Baby Belling

Yeah, no shit, I can write about anything!

I wonder if anybody under 30 knows what a Baby Belling is or was. (Can you still get one?)

Bedsits had Baby Bellings. What people forget about the Sixties is how miserably dull it was unless you lived near Carnaby Street. I mean, most of us had relatives who went on about the war and we dined at places where you got tinned soup and ice cream made from pork fat. If you wanted to be really groovy, you could dye your candlewick bedspread purple and put a  few posters up on the wall.

No, the Baby Belling is a sort of symbol, albeit an alternative symbol, of the 1960s and what it was like to live in them. Mostly it was a case of always having to borrow a shilling for the meter or sixpence to make a phone call. Does anybody remember Player's Number 10? They were worse than Player's Number Six and that is saying something. I used to save my change in order to buy ten Player's Number Ten cigarettes and they were terrible.

I used to make toast on an upturned two-bar electric fire.

Ah, the good old days.

******

At last the ill-fated video has emerged. It is not what we really wanted and it could have been a lot better, but at least it exists. I am talking about a promo video I backed and produced for an album called Earthrise, which, incidentally, I issued a while back. It's available on Amazon yada yada and the album itself is a very fine example of its kind. I really like it, which is why I poured money into getting it re-mastered, re-jigged and re-issued. It is why I lost all my profits on the video and it it still owes me money.

A word of warning. There is no money in music. You have to love it. Which I do.

Here's a link to the video if you are interested: http://youtu.be/Yy7Ej2Y93sE

Margaret Thatcher - a looking back.

An astonishing fact: 290 coal mines closed under Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson and 160 mines were closed under Margaret Thatcher.

Just one reality check of the many that we should consider when looking at the "spontaneous" outpouring of hate to Mrs T. It appears it is convenient for the Left to forget that the writing was on the wall for the coal mines long before Thatcher came along.

But it is the print unions that I should mention, having been at the hypocentre of their power. I was a Fleet Street hack and a floater - in and out of various places. Except that I was unusual. Me and Bill Bryson were very unusual in that neither of us belonged to the NUJ and both of us worked the Street of Shame. I wonder what happened to him?

The print union leaders were no better than Kim Jong-un. They were war mongers and tyrants. It was very difficult indeed to get work in or out of Fleet Street unless you were in the NUJ. In fact, we were a hated breed. I refused to join because they operated a closed shop. They did this in order to call all the shots. The stories of how this undermined the press are legion and how Rupert Murdoch broke them should be studied as a paradigm of the triumph of sense and good. Once, while I was working in a radio studio the engineer just walked out and went for a cigarette. The tape ran out and we were not allowed to touch anything due to the union stranglehold. He got away with what these days would rightly be a sackable offense. The printers used to sign in for their shift and then spend the day at one of the many all-day pubs. They would do about 2 hour's work in total and get paid fantastic sums. The paper I worked on had a sub-editor whose other job was at the Telegraph and a lay-out man whose other job was at the Guardian. In order to file stories, you had to put an NUJ sticker on the top of the copy in order to get it printed. We had a hooky roll of stickers and used them, but the fact remains; the unions had a stranglehold on the news industry. The only place you still see this is at the BBC where the single fact that they extort money on pain of prison in order to watch television allows the Corporation to remain in the hands of the Marxists.

I could go on, but you get the point.

Thatcher changed this. What she did was unmask the tyrants and show to all the world that they could be defeated. And they were.

Nobody wants to return to that world. In 1979 Britain was sick. The streets were covered in rotting rubbish and we were the poor man of Europe. Our cars fell to pieces and our service industries were execrable. Neither Neil Kinnock or Gordon Brown or Tony Blair have lifted the poor out of poverty, but they have allowed the rich to get richer. Tony Blair took us to war on a raft of lies. Brown sold our gold reserves at rock bottom rates. Both have tried to undermine our identity and our freedom.

I shall not rejoice when Brown or Blair die. I am afraid that in life, they did far more damage to the common wealth than Margaret Thatcher ever did.

Of course, the worst of it is that there has been nobody since who engaged the public, and let us face it, Thatcher was only there because a majority of the British People wanted her.

