So, the Word collective's glorious leader has rolled over and given up, has he, preferring his carpet slippers and mug of tea while enjoying the view over his rolling acres, safe in the knowledge that soft loo paper is only a short Stannah ride away?

Shame, poor old thing.

Some of us are made of sterner stuff. We are rewarded, occasionally, with fabulous weather and glorious sights.

Anyone else returned from the front line yet with some piccies to share?

Elysian fields.

Smaugasbord of delight.

Move aside please, raptor coming through.

British workmanship. Fair makes you proud.

Flagging in the afternoon.

Open air string quartet madness.

Cops with fairy wings.

Amy's car crash.

Jay-Z explodes. Wonderwall never sounded better.

No comment from number 10.

Tipi for two.

It was all Green fields 'round here.

From nowhere, the dim and distant past springs back to life. It's Saturday afternoon, and I'm doing the weekly run to Sainsburys. I've got the salad stuff, the veg, the fruit and the meaty bits. I'm heading in the general direction of the beers via the deli counter. Off to my right is the CD and DVD section, something I rarely look at. There's a "This week's offers" bit, though, so I think I'll take a quick shufty, just in case.

On the top shelf, all alone, is a CD in a cardboard slipcase with the title, "1957 - When Skiffle Was King". Now this is the sort of thing I'm happy to pick up in a supermarket; some sort of cheapo compilation that might contain a gem or two. I take it down for a look see.

It's stickered at £3, which, if it has even one or two good tracks, is a bargain. I turn it over. The first few tracks are as I might have predicted; Lonnie Donegan, Tommy Steele and so on. Then I spot the name of track four: "Last Train To San Fernando".

Whooooooosh. Wobbly waves cloud my vision.

I'm four years old, walking home from the barber's with my Dad, who's holding my hand. He's whistling a fetching tune. Blokes used to whistle in those days, where did that pleasure go? "Dad, what are you whistling?" "That's one of my favourites" he says, and starts to sing it to me as we walk, "Last tra-aaaaain, to San Fernando" is burnt into my cranial circuits, there to remain probably until I pop my clogs.

Here it is, finally, four and a bit decades later, in my hand, on a bloody CD. It's by someone called Johnny Duncan and his Blue Grass Boys, apparently, which is news to me. Marvellous. Sold.

Anyone else got a song that's come flashing back from the gloomy depths of their unreliable memory, shiny and new like it hadn't ever been away?

We've had Dennis Wilson's "Pacific Ocean Blue" finally re-issued. We've seen lost tapes from Caravan, Fairport Convention and many others finally resurface. There are monthly mags full of CD re-issue reviews of the great, the obscure, the long lost and the frankly chronic reappearing on shiny discs with oodles of extra tracks, home demos, mono versions and God knows what tacked on. We have acknowledged that we have access to more varieties of din than any earlier generation.

And yet.

There are still titles that I'd love to be able to buy, but I can't find anywhere for sensible prices. Sure, I can remortgage the house and get them secondhand via Amazon from some chancer asking three figures, but that doesn't count, not in the real world.

For example, much of the material that was originally re-issued (there's a new concept) on the "See For Miles" label remains locked in the vault while lawyers argue over royalty agreements. There are plenty of other examples of titles which, for one reason or another, remain elusive.

Top of my list of "love to buy it, but can't afford the stupid prices they go for on eBay" titles is Misty In Roots' fantastic live album called "Live At The Counter-Eurovision" from 1979.

What Lost Artefacts are other Word irregulars lusting after, what Holy Grails of ownership are you searching for?

Nice to know that last week's Twilight Zone is still with us, just the other side of the mirror, ready to swallow the odd posting.

Very few of you will understand this posting.

We know who we are. We are from the twilight zone that exists between around 4.30 pm this afternoon and 6.45 pm this evening.

You may think you see us out of the corner of your eye, or that you have caught a glimpse of us in a mirror as you walk past. You may be right. We are still here. Watching.

Mrs Vixen and I are lucky enough to be off to the Emerald Isle for the long weekend. The B&B is booked, the hire car is being valeted as I type. The car has a CD player. The B&B room has a CD player.

Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to suggest the playlist for our perambulations through Mayo and Galway and on to the Connemara coast.

We're looking to plunder the boutiques of Clifden and Spideal, bringing back a hefty stash of Irish music, new or old, to enhance the limited number of Christy Moore, Horslips, Chieftains and Goats Don't Shave titles we already own.

Make your suggestions, fellow travellers on music's highway; miles will be driven whilst listening to them and Guinness will be drunk to them.

Slainte!

