Thinking about Donald "Duck" Dunn and how he wasn't actually in Booker T and The MGs until AFTER they'd recorded Green Onions, and similarly recently when Davy Jones died so many people recalled "I'm A Believer" and "Last Tarin To Clarksville" and other Monkees hits where he wasn't the lead singer....

...and putting aside for a moment the fact that none of the Monkees actually played any instruments on their early hits, what are some other hit songs that a permanent/essential bandmember didn't play on?

Here's one for a start - The Beatles "Love Me Do" sans Ringo, although I could be wrong about this - didn't they do it again with Ringo appropriately taking up his skinsman duties?

A friend has dropped out so we have a spare ticket for Paul Brady's gig on Tuesday. It's sitting upstairs, not standing.

If anyone is interested PM me.

It's unreserved seating so you can sit with Mrs P and myself or find your own space. ;)

http://www.lostbeatlesconcert.com/

Eight cameras? How come this has taken so long to be "found"?

On some threads, at the moment I'm thinking of Hannah's cycling one, we get replies to a post, that get replied to, with the columns getting thinner as each post goes in. Then another post goes that is reply to a one much higher up the chain. Scrolling back up, it becomes very difficult to to tell what point is being responded to.

My suggestion, which I recognise may be totally impossible, is to have a marker for the tier you are responding to.

It would work like this; The first comment to respond to the original post would be tagged with a 1, perhaps positioned beside that little curved arrow. A response to that comment would then be tagged with a 2. A response to that comment would in turn get get a 3. The next comment comes in, but is a response to the OP so it's tagged with a 1.

Thus when you get long chains the count of responses could reach 10 or higher and so when someone comes in with a comment responding to, say, the 3rd tier it would be marked with a 4. It's then easy to scroll back up the page and find the comment that is being responded to.

This may be complete bollocks, but I thought I'd throw it out there.

Thanks.

You don’t need me to tell you that in Britain we have a great musical history, second only to (and in some respects the equal of) America. And yet, in true British fashion, we are unfailingly apologetic, cavalier and half-arsed about it, seldom affording our proud rock heritage anything like the significance or respect it deserves. Perhaps because we have so much “real” history in Britain, we tend to think that the rock and roll events of the last fifty years are not important enough to commemorate properly. By “we” I mean those who are empowered to deal with such things on our behalf.

We saw a classic example of this when the Ziggy Stardust plaque was unveiled in London’s West End a few weeks ago. The commemoration was long overdue but let’s own up, it was something of a damp squib. Bowie couldn’t even be arsed to attend, so all we got was his erstwhile bass player and drummer and where, exactly, Gary Kemp fitted into the picture was never fully explained. Oh, he was a fan of the album, you say?

Matthew Street in Liverpool may be a full-blown tourist magnet and downmarket shrine to The Beatles now, but this happened long after the original Cavern Club was casually bulldozed and the site redeveloped as a car park. Lest we forget, the venue that bears the Cavern name these days is a different building in a different location some distance up the road from where the original stood. Even the iconic Abbey Road zebra crossing was sneakily moved several yards down the street by the council in later years with no fanfare and without a thought for its historical importance. Bus drivers will be pleased to hear that all those tourists who hold up the traffic on a daily basis are having their photos taken in quite the wrong place.

Granted, we have an airport named after the head Beatle, but John Lennon Drive, Paul McCartney Way, George Harrison Close and Ringo Starr Drive are still apologetic Liverpool cul-de-sacs a million miles away from the four lane grandeur that is Elvis Presley Boulevard in Nashville.

In February 1963 the Rolling Stones began their famous residency at The Crawdaddy Club based in the Station Hotel, Richmond. The pub has changed names several times over the years and it even closed down completely for a few years. Presently it is (I think) operating as a restaurant and the last time I checked, mention of Mick and the boys was nowhere to be found inside or outside the building. When I asked the young barmaid which room the Stones might have played in all those years ago, she looked at me in the way a cow might look at an oncoming train and simply shrugged.

In London last week I decided to visit the site of the Railway Hotel in Harrow and Wealdstone. To fans of The Who this place needs no introduction. It was their Cavern Club, if you will.

A picture of The Railway Hotel can be seen on the inside gatefold sleeve of The Who album Meaty, Beaty, Big & Bouncy and it was here that their future managers/mentors Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp first saw them play in 1964. It was here also that Pete Townshend first smashed the head of his Rickenbacker through the low ceiling, beginning the band’s legendary run of onstage instrument destruction. In fact this very incident is listed as one of Rolling Stone magazine's "50 Moments That Changed the History of Rock 'n' Roll". So, quite an important rock landmark, then?

After falling into disrepair, the Railway Hotel was demolished following a fire in 2000. It was then announced that four blocks of flats would be built on the site, each one bearing the name of a Who member. So far, so respectful. Yet when I visited the area I could find only two smallish blocks named Moon House and Daltrey House. I asked a gardener who was tending the flower beds to direct me to the blocks named after Townshend and Entwistle but received a blank stare for my trouble. Even after circumnavigating the area twice I still couldn’t locate the two elusive blocks. It would appear they got as far as celebrating the drummer and the singer and then gave up on the whole idea. But the story gets even better: one of the nameplates proudly reads “Daltry House”.