The Left are outraged, but it is good to note they they are actually a tiny but noisy minority. They want to remove the personal freedoms that Thatcher and Churchill bequeathed to us, and that is the tyranny we must at all costs resist.

Thatcher

Margaret Thatcher has died.  I am going to write a short piece because I met Margaret Thatcher around about 1978/79. I was nobody, just someone in a corridor in a radio station, but she stopped (much to the obvious annoyance of her flunkies) and talked to me. "What do you do?", she asked. And I told her. But she was not satisfied with my answer and virtually grilled me on the spot. She exuded kindness and interest in other people. I was not important, I was not going to enhance her career, I was just someone she wanted to know about and her curiosity was genuine and kind.

Obviously, two minutes with someone cannot tell you the whole truth about someone, but as you well know, it usually does.

Thatcher changed this country for the better. I know. I had to deal with the print unions on a daily basis and I knew that they were corrupt and vicious. In those days it was like Russia, only it was Fleet Street. Thatcher had pride in our country. She was principled. She was occasionally wrong about things.

But she was right about Europe and for that we must thank her. Prime Ministers of her stature come along once every 50 years if we are lucky. And boy, do we need some more luck.

May she not only rest in peace, but may her legacy be a revival of principled politics and honest dialogue with the public. Cameron, take note.

Where's the limo?

A while back I started, and had a bit of success with, a blog called Rock Legacy. It can still be accessed, but I wont be writing on it anytime soon. In fact, just checking it out I see that I have not added anything to it for over a year.

Rock Legacy was my attempt to do two things; bring new bands to the attention of the public and also to record for posterity, some of the lesser known facts about musicians and music.

Insofar as the brief was concerned, I succeeded. I managed to interview a lot of interesting people and get something different out of them. The reason I packed it in was purely down to the cost/benefit equation. It was costing me a lot in terms of time, dedication, application and money and what I actually got on the website represented about a tenth of the actual effort.

Strangely, I ended up spending hundreds of pounds chasing people who never appeared on it. I remember spending three days in the Midlands, cold and wet and miserable, trying to get something out of a burnt-out pro who'd been in two headline bands. In the end, and after hours of recording and indulgence, I realised I had nothing I could use. He, like many I have since met, was just too far down the line. So ok, the drugs were a thing of the past but they had left their mark and what this particular rocker had to say was beyond human understanding.

Another project ground to a halt after a similar large investment. Sadly the person concerned had domestic problems that simply would not stay in the background. Meetings happened, thousands of words were written, several band members were consulted and, in the end, it was clear that I was wasting my time. Not the least because one central band member decided that I should be kept at arm's length, while another, contacted me on a daily basis and was hugely helpful.

You might not be surprised to know that some of the people on Rock Legacy (the interviews are there for all to see) were really wonderful. In fact, all of the ones who made the final cut were wonderful. Mostly.

I suppose my reason for writing this piece is to try and explain to those who want to know, what it means to be a successful musician. All I can say, from my experience with those who have been there and done it, is that most of them are very fragile characters. Most of them have poor social skills and an extraordinary ability to drop you like a stone when you are no longer of use.

So, lastly I will drop a few names.

Of course, I cannot mention the baddies. Largely because, to be honest, I feel very sorry for them. I have had some (good and bad) stay at my house several times - they have done Madison Square Garden or Wembley or both. These days their drug stash usually consists of heart pills and anusol. There is one baddie I will mention and that is Rick Wakeman. Prima Donna isn't in it. Sufficient to say that he took exception to something that another interviewee on Rock Legacy said about something and sent me an email, IN RED CAPITALS to tell me what he thought of me and this other chap. I was really very sorry to find that he seems incapable of normal every day discourse. And very surprised too.

Biggest surprise? Without doubt, Roger Chapman, a man known not to suffer fools. He was lovely. Clem Cattini? He played on about 40 or so number one singles (he does not really remember them all) and is just one of the world's gentlemen. Cliff? The Shadows? Cliff Richard and the Shadows come from the days when you treated your fans and the public with respect. I shall never forget how polite and articulate they were when I interviewed them very many years ago.

