the best traditions of public service broadcasting, it informed, educated and entertained, and packed a powerful emotional punch, especially episode three. Highly recommended.
I’m still watching the latest from Marvel, Agatha All Along, and I’m still really not sure what to make of it. As I wrote last time, it has a distinctly American sensibility for, I now realise, American values of pantomime: the acting is not – and is not supposed to be – naturalistic. It also sits in a line of witchcraft narratives that owe a lot to the Brothers Grimm as filtered through Disney, and the Wicked Witch of the West of The Wizard of Oz – and not in an ironic or critical way. I think I’m enjoying it, but I’m not as enthusiastic as the mass of fans on social media.
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I’ve been spending time reading The Scotsman from 1933 and 1939 as background preparation for the next novel(s) and it has been fascinating. My initial aim was to get background colour and detail for the stories and I’m getting that, but I’m also struck by the differences between then and now. By that I do not just mean a world where the listings are for Radio not TV and international travel is by sea not air, I also mean the way in which the paper is written and edited. Grammar and syntax are spot on even if the vocabulary is now dated, but, more than that, there are no bylines and no opinion columnists: the focus is on the verities of who, what, when, where and how. The reporting of Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor in late January of 1933 is exemplary: concise, sharp, analytical and objective.
There is also that thing of watching events play out in real time when I know the outcome and it doesn’t end well (something that is strong in A House Through Time as well.)
Working through the papers (and I plan to read through 1936 too) is quite time consuming but worth it. As I mentioned last time, I intend also to work through the Edinburgh Evening News and Edinburgh Evening Dispatch for the same years for a different tone and a different assumed audience. It has since occurred to me that for many people of the time the primary news source would not have been the papers but Pathé newsreels in the cinema. happily, these have been digitised and are freely available online.
An odd thing has happened. I had a listen to Taylor Swift’s latest album, The Tortured Poets Department (Anthology edition). I thought it was OK and listened to it again. The second time through I enjoyed it. Can you guess where this is going? I’ve since bought Folklore and Evermore and rather like them. I am not a Swifty in the sense that I don’t connect with everything she does, but I do like some of it quite a lot.
Jeez, a Deadhead and Swifty-adjacent: who’da thunk it?
In other news, I haven’t run since February thanks to a knee problem that I’ve been resting. My gym membership starts up again in two weeks and I’ll get a clearer idea of how things, er, stand then. I think it’s a muscle problem rather than a knee problem as such, so aside from not running I’ve also been stretching quads a lot. It mainly impacts if I’m going down hill so my first tentative steps will be on a treadmill followed by a flat surface. I still have time to get back to 10K fitness by autumn, though maybe not as confidently as last year.
My time generally has been spent either revising the work in progress, a more substantial job than I expected, or digging into my family tree. On the latter, from a position of scepticism I’ve become more enthusiastic about the contribution of genealogy DNA as a means of confirming or refuting possible ancestral lines. Finding a DNA match with a sibling of a conjectured 5xgreat grandmother is, if not 100% cast-iron, about as good evidence as you can get that the conjecture is correct.
Meantime, I really like this, because I was a 17-year old boy once too.
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