Outstanding

I'm too busy to write today so in response to Lynn's frenzy of swimsuit photos I'll re-post this pic of Young Dive in what passed for Speedos in the early sixties.
Don't worry; there'll be no shots of Old Dive cozzied-up.

This brings back yet another memory of the late and sorely missed Humphrey Littleton and his wonderful deadpan innuendo whilst hosting Radio Four's "I'm Sorry, I Haven't Clue".
That week the show was coming from Brighton and good old Willie Rushton was a team captain.
Humph piped up with "As we're by the sea today, the teams have come dressed in rather fetching swimming costumes and I must say Willie's are particularly outstanding."
Hee hee.

Burnt Offerings

Ye Gods!
All it takes is one sunny weekend.

London in this morning's rush hour looked like there had been yet another American "friendly fire" incident (remember in the first Gulf War, where more British soldiers were killed by Americans than by Iraqis?); only this time our bungling Colonial cowboys had hit England with napalm and neutron bombs.
The buildings were still standing but the streets were full of horrific burns injuries.

Why, oh why do English women insist on rushing out into their gardens at the first sign of decent weather and laying there for hours on end like a million bloated hog roasts, sweating fat faster than a barbecued sausage?

And what imbecile craving makes them wear things with straps in all the wrong places so that they look like someone has scribbled white lines all over a beetroot?

And why the fuck do they then come to work on Monday with their fat, wobbly, crimson torsos packed into way-too-small, off-the-shoulder sun-frocks of a completely different shape than those they were wearing while they sunbathed so that the contrast between peeling, scorched flesh and flabby pink bits is there on sickening display?

Honestly, the streets this morning looked like a burns unit had been evacuated during a fancy dress ball.

Cover it up, you stupid trolls!
It looks so fucking ugly!

Whatever happened to that beautiful soft English Rose complexion?
Why the rush to look either radioactive orange with fake tan or seared beetroot red with real sunburn?

By the time you're my age you'll look ten years older than you should and your skin will be dried-out, wrinkled and cancerous.
And you'll deserve it, you stupid, stupid people.
Give me an English Rose any day.
Sigh …

Birds Having Sex

What a gay weekend of posts this has turned out to be.
Having hidden behind late winter for so long, spring has at last burst out of hiding and is currently going batshit in my garden.

Things are having sex everywhere.
Trees, flowers, birds, frogs, toads, hedgehogs, bats, a myriad of creepy-crawlies are all making babies like there's no tomorrow … and those are just in my garden. When we get to the fields down the road it is a veritable orgy.
Oh … all except me, that is. I've not managed to mate for millennia.
Hey ho.

With the windows open the dawn chorus woke me a little before four this morning. Having no traffic, aircraft or indeed any other noise out where I live, the dawn chorus can seem deafeningly loud, though utterly beautiful. I lay there for a couple of hours listening to see who woke up first (the blackbirds) and waiting for the family of missel thrushes nesting in my garage to let rip.
Blackbirds, starlings, wrens, robins, missel and song thrushes, various warblers and finches and sparrows and wagtails and goodness knows what else were all screaming "FUCK OFF! THIS IS MY TERRITORY!" at the tops of their lungs.
If only we could say it so nicely.

Anyhoo …
Here are the white lilac and clematis Montana just outside my bathroom window.

I can't post smells, so you'll have to imagine what the air was like laying in the bath this morning with this stuff four feet away.
There's a dutch honeysuckle just beneath the lilac to add to the mix.
I'm anosmic, but even I could taste it in the air.

Wisteria Weekend

Here are some photos of the glorious and gnarly old standard wisterias in Saint Giles' Churchyard in Norwich.
I posted some last year but the weather was crap.
Today we have blue skies so here they are again.

All city centres should look this good.

No need for captions.

Let's Make A Racket - V

Improvisation and interplay.

Here's a silly little bit of fun.
We're back down at the blues club.
To recap:
Sunday Blues nights were where, each Sunday a band was put together who had never (other than Stevie and a very few regulars such as myself) played together before, to raise money for research into motor neurone disease (which Stevie is dying from).
The Rules of Sunday Blues were:
1 - Check your egos at the door (no showing off; just play what's right for the song);
2 - Nothing must be rehearsed; everything must be improvised on the fly.

