I hear the sirens calling
As the rain is gently falling

The grandaddy of British undersea power

Posted: 12/09/2011 | Author: | Filed under: History, Music | Tags: , , , , | 2 Comments

I’ve been reading how some of the lyrics from British Sea Power’s “Carrion” have been painted on the walls of a new wing of the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich in London. I like BSP, I like BSP’s lyrics, I like the National Martime Museum, and I like text as a graphic element, so this seems a perfectly splendid idea to me.

Thinking about this led me to thinking about John Philip Holland, the fella with the natty bowler and the magnificent walrus moustache pictured here. Holland was the brains behind Britain’s first submarine, the artfully named Holland 1, which was launched in great secrecy in 1901. The head of the Royal Navy at the time, Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson, was not impressed and described the boat as “underhand, unfair and damned un-English”, but it remained in service for several years. It was decommissioned in 1913 and sank while being towed to the scrapyard. I’ve been imagining the crew giving a rousing chorus of BSP’s “Carrion” – “Oh the heavy water, how it enfolds“ – as the submarine settled upon the seabed in a thick cloud of silt and shells and old fish bones. Never mind that there wasn’t actually anybody on board when it went down.

Holland 1 remained at the bottom of the English Channel until it was salvaged in the 1980s, since when it has been on display at the Royal Navy’s Submarine Museum in Gosport, Hampshire. Earlier this year, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers gave it the Engineering Heritage Award, which promotes artefacts and locations of engineering importance that have altered or enhanced the way we live. Previous winners include George Stephenson’s Locomotion Number 1, the Rolls Royce RB211 engine and the Thames Barrier.

Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson, incidentally, was born in my home town of Swaffham in Norfolk. That’s Nelson’s county, that is.

Featherhead

Posted: 07/09/2011 | Author: | Filed under: Magazines, Music | Tags: , | 2 Comments

I’m glad PJ Harvey has won this year’s Mercury Prize. I’ve not heard every album that was nominated, but I have heard “Let England Shake” and it’s a pretty special collection of songs. I’m not especially a fan of Polly Harvey as it goes, but my fellow Melody Maker writer and one-time flatmate Ngaire Ruth was one of her very earliest champions. She wrote the first review of PJ Harvey to appear in the national music press – a live review from the White Horse in London in 1991. Click on the clipping for a larger version if the text is too small for you to read.

Ngaire and I were living in Tufnel Park at the time of this review (a short distance from the White Horse and also a few minutes walk from venues like the Town & Country Club, the Bull & Gate and the Boston Arms) and I’ve a vague recollection of Polly popping round the flat once or twice. I seem to recall that she was quite friendly and very polite, but a little on the shy side. I don’t believe she ever wore a feathery headdress thing, though. I’m sure I would have remembered that.

Is this thing on?

Posted: 02/09/2011 | Author: | Filed under: Gibberish | 6 Comments

My fourth post in just over a week. I think this is going well.

I’m a wee bit disappointed that nobody has actually looked at my blog yet, though. And I do mean nobody. I’m wondering if there’s an on/off button somewhere that I don’t know about. Or maybe it’s because I haven’t actually told anyone the blog exists. I must do better on that front. I’m also worried about the fact that I’ve categorised two of my four posts to date as “gibberish”. For all you stats freaks out there, I do believe that’s 50 per cent.

Oh dear. This isn’t going well, is it?

Blog post three

Posted: 01/09/2011 | Author: | Filed under: Magazines, Pushstuff | Tags: , | 3 Comments

I’ve started this blog as a bolt-on to Pushstuff, an archive website of some of my old scribblings. Most of the Pushstuff stuff was originally written for Melody Maker, the UK weekly music paper, but my site also has a few bits written for other magazines and some book extracts. I have turned the “Pushstuff” in the first sentence above into a handy little link and you’ll find another link at the top of the list to the right, so you’ve no excuse for not heading over there straight away.

I guess I’ll be mainly posting about music on Pushblog, but I’ll no doubt drift off into other subjects every once in a while. I’m easily distracted. Don’t expect too many long essays, though. In fact, don’t expect any. I suspect most of my blog posts are going to be little more than extended photo captions and look-at-this-link things. I’m sure YouTube videos will be featuring quite heavily. All of which assumes I haven’t stopped posting altogether by this time next week. We’ll see.

Hello and, erm, hooray!

Posted: 27/08/2011 | Author: | Filed under: Music | Tags: | 1 Comment

Alice Cooper speaking to The Berkeley Barb in 1970: “The music that affected us was the saucy theme songs, like on ’77 Sunset Strip’ and ‘Bourbon Street Beat’. That was the kind of thing was going on when we were watching TV. Our conditioning has been television, our conditioning has been the space age, so that’s the kind of music we’re going to play. We’re not going to play Delta blues. I don’t care how many times his baby left him.”

Blog post one

Posted: 25/08/2011 | Author: | Filed under: Gibberish | Leave a comment

My first blog post, then. Goodness me. To be honest, I’m not sure I’m feeling up to it just at the moment. It’s a big responsibility, you know. So I think it might be best if I leave writing “Blog post one” until tomorrow. Or maybe the next day.

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