But can I say that it's perfectly acceptable as far as I'm concerned talking about Pieter Bruegel the Elder... he was one hell of an artist.

OK... the rock spelling test. I got 6/11. Not too shabby...

I got questions 2, 6, 8, 10 and 11 wrong. Bugger.

I started off well, but fell away badly towards the end (got numbers 6, 9, 10 & 11 wrong). I must say the podcast title steered me the wrong way regarding "Bewitched", a group I've never heard of.

Saw number 1 twice - Bristol 1975-ish - very loud & Swansea football ground 1976, on the Who tour along with the wonderful Little Feat & Alex Harvey - a lovely sunny day filled with good sounds.

Saw number 2 in Croydon (Greyhound rooms? probably not the Fairfield Hall but can't remember) - in about 1972.

Haven't seen any of the others so feel justified in not getting the dash in number 11.

Keep the great podcasts coming - I listen to them while pottering around the garden.

ApisPet

hardly any flies on me then. Got me umlauts right and everything

That was number ten. Mainly because I spelt their name with just four letters!

If numbers 8 and 11 were considered correct in the old or modern spellings. Got the old fashioned version of 8 right and the modern version of 11 right. Apart from those got another six right, was pleased to guess the first two correctly, disappointed I mis-spelled Lionel Rich Tea.

while listening to the segment on bands like Circulus and Good Habit, but I was strangely disappointed no-one made mention of former Highway Star Hitmaker Ritchie Blackmore, seem here giving it the full Hey Nonny Nonny with his merry band of wandering minstrels:

...out of 11.

I added the spelling test to the bottom of my shopping list which was the only convenient piece of paper to hand. This has given rise to a new game in which I imagine that the band names are the names of groceries.

Number two in your spelling challenge is obviously a vacuum-packed smoked meat product of Eastern European origin. Number eight - a medicinal lotion available over the counter, whose purpose is to assist the removal of unwanted body hair.

I am a sad man-child.

Or am I missing an in-joke?

Would have been 9 had it not been for those pesky umlauts.

And I hung my head in shame.

… but in my defence I'd never knowingly heard of four of the acts.

I've seen Circulus, although for a while I was confusing them with Comus as I saw them both at the same festival.

As I remember, the lead singer was Morty. The roadie was his brother, and his juggling skills were a feature of both bands' gigs.

I last saw them as pickup band for Bo Diddley around 1984. Bo was great. They weren't.

Spelling - 8/11. Helped by being interrupted while listening to the podcast and having half an hour to have a ponder on the specific weird spellings.

[Wrong umlaut layout in 2, schoolboy error in 3, shambles of 10.]

Good energetic podcast - obviously Letterman's temperature theory works!

a respectable 9/11. As seems to be the common trend, got numbers 2 and 10 wrong.

I miss the denim-clad rascallish Irish pop imps as mentioned in the spelling test. Just me? Ah, right so

9/11, 2 and 10 stumped me (I'd forgotten it was "zee" not "si" and I got the umlauts wrong).

If I remember rightly, Shakespear's Sister were so called because they had their name made up in woodcuts and the artist missed out the "e" at the end, so they took that name so as not to hurt their friend's feelings. This is a memory retained since the Barry McIlheney Smash Hits years though (I was 12), so it could be all wrong.

Great podcast this week.

Paxman putting Thompson on the spot about BBC Four WAS funny and cringeworthy,but not a little cuntish at the same time. The "bought in film" that he referred to so dismissively was "The Lives of Others" NO LESS! A T.V premier ,i believe, for the Oscar-winning best foriegn language film of 2006! Utterly compelling,excoriatingly tense,never likely to appear on ITV..possibly on Channel Four,but fucked up thereby with ADVERTS!
Paxman's piss-take of BBC Four,with Kelvin ("the Sun wot won it") Mckenzie laughing in the background did none of us any favours in this context...The "Skippy" doc' was also the perfect,if incidental complement to the then current Collins and Herring podcast of their 6music show...fnar fnar

Re: the discussion about companies no longer sending out hard copies - I heard Lauren Laverne mention the other day that record companies now refer to release dates instead as 'impact' dates - which seems to me another one of these hideous, meaningless phrases!

In several cases you seem to be conflating correct spelling, which should be encouraged, with mere typographical conceits, which certainly shouldn't.

First, Mark and Seventies don't need to "impose [their] own conventions" on the K.D. Lang issue. It was addressed many years ago in typical that's-that-settled-then style by the mighty Bill Walsh, who gets to decide on such things for the Washington Post.

Your credit card may say VISA, your athletic shoes may say NIKE or adidas, but this is just because the companies chose an all-caps or all-lowercase presentation for the brand names. That doesn't mean you write the words that way, any more than you would write WEBSTER'S NEW UNIVERSAL UNABRIDGED DICTIONARY just because that's what it says on the spine.

And the same goes for Wham's screamer. "Wham!" may be what it said on the tin (although inside the tin it didn't, as it happens), but this looks so irredeemably lame

Who was George Michael's bandmate in Wham!?

that you half-expect it to be followed by LOLZ ROFLMAO!!!!!! :DDDDD.

Menswear's "@" sign, Motorhead's umlaut (also ignored on the actual record labels), ABBA's mirrored "B", AC/DC's lightning-flash slash... in every case it's not a spelling issue at all but just a daft bit of business in a logo.

It's up to a publication whether it indulges, say, adidas its case preferences but if you're writing a sentence that starts with the brand name, then, regardless of house style, it's "Adidas have announced half-yearly profits of..." otherwise the brand-marketeers who knocked up the logo on the back of a napkin in 10 minutes of a multi-bottle lunch have won. And that way lies anarchy. Or do I mean An@rchy? Or an Archie…?

It's the Pedants' Revolt!

... very enjoyable.

However, some clarification about the Lennon commercial. It is not his voice, it is an actor (who sounds like he comes from Manchester), dubbed badly on to the Lennon film.

The whole thing is diabolical.

The spelling of B*Witched, according to the podcast on which the thread is based, has been mispelled in the thread title!

A quick round of applause for Seventies Mike's beard, surely?

Aren't they free of packaging in most cases?

I think you are doing Circulus a disservice by ridiculing their garb without saluting the accompanying medieval space rock: