Fantastic.

19th February 2025: I feel so stupid for never seeing this before...

His favoured method was to ask the politician to agree with an escalating series of propositions ('Would you agree that...?') before closing the trap: 'So if you accept A, B, and C, then surely you must accept that...?'' The closest he had to a catchphrase was, 'Ah, yes, but first let me bring you back to', employed when the interviewee tried to evade one of the systematic series of hooks. Heaven help any politician who lacked a comeback.

Interrogator-in-chief: farewell Brian Walden, father of political TV (Mark Lawson, the Independent, 13th May 2019)

I could think of so many shapeshifting fucks that I would love him to have skwewered, but I fear most of them would simply refuse the opportunity.

17th February 2025:

Damn...

RIP Jamie Muir, you fabulous talent. Larks' Tongues in Aspic is perhaps one of the most profound records I have ever heard and Jamie was a huge part of that. That he was only around for a short time in the band yet had such a massive effect on them speaks so much about how good he really was. And always will be.

Ambient Diaries volume IV is done. Now onto the other myriad things I have mapped out.

16th February 2025: Pretty sure that the Ambient Diaries volume IV is done, but I have to give it the requisite listen over for the Eyebrows as usual. The last track is something I really like:

	Ambient Diaries Volume IV 04
	An ambient track, part of a body of work recorded over the last five years.

Combing through the rest now. I'm surprised to find there is actually very little that needs to be acted upon, which is unusual, especially right after the tracks have been put together.

I've started watching The Outsider which has been touted as a sort of follow up to True Detective. It ain't. It's Stephen King. Sooner or later the mumbo-jumbo ghost shit creeps in and there are no rules and every opportunity for the deus to emerge ex machina again.

Nice title sequence though.

12th February 2025: This is absolutely essential viewing for everyone: Rick Beato in conversation with John Densmore and Robbie Krieger, better known as what is left of The Doors.

The interview is actually hilarious - the two of them carp at each other in a good-humoured way like an old married couple correcting each others' recollections of the events from 60 years ago. Beato is in his starry-eyed element, of course, and asks some genuinely fascinating but incredibly geeky questions about how their music was recorded, what kit they used, and so on. Also some genuine insight into the inner workings of the band and the dynamics within, which seem to centre on their legendary front man's inability to turn down any form of alcohol offered to him, something that really seemed to fracture the band more than anything else.

Something I noticed: there is a strong similarity to the other interview that Beato did with Brian May, in that every time the late and legendary singer's name is mentioned there is a real air of expectation around what was about to come next from someone who knew them better than most people. At least here we are spared the 'he's not really dead' claptrap that was sadly hawked about by the other band member at times, and which was never helpful.

It was also refreshing to see how the interview did not subtract from the fact that some of the best songs the band had were not written at all by Morrison, but by Krieger. In fact, it was also clear that anything that Morrison did 'write' was really just a lyric to which he applied a tune to remember the words. For a non-playin musician, that's quite an incredible gift, especially when you consider just how splendid some of those melodies were, like this one:

A friend's brother once told me that he couldn't think of a single bad tune by this band. I scorned this opinion (thinking mostly about the weaknesses of The Soft Parade) but then had to concede that I couldn't think of an actually bad one either. Like all bands they had moments that were better than others, but unlike some of them they never actually dipped into self-parody or mediocrity.

I am revisiting Arcana as a project (and maybe even as a concept), I've rattled off an EP which I am brooding over and have come up with a third project which only has a title and a very loose idea behind it as to what it will contain. As if that is not enough, I am also going to return to the Ambient Diaries series and come up with volume IV, something I jotted down some ideas about earlier today.

11th February 2025: I've always found this interesting. If you work out how many people are responsible for you being here, you can count back by generations. So if you're in your 20s right now, your two parents were resposible for you being here in 2000 or thereabouts. If you go back another 25 years (if we can assume that is the length of a generation, which is reasonable) you can then add in their parents too which brings the number up to six. Another generation back will add on their parents, which brings the total up to 14. And so it goes on and can be quite easily calculated.

The interesting thing is when you get to around the time of Queen Matilda of England, around 1125 or so. By that time you've gone back only 36 generations, but the number of people standing behind you in the genetic queue is 137438953470 which is higher than even the outside estimates provided by the Population Reference Bureau's idea of the total number of humans who have ever lived (which is 117 billion). So what has gone wrong here? Is our calculation wrong?

