These are just fleeting thoughts from the heartland of the UK's colonial dustbin somewhere beyond the wall of sleep. Odd bits of music and so-called worldly wisdom may creep in from time to time. Don't expect too much and you won't feel let down. As ever AI and old age are to blame. I'll just leave it there ...
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Substack can be a few days ahead or a few days behind, you can never really be sure. Anyway here's an overview of modern economics and personal anxiety. And I'm blaming Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger for about 99% of the trouble in the world but you don't have to take my rather obtuse words for any of it. Click on the pic in the traditional style.
"The cauliflower soup may contains slight traces of scallops - but frankly I have to doubt that statement."
Today's BLT: Why do healthy foods i.e. vegatables, salads etc. get themselves stuck in between your teeth as if they were bits of bacon or toffee? You think you're eating into the good guys and then find a few moments later it's their green and (at this point) unpleasant remains and debris that are clogging up the tooth and gum gap area. Perhaps I'm just not chewing correctly or my mouth has some design flaw that gets worse with old age. Maybe nature just wants perpetual revenge on humans via any quick oral way that becomes available (?). No point in trying to get proper dental advice on this either, you'll just get that smug, waggy finger lecture that you already suffer every six months.
Yesterday's lunchtime unhealthy potato crisp, cheese, rocket and mayonnaise on sourdough sandwich. 7/10 approx. No post sarnie tooth blockage excavation or rescue work was required.
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Breaking the unwritten rule of avoiding posting shit on a weekend. Fake headlines might make more sense than real ones. The media just keep on saying things and we just keep on reading them. Thanks to CBQ for this amusing headline generator tool. Anyway it's the last day of the month.
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I’ve always been eager to prove the insignificance of religious significance. Truly, I’ve never proved anything of the kind in my life. Proof just slips away overnight, like some rogue ex-US ambassador or Epstein's financial advisors operating their pocket calculators for the artist formerly known as Prince Andy. Feasts, festivals and seasons come and go. Nobody cares apart from retailers and avid followers of wayward public opinion. Hot cross buns are different. This year (as usual) they’re in the shops at the same time as Easter eggs, and I’m not complaining.
So I’m on the hot cross bun diet. Two a day. I’ve been on this diet for exactly one day. It’s holding up fine. No side effects. As an added bonus sometimes you can find weird human face lookalikes in or on the buns. There’s definitely an angry, or at least perplexed, God like grimace worn by the top bun in the photo. Maybe it was the size of the knife I was brandishing. As Kevin Bridges once joked a few years ago, “God’s a wee bit out of his depth now ...” and 2026 just might do it for him.
P.S. There needs to be a “classic” British comedy film made about rival bakeries in some mythical Yorkshire village: “Top Bun.”
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A very short, short story. You must commit by making a click above, otherwise nothing happens. References to Hitler, Stalin and Alice Cooper. You might be slightly offended or disturbed. I might not be bothered.
Mondays must be the day I catch up and dump materials and links here and there. This one's been out for a while, so it's here in it's full and unedited form.
It's often said, half way towards a joke, that the world went downhill after David Bowie died in January 2016. Over ten years ago now. There’s no evidence for that. His death did not tip the planet from it's axis. It marked a moment. It did not mark a measurable collapse. But it's an interesting thought. David Bowie's being is somehow responsible for the stability of the world and the progress of all the stupid humans left behind, including me and you. He passes away and right then a new era of decline is upon us. Slow to begin with but with the passage of time measurable. The power of popular culture, film and music is not to be underestimated. That’s something that most politicians fail to understand, but for the people the signs become visible, then clear.
Bowie shifted shape throughout his life. He refused the honours that others of his generation lapped up. He was a cracked and bad actor. A bee hive drone, an image junkie and an off the wall, cut up poet. The man who fell to earth and the Goblin King. There is a theory that he was super human or a god of some sort. He held onto an elevated status for fans and media types alike. Then he moved away to some other realm. Higher, cleaner perhaps. If he was a god at all, I'd say he was a modern, updated version of Pan. A 21st Century Pan, playing the saxophone rather than the pipes or a woodland harp. A Hornblower at the Gates of Dawn who made a few bad albums along the way.
