This is, without doubt, an excellent blog site. Many wonderful things for a chap to browse through, to ponder, and, when the feeling so stimulates, to contribute to.

But I’ve noticed on a number of occasions now, someone has raised an interesting point, or made reference to an entertaining video on youtube, only to get the rather curt response of “we’ve already discussed this”.

Is this an acceptable course of action? If you have posted such a response, ask yourself this: would you go around the gatherings at a party and say “be quiet - this conversation has already taken place”? Probably not. So let's not do it here. There are enough subjects to read – if you find yourself looking at something you’ve seen before, don't make the latest poster feel small, just move on to another topic.

Not all of us have time to read every post, so we may well allow something to slip by on the blog, only to hear about it elsewhere and consider it worthy of mention – and thus committing what is perceived by some as a serious faux-pas, resulting in opprobrium and a sniffy, nay, smart-arsed reply.

I’d rather see something worthwhile posted twice than not at all – but making bored noises when something IS posted twice increases the risk of the next good thing NOT being posted.

That’s it – back on yer ‘eads. And apologies if someone has already made this point…

I've got two tickets, but Mrs H. cannot make it, so one will be wasted. Free of charge, or anything you like up to the face value of eight quid.

First come, first served.

...brought on by Archie's mention of something called "inverting the stereo phase".

Speakers and earphones come with a Left and Right marked on them. Does it matter? I read somewhere that if you wire speakers up the wrong way round, the music sounds "wrong" - less sharp, less defined.

When I mentioned this to a semi-techy friend he snorted derisively, said "of course it doesn't matter, sound is symmetrical" and went on to talk about something to do with computers.

So - is wiring up speakers correctly important or not? If you get it wrong, does it just make Denny Dias's (or Skunk's) guitar solo in The Dan's "Change Of The Guard" go from right to left instead of left to right, or does it make everything sound bad?

Is the truth out there??

Leafing through the current issue of The Word I saw the advert for the new B52s' album. This advert quotes Mojo magazine, describing the record as sounding "exactly like a B52s album should … an arch call to sexed-up revelry". Having bought Mojo a few days earlier, I flicked to the review therein and reread it.

The reviewer had awarded the record one star, describing the girl singers as sounding "like nothing less than Shampoo's sozzled grans on a hen night". The "rockin' surf guitar riffs" in the ad are actually expressed as "the same old slack tuned guitars" in the review, while "Fred Schneider … is just creepy".

So, seriously, how does the ad get away with quoting Mojo to a hugely positive effect, while the review in Mojo damns the record to hell? There is only one Mojo, right? The ad isn't quoting from some foreign publication of the same name is it?

I believe that the rather splendid photograph of The Trogg's own Reg Presley, confidently brandishing a bass guitar in the current issue, is wrongly captioned. The claim that Reg never played bass is refuted by a story that I read, either in Q or in the NME, some years ago.

Apparently Reg was making the best job he could with a bass guitar in a recording studio somewhere. None other than Bob Dylan happened to be working in an adjacent room and heard the cacophony, a noise that suggested Reg's level of expertise was minimal at best. Bob wandered in, observed proceedings for a moment and asked Reg how long he had been playing the bass.

Reg paused, mid-pluck, looked thoughtful and replied:
"Orl fuckin' arternoon, mate, orl fuckin' arternoon."

Any other readers have examples of twixt-musician, badly-played-instrument japery?

Boy, somebody screwed up this time. Heads should roll. P45s sprinkled like autumn leaves. In the latest WORD, someone on your payroll has listed "25 or 6 to 4" off Chicago 18 as great song by a terrible band. Wrong, so very wrong, on two counts.

Firstly the "25 or 6 to 4" off Chicago 18 (released in 1986) is by no means a great song - it is in fact pretty much unlistenable - I'm serious, it is unutterably bad (you can download it, free of charge from here if you like Click Here for Crap Version) BUT the "25 or 6 to 4" off the second LP from the artists formerly known as Chicago Transit Authority, recorded in 1970, is magnificent, an iron horse of a song, a great song by a group who were to go tragically ... er ... terrible.

Which brings me to the second mistake - proper Chicago, the Chicago with Terry Kath, a honking brass section and at least one set of cojones between them were a truly great band. Not for them the namby-pamby single volume LP - no, their first three LPs were double albums, their fourth a stonking four volume box set of live material. Their first album remains great to this day, is regular on the old pocket jukebox and would be one of the few that I would genuinely beseech any WORD reader to trot out and buy.

Most comments about music are matters of opinion. My friends, the words above are a matter of fact. Of that there can be no doubt.