It's not. The number is quite correct and reveals the following:

1. We are all the product of a subtle form of incest.

2. If someone claims to be a direct descendent of (say) William The Conqueror, you can say back to them with absolutely no possibility of being wrong that yes, you are too.

3. That we are quite definitely all Jock Tamson's bairns.

And of course, it doesn't end there. If you go back far enough you'll find that the genetic contributions that led directly to your existence also involves non-human creatures. Go back a million and a few generations and you might find some real weird people in your family.

Great (^1.2 million) Uncle Dimetrodon Dickson

	Variations EP 02
	A twist on a theme, working in progress.

Finally found this for a non-joke price on eBay.

I cannot wait to get my hands on it. This is a band that I sort of wish I had been in, whilst at the same time realise that their two last outstanding albums were stitched together in a studio SMiLE-like from improvised scraps left by others. It's up there with The Aeroplane Over The Sea and Pet Sounds for me. It's that good.

6th February 2025: This one sure resonantes...

Final Working Definition: a bullshit job is a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.

That more or less sums up 80% of everything that I ever did in paid employment. Not that I didn't try, or that I was a slacker, or that I was even unenthusiastic. I just knew that everything I was doing made no difference to anyone and that if the job was not done then there would be barely any repercussions beyond some angst over paperwork, or corporate liability, or something or other. For the other 20% of the time I knew that what I was doing 'mattered' on a small individual basis, but even then I knew that I was part of an organisation that was pissing into the wind, that knew it was pissing into the wind, yet still thought what it was doing was important and valuable, mostly for a very few tiny successes that it may have had, most of which were really handed to them on a plate.

The only reason to commit to my Bullshit Job was to earn money to pay for the things that actually mattered to me, and to keep house and home with my partner and to maintain a style of living that suited us both. Other than that, I saw no reason in doing anything other than to maintain the wishes of the bosses I answered to whom I knew had no idea about anything and whose greatest contribution to anything was to make a decision about something put to them, something that was not only their primary function but which was also something that nearly all of them avoided doing because the nanosecond they did so it would be absolutely and completely apparent that they were bereft of ideas, leadership and any of the other myriad traits that they lied about having in order to Get On.

One thing that I was extremely conscious of was that my job did nothing to make anyone's life better (other than indirectly) and instead only served to make things a whole lot worse for a very small number indeed. In that, I really have little to offer other than a mild form of regret that I wish I had experienced when I was there. I just wish I had known the foresight to ask why I was doing what I was doing (not meaning 'the reward' but 'the action') and what made my life end up there in the end. Like a lot of working lives it was mostly shaped by a series of accidents and lucky interventions, rather than through any driving ambition of my own (something that I not only mistrust but also see as a character weakness i people who know that they are shoring up a dreadfully hollow existence otherwise) which I have always signally failed to demonstrate, and I am glad of that. Ambitious, competitive people are the sort that I instinctively shy away from for a number of reasons:

1. Their conversations are entirely defined by, limited to and encompassed within either their work, their lives, their problems or their personal victories. They are almost pathologically incapable of speaking in the abstract and have very few strong opinions outside their own narrow range of personal interests. The most I have ever got out of one such person was their love of TV and a myriad TV series that they claim to enjoy, something I unfortunately really don't.

2. Their competitive streak is not a streak, it's an emulsion. They cannot even play party games without getting over-excited about winning and downright sulky when they lose. I like to win these things as much as anyone, but the feeling of triumph might last about ten seconds after which I switch over to something else. I don't dwell on the outcome and - worse - do not conduct myself during the process as though my soul depended upon the way things pan out.

3. They have a great memory for their few victories in life, and a great deal of amnesia for the many defeats. We all have the latter. Deal with it and move on. One of the worst phrases was 'it was a learning experience', which is only valid if the learning actually happened and made you a better person.

4. They are also usually perfectly capable of embellishing their own sense of worth and importance to society to an astounding degree. Which brings me back to the subject of Bullshit Jobs.

6th February 2025: Compositions still come over very slowly. As usual, some are inspired by Sounds or presets which sound great in isolation (or at one tempo) but when piled into a DAW and blended with other sounds can appear a bit meh. Onward with the struggle.