Yes, they even spelled Roger's name wrong. There’s something heart-warmingly British about that, I think.

1965

2012

I've nothing against The Masters and will probably watch the final couple of hours on Sunday.

However, how can anyone start a sporting thread when no-one has started one about Victoria Pendleton's gold medal in the Sprint at the World track Championship? Firstly watch the clip of her semi clash with her great rival Anna Meares (who had set a new World Record in the heats). To get up after hitting the track at something like 65 kph and then go on to win the final is the mark of a great sportswoman.

Vale, Victoria, a truly great champion.

Having just nominated Goin' Back as one of Dusty Springfield's Top 5 I can't let the very best version of that song go unnoticed, so my top 5 Byrds songs are:

Goin' Back
The Ballad of Easy Rider
Chestnut Mare (album version)
Hickory Wind
I'll Feel A Whole Better

Radiohead aren't, in the normal run of things, a band I have much time for, but I applaud their efforts on behalf of fans via this initiative.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/radiohead-try...

Whether or not it will succeed, remains to be seen. I'm not sure it will. The problem as I see it is that touts seem better able to get hold of tickets before fans. Preventing that happening is the key. How it's done is another matter, but more power to them for trying to do something.

If you are a fan of information displayed graphically and also the Beatles, this site may be of interest http://mikemake.com/Charting-the-Beatles. I particularly like the work schedule for 1963 to 1966.

but also incredibly small.

Investigate the scale of the universe from the tiniest fundamental particles to the edge of the Universe.

Be suitably boggled.

http://htwins.net/scale2/

The new BBC website has been in place for a few weeks now and I hate it. I hate it more now than when the first introduced the change. I feel more and more disinclined to visit what was once one of my favourite sites.

I refrained from a kneejerk response, thinking I should give it time. Well I've done that and it doesn't make it any better.

Aside from breaking the "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" maxim, I dislike the way that having given users the facility to customise the website that has now been taken away.

The bright yellow colour scheme is headache inducing. I don't like the way the images shift slightly from side to side on the home page when the cursor does anywhere near the directional arrows. The layout is a mess (probably a mess left by the last Labour Government © David Cameron) and the general navigation is horrible.

I've complained a couple of times to them and not even had an acknowledgement never mind a proper reply.

Do you feel the same way or am I merely a cantankerous old fool who doesn't know progress and improvement when he sees it?

I'm listening to the new long player by Newcastle based singer/songwriter/band Beth Jeans Houghton and the Hooves of Destiny, 'Yours Truly Cellophane Nose'*

Whilst there's nothing wrong with it, there's not a lot right with it. It's got music on it, it's well produced, the band sound good - but there's a whole lot of something missing. It's clever, and maybe that's the problem, it sounds to me as if she's trying too hard.

It puts me in mind of turns like Patrick Wolf and Lightspeed Champion - press darlings with a strong image and great PR, but without any heart and soul. Much like the current series from Noel Fielding, no matter how much smoke and mirrors you throw up, how much turd polishing there is going on, you can't disguise the fact that there's a great big hole where the heart should be.

*that title alone is a portent of doom, it's fucking awful.

Planned to listen to Revolver but opted for the above. Energy, bounce and Ringo really swings on the title track. Some of the tracks obviously knocked off pretty quickly, but the harmonies, the tunes, it does not get any better. F'ing function lock stuck on keyboard, hence the brevity.

I've just been looking at Amazon and top of the New For You offerings is a Little Feat album titled American Cutie (yeuchh!). It's out at the end of February.

The notes say it was recorded at Ebbets Field on July 19th 1973 and is an FM recording. It's the second of two shows performed that day, with the bonus of three tracks from the earlier show that didn't feature in the later one. It's for sale for an apparently reasonable £7:86 + p&p. The label is Left Field Media, which is one I've never heard of so I suspect it is one of those quasi bootleg albums that is slipping through from which the band will make either nothing or not very much.

However you can get it for free because it's already available now on the Internet Audio Archive. Indeed you can get both shows in their entirety. The files are in both flac and mp3 format. So unless you're desperate for some not particularly inspired cover art, I say don't bother. There is artwork for the late show in the files on the archive anyway.

Both shows:

http://www.archive.org/details/lf1973-07-19.flacf

Late show plus extra tracks:

http://www.archive.org/details/lf1973-07-19.LateNightTruckStop.flac16

I came across this video,which is a computer animation of construction followed by a fly-through of Frank Lloyd Wright's architectural masterpiece.

It was built for a family known as the Kaufmans in the late 1930s, but since 1963 it's been a museum. It is somewhere on my list of places I must see, but isn't too near any other places I'm likely to want to visit.

Any members of the Massive been there and like to share their impressions?

http://vimeo.com/802540