...or so I believe from reading a passing mention of such a thing's arrival in April. After they did such a - unexpectedly remarkable - job with the 2CD 'This Was' edition in 2008 I've been looking forward to this hitherto only conjectured enhanced version of JT's next LP. It's a year late, but still...

trouble is I can't find any details online yet. Anybody here in the current EMI reissues loop?

I live in Northern Ireland, so this is probably going to sound like a bit of a sideshow to most people here, but its still part of the UK, which means it might be relevant to 75% of Word bloggers. It's still the same government purse.

Tonight on BBC NI there was a current affairs investigative documentary into the business dealings of Iris Robinson - paid from the public purse as a councillor, MLA [member of NI Assembly] and MP - and the apparent protection, contrary to ministerial codes, of her husband Peter (NI First Minister and westminster MP) when he found out.

It involved Iris channelling £50,000 from cronies to a 19 year old son of as friend to help him secure the lease on a business opportunity operated by the local council on which she is a councillor. She then started having an affair with this chap. I'm not going to make any comments about her affair, nor how that affects the integrity of her already public and controversial views on other peoples' sexual activities. I'm, not going to deride her for stepping down from public life a few weeks back because of 'mental illness'. I suffer myself and its a terrible thing to have.

No, what I couldn't stomach was the nasty, self-righteous, mean-spirit-beyond-belief attempts by Iris - clearly, unequivocally documented in the broadcast by texts from her to her political adviser, Selywyn Black, who resigned his position on conscience when he was obliged to become a gopher in all of these shenanigans - to claw back the £50,000 she'd channelled to the kid in the guise of kickbacks (she immediately wanted £5000 of it, as the cheques had been made out to him directly; then later, when his business was established, the rest - initially half for herself 'to cover her costs' in helping the guy and half for her church, no doubt in her mind making the whole thing righteous and fine, until husband Peter found out and tried to retrieve the cash for the original donors, at no time informing any of the appropriate authorities as he is required to do as a multiple-parliamentarian).

Are the Robinsons in some kind of penury? Here's a bit from a BBC website story tonight, after the broadcast: "The Robinsons have also faced scrutiny over their joint annual income of more than £500,000 including expenses, with a further £150,000 in wages for four relatives, including two of their children."

During the expenses scandal Peter Robinson's lunch bills were exposed as excessive; apparently his Office of First Minister of NI employs more staff than the White House (this may or may not be apocryphal but believe me, as a tiny cog in its wheels, public sector waste in NI is sickening).

£500,000 is more than I will earn in my lifetime.

And still Mrs Robinson needs the £5,000 kickback off the books after sorting out dodgy loands to cover her costs for helping out the son of a friend. (I don't care about her affair - that's her business.)

Go to hell, Mrs Robinson.

At the risk of coming across (even more so than usual) as Victor Meldrew, my wife collapsed on the sofa in hysterics this evening while perusing the latest prospectus of Further Education and Recreational courses from Belfast Metropolitan College (www.belfastmet.ac.uk - in case you don't believe what I'm about to say...).

The cause of this mirth? In among the perfectly reasonable Flower Arranging, Yoga, First Aid, et al, and slightly wilder shores of Life Coaching, Conflict Resolution and 'Make Up Techniques' [I wonder is that the same as the conflict resolving thing...?), was this:

'Singing In The Shower'

A 14 week course of 2 hour sessions, for £60 (£42 concession).

I'm not joking.

Further on she found another almost as mind-boggling:

'Karaoke - Improve Your Performance'

I couldn't help thinking that if we continued to look it would only be a matter of time before we found 'Singing In The Shower - Improve Your Performance'. Maybe they're keeping that one for next term, when there's a whole raft (ahem...) of shower-singing proteges ready to go for the Tenth Dan, or the Black Towel or whatever.

Honestly, can ANYONE here think of a single individual you know who would look at this in a brochure and think, 'ah, that sounds good...'?

Some time in the 80s I saw Freddie & the Dreamers do their thing at, literally, the end of a pier in Blackpool. Around that time I recall reading somewhere a minor scandal wherein Freddie's voice was 'not what it was' (I know, I know...) and that he'd had a guy 'behind the amps' doing the vocals while he goofed around out front and mimed.