I must mention Steve Hackett. Steve and his wife Jo were so very hospitable when they visited Edinburgh last year.

I must mention my friend, Dave Scott-Morgan and Richard Tandy. The three of us got together and produced a re-issue of their record, "Earthrise". It really does stand up as a very good record indeed and you can still get it on Amazon!!!!

Dave and Richard were of course, in the Electric Light Orchestra. I can't remember how I first got in touch with Dave, but it had something to do with his having a hit song that got covered by Sandra Ann Laur, called "Hiroshima".

There are one or two perks associated with having done the Rock Legacy project. I got to see some great acts, got some free CDs and met some interesting folks. I also got to hear a lot of demos that will never see the light of day.

There is one, from a former big-timer, which he sent to me just out of friendship. It is brilliant but he insists "it's only a demo". So far, he resists my pleas to put it out and so far, its just me and a few others who have heard it. Funnily enough, because it is worth its weight in gold, it is the thing I cherish the most out of the whole damn business.

Finally, here's a video. It's probably the reason I became interested in music in the first place and the reason that my knees turned to jelly when I met Hank and Bruce.

How do you solve a problem like Korea?

At the end of the Sci-Fi classic, "The Day the Earth Stood Still", Klaatu advises the assembled representatives of the world powers that unless they curb their intentions and cease to engage in an un-winnable arms race, the mighty robot, Gort, will destroy the Earth. The reason being that they were now a potential threat to the inhabitants of the other planets and they would not be allowed to become a viable one.

Great play was made in the movie of how difficult it would be to get these representatives together in the same room in order to listen to what Klaatu had to say.

At last, the Chinese and the Russians have tired of North Korea and the two countries are beginning to align themselves, obliquely, with the American position. Not publicly of course, but in private, diplomats on all sides are attempting to contain the bellicose and fantastical pronouncements of Kim Jong-un.

There is of course a fundamental problem. Kim Jon-un is mad and is surrounded by madmen. He has also followed in the footsteps of other great dictators such as Stalin and made very certain that there can be no powerful opposition and no internal threat to his life.

This was the mistake Hitler made; he later regretted not liquidating the upper echelons of the military, whose codes of chivalry and honour and their arcane and recondite rituals were virtually impervious to the crude mechanisms and mores of National Socialism.

Kim Jon-un, as far as we know, has an iron grip on the military, who if anything want war more than he does.

So what to do about him? Nobody is taking his threats for nuclear war as a joke. It does not matter how effective his arsenal is, it exists and can do damage, particularly to South Korea. Moreover, it could conceivably escalate into world war should the USA ignore the Russians and Chinese in order to retaliate on behalf of the South Koreans.

The stakes are high and all the more frightening because the man at the centre of it is a 30 year-old nut job with a certain desire to take the whole edifice down with him if it came to it.

We can only hope that the major world powers are, as I write, discussing every scenario and coming to some kind of agreement about containing the crisis.

The Mark of the Euro

Years ago, when still in my teens, a ragged-trousered prophet educated me on the meaning of The Book of Revelation. Looking wild, with his long hair and sagely stroking his beard, he confided that the number of the beast, that number without which you could not buy or sell, being 666, was in truth, alive in the guise of the European Economic Community. This he told me, forty years ago. He also told me that the Antichrist was to be revealed as the Pope. I was assured of this, and that the prophesies of this last book in the Bible would be fulfilled as sure as day follows night.

Well, the Pope, I fear, is far too busy defending the Catholic Church against the scourge of simple logic and the actions of certain priests and leaders whose sexual deviance have exploded onto the public arena. The many priests – for they are legion- have, like so many today, been exposed to the light due in great part to the technology revolution and the transmission of knowledge at the speed of light.

But back to that other prophecy, the one about the European Community. We are fast approaching the point in this technology revolution when it will become possible (or already is possible) to have our identity and bank details implanted under our skin. A simple device will scan the relevant part and deduct the cost of any transaction we should make. Some years ago a futurologist may have predicted that we might have a bar code tattoo, but even that may not be necessary. Still, it would have fitted well with my “mark of the beast” analogy.