We like anchors. When someone large in our lives goes, we fix the date in our minds. The years that follow feel harsher, so we tie the feeling to the loss. Nostalgia does the rest like a comfort blanket. We see changes differently. The past looks clean from a distance. It was easier when things were as they were. We forget the real muddle and constant noise of life and keep the low light of a better memory flickering. Those unaware of the Bowie magic can't see the obvious, so it goes. They have their other gods to deal with. Root causes are at the root. Sin came into the world via one man they say. Not David Bowie though. This time around.
The data, numbers and the feelings tell a blunt story. Some long trends kept improving after 2016. Extreme poverty, over decades, has fallen sharply and did not suddenly reverse that year. Other problems grew more visible. Climate change deepened but arguments remained polarised and amplified within an always quicker media machine. Politics hardened into schoolyard battles and bully-boy tactics. Even Bowie's conflicted take on politics may have looked attractive to the faithful.
A pandemic swept the globe in the early 2020s. Wars and invasions run on and still run to and fro to please the industrials. Epstein’s tacky, ragged ghost still haunts victims and his rat faced fellow criminals. Tragedy and suffering still are everyday things. Unreported and misunderstood. Crime and punishment, boom and dip, false dawns and unpleasant lottery winners. But none of these began or emerged from some new Frankenstein style swamp with Bowie’s unexpected death. They were already in motion and have been since the first stone was thrown in anger at some rival hunter gatherer.
So the claim doesn’t hold up as fact. It works as a metaphor. A great artist moved on. The years that followed felt unstable to many. It is human to draw a line between those things. Bowie was a touchstone, a life raft, an icon and also an incomplete and flawed genius. He was a fragile human and he became sick and died, sooner than we might have expected. It is not evidence of anything. It's a fantasy.
The logic of existence persists and pushes away against such a far fetched theory ... but it makes a kind of sense. If you want it to. Stepping back and looking at human activity there is a sense of absurdity and the ongoing repetition of futile behaviours that leave us static in some muddy rut, somewhere we don't belong.
It's a familiar rut. Almost comfortable. We've been here before and perhaps rather than settle for Occam's Razor and the obvious and simple truth, let's try another angle. A fresh explanation. Take a gamble on a piece of thinking. Clear blue skies overhead, not a cloud in sight. Our investments go up and down, according to some stiff market breeze or with the movement of a butterfly's wing far away in Africa, or so it seems. What difference does one more death in a billion make? Maybe more than you'd imagine.
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They're young and fit. The fabulous Big Air boys and girls. Flying across the blue Winter Limp-Pig skies in Cortina (once famous for it's tin worm cars). Braver than the Hulk or Thor. They are either very stupid or simply superior humans who will eventually live on Mars untroubled. Their future is bright. Mostly (rich?) white kids and the odd fully formed adult trying to beat some long standing injury, they rule the air with their crazy dreams and tricks. A cooler than cool elite little set.
Everything, every stunt, every move is "HUGE!" or "MASSIVE!" according to the wannabe teenage sounding commentary team. It's over in seconds too, blink and you lose the plot. Just don't have the camera drone collide with your helmet as you race down the mountain. I'll miss it all when it's gone, or until the next hyped up media distraction comes along.
China, Japan, USA, Canada and all the snowy/mountainy European counties are the top dogs. There's a few flyboy/girl smatterings from elsewhere but I find it odd, and it's across a range of Olympic winter sports this year, that I just can't root for the USA in anything right now. I don't hate Americans or wish them ill, far from it. But with the current toxic regime looking to capitalize on and brag about anything that you can wave a flag over, I don't want them to have a chance to do that with these competitions. See the athlete and their performance, not the country should be the rule. But ... it's tough to see past those other American idiots.
