26 March 2007

FIP

Nope, it's definitely gone now. Both on 98.5 and 91. The man has won. Oh well.

Mod off to download another two Bob Dylan shows.


Edit - oh, it's back. I'm going to stop going on about it now...

22 March 2007

Pulp Fiction

From a time when small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri, the cover art of Ron Turner. More unlikely spaceships and angry Venusians than you could possibly need of a day. Gratuitous breasts, 1950s chrome-finned optimism, giant hands crushing the Empire State Building, it's all there. Magnificent. And isn't Vargo Statten is a superb name for a scifi writer?

Mod out to dust down his kill-o-ray and replenish the duodenium cells on his space hopper. Or something.

21 March 2007

Dark Satanic Mills

I went to Yorkshire for the first time on the weekend. It weren't bad. Not as good as Sussex, or indeed Lancashire, but not bad. Nice hills and stuff. But I was mostly taken by the massive cooling towers right by the motorway going through Sheffield (above), about as dramatic a view as I've ever seen. They'd never allow that down south...

08 March 2007

Reep Feep

One of the best things about living in Brighton (apart from the sea, the pubs, the overpriced everything, the Londoners and so on) is FIP. A French radio station which for years we've been mysteriously able to pick up on normal radios on exactly 91 FM. It plays everything from Billie Holiday to Wu Tang, and being French, they very sensibly play all the tunes with the swearwords left in. So refreshing. No ads, and almost no talking (and what talking there is is in French. Parfait). About one tune in four is actually French, and a similar amount are jazz, especially when you really need it on a Sunday afternoon. It's the sound of Brighton, they even come over and DJ in pubs and people sit round drinking red wine congratulating themselves on their taste. More than they usually do, that is.

But now it's gone. 91 FM is a wasteland of static, and I fear that maybe one of the urban myths about it was true; that some kind soul was boosting the signal in his loft, and he's just been busted. We can still listen to it online, but it's not the same as having it on a transistor radio in the park.

RIP FIP. Mod out to buy half of Maplins and put this injustice right.

05 March 2007

Muse of the Month

Well, the last 3 months, really. Basquiat Scrawls' post on Joanna Newsom got me wondering why I haven't given her the time of day yet. The same friend that fixed her up pressed a copy of that album into my hand a while back, with what sound like the same fairly exacting listening instructions. And what have I done? Nothing. Because of Jenny Lewis. I only have time for one bewitching cute genius in my life, you see.

"Have mercy, have mercy, have mercy on me
Let's pretend that everybody here wants peace..."


04 March 2007

"And it's a Pink Moon..."


No-one tells me anything. I was in the pub earlier when I noticed some people in the street pointing at the sky. Either it was the start of a bohemian production of War of the Worlds, or someone was naked up a lamp post. So I went outside and lo, it was a lunar eclipse in progress. Why don't people tell me these things?

All over the North Lanes people were standing outside pubs talking and looking at the sky, some trying, and mostly failing, to explain it to each other. I shared a Bonnie Tyler joke with someone while drinking a Lagavulin. Had to be done.

I was going to name this post after the Pink Floyd album. But then I went and sat on a bench across the street and watched it turning pink, or perhaps orangey-red if you're going to be pedantic, and thought of Nick Drake. Pink Moon's going to get us all, people...

Mod out to check on the celestial alignments for Doomsday.

PS Ok, so I can't resist it. "There is no dark side of the moon, really. Matter of fact it's all dark".

02 March 2007

01 March 2007

Francis Wheen's Top 10 Delusions

Read this. He rants so much more elegantly than I ever could.