5th February 2025:

3rd February 2025: Keen readers of this journal - there must be one of you out there somewhere - will no doubt remember that I have a copy of The Magnetic Fields signed by both the coauthor Philippe Soupault but also the translator, the poet David Gascoyne. I knew little about Gascoyne other than he was a bit of an underachiever. Only today I turned up the following in a book regarding people who may have once been considered for the role of Poet Laureate:

David Gascoyne (1916-2001) was an English surrealist poet, and friend of Salvador Dali and Max Ernst. In 1969, he became convinced of an imminent apocalypse, which led him to head for Buckingham Palace early in the morning of 29 May, in order to tell the Queen of the plot for world domination by the Scientologists. Outside the Palace gates he was apprehended. 'I immediately found myself in conflict with the earthly powers in the person of a young guardsman.' After a brief struggle, he was placed in a cell, before being driven to the Horton Psychiatric Hospital in Epsom.

Bizarre.

The next one up will be a four track EP called Arcana which will have some banging party music on it.

1st February 2025: Uh oh...

31st January 2025: Flux released after a few last minute cleanups and one almighty howler being found.

30th January 2025: Flux might be over finally. Just got to square it all up and add the eyebrows and see what I have. It's taken a lot longer than some of the others, but not for an additional detail or because I was actually taking my time over this one. It was because I genuinely ran out of steam on this one and had so little to present that I was recording and rejected at a rate I have never really done before. Am I getting worse or simply more hypercritical?

	Flux 08
	Bent instruments, endless delays, incoherence with moments of coherence.

25th January 2025: An excellent story:

Lady Gladwyn could not have been aware of an unfortunate incident a few days before. On the morning of a lunch in Rome held in the Princess's [Margaret's] honour, the ten-year-old daughter of a senior British diplomat had been taught to say grace. But when the big moment came, she grew tongue-tied. While the Princess and everyone waited expectantly, the little girl whispered to her mother that she had forgotten what to say.

'You remember, darling,' replied her mother encouragingly. 'Just repeat what Daddy and I said before lunch.'

'Oh God, why do we have to have this difficult woman to lunch,' piped up the little girl.

Work still slogging away on Flux. I think this may be the first time I have suffered a serious form of block, in that I have started and restarted both tracks six and seven four times each. Like a lot of people, I tend to relisten to stuff I have just done and become hypercritical about it. This may be the first time that it's a case of me finding no redeeming features in so much of it. Seven was finished last night in a draft form. I have an idea for eight now, and that will then be enough.

Another excellent snippet:

* Of all the adjectives used to describe the Queen Mother, 'radiant' is surely the most frequent. During her lifetime it almost became part of her title, like Screamin' Jay Hawkins or Shakin' Stevens. Radiant this, radiant that: she might have popped out of the womb radiant, and continued radiating morning, noon and night. As time went on, it became hard to imagine her ever unradiant, but then again, she never had to put out the bins, or book a ticket online, or trudge around a supermarket with a twelve-pack of toilet paper. She seems to have achieved her perpetual radiance by ring-fencing herself from anything unpleasant or - a favourite word, this - 'unhelpful'.

Both taken from Princess Ma'am: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret by Craig Brown. The woman sounds like an absolute nightmare and one of the best arguments for Republicanism I have ever encountered.

I actually had my own run-in with The Royal Dwarf (as many seemed to call her, particularly when she was older and 'sometimes difficult') which didn't involve actually meeting her face to face. In the 1980s I was dining in the city with my then wife and her parents in a Chinese restaurant which had a decent reputation and pedigree, but which was by no means particularly fancy. The evening was going pretty well when the (full) restaurant was joined by a couple of tall men in raincoats who sought out the manager and had a word with him in what looked like serious and urgent confidence. Health inspectors? Protection Racketeers? The manager's face changed from inscrutable to flustered almost immediately, whereupon the men left and the manager issued instructions to the waiting staff who scattered like disturbed mice, circulating the tables in equal haste to break the news to their paying customers that the restaurant had to be cleared immediately as they were 'booked for a private occasion that evening'. Naturally the attitude of the customers was understandably at odds with the urgency of the manager's request, especially when one of the waiting staff started handing out full bills for the items consumed. As far as I could see, they were in no mood for comping anything.