When I was about 14, my dad had a work mate who played and sang in folk clubs on "singer's nights". He came round to our house sometimes for tea on his way to a folk night in a pub somewhere, and parked his guitar, in its case, in our hall. Now I'd never really tried playing a guitar before, so I piped up with some interest, out came the guitar and a few rudimentary chords were taught. Trying to improve on that hesitating start has given me pleasure ever since.
He also passed on a recommendation for an album he'd bought by a new singer-songwriter from the midlands called Harvey Andrews; the album was called "Writer Of Songs".
My dad soon bought the album, the first folk LP of his collection, and I got the sheet music. With my first guitar under my arm, I played that record over and over again, sore fingers throbbing, wrist aching, barre chords buzzing as I tried to play along.
All the family loved Harvey's songs, rich with imagery, laced with a working class morality we all felt and shared. I took a cassette copy of it off with me when I first left home.
On every subsequent visit to my mum and dad's house, I played dad's copy on his stereo. It formed a musical link, a shared experience, going right back into schooldays, a token of our shared passion for music and my thanks for the start in life my parents had given me.
Years passed, and I bought my own vinyl copy, then the CD when it became available. My brother too had his own copy.
And still I sought the album out on dad's LP shelves whenever I returned to the fold.
Last night, Harvey Andrews played a gig at a folk club back home in Plymouth. I drove down and took my dad and my brother to the club to see him play. Harvey's 65 now, and my dad is 85. You wouldn't have known it last night.
I shall forever be grateful for the musical thread that runs back across the years for my family and for me, crystallized by that record, and brought sharply into focus once again last night at one of the best gigs I've ever witnessed.
Do any of you share my experience? Is there one special record that your family shares fondly, across the generations?

My brother sent me a link to this gem, which is nothing short of sublime. What really marks it as an unutterably brilliant few musical minutes is the look on the player's faces in the last 5 seconds, as the last notes fade.

They KNOW they have just absolutely NAILED this song:

While researching some recommendations from fellow Word bloggers, I found myself sifting through some of those lists that people make on Amazon. Lists like "20 albums I shoplifted as a teenager" or "My favourite marching songs", that kind of thing.

A familiar album cover presented itself on someone's list; the eponymous one from the Edgar Broughton Band, with rows of meat up on hooks. I'm sure any of you who have ever perused a Harvest inner sleeve will know the one I mean.

Now, for some reason lost in the mists of three decades, I never got around to investigating this lot. Perhaps it was the moustaches, I don't know, but I don't think I'd ever heard anything from them except "Out Demons Out".

My curiosity, combined with the fact that the album was only a fiver, led to one of those impulse buys that leave you either chuffed or rueful.

You know what? It's bloody good. How on earth could their work (at least three or four good albums by all accounts) have remained in my blind spot for all this time? They were never Premier League, but they were never really obscure either.

There must surely be others amongst us who have ignored bands for years only to find that there's a whole body of work probably well worth investigating once the blinkers have been removed? Who else has had a similar epiphany, and who were the band?

Don't you think it's about time we gave this guy another chance, a fair reappraisal?

Whaddya think JJ?

BBC4 at 9 tonight.

Far out.

This just in over at the Register.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/30/radiohead_rainbows_explained/

Radiohead, who these days can only make noises like "a faulty air conditioning unit", are accused of being "a group of canny businessmen with offshore bank accounts".

There I was thinking they styled themselves as musicians. Silly boy.

The missus has gone out for an hour or two, it's early evening, and I've had a sh*t day at work.

Right.

As I type I'm grinning like an idiot, drumming on the desk and struggling to type and spell things properly 'cause "Caravanserai" is belting out at mega-watt levels and I know every bloody note, every word, every shout, and every drum beat and it's just effing GLORIOUS to hear it properly once in a while.

What do you reach for to play from start to finish at structural engineering threatening volumes when the opportunity presents itself?

Whoever you go to see, they're reasonably likely to do one or two songs written by someone else.
Sometimes a cover will be part of the main setlist, perhaps because it's a version they've done on an album, and sometimes they'll be in the encore.
If it's in the encore, you might think that they simply don't have enough original material to go the distance, but often bands will save a favourite cover version for the encore just because they like playing it, and they can have some fun with it.

What's the best cover version you've heard played live, preferably one that's not actually on the band's albums?

I'll kick off by relating that when I went to a gig by the Canadian band Heart, back in the 70's, they finished the gig with an impeccable and altogether muscular cover of Led Zeppelin's "Rock and Roll", which impressed me mightily. Almost as much as I was impressed by Nancy Wilson.

The singles chart is depressing. It seems packed with tunes bashed out by a committee, and these days it must be a de rigeur risk aversion strategy to engage a collaborator for a "Featuring" blame-share arrangement.

The "artists" seem to have names generated by a warehouse full of monkeys bashing away on mobile phones with prdctve txt and ran.dom punctu.a.tion.

So who ARE all these poor hopefuls, doomed to abrupt abandonment by their record companies in a week or two?
Where are last month's orphans and what are they doing these days?
Was my weekend shopping in Sainsbury's packed by a former chart topper?
Have any 16th minute unfortunates been sighted recently, carrying out menial tasks and rueing the loss of the stretch limo?