Some people say there’s no better way to spend a cold, wet Tuesday evening in December than sitting in a cold, wet West Stand at Brisbane Road watching Orient fail to beat Luton Town. Some people are idiots. But this is East London, so… come on you O’s. #leytonorient #lofc

Santa! Noooooo!!! You’re my besht mate… I bloody love you…

Ishh… issht beginning to look a lo… a lollike Chrisshmash… [Green Lanes, Saturday, somewhere south of Manor House station…]

Some photos from yesterday’s walk from Aldgate to Enfield via Green Lanes: repurposed clocktower from the Eastern Fever Hospital in Hoxton Community Garden; Wood Green (for those of us of a certain age who grew up listening to Capital Radio, this will always be Wood Green Shopping City); [1/2]

Having spent last Saturday walking an ancient route (Roman Ermine Street) from the City to Enfield, we thought this week we'd walk from the City to Enfield along the old drovers' road from Hertfordshire, aka Green Lanes. First, though, breakfast at Copper Coffee in Aldgate (view from the top floor).

Our walk up Ermine Street on Saturday took us through Tottenham and past this great glassy lump. Orient are currently planning a new stadium too, and the fact that we’ve just engaged the very same architects that Spurs used has got a lot of people extremely excited indeed; [1/2]

Having already hoofed it like a Roman down Stane Street and Watling Street, we spent yesterday walking out of London along another ancient trackway, Ermine Street, following it from Bishopsgate to Edmonton; we’d hoped to reach the M25 and Waltham Cross, [1/2]

Bit late with this, but… Colours Yet To Be Named, the gorgeous new album by Lightning In A Twilight Hour, is a bewitchingly beautiful thing, all hazily layered atmospherics that dissolve into crystalline, heart-melting tunes with words that haunt and linger. It's as good as [1/2]

Pigeons in puddles! (One for old readers of Smoke: a London Peculiar…) #WalworthRoad #ElephantAndCastle #Camberwell

A 3-hour walk through East London in the rain, then 2 hours in a freezing West Stand seeing Orient fail to score in the rain - small pleasures Premier League fans will never understand. Don't think much of the Blackpool team bus, by the way. This is East London, come on you O's. #leytonorient #lofc

Uh oh, looks like Boris has whipped his little chisel out again... #bermondsey #bermondseystreet

Watering the pitch? Today??? This is East London. Come on you O's.

Juxtapositions. (Hackney Wick, en route to Brisbane Road.)

Also this, outside St George’s in Beckenham, a church which, coincidentally, has possibly the UK’s oldest lychgate. I did say “coincidentally”. And also “possibly”. (It’s 13th century.) So, if you want to feel Bowie’s magic as the cool cats of Beckenham once felt it, head to St George’s on the 21st.

Three more photos from our trip deep into the London Borough of Bromley, which is so proud of “former Beckenham resident and entertainer David Bowie” that it’s painted an Aladdin Sane lightning bolt on the pavement outside Zizzi. #Beckenham #DavidBowie

On Saturday, apropos of nothing in particular, we walked down into Bowie Country. So, this is the site of the house on Southend Road, Beckenham, in which David lived from October ’69 to May ’73 and passed the time writing The Man Who Sold The World, Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane. [1/5]

Highlights from the Catenary Wires on Saturday were the gorgeous Things I Love, with its namecheck for The Fall and @heavenlyamelia.bsky.social’s vocal as beautifully, perfectly fragile and tremulous as I remember from that first gig at the Arnolfini back in 2014, and Mirrorball, surely the [1/4]

A photo of @brianbilston.bsky.social from last night’s fantastic gig with the Catenary Wires. Songs being poems and poems being songs and guitars being utter guitars – what more could you want? Tickets still available for the rest of the tour. @heavenlyamelia.bsky.social @skepwax.bsky.social [1/2]

I was always so impressed that @clarewadd.bsky.social did her first fanzine when she was just 16; when I was 16, I was still hiding away in my bedroom, listening to John Peel with a tape recorder jammed up against the transistor radio… it hadn’t occurred to me I could actually be a part of all this…

This morning I discovered – somewhat belatedly, on account of not being very cool these days – that there’s a band in Shenzhen called Atta Girl, named after the Heavenly classic; and it got me wondering whether any of the members of Heavenly had ever gone on to do anything else interesting, [1/3]

The lights went out when I was halfway down the cereal aisle in Morrisons this afternoon. I look on this as an omen. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime. [1/2]

Whenever we wanted to annoy the bands, which was surprisingly often, we used to claim that the best thing on Sarah Records was Saropoly, the board game we made to celebrate our fiftieth release. And now this gorgeous [1/4]

Back in 1986, when I was working on the fourth issue of my old music fanzine, @leytonorientear.com published its first. I managed to do one more. The Orientear have done another 299. I'm not sure what this proves. But it seems good reason for a beer. As does Orient 1 Lincoln 0. So, two beers...

I’m a bit late with this, given we got back over a month ago, but – a small piece of travel advice. If you’re going to Lyon from Paris, Trenitalia’s Frecciarossa is about half the price of the French TGV. If you choose the Silenzio (“Quiet”) coach instead of the Allegro (“Party!”), though, you [1/2]

More old Sarah people with new things, but this one’s literary: the internet diaries of @dickon-edwards.bsky.social collected, edited and – archly raising an eyebrow at Beardsley* – wrapped in yellow paper and inky black woodcuts to produce, you might smile knowingly and say, a yellow book. [1/4]

Something else we passed en route to the O’s last week: the old gateway to Northumberland House – a Jacobean palace that stood on the Strand till 1874 (see Pic 2) – now relocated to Bromley-by-Bow health centre. Don’t say I never tell you anything interesting. (Photo by me, painting by Canaletto.)