We had a third rule for the vocalists: At least one song per evening must be made up on the spot. Newbies were allowed to sketch a few lines down during the break, but Steve and Luke and the regular vocalists loved to start playing a song with nothing in their heads and see what came out.
This is one of those.

I've included it here to highlight the interplay between the musicians.
The line up on that night (24th. June, 2001 according to the label) was:
Stevie: Bass and vocals;
Dave Sparrow: Drums;
Some Spanish session guy from Barcelona, whose name I never knew: Organ (He was on tour with someone like Julio Inglesias and Steve invited him in for the night. He brought a full-sized Hammond B3 with him and a Leslie cabinet the size of a carthorse. He played splendidly, as you'll hear).
Laurie A'Court: Tenor and alto saxophones;
Old Dive: Guitar.

What I love about playing with musicians of this calibre is that everybody is constantly listening to what the others are playing and adjusting their own playing to complement it.
This track actually requires repeated plays to hear what's going on underneath the soloing.
- You'll notice that (unlike most pub bands who simply turn up the soloist and carry on thrashing about behind them) when for instance the first organ solo comes in, the rest of the band drop the volume so that the nuances of the solo can be heard.
- You'll hear spontaneous changes in dynamics and volume as players react to one another.
- You'll hear Old Dive trying out a completely different rhythm guitar part in every verse to try to find one that fits in case this song becomes a keeper and gets played again on other nights.
- You'll hear Dave Sparrow play an immaculately loose little drum break; not the usual tub-thumping drum solo but a delicate skittering around the rhythm that suits the feel perfectly.
- You'll hear the usual appalling ending where Steve turns to say "this time" and then forgets to sing the last line.
- You'll hear an unlistenable cacophony at the start, as this song was started by Steve picking a key and laying down a bass groove for us all to join in. Actually the start of this one is missing because whoever was recording forgot to change the tape until we had started playing so it kinda fades in.
- You'll hear Old Dive winding Steve up by playing modally at the start. Steve cannot think outside the pentatonic (he thinks anything not strictly in the blues pentatonic mode is a "bum note") and Michael and myself would constantly goad him by playing in dorian or mixolydian, prompting him to turn and yell "Stop all that jazz bullshit, you bastards!" at which we would grin like guilty schoolboys and revert to pentatonic.

Sorry to be boring, but there's something about this one that keeps me coming back to it.
Quite apart from the fact that it gets a groove on, it is the live interplay and improvisation that hooks me. Dynamics between musicians cannot be rehearsed and this mess of a song is one of my favourites from all of the hundreds of hours of blues club recordings precisely because of that.

The song is called "Too Many Monkeys In My Tree", reflecting the fact that Steve had a lot going on in his personal life back then.
It is a bunch of utter tosh but I like it.
It is also the song that inspired the name of yet another of my sanity bands: The Groovy Fuckers (a throwaway line by Dave Sparrow off mic as the song finished: "Shit, we're a bunch of groovy fuckers." … Drummers, eh? Erudition personified).

This was also the very night when that disgusting "ponytail and stupid pointy sideburns" photo was taken, so I'll post it again here as it is the only shot I ever got of Laurie and myself playing.
Plus it's a nice shot of my guitar and it makes my cock look big.

Whatever Happened To …

Look out. Old Dive's feeling a bit maudlin about a bunch of has-beens.

Some of you may remember me talking about "sanity bands" in last Thursday's "Racket" post.
A "sanity band" is what musicians call those occasional bands of old friends you play in simply for pleasure between touring, recording and pro-band stuff (work).

The nice thing about Sanity Bands is that the band playing down at your local or at the village fête may well contain somebody whose records are nestled in your own collection, or at least the session players off their albums and tours.