To be fair, some customers who were hardly into their meals were allowed to have their food boxed to take away, but that hardly helped. For ourselves it was less of an issue as we were onto the brandy, so leaving was not the issue as much as the absurd haste. When the bill came to the table my father-in-law asked what the rush was all about. The waiter replied he was sorry but 'Princess Maglit' was coming and the place 'needs to be empty of people'. ('Needs'?) I assumed that the men who had come in earlier were Royal Protection or something and that the RD had announced her intention to dine in one of her favourite places (as I later found out) but that the sight of subjects at their beef, green pepper and black bean sauce would not assist her delicate digestive sensibilities, so we were hoofed out onto the street.

I was disappointed not to see a fleet of black cars hauling up outside but did not stick around to witness it myself. Assuming it happened of course. The Royal Sponge-For-Brain may have changed her mind at the last minute and gone on elsewhere, as was part of her reputation. That may have explained the restaurant's eagerness to bill the poor sods who were already there: that might be the last money they were taking all night, such was the other part of her reputation.

Whatever the event, I don't think I returned to that place again. Inexplicably, it's still there, although after the head chef left I understand that it suffered a serious downturn in its reputation and is now just a tatty reminder of how it used to be.

Viva la Republic

22nd January 2025: I was literally just reading about Elliot Ingber yesterday and was amazed to find he was still alive. And today I find he is dead as of about 12 hours ago.

Godspeed, Winged Eel Fingerling

This is enlightened...

Portugal's policy rests on three pillars: one, that there's no such thing as a soft or hard drug, only healthy and unhealthy relationships with drugs; two, that an individual's unhealthy relationship with drugs often conceals frayed relationships with loved ones, with the world around them, and with themselves; and three, that the eradication of all drugs is an impossible goal.

That it even looks enlightened shows how withered things have become.

20th January 2025: Just skimming over a book retailer online has (accidentally) revealed to me that there must be upwards of 100 biographies of Jim Morrison.

How can you write so much about a single dullard? Do any of these books say anything 'new'? Who the hell is buying this?

Finally removed Threads, Facebook and Twatter from the column on the left of the page. I'll be replacing them in time with music sites, probably.

Also, trying not sound overly like Yoda, but I just sensed a huge shift in BlueSky yesterday, and not in any way for the better. Maybe I am used to everything on the Internet falling apart, but I think it's inevitable.

Good one from The Oatmeal:

19th January 2025: What the bent twats at Ali Express advertise:

What the bent twats at Ali Express actually sell it for:

Elvis on Ed Sullivan.

Stones in Gimme Shelter.

Beatles at Shea.

Pistols on Grundy.

And this. A thousand times, this. 'Thus confronted, rock and roll becomes irrelevant'

Dance, dance, dance to the radio.

Radio, live transmission

Radio, live transmission

Listen to the silence, let it ring on

Eyes, dark grey lenses frightened of the sun

We would have a fine time living in the night

Left to blind destruction, waiting for our sight

We would go on as though nothing was wrong

Hide from these days, we remained all alone

Staying in the same place, just staying out the time

Touching from a distance, further all the time

Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, to the radio

Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, to the radio

Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, to the radio

Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, to the radio

Well I could call out when the going gets tough

The things that we've learnt are no longer enough

No language, just sound, that's all we need know

To synchronize love to the beat of the show

And we could dance

Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, to the radio

Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, to the radio

Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, to the radio

Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, to the radio

And here is another style of poetry entirely...

17th January 2025: Following on from yesterday, which follows on from reading John French's book again...

Sorry to its many followers, but I have never managed to get into this one, really. It seems to suffer from a combination of near-wilful obscurity, a lack of any real tunes, and (above all else) some terrible, muddy production. In the case of the latter issue, that has of course always been a problem here. Safe as Milk sounds pleasingly lo-fi at times, but Strictly Personal is wrecked by phasing, Trout Mask Replica sounds better but was recorded on unfamiliar equipment that ran at very high tape speeds and hence gave a brittle edge to it, and then the next two were apparently recorded at the bottom of the LaBrea Tar Pits. It's a pity as a lot of the good ideas were either lost or modded into obscurity.

Clear Spot was far better recorded, but was the first step on the painful journey into the first two Virgin albums, which were abominations. Arguably, Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) was the first album that contained good material and which was well produced and recorded, and that was probably surpassed by the superior Doc at the Radar Station, which I think might actually be his best album of them all. (I will gloss over Ice Cream for Crow as it seems to be less of an album and more of a sweeping up of ideas and recordings that had been around for years)

The problem with this one, though, are the songs themselves. They are all pretty short, but they crowd around the centre stereo spot and are often obscured by Don's voice which - again - only has a vague sense of synchronisation with what else was going on and which occupies the same place. So what is missing?

When it came time for Don's vocal overdubs, Dick Kunc took every type of conceivable microphone and set it up in the studio in a big cluster. Don had been saying he wanted his voice recorded correctly 'for a change.' When Don asked what this was all about, Dick replied, 'Since I have no idea what kind of vocal sound you actually want, I am going to have you sing and I will give you samples of every conceivable sound you can achieve.' Then, you can decide which you like. I thought it was a great plan. Don did not seem to understand, and thought it was some kind of joke on him.

Dick appeared to be oblivious to this, but I could sense that Don was building more and more of a case against him. Finally, Kunc was fired, but in typical Don fashion. If I remember correctly, Artie and I were the ones who actually had to tell him. We both apologized and said that we had no idea what it was about. Dick was obviously hurt and shaken by the decision. I enjoyed having him at the house, and so did Helen. She said it was nice to be around someone like Dick, who got up whistling and read the paper in the morning.

I went to the Record Plant the next day to watch as Don overdubbed his voice. Unfortunately, he was never easy to work with in the studio. Phil Schier, however, was a more non-threatening type of guy and Don trusted him. However, it was apparent that Don was not prepared again and was winging it on several pieces. It wasn't a comfortable experience, and we left after a very short time.

'Beefheart - Through The Eyes of Magic', John French

Well, a second guitar for one thing. Harkleroad and Boston play a load of notes to compensate (or so it seems) but missing Jeff Cotton meant that a gap had to be filled, and whilst the addition of ex-Mothers man Art Tripp on marimba to play second 'guitar' is without doubt a USP of sorts, it doesn't have the same level of noise about it. The effect is to make the sound rather weedy by comparison, especially when the moments arrive that would have been a dual guitar break, only to feature a single guitar and some rather strange plink-plonking from the other side. It's an idea that might have stretched to a couple of songs, but Don was likely alienating so many people by that point that word had gotten around that joining his weird band would also mean joining his even weirder personality cult. (Elliot Ingber eventually doubled lots of Tripp's parts which actually solved on small problem and created a third: it beefed up the second sound, but introduced a level of simplicity, when a third instrument could have given a real sense of depth)

I don't imagine that the TV advert did them any favours down in Squaresville, USA either.

During this time, we rehearsed more often over at the Trout House. Elliot and Don also had brainstorming sessions in which basically Elliot gave Don ideas that he used almost verbatim. The most vivid memory I have is of Elliot describing in detail the promotional b&w film for Lick My Decals Off, Baby. This happened at Don's house while I was there.

'Beefheart - Through The Eyes of Magic', John French

Sure, take the ideas and suggestions made by others, but don't steal their credit...

Art Tripp: But the thing that never ceases to amaze me even to this day and I've told this a hundred times to other people, is I actually thought, and I think some of the others actually thought that this was a commercial effort. (laughter) I mean, Trout Mask was just too far out and now we're going to do Lick My Decals Off, Baby, which we expected to hear on AM radio. That to me just shows how goofy we all were.

John French: Well, I am going to say this and you may not believe me, but I never believed that stuff was going to be on AM radio.

AT: Yeah, well I didn't either, but going in to it...

'Beefheart - Through The Eyes of Magic', John French

A review at the time made the difference between this album and its predecessor around one being music and the other being songs. I'm not sure I can share that opinion. Trout sounds like it was recorded in white light in a studio, whereas Decals sounds like it was recorded under a big wet bridge.

Still really enjoying this record after all this time. I cannot really put my finger on the reason why, but it plays with a sort of confident swagger that a lot of their counterparts could only fake, and fairly badly at that.

Now working on an update for the Decent Sampler version of the Mellotron Mk V. One happy bit of news is that I have found a suitable font for the logo: Gacor Regular. Looks okay from here anyway.

