It’s 1974! Yes, Hawkwind had once produced the great space trilogy. But surely the less lofty mid-Seventies had brought the sonic cosmonauts crashing down to earth. In fact they adjusted to earthbound life with surprising ease. (1/2) www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BZx...

OK, Badenoch’s “you can’t quit, I fire you” moment has thrown me. I had assumed someone would depose her nearer to the election. What with her being i) useless, and ii) only ever party leader because James Cleverley can’t count. www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cr...

This is 1973! I doubt it was a conscious plan, but the New York Dolls came on like they wanted to out-Stones the Stones - more outrageous, more impertinent, more aggressively camp, more music by and for freaks, lowlifes and outsiders. www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTAv...

On Cheeto Mussolini's latest... i) Oil isn't gold any more. Things have changed since the Gulf War. Trying to colonise a country because it has oil reserves doesn't make the economic sense it did then. This isn't happening at the behest of the oil lobby. He's fighting yesterday's war.

Could anyone recommend any cheap or (preferably) free logo creation software? Something that actually lets you build from a design, rather than tweak existing templates a bit. I did use Inkscape, but... problems. Some say Affinity Designer, anyone got any experiences of that?

Make it viral.

Email: "New bill! Log onto our website to access." Me: "OK" Website: "We do not have all your contact details. First, please click here to complete them." Me: "OK" Website: "We do not have your phone number. Please provide." Me: "Err.. this is my phone bill."

It'll be this, in some form or other. Remember the monstrous debacle that was the invasion of Iraq? Because the people behind it were equal parts incompetent and arrogant? That plan was terrible. This time, its quite possible there isn't one at all.

Starting 2026 of with a Calendar playlist. One track for each month, plus all four seasons. Starting off with the Fall's measured tread through Winter, reaching the heights of Summer through Low, then Sandy Denny taking on the shortening days... www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

Where do I go to get my apology from all the folks on both sides and center of the political spectrum who insisted Trump wasn't a warmonger or imperialist and would be different to the Democrats and Republicans and (especially) neocons who came before him?

Any updates over Netanyahu? Someone who there actually is an international arrest warrant over. www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c5...

Dear 2026, Do you think we could have less fucking fascism please? We are asking nicely.

But... but I hadn't finished catching up with Dark Energy Season 1 yet. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

It’s 1973, the year of concept albums with airbrushed covers staged on ice. The next extended mellotron solo will take us up to 1975… Happily, on ‘Dark Side of the Moon’, Pink Floyd stuck to songs. And gave a dramatised setting to what Roger Waters described as “fundamental issues”...

Quite a lot can be explained by the plain fact that our leaders and their hangers on are *enraged* that they can’t send people to prison for doing things that aren’t illegal, and they see this as a very serious problem that needs to be resolved, urgently.

council

For my Xmas night viewing, I watched Enys Men followed by Whistle And I'll Come To You. Now feeling decidedly not normal.

My top five gigs of ’25 would be something like this… Heilung (Brixton Academy, as I still call it) The New Eves (Concorde 2) Gillian Welch (London Palladium) my bloody valentine (Wembley) The Sabres Of Paradise (Concorde 2)

Let's recap... A racist mob ran through our streets, intimidating minorities, smashing people's windows, setting light to libraries. After which it's all been about accommodating their "legitimate concerns". Then...

It’s still 1972! Hit that long, looming note and let it flow. Why do people pretend Captain Beefheart is hard to listen to? Do they just like being gatekeepers? Okay it helps to have heard the source materials - raw blues, crazy psychedelia and free jazz. 1/4 www.youtube.com/watch?v=XF17...

‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ - the proles are somewhere between the supporting characters in a film of the era (characterful but depthless) and full-on Hogarthian gin-swilling brutes. A bizarre shift for an author who’d written many books about living among the workers, like a class anthropologist.

Million Dead were not a likely contendor for a reunion tour. After all, their second (and last) album was largely about the band splitting up. But here they are, and playing pretty awesomely. (1/3) www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1od...

If the woke liberati are cancelling Christmas I wish they’d hurry up. I can’t avoid it much longer and there’s a very real danger that I may have to spend money on presents, see people I’d prefer to avoid, and participate in the entire ghastly rigmarole. Get on with it.