In more recent years, via a chap I know who is involved with U2's recording process (I'll be no more specific in case it's all true and he gets into bother), I hear that the Edge has a whole squad of guitar players 'under the stage' at live shows playing extra parts.

This past week someone mentioned the same sort of thing except this time it was the Rolling Stones. (Which made me think: if so, do those guys have to throw in duff and mangled chords every so often in case the punters get suspicious that Keith and Ronnie can suddenly play consistently?)

Anyway... my question is this: can anyone - from FIRST HAND EXPERIENCE (not just 'I know a bloke who swears its true...') - confirm the U2-or-Stones tale, or indeed confirm a bloke-behind-the-amps scenario involving any other significant act.

Or is it, like the Bono & Brooce dining-out anecdote that's featured in a recent thread, just another urban myth?

Three years ago I was bequeathed a remarkable trove of reel to reel and cassette recordings of folk club gigs spanning 1963-66 (from St Andrews University folk club), 1971-75 (from a folk club in Kent), and 1977-89 from a folk club in Belfast. There are also various reels from folk festivals during that period and a number of reels of off-air BBC session recordings (folk, rock, blues etc) from the mid '60s to c.1973. The club recordings are meticulously databased; the session recordings I've had to trawl through and identify (still not completed - it's more of a chore than you might imagine) using Ken Garner's books and a load of intuition.

A handful of the club recordings have been utilised on boxed sets (Carthy and Shirley Collins), Davey Graham's 1966 St Andrews set is available in full from Rollercoaster, and Robin Dransfield's and John Martyn's Kent sets are available on Hux - with a few further shows by Barry Dransfield and Davey Graham, certainly, to come, and a couple more currently TBC. All with artist approval and royalties.

I've tried in fits and starts over the past 3 years (other obligations permitting) to get things going between labels and other artists, but it's a lot of work from my end (having things digitised to provide samples, then sending copies to maybe two or three members of a band and a label or two, only to find that one band member still has a grudge against another, or doesn't like the other's preferred choice of label to deal with. It can be tortuous and, really, who has the time?

So it's struck me (thanks to Sheev's Hunter Muskett posting) that, with Word bloggers' help, it might be possible to short circuit that situation. Really, I'm happy to have materials digitised to order (it costs about £50 a reel using a local studio) if the artists who made them want to release them or use them as sources for bonus tracks on CDs etc. The stuff might as well be heard before that generation is gone and before the market for CDs dies utterly.

If anyone reading this knows personally (ie has personal contact with) any artist/former artist they think might be immortalised on these recordings, ask and I'll let you know on this forum if there's anything in the vault (including BBC session tracks from thev above period) and if so you can put said person in touch with me. this might end up terribly time consuming but I was left this material by its original owner because he reckoned I'd be able to do something with it, so that's what I'm doing... (A large amount of the Northern Irish material has already been digitised and placed for public access in the Irish Trad Music Archive in Dublin and the NI Arts Council's collection in Belfast, but I don't expect to be able to get the English and Scottish material similarly digitised/archived - despite its being by far the most interesting commercially and historically).

It goes without saying that this isn't a tape-trading free-for-all - honestly, I just want to make connections with any artists who morally own the stuff and who might find it useful...

I see that what remains of Sham 69 - now that they've got rid of Jimmy Pursey, as apparently he didn't want to play retro punk festivals (er, like a diary farmer who doesn't want to sell to the milk marketing board, I'd have thought...) - are playing a pub near me in a week or two. It made me think: are there any other bands whose names become embarrassingly 'ironic' if circs change in a certain way?

In this case, one could get into gordian knotys about paradoxes and tautologies - should this version of Sham 69 now be, in fact, Sham Sham 69...? Or if Jimmy Pursey started a rival version would one of them change to become True 69...? Or if John Major turned up at a gig only to be disappointed that the kids were no longer united, could he perhaps bestow upon them his in his memorable phraseology the name 'Bogus Sham' 69...?

Oh, where will it all end...

One has to admire Linda Thompson for thinking outside the box (-ish) in her record-funding jumble-sale-esque ideas, detailed elsewhere. But am I alone in thinking this feels a bit threadbare, a bit doors-closing-at-the-last-chance-saloon for the likes of Linda Thompson to be hawking around exclusive-anecdotes-by-telephone of dating Nick Drake or whoever for $50 a go, or whatever it is (see the link to her site for the full tawdry details) in the hope of scraping together the cash to make a new record? Or, more to the point, to make a new record IN THE WAY THEY USED TO BE MADE - ie. paying hired musicians well, using a decent studio, probably getting caterers in, etc etc.

