Starting in the late 1960s, John Peel introduced a generation of British radio listeners – including me – to wondrous and strange “underground” music: Captain Beefheart, the Incredible String Band, Country Joe and the Fish, and many, many more. (Who can forget the Purple Gang’s “Granny Takes A Trip”, an innocent little ditty whose title was guaranteed to get a rise out of BBC management?) He even started his own record label, Dandelion, to give a chance to college bands like Principal Edwards’ Magic Theatre. And the wonderful thing was that he wasn’t stuck in one era: he was always looking ahead, introducing listeners to the unexpected, for nearly 40 years.
On my last trip to England, I was driving down the M40 and tuned in to a talk radio show which seemed to defy all the rules for the genre. It juxtaposed topics in a head-spinning way: the silly, the sad, the ecstatic, and the profound. The host’s voice seemed familiar, but I was concentrating on my driving, and so…. And then at the end I learned that it was John Peel, in a non-musical role, and I realised why the program had challenged conventions. Because he always did. Thanks, John. And goodbye.
Update: Chris just posted a nice piece with a link to John Peel’s favourite song, Teenage Kicks by the Undertones.
Update: The radio show was Home Truths. You can listen to a tribute issue of this wonderful program at the BBC Radio 4 website.
Author: geoff
Two CDs of the week: "Blackfield" and "Speak"
It’s like waiting for a bus… you hang around for ages, and then along come several. Well, in this case the waiting has been for the mail from England, which finally delivered two very special CDs with one thing in common: Steven Wilson.
In the USA, Steven Wilson is best known as the leader of Porcupine Tree, the progressive and increasingly heavy rock band that began with some home produced tracks with a fictitious back-story and has now become a major force, with albums such as The Sky Moves Sideways, Signify and In Absentia. But in Europe, he was always better known for a variety of collaborations with different artists using different names. Which leads us to today’s crop.
First up is Blackfield, a new project by Steven and Aviv Geffen. The songs are simple, short, direct, and beautiful; the sound is that of Lightbulb Sun-era Porcupine Tree, with full, sensual arrangements. Deeply satisfying. The album is short – ten songs, just over 30 minutes – and there’s a bonus CD with two new tracks plus a live version of Cloudy Now and an MPEG video of the title track.
The second album is Speak by No-Man. Tim Bowness and Steven Wilson have been No-Man since the late 1980s, and this material first appeared on cassette back in 1989, long before they had a recording contract or a sense of where they were going! Although unmistakably by the same artists who gave us the rich soundscapes and tone poems of Flower Mouth and Returning Jesus, Speak is more eclectic, less structured. Fragments of melodies, rhythms, and “found sounds” of indefinite provenance sweep in and disappear as if dissipated by a sudden breeze, while Tim’s quietly insistent words pull you in. I have all of No-Man‘s later work; it’s good to be able to hear their roots.
Blackfield has been released in the USA, but No-Man recordings are hard to find. The best source is Burning Shed Records in England.
The empty accusation of the "L-word"
From the Des Moines Register: “Yes, Kerry is liberal. But what’s to fear from a liberal president? That he would run big deficits? That he would increase federal spending? That he would expand the power of the federal government over individuals’ lives? Nothing Kerry could do could top what President Bush has already done in those realms.”
(Via Andrew Sullivan.)
How not to break a record
Like Steve, I was (on balance) glad that Manchester United beat Arsenal. Even if it did end the Gunners’ record-breaking run, the Premiership is now really exciting. But not this way:
BBC SPORT | Football | Premiership | FA acts after Old Trafford battle: “Manchester United’s Ruud Van Nistelrooy has been charged with serious foul play by the Football Association for a tackle on Arsenal’s Ashley Cole.
And Gunners boss Arsene Wenger has been asked to explain his comments about Van Nistelrooy and referee Mike Riley.
Van Nistelrooy has been given until Tuesday to “deny or admit” the charge which will be heard on Thursday.”
Two great streaks – one continues, one ends
Here in New England, the Patriots stretched their streak to 21 by beating the NY Jets. And back home in old England, Manchester United finally ended Arsenal’s 49 game unbeaten run. All good things must come to an end….
Trying ecto again after trying MarsEdit
In general, ecto is much more WP-like than MarsEdit. It has convenient toolbar options for colouring text, building lists, and so forth. As in MarsEdit, the option to manage multiple blogs just clutters things up for the 90% of us who find that running one blog is hard enough work.
ecto has no support for images at all: you have to do it all by hand.
I take that back: there is an Import from iPhoto feature that works (that’s Al Stewart in concert in Boston), but this ignores the third party image link issue.
As usual, I want features from each of them.
Blog update: added security for comments
An administrative note: I’ve modified the comment forms for the blog to require you to enter a security code – a four digit number corresponding to a grey image. This is necessary to foil the increasingly aggressive blog spam bots – I receive literally dozens of attempted intrusions every day.
If anyone reading this blog is visually impaired and can’t cope with this system, please drop me an email.
Testing MarsEdit weblog editor
OK, I misread the info on NetNewsWire 2.0 and assumed that the blog editor was “broken” rather than “broken out”. So this is what it’s broken out into: MarsEdit.
The overall appearance of MarsEdit is nice. However it hasn’t imported my blog categories, and I’m not sure how to get them in. I’ll see what happens when I upload this.
Also the Format option only seems to offer None – will it convert line breaks to paragraphs, which is my preferred style? I like the option to use either style for italics – i or em – although I was surprised to find it in a submenu at the bottom of the HTML menu, rather than in Preferences.
Having the MarsEdit Add Link up in the HTML Tags menu really sucks – 90% of my blogs entries involve banging out a bunch of text with a few links in, and I’d like the Add Link to be on the toolbar. Also I’d like the Edit menu to support Paste and Paste as quotation, as in Mail.app.
The XML-RPC Console is a really useful idea. Of course you should never need to use it – except for the situation when nothing else will do….
Highlighting text and hitting cmd-B for bold or cmd-I for italics is nice – but why not cmd-U for underline?
[Updated] OK, that first post looked awful. But after I hit Refresh (how obvious is that?) I pulled in a bunch of recent posts, and it populated my Categories and allowed Convert Line Breaks. Hint: perhaps force a Refresh first time out? And who would know that to set the properties and defaults for a blog you had to double-click the blog in the Weblogs drawer with apparently no menu alternative?
[Updated] That fixed the paragraphs.
The blog entry editing window is a bit schizophrenic. If it really wants to be like mail or word processing, I want formatting items on the toolbar. And the section of the toolbar that includes the Weblog: menu and the Body|Extended… stuff is just clutter. I imagine if I had multiple blogs I could refresh the entries in one, double click a specific entry, select a different blog, and post it. Blog-to-blog cut’n’paste. Cute, but useless to all but 5% of us. An option to hide that stuff would be good, and would free up space for formatting options.
Let’s try inserting a picture. Again, that’s on the HTML menu rather than the toolbar. The New dialog is nice; the Previous one is odd, and didn’t seem to work – perhaps it only shows images that you’ve previously uploaded with MarsEdit. But neither of these lets me link to a third party image, as far as I can see.
[Updated] On the image question; it’s a shame to lose the cool MovableType feature of creating a thumbnail linked to a popup image.
Overall this feels nice – a bit smoother than Ecto. More expensive, of course.
Testing the Mac version of ecto
This is the Mac version of the ecto blog editor. It’s visually much nicer than the Windows version.
Strangely, even though I specified a default of “convert line breaks” during initial configuration, it seems to have been lost. Or at least the “Options” menu has it set wrong and greyed out. The “Preview” looks ok. We’ll see.
One more ecto test
I keep getting “The underlying connection closed” messages – odd. Also my modification to the previous entry didn’t look quite right, because (I guess) when you edit an entry ecto forgets my default formatting mode (convert line breaks).
Overall I think this will definitely be easier than hacking raw HTML, as I do now. The other candidate is the full version of NetNewsWire, but I may have complicated life for myself by testing their latest beta, in which the editor is apparently broken. And of course NetNewsWire is Mac only, which is OK in principle and awkward in practice.