Here Comes The Flood

When I was an angry young teenage rebel (or so I thought) and the chair of the local youth CND, I hung out with a group of faux hippies a few years older than myself. This bunch were into pre "And Then There Were Three" Genesis, Marillion, Peter Gabriel and all things proggy,  ie it was either a quadruple vinyl concept album or the vinyl consisted of 2 tracks both taking up the side of an album and dealing with dwarves, faeries,  evil kings and the like. Most of this I thought was absolute pish. Have you ever heard of Golden Avatar? No. I wouldn't even bother spending 5 minutes seeking them out,  they were gash.

Every so often I would be subjected to something which was not too awful and on rarer occasions I would hear something that I actually liked, like the 20 minute version of The Pusher found on the Early Steppenwolf album or Zero The Hero and The Magic Spell from the Gong Live etc lp, the latter standing me in good stead  when I got into The Orb and System 7.

Another album that I first heard when sitting on a bean bag or on a mattress on the floor while gagging from inhaling the awful combination of patchouli oil and burning incense was Robert Fripp's Exposure. Fripp had been a member of King Crimson and contributed to Bowie's Heroes which spurred him into recording Exposure with a load of others such as Peters,  Gabriel and Hammill, Brian Eno and others who would have been termed as "dinosaurs" in 1979.

One track in particular caught my attention and it was a rather stark and beautiful version of Peter Gabriel's Here Comes The Flood which can be found on Gabriel's first eponymous album alternately known as "Car".

I hadn't thought about this album in years until a few months ago when someone posted a Gabriel track and from then on I couldn't get the track or more correctly the slight remembrance of the track out of my head. So as usual the first stop was Amazon but I wasn't sure that I wanted to spend 17 quid on the Special Edition or twelve for the normal one. So then,  as it really was bugging me I searched the net to try to get a snidey download of the album but every time I found it the subsequent link turned out to be dead.

So,  a fortnight ago while picking up a mint, picture sleeve 12" of Geek Love for a quid in my favourite Oxfam Music on Byres Rd, I also spied a vinyl copy of Exposure at the very reasonable price of £3 which I duly purchased. I think that I went temporarily mad as I also paid a fiver for a copy of The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway by Genesis which I was never fond of in the first place.

After getting the album home and playing it, I have to admit that it hasn't aged well, maybe it just wasn't that good to begin with. However there is something foreboding and eerily beautiful about the sparse arrangement on Here Comes The Flood.

Robert Fripp - Here Comes The Flood

There will be no activity from the kitchen table until Friday as I have to go to bloody Budapest with work for three days and I haven't been arsed to do any posts

Mid Life Crisis

I have been thinking a lot recently about scooters and in particular getting my hands on a fully restored Lambretta GP. I realise that the sight of an overweight middle aged man riding one would induce hysterical laughter from most people, the trouble is I really don't care, as I type this I can smell the 2stroke oil and hear that tinny, some would say rather feeble sounding whine of the engine.

I have the remains of a Vespa P200e rusting away in one of S's many sheds but the prospect of months of work in a cold draughty garage with my head in a Haynes manual isn't really that appealing.

JC, inadvertently fuelled this desire last week when he posted Shall We Take A Trip by Northside. After reading his piece, it got me thinking of an article the Face did years ago on the second wave of the Manchester/baggy bands,  such as the afore mentioned Northside, Flowered Up,  Eusebio and a few other also rans. From this article it wasn't a giant leap of thought to another article in the magazine, I was an avid reader from early on right up until the end, about the Glasgow Scooter scene, an article I missed out being part of by an hour or so.

From when we all got our scooters, it was a regular occurrence to go into the town of a Saturday, go to Mickey Oats to buy various essential parts for our scooters or if really lucky not need any essentials and therefore spend money on unnecessary shiny accessories. Then it would be off to the Barras, where the mods in our midst would go to the incredibly manky OneUp cafe, while I scoured the record stalls for some bootlegs.

In the late 80's, the head of one of the more infamous scooter clubs in the area opened up a scooter parts shop not far from the Barras and the meat market and we started to get our spares from there,  considerably cheaper than Mickey Oates.

One Saturday we arrived to find lots of scooterists milling about outside the shop all dressed in their best gear and their scooters all clean and shiny. When asked what was going on we were informed that some press photographer was coming to take pictures. We decided to hang about but after an hour or so I got bored and decided to ride home and thought nothing more about it thinking that someone was on the wind up only to find out later that it had been true, the photographer had turned up and done his stuff but nobody could remember what mag it was for.

A couple of months later the piece came out in the Face.