And it's not just the background nobodies like Old Dive; Eric Clapton plays at birthday parties in his local village hall and will occasionally turn up at a blues pub, masquerading as "Dick And The Firemen".
Lots of famous folk have Sanity Bands.
Most use them for pre-tour try-outs in small clubs; REM used to play as the splendidly named "Bingo Handjob" before too many people found out; and metalheads Iron Maiden would play The Dial pub in Norwich (I helped out their soundman a few times there) or Steve Harris's bar in Santa Barbara do Neixe in Portugal as The Nodding Donkeys.

Quite a few famous folk stood in with us at the Sunday Blues club over the years and occasionally I'd bump into them at their own anonymous "sanity nights". I got a call a few years back asking me to stand in as lead guitarist for a heavy metal gig in the midlands and found myself playing with half of Whitesnake.
We were grinning away and thoroughly enjoying playing old crap like Boston's "More Than A Feeling" and Metallica's "Nothing Else Matters" and having a fine old time. And all for a local charity.
It is so nice to see musicians having fun outside of work.

But then we come to the odder side of the music industry; that sad, flaccid tide-wrack washed up on the beach marked "Whatever happened to …"

Odd things happen to once-famous people when they drop out of the charts.
Some go on to open supermarkets or spend a few years hosting bitter little local radio shows.
Some have the sense to realise it's all over and get a job and start over.
But some just put their heads down and keep on going, defying reality with gritted teeth, usually playing the holiday camp circuit to a roomful of grannies who remember their hits and a bunch of kids who think them so naff that they're almost cool again.
Often, original members have died or want to kill one another, which leaves the door open for a bit of work for the likes of me.

Old Dive has wound up playing some fucking odd gigs with the has-been set.
Sheesh!

Here's a very brief selection of the odder ones:

Remember Errol from Hot Chocolate? I played a bingo hall (!!!!!) with him once. And the cabaret act had us playing a fifteen minute jazzy vamp of "Come On Baby, Light My Fire" … said cabaret act being a … ahem … fire-eating stripper.

I remember a horrendous holiday camp gig with Freddie And The Dreamers. Gack! I shouldn't speak ill of the dead, but Freddie Garrity was a deeply unpleasant little shit whose idea of stagecraft seemed to revolve around swearing at the band and throwing the odd bottle.
Fortunately none of them came my way.

Some people are a lot nicer.
I played an Old Year's Night with The Bachelors once, and had a bloody marvellous time.
Our soundcheck consisted of Con and Dec (both virtuoso musicians, though you'd never know it from their hits) and ourselves thrashing joyfully through Stairway to Heaven and a bunch of REM numbers. Then we sat in the green room playing billiards, swapping Les Pauls and jamming for a few hours and reminiscing about "the old days".
I told them the first time I'd seen them play live was at Great Yarmouth ABC Theatre in 1964, when I was a nipper. They were on the same bill as The Inkspots (remember "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes? … No, you're all too young) and and their faces lit up. They remembered that tour as one of the high spots. And they had some great stories to tell about other famous folk of the time, some of which might leak out another day but most will go with me to my grave to give me something to giggle about when I'm dead.
That 1964 gig was a seminal moment for me. I'd just got my "Beatles" guitar and this was the first time I'd been to a real concert.
Bands were huge back then in a way that they can never be these days.

Probably the weirdest "has-been" gig I've ever played has to be a charity gig in a school hall with Ruby Murray (ask your grans … she was known as "The Irish Nightingale", though you probably know her as the Cockney Rhyming Slang for "curry" … Fancy a ruby?).
Phil was in the band then, too. Shit that was a long time ago.

Ruby - God bless her - turned up pissed as a fart at ten in the morning with her outrageously camp personal manager and proceeded to drink steadily all day, getting through at least two more bottles of scotch.
She was a trouper, however. Once on stage, she clung on to the microphone stand to keep herself upright and sang beautifully.
Afterwards, signing autographs, you'd have never guessed how totally shitfaced she was. It was only after the audience had gone home that she reverted to a drunken, Irish shouty-woman.
She must have been at least a hundred and thirty years old at that gig but she took a fancy to little Steve, our drummer, and snogged him horribly at every opportunity.