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Did "Shine on" ever shine and why am I dredging up this old and worn out material? I don't know, other than that I've hit an age where having some of my random thoughts placed into order and catching them in a bucket seems important. Household objects on a shelf in a row. Photographs set on a timeline. I know this imagery isn't really helping, but it's the best I've got.
I could write about things that are deeper and more meaningful, but I'm not so well connected. Not this time anyway. There are a lot of songs about Syd Barrett out there. Some well-intentioned, some cashing in, some just "influenced by", and so on. Rock music loves the disturbed and the dead. They're the subjects that won't kick back or complain as their myths and legends fade, grow or mutate.
The most famous song about Syd is, of course, “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” from Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd. This album directly followed The Dark Side of the Moon and, as you'd imagine, audience expectations were high and unrealistic. A tough challenge for any band. There's over two years between the albums. A long time in rock music. For the title and main theme, they took on the subject of their own recent evolution from Syd's influence. A thing that many bands have done with lost or missing creators. Write about what you know, I guess. Common experiences.
The multi-layered piece is meant to be an undead eulogy for Syd Barrett, a man who was still alive at the time but not present (apart from the "incident"). It wants to be tender. It wants to be noble. But wanting isn’t the same as being. What it delivers has a brutal feel and a distance about it, like a cold monument built from the polished stone of prog rock. The man it honours was, at his pop peak, all quicksilver and slippery nerve. A madcap laughing but heading down the drain. I can't really listen to his post Floyd solo efforts these days. Crazy; unkindly, yes. Diamond; not so sure.
The lyrics are blunt and weak. “Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun.” It sounds grand. It sounds important. But it doesn’t say much. There are awkward religious overtones. The phrases drift by in big, cloudy symbols leading into black holes, steel breezes, diamonds in the sky. They gesture towards tragedy without ever cutting in closer to the bone. Barrett once was sharp, strange, playful. Dangerous and destructive. His early work with Pink Floyd had bite and colour. Here, he’s reduced to a fallen star. It’s neat. It’s tidy. It’s not a good fit.
Musically, the song sprawls over the album, divided into pretentious parts like a medical textbook. Long stretches of synth-heavy atmosphere. Slow builds that promise revelation but can't quite deliver it. David Gilmour’s guitar lines, always silky smooth and controlled, as we've come to expect. Roger Waters using the solemn weight of his writing, but the weight never provides emotional heat. The iconic four note motif is strong the first time. With multiple listenings, it can feel like an idea stretched thin. There is craft here. There is polish. What’s missing is connection.
There is also an uncomfortable sense that the band projects misplaced guilt and nostalgia onto Barrett rather than engaging honestly with who he was. The tone is reverential but distant, as though the subject has already been turned into some tragic symbol. Hard now to remember the person. He was a writer of naive pop songs that glinted. They darted into off-kilter observation. He was whimsy and melody and nerve. This song turns him into a statue.
For an artist as idiosyncratic and defiantly unconventional as Syd Barrett, whose early work burned bright before falling into disarray, this stately, slow burning lament feels misaligned with his spirit. I wonder if he might have recoiled at such a ponderous, self serious monument. Did he have the capacity to listen from his dark corner?
Mental health problems are not easy for family and friends to deal with. All the love, effort and time taken to try to "help" are often thrown back and rejected. Feelings and loyalty are stretched to their limit if the condition spirals, as Syd's clearly did. It's not some glorious thing. Ultimately the shining part becomes a faded history and the dull reality is of a struggle to just exist without pain. Nothing fills the hollow centre. These are things that are hard to describe and harder to sing about.
In the end, “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” feels well meant but incomplete. You could argue it had to be done rather than ignore the story, but as it reaches for the myth, it misses the man. Treating Barrett like a victim when he was a restless talent who thrived on surprise. I can respect the intention. I can admire the sound. But now I don’t feel it. Maybe that's why it doesn't so much fail as simply miss the mark. It's an album I'd choose to avoid listening to. In the end, we all wish that everybody we loved could be here, but that's just not how things are.
I’ve known about Khruangbin since around 2019. I didn’t go looking for them. I don’t really do that with music. They showed up anyway. Like some stray dog that decides you’re it's person.