This is a very noble way to think, but it strikes me as a Canute-with-waves outmoded ideal. If the Pet Shop Boys can only sell 11,000 copies of a new album these days, it doesn't take a genius to work out how many a Linda Thompson album will shift. Unless she's prepared to make it in the fashion everyone else south of U2/Madonna/Coldplay make records these days - wings and prayers, calling in your mates on a promise, hoping to sell enough at gigs (except, er, she doesn't do gigs) to pay for home recording gear and manufacturing costs, etc - one has to wonder what point she's trying to make?

If it's a self-respect/self-esteem/I-can-still-do-it thing, I think she might be better just telling herself, 'Yes, I KNOW I could make an album I, at least, would regard as the best of my life... but the world has moved on, the industry's changed, the sums don't work, I'm a '70s artist' in everyone's mind whether I like it or not, it'll get affectionate reviews in a couple of broadsheets, I'll get a Q&A in Word and only 312 people will buy it... So I'll just slip from view and be glad that I have a decent, respected place in music history and that a fair number of people cherish what I did back then - which lives on.'

She has, surely, nothing to prove - and clearly not enough of an active audience to make new recordings economically viable under the old model - and if she ONLY needs to prove something to herself, why bother crafting something for release? Old habits die hard, I suppose.

I'm not saying capitalist economic concerns are the only, or the over-riding, criteria in pursuing any kind of art - heaven forbid! - but would we not all be happier with, as a decent compromise if she feels she really must make new recordings, a new Linda Thompson record made on a kitchen table with one mate on acoustic guitar, her singing and another mate with pro-tools on his laptop and a decent microphone? We've all heard records made this way - out of necessity, often - which can still sound fabulous: the recent Mama record, 'Crow, Cotote, Buffalo' for one, and the recent Karine Polwart all-traditional album. Neither could have been bettered had a million quid been lavished on them (though it could have helped with the PR of course!).

Should Linda not downsize her ambitions to pressing up 500 copies, sell it through her website, everyone who wants it gets it and is happy, she still gets exactly the same affectionate Guardian reviews, magazine interview space, etc, and doesn't have to sell her soul and diminish her dignity with website car boot sales? A bank loan for £1500-£2000 would cover it all and she'd sell enough to cover costs and slip her collaborators a few quid. It's not a stairway to heaven, but it's the way the music game works these days. No?

Just a simple trifle to momentarily brighten the day - imagined names for tribute acts that really OUGHT to exist, if only for the epitude of the name. Here's the first few I've brought to mind - I'm sure it's unnecessary to name the acts being 'paid tribute' (otherwise the names are no good!) - any others?

Nott The Hoople

Faux Diddly

Atomic Fraudster

Fairport Contravention

The Who?

Depeche? No

I have a friend - let's call her, hypothetically, 'Carol' from 'Luton' - who enjoys this forum more than she'd care to admit, even the thread about beards, but is too shy to contribute (thus far) because she's convinced she'd be the only girl. To be precise "the only 30-something music-obsessed girl among a load of 40-something music-obsessed blokes". I've assured 'Carol' from 'Luton' that there are indeed some people without beards on this forum and that, indeed, some of those people are 'not blokes'. But a show of hands in one handy thread would help clinch the deal...

It seems to me we just don't hear enough about early 70s Australian rock in the Northern hemisphere. I'm always baffled when the same half dozen names from Oz are mentioned 'up north', as if the vast hordes of their great and noble forebears never existed. After all the 'Not Proper Rock' discussion of late, I'd like to submit that THIS - by Billy Thorpe & The Aztecs, 1971 - is the qyuintessence of what 'proper rock' should be. Not having had a go at this embedding lark before, the following may end up as a load of tech-gobbledegook. Or it may be an embedded youtube vid. If it's the former, well, I'll return and just paste in the link...