The fact is, we do very little without the blessing of the EU, who decides that we shall be forever be bathed in dim energy-saving light. The same EU who determine the size and type of practically everything that is bought and sold.

This entity is not democratic. The main decisions are not made by democratically elected people. Instead the EU is run by a group of commissioners and other bureaucrats, who in turn are manipulated by a small number of world leaders. I have to ask myself, seriously, if they pose a threat to freedom and democracy. Is the EU the “beast”? Are we subservient to the point where we cannot go about our daily lives for fear of their awesome power?

In Cyprus, this week, I think we began to see the answer.

A moving experience

Not a pretty sight; a tired, defeated Weasel sitting on the floor in a heap. Weeping.
Moving? Yes. Into a better place, but not one that did not need a lot of pain, frustration and almost overwhelming fatigue. The hire van was wrong. Instead of a decent Long Wheel Base job, big enough to get the sofa in, we were allocated something that looked like a large hoover. No alternative available, and I had flown young weasel from London and hired a mate especially. At least the hire firm admitted their fault and rang around and got us a larger van. Of course, the son and his mate were full of glee but not much application or fortitude. (A late-nighter in Glasgow and about two hours' sleep put paid to any determined effort to load the furniture.) I had better explain; I had a double hernia op last year, then I had another double hernia op to put right the first one, so I am in no state to move oak furniture. BT were booked to activate a line and were given 4 weeks notice. They turned up and declared that they would have to dig up the road and contact Barak Obama and that this would take some time. I am writing this in the forlorn hope that we may one day have a phone and broadband, having suffered, to date, Dickensian levels of internet access and a fag-paper's width of band-with, courtesy of something called Wi-Fi with Fon. BT's customer services are wonderful. They do everything but actually influence the activity of the various engineers who have appeared, shaken their heads, sucked in some air and declared our junction box a disaster.

Dickensian levels of internet? "But there was no internet in Dickens' time" I hear you cry. Exactly.

I have consoled myself with a Hi-Fi upgrade and for those who care, I now have a pair of Monitor Audio Bronze BX2s and a Marantz CD6004 to go with my old NAD C350 Amp.

******

David Cameron. Eastleigh by-election.
As Max Hastings put it, the result

"should alarm everybody who cares about the future of Britain.
It suggests that unless Cameron can raise his game dramatically, he is heading for a place in history somewhere between John Major and Ethelred the Unready."

Cameron, for all the stupid flak he gets for going to a school near Slough, is still just another patrician smoothie arsehole who thinks he knows what is good for us. He just does not get it. He does not understand or respond to the real concerns of ordinary people.

However, the real danger is not Cameron. The real danger is the number of people who still voted Liberal Democrat in Eastleigh, despite the Lib Dems being a party which largely consists of lechers, perjurors, perverts and alcoholics. Somehow, we are being taken for a ride in this country and sadly, most of us are paying our penny and stepping on board the bus.

****

Getting to know the lie of the land.
I have a log man. A man who delivers logs. He is about two years older than me and looks, at a conservative estimate, about 20 years older than me. He's called Jimmy. I call him Wee Jimmy. Jimmy is wonderful. He is a mine of local knowledge, having lived in the locale all his life, apart from an aberrant few years spent in the next settlement, which did not agree with him. The trouble with Jimmy is that he does not understand my lack of local knowledge. When ever I ask him where someone or a place is, he gives very precise directions followed by the line, "You can't miss it". Well, I can and do. What Jimmy does not realise is that he has gone to school with Old Jock and that Old Jock has lived in the same house for 40 years and of course, Wee Jimmy has gone past that house, also for 40 years, and accordingly has not missed it since about 1962. We Jimmy has been waiting for a hear-lung transplant for several years, but still fells trees and delivers trucks of logs. You cannot buy true grit.

Today we walked for five miles along a disused railway track - a valley surrounded by sweeping mountains and burbling burns. It's a good walk, one which has a requisite pub at both ends, though you do have to have two cars in order to do it. And to think, people pay to go on holiday here!!!