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…is playing up again it’s no joke.
When she comes she moans another’s name,
But that’s the spirit of the age, (spirit of the age)
That’s the spirit of the age (spirit of the age)…”

Happy Winter Solstice for yesterday friends, pagans, hippies & Hawkfans. Getting to Stonehenge or Avebury for the A.M. didn’t happen but the weather was a bit murky anyway *shrugs*

However Hawkwind helped us celebrate in style

OK, so Big C was late out of work and that meant we got there 2 hours after the start of the show We missed the support, Spacehead, and the start of the Hawks show, coming in on “Out Here We Are” from the latest “Take Me to your Leader“ album. We grabbed a couple of cans from the bar before heading out into the crowd to go soak up the atmosphere Oh, and the usually brilliant psychedellic lightshow

Captain Brock was at his best again with great performances by the steadfast Davey & Chadwick, Jason Stuart on keyboards and classic Turner-esque noises from Jez Huggett and his enchanted Saxophone.

So we got an earful of new tracks like “To love a Machine” and “Greenback Massacre” and the recently rejuvenated, re-vamped & re-released Calvert classic “Spirit of the Age“ with a smattering of classics from their 36 year repertoire – “Psy Power” (Hawklords, right?), “Psychedellic Warlords”, “Love in Space”, “D-Rider”, “Hassan I Sabha (Assassins of Allah)” & “Brainstorm” from what I remember. Magic stuff.

And the dancers were back! Blacklight with fluorescent body paint, glowing appendages, dayglo androids and psychedellic nymph girls with giant butterfly wings blowing bubbles over the audience… that’s what I call entertainment

Next gig is the RoadBurn Festival in Holland, April 2006… anyone fancy a trip?

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Stocking Fillers? Sod that…

THESE are PROPER stocking fillers…

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Having peeled my slumbering form off the sofa at around 4:30am I retired to a proper bed and continued drifting through the wastelands of sleep.

At around 6 o’ clock one of my cats jumped on the bed and woke me up again.

Then at 6:03am there was a loud KABOOM, the catflap in the kitchen door swung open and shut… Was I dreaming? Was I half-imagining that? Was it the local military on exercise? Had their ammo dump gone up in a fireball? Was that an earth tremor?

I checked Google for news. Nothing. I fell into sleep again.

And now at just after 10am…

Massive explosions hit fuel depot

Where it states…

“Three large explosions have rocked a fuel depot near Hemel Hempstead in Hertfordshire shooting flames hundreds of feet into the sky.”

…and more poignantly…

“The first blast happened at 0603 GMT at the Buncefield fuel depot, close to junction 8 of the M1 motorway and was heard more than 100 miles away.”

That’ll be Farnborough then, we’re only 40 miles from Hemel Hempstead.

Good luck to everybody trying to breath up there, inhaling the fumes from 60 million gallons of fuel on fire…

Glad I filled up the car yesterday, I can just see the price of petrol going up a tad, so I must thank my lucky stars I *only* paid GBP50.54 for a tank of super (that’s USD88.70)

Must ring my mother now, she’s just 20 miles away from there. I wonder what flavour their air is…?

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In the last post we were talking about Neil from the Young Ones and I was inspired to go find “Neil’s Book of the Dead”, something I owned as a kid but somehow lost/had stolen as is the case with all cool things in a young person’s life, or did I just have a bunch of shifty friends?? (BTW that was a silent f )

So I looked for a cheap 2nd hand copy of this out-of-print tome and found one with somebody in the US. In the description was this odd little credit; “from the estate of the late Greg Shaw”

Intriguing but I think nothing of it. I order “Neil’s Book of the Dead”. It turns up. I’m so hippy

And there, inside the front cover, an envelope, pressed, at home between the dust cover and the folio page… An inked letter adressed to Greg Shaw, BOMP!, CA 91510 and a phone number for guest list/booking info, with a 25c US stamp and a Los Angeles postmark PM, 17 January 1990. Actually it’s not a letter, it’s a poster… Blackbird, Lingerie, January 19.

How very interesting…

So I go do some quick research and it only turns out that Greg Shaw is this very cool dude who set up the Bomp! record label, which released recordings by Devo, The Germs, Stiv Bators (of The Dead Boys), he founded the now-defunct “Mojo-Navigator Rock & Roll News” and “Phonograph Record” Magazines, wrote “The Doors on the Road”, was manager for the Flamin’ Groovies, used the term “Punk” to describe ’70s rock ‘n’ roll before what we now all know and love as “punk” became punk after which he then he called rock ‘n’ roll “garage”, coined the term “power pop”, set up the Voxx record label…

Unfortunately Greg Shaw died in October 2004, but you can read all about him here with a TON of info & links to follow if you’re so inclined.

I haven’t yet found out who/what Blackbird is yet though…

But man, that’s a nice and unexpected little piece of history here

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