... and five days before Heavenly's London gig, Blueboy are doing this. It’s almost like the last thirty years never happened. Um – they *did* happen, didn’t they? Absolutely all of them? In order? Because, if they didn’t, I’ve got some photos that really will need a bit of explaining... #Blueboy

Even though I grew up two stops down the Central Line from Stratford, it wasn’t somewhere I ever went: other than the scruffy old shopping centre where my mum worked, there really was nothing there, nothing at all. It’s all big and shiny now, with faux-rustic signposts and coffee shops, [1/2]

A slow response to such exciting news from @skepwax.bsky.social – I’ve been trying to find the right words. Corrugated, morose, gherkin, squeamish and balustrade, for example, are not the right words. But they’ll have to do, or else you might miss out on something I know will be totally corrugated.

I keep meaning to raise a glass to the Leyton Engineer, our usual spot for Saturday-evening post-match sorrow-drowning, for having a Harry Beck Booth, complete with historic maps (Leyton-born Beck invented the Tube map). My old Smoke co-conspirator @juderogers.bsky.social would approve, I’m sure…

It's 5pm and the wyverns are dancing. Orient 4 Doncaster Rovers 0. #leytonorient #lofc

Soon, that stand over there will be full of happy, excited folk from Doncaster, happy and excited that they're not spending the afternoon in Doncaster. This is East London. Come on you O's. I need to buy some bricks. #leytonorient #lofc

Well, this always was a poem I’d find myself whistling while doing the washing up, so no surprise that @skepwax.bsky.social have made it a single; and if the train in the video looks familiar, check out Heavenly’s I Fell In Love Last Night on YouTube – there’s thought goes into this stuff, you know.

When we started Sarah back in 1987, our aims were simple: release 100 fabulous pop records and bring about socialist and feminist revolution. The idea of being international superstar DJs never crossed our minds. But with the rest now sorted, here’s Clare on the wheels of steel in Osaka last Monday.

Great news about the new stadium, but why all the guff about it “redefining sport in East London”? Orient have been doing that ever since I’ve been watching them – it’s why you’ll find me in the West Stand at 5pm every other Saturday shaking my head and muttering “I don’t know what that was…” #LOFC

Don’t know about you, but I tend to find major river confluences a bit of a disappointment. In Lyon, though, we got to see the Rhône meet the Saône and, well, chapeau, les fleuves! Rhône on left, Saône on right. Not sure about the train tracks, but I think that motorbike’s got serious SatNav issues.

Despite being of good Bethnal Green stock, I’d not come across the novel Bethnal Green till I saw it in that Mick Jones exhibition the other week. Going by the blurb, it's set in a post-war East End my parents would’ve known all too well in their courting days – it could almost be their story. [1/2]

Having accidentally acquired a groundhog from a bloke in a pub (look, I thought it was a big guinea pig, OK?), I seem to be permanently trapped in last Monday, forced to either listen to @brianbilston.bsky.social and The Catenary Wires in session on 6 Music over and over again [1/3]

Man sidles out of Mary's Cafe on Camberwell Road as we're passing at 9.30 this morning. "Want a few bits of salmon?" he mutters. Well, sir, no. I don't think I do. #Camberwell #Walworth

And the third Sarah-related release is… A Life In Numbers, the beautiful new album by Blueboy, with Gemma now on lyrics and on vocals that slip in the flicker of an eyelid from note-perfect confidence to something more vulnerable, fragile and raw, while Paul’s guitars [1/3]

I know it should be really easy, given what he went on to do, but for some reason I can never remember whether Robert Redford played the Sundance Kid or whether he played Butch Festival.

“Swallowing lies as history repeats. Not a single care for those they put at risk…” Songs with lyrics provoked by the state of the world always run the risk of being left to sound irrelevant or foolish by the time-lag between composition and release; sadly, pretty much the opposite is true in [1/3]

Stopped off in Mile End on our way to see the O’s on Saturday to visit the Rock & Roll Public Library, the personal pop culture archive of Mick Jones from the Clash, bits of which he occasionally lets the public have a nose round. Posters, fanzines, records, books, magazines, [1/2]

Not sure why but, no matter what the result, whenever I leave Brisbane Road at 5pm I always have an inexplicable urge to buy some bricks. Bit wet today. #leytonorient #lofc

Back in 1989, having a band itching to do an album was a tad awkward for a 7”-only label like Sarah. But losing that band to someone else would’ve been unbearable, so… we compromised: we’d do our first LP, just as long as it didn’t measure more than 10” across or contain more than 8 songs. [1/4]

Last Friday, the Great Orrery of Indiepop produced one of its more unlikely syzygies when no less than THREE records with Sarah connections ( #TheFieldMice, #TheOrchids, #Blueboy ) were released simultaneously (and quite coincidentally). [1/3]

Well, that didn’t go well. Hopefully no Northampton fans will be joining us in the pub. Though, as Chas & Dave once almost sang… I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care if they come round here, I’ve got my beer and my @leytonorientear.bsky.social, got it all sorted out in the Engineer. #lofc

Not sure there’s much I can add to what Clare says, but… if you’ll forgive a little self-indulgence, here are the ads we took out in NME and Melody Maker at the time. The paper’s yellowed a bit over the years, but… the words still seem to say what we meant them to say.

Just thinking again about this post from Sunday, I should probably make clear that, to the best of my knowledge, Elton John has never dug up a dead dog. Also, if he *were* ever inclined to do such a thing, I’m sure he wouldn’t do it in Pinner. Way too obvious.

Yes, download this for less than the price you could’ve refused to pay for a 12” single in 1987! Sound/visuals are stunning, by the way, so don’t let the thought of “live recordings” put you off – this is not Alive In The Living Room. Even though Phil from @thejunebrides.bsky.social was on that too.