Fergie Is Our King

A long emotional and tiring day yesterday. A journey down  and back from Old Trafford on trains full of Huddersfield fans. Hopes and dreams alive and bursting into bloom  3 times in a few short minutes. Nearly 15 minutes of nail biting tension and then a whistle and it was over. Posh are back in the Championship at the first time of asking.

This is not the time to ponder our fate next season.

We are Boro, we are Boro 

Long Weekend

Bank Holiday weekend another extra day off. Yayy!

Sunday is the Play Off Final- I am getting excited about this. Hope we win convincingly not by penalties or because Huddersfield are crap. Us fans will be outnumbered 2-1 by the look of things and win or lose I will be on the train home with a lot of Hudders fans -can't avoid it train goes through Huddersfield- so I will be generous in my assessment of them in victory or defeat!!!.

Up the Posh!!!

Posh We Are

An exciting time. I was at London Road to see Posh destroy MK Dons in theLeague One Play off Semi Final second leg last Thursday. The London Road end went mental and we were on the pitch at the final whistle. I was still buzzin when I got off the train at Central Station at 2:30 Friday morning.

This Sunday we are in the Final at Old Trafford ( shame its not Wembley- thank you UEFA). Me and my son will be there. Its 11 years since we saw Andy Clarke score the winner at Wembley.A couple of promotions and several relegations later we hope Craig Mackail Smith scores the winner at Old Trafford and we get back in the Championship. And this time we stay there.

United we all stand

Songs You Should Hear-Maid In Heaven

The return of my occasional series is highlighting a song that has been downloaded the most from my online selection. I haven’t ever posted it here so it must be downloads from people searching for it online. Hence my belief that this is a song that people really want to hear.

 

Its not particularly obscure, not particularly hard to get hold of in CD or vinyl form, but it is a particularly great song.

 

Be Bop Deluxe were my first big musical crush. I was obsessed by them between 1974 and the end of1976 and the punk storm that blew most things away (for a while at least) . I still have a fondness for Bill Nelson ( the inspiration force of the band) and check his website (here) out regularly and have been known to buy his increasingly  esoteric solo output . I have written about him before  so won’t repeat myself. But he is  a genius. He can make that guitar sing.

Maid In Heaven- Be Bop Deluxe

Cloud Cult

I have been meaning to write something about this band for ages. It is a band I discovered via a music Blog. I downloaded the track, loved it and promptly bought all their stuff available on their website. So there DMCA, music Blogs are promoting artists and bringing them to people’s attention not destroying them. Now I can’t claim to do this with every track I downloaded but if I really fall in love with the music I do buy the product. So for me, it’s all about the art. Blogs are just another way of getting your art seen and heard by more people.

Anyway to the band in question.Their music sums up all that is good about mixing classical instruments with guitar bass and drums. There is a space in the songs that to me reflects the open spaces of where the music is conceived. Craig Minowa's voice is not technically perfect (like another singer whose band I also love- Danny McNamara of Embrace) but it fits perfectly with the music.

It helps that heir website is slick and upto date and you can stream their songs on the player. It helps that they include lots of personal stuff that draws you into them and gives another dimension to their work. It helps that they are concerned about the environment and take steps to ensure they are as far as possible not polluting the world.

I hope to see them one day. I really like them. I think you will too.

 No one Said It Would Be Easy- Cloud Cult

R.I.P. Poly Styrene

 

I know I am a little late with this but nevertheless Poly Styrene’s death from cancer is still making me come to terms with both getting older and wondering who will be next to go  amongst people who have had at the very least a musical influence on me.

 

Poly’s band X Ray Spex were the first band I ever saw live. I was 16 years old and had discovered John Peel and punk. 

It was 1977 and half term. Me and my mate Michael decided to go for a day out in London . Reading NME on the way in we learned that X Ray Spex would be playing at The Marquee that night. I had heard  Peel play the  debut X Ray Spex 12”  ( Oh Bondage Up Yours! b/w I Am  A Cliché )in his shows several times so I knew what sort of music we could hear.

It was 75p admission and we figured if we skimped on paying the train and Tube fares and didn’t eat much we could afford it. So we rode the train the twenty or so miles into London dodging the  guard , walked confidently through the tube stations and found ourselves in Leicester Square and  as night fell made our way up Wardour Street . 

This was pre id , pre obsession with under age drinking days so we got in without as much as a second glance even despite not looking remotely like punks ( I was still wearing flares for god sake as my parents wouldn’t shell out for new jeans)

 

We bought ourselves a pint of something or other ( it was supposed to be beer but to this day I’m not so sure) and waited amazed that here we were in the famous venue waiting to see a real proper punk band. The club was half full of  punks, the sound system played all the new punk standards and then  X Ray Spex came on.

 

It wasn’t the best gig I've ever been to ,the band weren’t the most proficient  but the energy and chaos shown by both them and the audience had a profound effect on me and Mike. Poly’s voice was powerful and full of raw emotion and soared above the music effortlessly. They were short of material and played some songs twice. The whole set couldn’t have been more than half an hour long.

 

 I was hooked on  music and live music especially  from that point on.

 

We missed the last train home and I was grounded for a few months but it was worth it. It was also the first of many visits to The Marquee over the next two years. 

Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons in The Boy Looked At Johnny reckoned Poly was the future of music. For whatever reason she wasn't . That doesn't matter because  although I never met you Poly  you left a  impression on me that remains as clear  to me today as it was all that time ago. And Mike if you're reading this, I hope you remember that night as vividly as I do. 

The world is poorer without people like Poly.  RIP