This reminiscing has not quelled my desire one little bit for owning another scooter, I realise it is a ridiculous idea and that scooters are nothing but hassle but I don't think that you ever get the bug out of your system, once a stupid bastard always a stupid bastard.

Oh, and if anybody has a copy of that article I would greatly appreciate a scanned copy as I got rid of all my old Face's, Jockey Slut's and the likes 4 years ago when we moved and hate to admit that they went to the local cowp.

The Jam - When You're Young

Monday, then it's the Mudd Club

We're back in student disco land, 22 years ago (christ almighty, is it really that long ago) with this post.

As I've mentioned before my time of penury and starvation, better known as student life started in Aberdeen in 1987 where I spent my first year, running up a debt that the bosses of HBOS or RBS would have been proud of, dancing and drinking the week away and attending the odd lecture or even more infrequently a tutorial or two.

Monday night was one of the best nights out in the city, well for students at least. The Mudd club held in the local Ritzy was where you went to hear all the latest indie stuff, have a good dance, meet and try to cop off and drink increadibly cheap Furstenberg, which for some reason was always on promotion. As a result the Tuesday was more often than not written off as a bad idea, happy days.

Here are two tracks I remember hearing a lot at the Mudd Club and subsequently purchasing from One Up records in it's original location on Diamond Street.

That Petrol Emotion - Big Decision

Pop Will Eat Itself - Beaver Patrol

Bank Holidays In Days Of Yore

Way back in the mists of time when I was a teenager,  Bank Holiday weekends meant endurance tests.

As part of a scooter club you were expected to go on scooter runs. There were a series of National events organised throughout the year, with the Easter Weekend, usually seeing the first and then periodically until the last at the end of October and all bar one would be south of the border meaning that the Scots always had a considerable distance to go.

I don't know how many of you are familiar with the delights of riding Lambrettas or Vespas, so I think I should explain a little.

These feats of Italian engineering  usually have an engine capacity  between 125 and 250 cc and a top speed in the region of between 50 to 65 miles per hour. They are designed for zipping in and out of traffic in Italian cities not for riding twos up with a load of camping gear, supplies of buckfast and a change of clothing (if you were like me and had some semblance of personal hygiene) from say, west central Scotland to the South Coast of England.

As a result of the design of the scooters and the punishment of travelling such long distances an AA or RAC membership or preferably both was as essential to a scooterist as 2 stroke oil and it was not unknown for scooterists to attend runs courtesy of the RAC and then get home with the assistance of the nation's forth emergency service and vice versa. When traveling to runs it was common to see groups of scooterists performing what is the mechanics version of open heart surgery on the hard shoulder to their beloved machines. There was one member of our club who did away with luxuries such as a tent or a change in clothing in order to carry with him all the components of a spare engine.

When you did eventually get to the camp site, which was usually the shittiest bit of waste ground in or near the town, the real problems began. Who's got the tent? was the first cry and if the person who was supposed to bring it remembered and it hadn't fell off the back of the scooter during the trip you were off to a good start. Where are the poles? What do you mean you haven't got them? This I hasten to add was not as rare an event as you would think and resulted in  some novel methods of tent erection being employed.

Once the tents were up, it was time to find somewhere to drink. This  usually entailed trying to get a couple of thousand scooterists into the 2 or three pubs in the town which hadn't barred us before we even had a chance to do something wrong.

When all else failed you ended up spending a couple of days drinking warm cans of lager and eating crap from the dubious burger van on the camp site, using what could only in the loosest term be called washing facilities and not sleeping due to the real chance of being run over by some drunken scooter boy who has decided that it is a good idea to ride up and down the camp site in the middle of the night after drinking Buckfast and lager all day while also toking on more weed than your average Rastafarian will consume in a week.

Then after a couple of days without sleep and after drinking too much it was time to get back on your machine if it had not been bundled into the back of a van during the night by some shady guys, (you know who you are) and ride the two to three hundred miles home praying to god that you don't hole a piston or have a seizure on the road home.

As you can probably guess scooter runs weren't my favourite weekends away. Being a lightweight who enjoys the finer things in life such as a flushing toilet, running water and a bed, going on these expeditions wasn't high on my list of priorities and I attended 2 to 3 a year if really unlucky. I did have friends such as Stiff, Gordon and Mick who would try not to miss any, always had a ball and came back with some brilliant tales of hedonism and pure stupidity that if I were to re tell them would not be believed but all did in fact happen. They even made the trip down to Margate, a particularly gruelling journey only to find that the scooter run was actually the following week!

So in celebration of Bank Holidays of the past, here is a particular favourite northern soul track of our scootering fraternity, the LSC (Lanarkshire Scooter Club).

R Dean Taylor - There's A Ghost In My House