People who say the problem is too many human rights, they don’t tend to be the good guys... www.theguardian.com/law/2025/dec...

So I saw the Dirty Three for the first time in over twenty years. And apparently their first tour in ten. They promised at the end to be back in another ten. (Footage this time not from London...) www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Hti...

We need to stop thinking of them as master planners and expert schemers who'll stick us in some tech dystopia. It's going to be more like the banking crisis. Rich people will lose a packet due to their own stupidity & arrogance, and then insist poor people pay them back.

It’s 1972! Where Bowie came to embody the spirit of change, enhanced when his best-of albums were also titled ‘Changes’. Of course Dylan and the Beatles had already gone through massive shifts in style. But it was Bowie who made himself change's face. www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ook...

Saw SANAM for the second time last night, and still something splendid to behold. While they mix up Arabic music, left-field rock and electronica, it's the un-ostentatious way they do it, as if this the music it naturally occurs to them to play. www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4tA...

Increasingly tech is seeking to solve for the problem "humans exist," which is what you'd expect to see in a system where humans are seen as a cost and not a value.

Seeing the Sabres of Paradise live without Andrew Weatherall? I was dubious at first. But they turned out to be nothing less than awesome, with very much a live band sound. The legend continues. This clip is apparently from their first gig post-reformation... www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aRg...

It’s still 1971! And time for Psychedelic Funk. Funkadelic had a cheery irreverence for both social and musical convention, based in Funk but bending and blurring musical genres with abandon. George Clinton was like James Brown, Lee Perry and Frank Zappa all in one. www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVHr...

So I got to see the legendary my bloody valentine again, despite their appearances being rarer than Bridagoon. And still no-one sounds like them, despite decades of people trying. At this point I usually say 'not from Brighton'. This time, its not from London... www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kmo9...

It’s 1971! The crucial thing about Can, at a time when too many bands went flashy and fancy, they evoked the force of repetition. As bassist Holger Czukay put it, “when you repeat something you change it”. And all powered by Jaki Leibeziet’s awesome drumming! www.youtube.com/watch?v=-V0g...

Their argument is literally “won’t somebody please not think about the children.”

Anyone know of a good history of the early novel? Not just the social stuff, about greater literacy the rise of the printing press and all that? A formal history of how the novel developed structurally. When did it first break from the faux memoir thing, and so on? Any pointers gratefully received!

I’m not surprised they can be this cruel. I’m not surprised they can be this hypocritical. What surprises me is they still haven’t worked out that if they get in a Nigel Farage lookalike contest with Nigel Farage then Nigel Farage is going to win. I‘m surprised they’re this stupid.

It's still 1970! Most know this story… Earth, a fairly run-of-the-mill Blues Rock band, recorded a track which they found to have a new sound. And rename themselves Black Sabbath after it. It’s (or is pretty close to) the first Doom track... www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lVd...

TV conspiracies: we’ve hacked their computers but they’ve perfectly cleaned up the evidence! Real conspiracies: To: conspirator From: famous person Attachment: evidence.png

It’s 1970! Though also today, as we're cunningly timing this to Neil Young 80th birthday. When it became obvious the young *weren’t* taking over, the past became the new future, and music a self-conscious stirring together of all traditional American styles. www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PG2...

When was the last time anyone at the BBC had to resign for misrepresenting a leftwinger?

It’s still 1969! With it’s frenzied guitar and barbed-wire vocals, its staccato series of apocalyptic sights, ‘21st Century Schizoid Man’ is like a Bosch painting if drawn with Grosz’s spiky pen. What’s more the 21st Century so far has turned out exactly like this. www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ska...

In shock news, Four Eyed Gav went to an art show. In equally shock news, he found that critics didn't really get Neo-Impressionism. (Yes, that's the dotty one!) lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2025/11/radi...

It’s 1969! One night, Sandy Denny started singing the trad tune ‘A Sailor’s Life’. One by one, the rest of Fairport Convention started joined in. They’d done trad tunes before, but never so electrified. They played it live that night and put it on their next album. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ygi8...