16th January 2025: Love the music, but the guy was a fraud of the first water. His occasional forays into brilliance were at the hands of the bands he recruited. That was perhaps his greatest talent.

The Labour Party - as weak as slittery cat shit. The slightest voice of criticism from the Tories or Musk and their arses got into a collective collapse. What spineless nonentities we have to choose from.

Working on Flux now and then. There is some great stuff happening here...

	Flux 02
	Endless change. Eternal transformation. The slow movement between something and nothing and back again. Flux eternae.

12th January 2025: I don't know if I entirely agree with this, but it's a take on a new subject by someone who has been around for a while now:

So does the prospect of [AI] taking your music worry you at all?

Actually no, not at all. For very personal and complex reasons.

Can you summarise them?

Well, I'll try. I'm now at the stage in my life where I am essentially a hobbyist musician and am only making stuff up because I want to, rather than because I have to, to make a living. So if people want to help themselves to that material, then please feel free. If they want to go after the older stuff then they would have to contend with old school labels and publishers, so they are likely to transform it into something that is unrecognisable from the original anyway, so we will never notice it anyway.

Yes, but what about the original idea being yours? Does that not bother you that...?

Look, we have stood on the shoulders of others for centuries, maybe as long as art has been around. If we don't build on what has gone before then what we will have would be unrecognisable to the audience, so we steal and pinch and borrow an transform. It's been going on for years and years. Decades. Centuries.

But you don't claim it as being your own though, do you?

No, of course not. That's the Led Zeppelin problem. I assume they must have had some sort of meeting where they decided that no one had ever heard of Willie Dixon, or something. But at the same time you don't entirely confess either. You're just better off saying nothing at all. Plant and Page said nothing but their issue was that they didn't transform the material enough. Some of it sounds like a cover version, it's that close. So you are better off just saying nothing.

But would that not kill creativity?

Of course not. In the 70s home taping was going to kill music. Then it was file-sharing. Then it was AI. Music lived on past all of that stuff. I'll tell you what might kill music, though: streaming. Why bother to invest talent, money and effort into something that is going to pay you back a fraction of a cent for every play? Why bother? And that's not artists or the consumer stealing - that's the industry doing it to itself.

Why would they do that?

Oh that's easy. Thanks to the internet and cheap music production software you can make stuff up in your home and - assuming people want it - can sell it direct via Bandcamp or whoever. Who needs labels?

To fund stuff being made?

Through what? Advances you have to pay back to them? And what else? They insist on you handing over copyright so they can republish it. They insist on you financing everything out of your own sales so you can sell tee shirts at a stall, and people wonder why you have to charge $40 for a screen printed tee? These people are the worst kind of parasites you can imagine. What they do is easily replaced by another model which is now available to everyone [who] wants to use it. The thing is that they are now fully aware that this is the case, so they seem to be trying to scuttle the fleet before the torpedos get them.

Hasn't the death of the traditional record label been reported before, though? I seem to remember similar arguments back in the 1990s about this.

Sure. But now it's actually happening. For too long they convinced us that doing without them was unthinkable, and that people would have to go to them voluntarily to further their intentions. Now it has all changed.

So...how come they are all still in business?

Erm...

The bit about Led Zeppelin seems to have ben true, at least in terms of Whole Lotta Love, as Robert Plant explained:

Page's riff was Page's riff. It was there before anything else. I just thought, 'well, what am I going to sing?' That was it, a nick. Now happily paid for. At the time, there was a lot of conversation about what to do. It was decided that it was so far away in time and influence that... well, you only get caught when you're successful. That's the game.

At last. Immortalised in Private Eye:

From the Independent:

A singularly depressing read if ever there was one. I know that nothing about Beefheart is all it seems, but to learn just how bad it was through the words of someone who dwelt within the Trout House is just staggering. I still think that TMR is one of the best albums ever made, but that seems to be in spite of Don Van Vliet rather than as a consequence of him. Some of the reading is genuinely harrowing, and gives a phenomenal insight into life beyond the music and deeper into the heart of what living within a cult must really be like and why it's so hard for some people to see a way out of it.