It's been an odd life …

Hey Ho

Hokay … Here's another snippet from the BBC news website to accompany the one about tea from a couple of days back.
The leaning minaret of WHAT?

A Wordy Fucker Writes

Hokay …
So I was chatting away yesterday and the subject of Scrabble came up.
Now you all know I'm a mild-mannered and uncompetitive sort of guy (alright … Fess up; who said "HA!"?), but put me in front of a Scrabble board and I morph into a complete and utter bastard; a twisted, cruel and evil torturer of the haplessly ill-educated.
I've even been known to cackle.

Being a black belt, fifth dan pedant, the complete Oxford English Dictionary is LAW!
We'll have none of that "Official Scrabble Words Dictionary" crap! That's just a gimmicky tie-in for ignorant twats with no vocabulary.
I am a Jedi master of OED arcania and in particular, that Scrabble-winning endgame coup-de-grace, the high-scoring two or three letter word that nobody's ever heard of.
I revel (indeed I wriggle and writhe with sensual glee) in such words as "fid" (a conical hardwood pin used by sailors to splice rope), "dzo" (a hybrid cattle from the Himalayas), "xi" (fourteenth letter of the Greek alphabet), "ewt" (a kind of newt; I kid you not), "ax" for axe, of course, "od" as Reichenbach's arbitrary name for a force, and many other splendid words guaranteed to cause a fight over the Scrabble board.
Complain that it's not in the so-called "official" non-dictionary and I'll beat you to a pulp with the OED and I'll be sure and use every single volume in amusingly painful ways.
And don't even THINK about using a non-word from that cretinous charlatan Noah Fucking Webster. Try "color" and I'll kill you without further warning.

So …
That leads me to what popped back into my mind yesterday from the dank cellars of what remains of my memory; a competitive game a couple of decades back.
This was a local BBC radio organised thing. The prize was a trip to Moscow, which - being of the Anarcho-Syndicalist persuasion I was eager to win.

I didn't win, by the way. Some bastard ringer from London beat me by two points and I had to go home with £250 to spend in Jarrolds, the local department store.

My little tale today comes from the semi-final, where I was paired with an evil and bitter, calculating hag in the disguise of a nice little old lady.
We were up against a time limit and getting toward the last play and it was neck and neck.
Playing with an audience and a panel of judges (A fester of judges? A midden of judges? What is the word?) seemed to bring out the nasty in people and this nice little old lady was being a real bitch.
We were desperately blocking any high-scoring squares and frustrating one another at every move; jaws set into grimaces and steely glares flashing murderous hate across the table.

Last move …
The hag-lady laid first and was suddenly twenty-nine points up.
BASTARD!
But in her greedy haste she had left an opening. Had she gone for a lesser score somewhere else on the board she may well have beaten me, but her overconfidence left a tantalising triple-word score square naked and vulnerable.
My only problem was that the perfect word was not … er … the perfect word to use in front of a little old lady and a family audience.

Fortunately I am an evil, twisted bastard with no morals …
I called a judge over and he concurred - somewhat blushingly - and I laid my tiles.
V - 4 (triple-word score)
U - 1
L - 1
V - 4 (double-letter score)
A - 1
on a triple word score to give me forty-five and the match!

Bwahahahahaaaaaaaaaa!

Her face was a picture.
I love being a bastard.
Hee hee hee hee hee.

Anyone for Scrabble?

I Miss The Cold War

I just found this on the BBC News website.

The headline runs:
"Nuclear Threat Sparked Tea Worry"

"The threat of a nuclear attack on the UK in the 1950s caused concern over the supply of tea, top-secret documents which have now been released reveal.

Government officials planning food supplies said the tea situation would be "very serious" after a nuclear war.

"It would be wrong to consider that even 1oz per head per week could be ensured," they stated.

The papers were released under the Freedom of Information Act by the National Archives at Kew.

The documents said a nuclear conflict would result in the loss of three-quarters of tea stocks."

I am so proud to be an Englishman.

Newbies might be tickled by my own experience of nuclear war.
Especially as it contains a photo of me in shorts.