Or should that be 'conundra'? For some reason Pete Best came into my mind this evening - a friend interviewed him a couple of weeks back and thought him a thoroughly decent chap - so I've just been browsing his MySpace site: http://www.myspace.com/thepetebestband

What must it be like to be a man whose entire life has been overshadowed by the perception of being somehow a failure, or inept? I think it's a great credit to the man that he seems to have dealt with such a unique and potentially life-destroying millstone with such dignity. In a way, was he the first 'reality star'? An individual famous for being famous - a kind of ignominious fame without the money or the kudos, a subject of ongoing voyeurish media interest. Obviously, the 'Anthology' releases gave him, at last, financial security as some kind of belated reward - or, to my mind, compensation for the burden of having been 'Pete Best' for the previous 30-odd years.

Now that he has the luxury, after a 70s/80s of trying to be anonymous, to accept his position as an ex Beatle - and I don't say 'trade' on his Beatle connection, as no doubt many others have, because (a) in a way he has almost no choice and (b) he now doesn't need the money - and make some music, I'm glad to see his tale drifting on into a gentle happy fade-out.

On a lighter note, though, his entry into the English language (ie in the sense that everyone knows what you mean when you describe someone as the 'Pete Best' of a successful band/organisation/situation etc) throws up an interesting with regard to his current outfit, the Pete Best Band. It has TWO drummers - Pete and his much younger brother Roag (whose father was Apple supremo Neil Aspinall - the mind boggles there, doesn't it?).

So... does that mean that Pete's NOT GOOD ENOUGH TO BE THE DRUMMER IN HIS OWN BAND? Or does it mean, if Roag is eventually dismissed or opts to leave just before the PB Band have a surprise huge hit, that HE will then be saddled with the moniker of being 'the Pete Best' of the Pete Best Band (even though it would still HAVE a 'Pete Best' in the form of, er, well, Pete Best)? And, in less speculative fashion, if you read Roag's bio on the MySpace site he refers to having written a No.1 hit in 18 countries in his teens, without seeing any of the money or glory (he doesn't mention what it was or who had the hit - anyone here know?). Doesn't that kind of terribly bad luck ALREADY make him a kind of 'Pete Best' figure?

Still, however bad the Bests' luck has been, I wish them well. And, though it may be in rather poor taste to repeat a quip I heard recently that 'the Beatles are dying in the wrong order', it's not impossible that in the end (the) Best will be last. There may, indeed, come a time when Pete Best can play a concert and call his band, with whomever else in it, 'the Beatles' - a time when there may be no-one left alive (and maybe no EMI left in existence) who could legitimately deny him the right to do so. And if that time and vagary of mortality transpires, who could begrudge him?

There are times when one's instinct is to raise a glass to those who feel karma/natural justice needs a helping hand:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/edinburgh_and_east/7962825.stm

I don't advocate law-breaking and never have, but I'd be lying if I said that, personally, I hope it only gets worse for him...

...as Chief Inspector Morse used to say. I don't know about anyone else, but can I say that my Sunday evening has been blissful in the company of Inspector Lewis, Sgt Hathaway and a delightfully absurd plot involving plenty of Lewis Carroll, Tolkien, and CS Lewis references and lovely Oxford cinematography. I have, happily, still no idea what 'The Wire' is all about, but I firmly suspect it's the exact opposite of this luxuriant escapist English whimsy - gritty, fast-cut, American, realistic... Which comes in 500-episode seasons campared to Lewis's half dozen. Who needs it - real life's bad/time-constrained enough!

Am I alone in being a pastoral-Anglo-crime-centric dreaming-spires Word reader? Is Morse/Lewis, indeed as I suspect, the 'Canterbury scene' to The Wire's gangsta rap....?

Okay, crap thread title - sorry about that! And, indeed, another rather ponderous topic...It's this: how far does the existence or ready availability (on youtube, for example) of moving-images of musical acts of yore alter our [population as a whole, not just Word readers] perception of musical history and the relative worth of those represented or not?

What am I talking about? Well, it strikes me that especially now, in a age when 'everything' is supposedly available at the click of a mouse, the apparent LACK of something serves to dilute its importance or even, perhaps, push it so far into the footnotes that it might as well not have existed. In other words, if you were once in a band but you're not on youtube did you ever exist, or if you did you must have been very obscure/unsuccessful. Which is of course not necessarily so.