"I do recall the most obvious case of Don being out-of-sync, as Frank mentioned above. It was on Pachuco Cadaver. Don wanted to overdub some horn on the end of the piece. So, he assembled his soprano and took it out into the studio. Not wearing earphones, he became totally out-of-sync with the track. He came back through the door and asked 'how was that?' I was surprised at his asking. My thought was that it sounded like crap. However, two things were going on in my mind. Perhaps he intentionally wanted it out-of-sync.

"It wasn't me playing, so who cares?"

'Beefheart - Through The Eyes of Magic', John French

11th January 2025: Although some see it as a hope for the future, I can see shades of Twitter already appearing quite strongly in Blue Sky. It's ridden by 'sexbots' already, and this morning I'm getting Ponzi scheme notifications to increase the value of some worthless crypto. So far it is missing the egregious ads and the right-wing bots, but so did Twitter once. I have also seen that "As of January 2025, the social media company Bluesky is valued at around $700 million. This valuation is the result of a new funding round led by Bain Capital Ventures." (As reported on Cosmico)

If it trades then shareholders will be gagging for someone like Musk to jump onto it. I think this might be humanity finding its low water level, somehow.

Imagine if Harry Nilsson hadn't sold 9 Curzon Place to Pete Townshend. Who would it have claimed next?

Weirdly, the Rolling Stone article of August 29, 1974 repeats the story told so often about Cass Elliot:

Death was ruled accidental at a coroner's hearing the next day; the postmortem showed that she died as a result of choking on a sandwich while in bed and from inhaling her own vomit. She had complained to friends recently of frequent vomiting, possibly the result of dieting.

It transpires that this was actually based on a lazy assessment of the doctor who attended the scene and who made the assessment based on there being ham opened in the apartment. So how did it get as far as a PM? An odd story to repeat.

Perhaps unsurprisingly the death of Keith Moon holds fewer surprises.

It was later revealed Moon had 26 undissolved Heminevrin tablets still in his stomach when he died.

Kinell

And this one is not so far from the truth...

10th January 2025: Just when you think the world could not get any more barking mad, this comes up:

Former Prime Minister Liz Truss has sent a legal "cease and desist" letter to Sir Keir Starmer demanding he stop saying she "crashed the economy".

Her lawyers argue the claim made repeatedly by Sir Keir is "false and defamatory", and harmed her politically in the run-up to losing her South West Norfolk seat in the general election.

Truss was the UK's shortest-serving PM, forced to resign after just 49 days in office when borrowing costs soared in the aftermath of her government's mini-budget.

The prime minister's spokesman suggested Truss should also write to "millions of people up and down the country" who, he said, had seen their mortgage bills pushed up by her economic policies.

Well Liz, if you didn't crash the economy, then who did? Your chancellor. Your choice. You were PM. You take responsibility for it. You endorsed it. And what an insult to the people of South West Norfolk. Are you saying they were blinded by what people were saying about her, and were incapable of making up their own minds as to whether you're a useless extrusion of used cat food, hastily stuffed into a twin set with a face drawn on it?

There. Done it. I look forward to being sued or something. Bring it on. Incidentally, that photograph of her above is so telling. Those eyes. Nothing functioning behind them except for ambition. No ability whatsoever to assess her own suitability for the job. Just like Rishi. Just like Boris. Just like Theresa. Just like David.

Should we drag this one out again? Why not? Here we have Crown Exhibit A where the defendant is cosplaying a Prime Minister. She knows what she wants. She even might know how to get it. But once she is there, she knows that we know she doesn't have the slightest idea about what the job entails. Just like Rishi. Just like Boris. Just like Theresa. Just like David.

We've now reached some sort of apex point, where it's just enough to want to be a Prime Minister and even play dressing up as one. The fact that you have no actual abilities is no hinderance to ambition. Just go for it. The country deserves you and you deserve it.

And if it all goes wrong? Then it has nothing to do with you.. You're the chosen one. Anointed.

I hope these people never get a sniff of any sort of power again. I wouldn't even have them as chair of the local neighbourhood watch. And let's not forget, Liz Truss is the same rampaging twat who wrote this:

2nd January 2025: Damned cold, damned wet and damned overcast which is frustrating when the Aurora Borealis is supposed to be at large this evening. Not only is it overcast, but everywhere is flooded with light pollution in the city, so even if you could see it you probably wouldn't...