My Old Friend the Blues.....

Have some Ella and Dinah. Sheer class.

25-O-Clock.....

Right, it's official: Spotify is my new best friend! What a marvellous little application and with more artists and music being added every day it can only get better. Should we be worried by that? Are we all getting sucked in until we hit critical mass and then the free, advertising included version becomes subscription only? Time will tell I guess but at the moment I'm going to fill my boots.

At the moment the advertising is pretty minimal and most of the time it's 'Roberta from Spotify' extolling the virtues of the subscription service. 23 minutes or so between adverts so I suppose another option would be to cram a few more in to keep the revenue stream healthy. At that point it might get a little annoying but let's face it it's no different than commercial radio or even the BBC with their constant advertisements for themselves. What does differentiate it from the radio though is that YOU pick the music whether it be revisiting old favourites or discovering the new. So even with a bit more advertising it's still preferable to the mindless radio pandering to vapid 'music-by-numbers', air-brushed pretty boys and girls who are more fixated on celebrity than creation.

Anyway, through Spotify I have finally caught up with the Dukes of Stratosfear - XTC's Andy Partridge, Dave Gregory and Colin Moulding's psychedelic side project that spawned two albums in the mid 80s. I was aware of it and briefly, long ago had a listen to a couple of tracks on a circular black plastic gizmo that you had to extract the sound from with a needle!! All I can say in my defence is that I was probably not susceptible to their type of music at that time - the mid 80s being all about drum machines, synthesisers and snoods. Pixie boots as well as I recall. Not that I would've been seen swanning around in such outlandish garb.. I'd already gone through that phase in the 70s.

So it was a pleasant surprise when one of their tracks turned up on a Spotify play list and I liked it so much I searched for the rest of their stuff and was just blown away by the attention to detail in their reinvention of late 60s psychedelic pop and rock. You can recognise the homage to the works of the Beatles, Pink Floyd, The Byrds, The Move, The Small Faces, The Who and others. An aural treat.

I have heard - but haven't verified it yet - that the Stones Roses requested producer John Leckie for desk duty on their debut as a result of the Dukes' two albums. Anybody know if that's true?

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I got given a ticket to see the Australian Pink Floyd play 'The Wall' in it's entirety at the MEN Arena on Wednesday. A pretty impressive show it was as well even though I'm not a great fan of The Wall and only a lukewarm Floydy. The musicianship was superb. Close your eyes and it could've been Floyd themselves. Open your eyes and there was quite a spectacle with back projections, lasers and inflatable pigs, schoolteachers and...er.....kangaroos. All in all a very impressive show that lasted not far off three hours after a forty minute encore that included Shine on you Crazy Diamond, Wish You Were Here and a couple of tracks from Dark Side.

It's not the real thing though is it? For all their artistry and witty musical and visual interventions (Waltzing Matilda creeping into the opening quiet bit, the hammer heads turning into kangaroos), there's an authenticity that eludes 'mere' copyists. I don't think it's an issue when you're watching a tribute band in a small club or pub somewhere, but when it's in an arena holding four to five thousand it's just unseemly. Like they've usurped the righful owners' kudos and limelight. Like they think they're the real thing.

All told I'm glad I went though. Would I go again? Nah.

Then again I wouldn't go to see the original Pink Floyd play The Wall in it's entirety either. Just Comfortably Numb please I can do without the rest of the juvenile lyrics and fairly one-dimensional music that accompanies it.

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Along with Spotify and iPlayer I've finally got Channel Four's on demand service up and running on my PC. So, first up was The Devil's Whore, a recently broadcast four parter following the eponymous heroine through the trials and tribulations of the English Civil War. I thought it did a good job of the politics of the period although I felt the main protagonists were fairly shallow characterisations. But with less than four hours to tell the story they probably did as much as they could. On the whole enjoyable.

What did cheer me was when I stumbled on the entire series of GBH sat in the Channel Four archives and available for free. I loved this when it was first released in the early nineties and I'm really looking forward to watching all seven 90-minute episodes again. I hope I'm not disappointed.