I'm thinking about this having exchanged emails recently with Andy Roberts (ex Liverpool Scene - 1968-70 band, played IOW festival and Albert Hall, released 3 or 4 LPs, toured US, etc) on the subject of the first legitimate Liverpool Scene CD release, due in May (and mentioned in a post elsewhere). We found it amusing that wolfgangsvault.com were selling replica Liverpool Scene 'Bobby & The Helmets' alter-ego t-shirts purely on the basis that there are famous pics of Robert Plant c1969 wearing them - the blurb on the site made it pretty clear that no-one there had ever heard the Liverpool Scene and but for the shirts-by-association they might never have existed. I pointed out to Andy that if you're not on youtube these days - where all and sundry can click a mouse, glance at an old clip for 2 mins and satisfy themselves that (a) you existed and (b) that's what you sounded/looked like - you may as well NOT have existed for today's music lovers. Luckily, there IS footage of the Liverpool Scene in existence, and I suggested that Andy might upload a few clips sometime soon to rectify matters.

BUT... what if there are great, important acts who were NEVER filmed or whose filmed performances are now totally lost? There are, for instance, no surviving TV clips of Johnny Kidd & The Pirates - which is a cruel distortion as they apparently appeared many times on TV. Likewise, I don't believe there are any extant 50s/60s clips of Duffy Power (bar the interview bit with Larry Parnes used in the Beatles 'Anthology' series), no performances from Anne Briggs (bar speaking cameos in two documentaries made about other people during the 60s), nothing at all by folk-rock pioneers Sweeney's Men, and seemingly nothing vintage from Link Wray bar one dreadful piece of light-entertainment hokum from 1960, nothing solo by Bert Jansch prior to 1974... And yet all the above DID make now-lost TV performances. There's also nothing extant by Northern Irish prog-rockers Fruupp, despite two concerts/docs filmed by the local BBC and local ITV in the mid 70s - but I don't think I'd put them in the same league of honour as the rest!

Some acts - like Nick Drake or Mellow Candle - were of course never filmed, but their legend has managed to live on regardless through the power of print mostly.

Who else do Word regulars feel have 'suffered', reputation-wise or in terms of neglect, largely because of a dearth of moving images? It strikes me that the relative paucity of vintage King Crimson film is wildly out of kilter with their status, for example... And who might be more venerated now if only they existed on film...?

I posted the below (postulating the end of the 'rock era' and how it might come to be seen/defined in retrospect) in another thread recently, sort of thinking out loud, but I keep thinking about it - hope no-one minds if I regurgitate the subject as a separate thread? I'd be fascinated to hear other opinions...

Most 'eras' can only be ascribed start-end dates, often woolly, sometimes conveniently clear, in retrospect. It is, for instance, fabulously convenient (in retrospect, for commentators) that Lonnie Donegan had his last hit the week before the Beatles had their first - though clearly the 'skiffle era' had pretty much run its course as a general phenomenon a couple of years before that, by 1959/60. The terrorist killing of several members of the Miami Showband in 1976 is always referred to as the end of the Irish showband era, although again it had run its course as a general phenomenon by the end of the '60s. Ike Turner's 'Rocket 88' was the start of rock'n'roll, Elvis going into the army was the end of it. I'm sure everyone has their start/end dates for the 'beat boom', the 'punk era' etc - probably analagous with particular record releases and arguable around those. But I wonder can we define, encompassing all of the above genres, something that could stand scrutiny as the 'rock era'? Some would argue that the Jazz era (1920s+) ended when Duke Ellington died (1974); is there a single living musician whose death would possibly be as convenient a way to encapsulate the 'rock era' (1950-something to ____ ?)

Wizz Jones once said that you could tell when the '60s Brit singer-songwriter boom centred around 'Les Cousins' in Soho ended because, by then (1970), there was no more audience - everyone in the audience was themselves a singer-songwriter. I think we're getting to the point now where there are probably more aspiring musicians/people making records than pure audience with a meaningful engagement to music. Not as easy to prove, mind, as it would have been glancing into Les Cousins and noticing everyone there had a guitar case... Obviously 'rock music' in all its forms continues on, and will do so as far as one can see BUT 'variety' contined long after the 'age of variety' - where it was the defining popular/social entertainment of its day - had ended, withering down to end-of-pier summer season acts and the Chuckle Brothers.

I think the present time may well be defined as something like the 'internet era' - a time when multifarious communications and gadgets defined how society worked/rested/played. I'm sure I'm being too verbose, so I'll stop there...