The first record I really listened to was Con Todo el Mundo. Before that it was scraps, live clips, YouTube footage, half-paying attention. Once it clicked, it stayed clicked.
You have to admire a few things right away.
One: the brutal simplicity; guitar, bass, drums, nothing extra.
Two: committing fully to a dry, locked on wah tone and never apologizing for it.
Three: the apparent refusal to change guitar strings more than once per tour, if that. There’s discipline in that kind of neglect. It may be a myth.
There are other reasons I like them. The music, obviously. The quiet weirdness that hangs over every performance. Do I understand what they’re doing? No. And I don’t think that matters. Maybe the best way to explain them is to say why a reasonable person might keep listening.
You know it’s Khruangbin in about ten seconds. Earth seconds. No delay. The guitar is thin and sunburned. The bass is elastic and upfront. The drums are loose but never lazy. It feels familiar even when it isn’t, like remembering a place you’ve never been. Deja Vu surf funk.
This is instrumental music that refuses to be wallpaper. There are few vocals, sometimes none, yet it still feels deliberate, emotional, like something is being said. Not supermarket music. Though I have heard them played in a Tesco, which felt wrong in a way I can’t quite explain.
The global influences are obvious but never desperate. Thai funk, dub, Middle Eastern scales, soul, surf rock, psychedelia. They don’t steal. They don’t show their work. It just passes through them and comes out clean.
They make perfect music for a certain kind of living. Night driving. Low-stakes work. Sitting still. Substances, if that’s your thing. Hanging out without needing to talk. Zoning out without disappearing. Spanning deserts, wilderness and still, bare rooms. Khruangbin fits all of it, which is harder than it sounds.
Laura Lee’s bass is the center of the band's gravity. The lines are melodic, confident, loud enough to matter. People come for the bass and stay for everything else. There’s a calm authority in how she holds the band together. No tension. No drama. Just forward motion.
Donald Johnson (DJ) makes restraint look easy. It isn’t. The grooves are precise, stripped down, unforgiving. No showing off. No wasted hits. Space everywhere, and that space is where the music actually lives.
They’re relaxed without being dull. The songs don’t sprawl or collapse. There’s always swing underneath, small shifts, quiet momentum. You feel it more than you hear it.
The look matters too. The peculiar wig thing image. The stage clothes. The album art. The stillness playing live. It’s cohesive and strange and memorable. It felt important at the start. I don’t know where it goes next, or how much it really matters in the long run. There’s a fine line between icon and costume.
They reward repeat listening. I'm not bored with them, but I don’t binge either. Too much would ruin it. Each listen reveals something small; a fill, a tone change, a rhythmic turn. The music deepens instead of wearing out.
Most of all, they feel sincere. No irony. No smirking distance. No contempt for the listener. Just three musicians locked in, enjoying the sound they’re making. That kind of honesty is rare, it spreads.
Where are they going next?
I don’t know.
That’s fine by me.
A picture says more than a blank page: The apples that didn't quite make it. A sad day for the apples and also our many and elabourate apple based dreams. No but yes it does little harm to be guided by voices from time to time. I suppose that the obvious exceptions would be when buying a used car that has "classic" status or bidding for a "rare" guitar on eBay. There are other examples ...
It's Friday the 13th but I'm not really superstitious these days so I'll just walk under a ladder and head out onto a limb and launch this little piece: People, well most people (to be honest I’ve not actually spoken to all that many) often treat Dark Side of the Moon as Pink Floyd’s unquestionable, statistically and plaudit winning high spot. Number one album for x amount of weeks etc. I can understand why, it's all true. That’s simply because it’s their most popular, polished and arguably commercial bit of work done within an album format. Maybe just not their most inspired. I think that Meddle is the record in which Pink Floyd actually comes together with their best mix of material. It’s the perfect one side of shorter pieces and the flip side being the single longer work, “Echoes,” that sets it out as my model for listening perfection.
Meddle is Floyd’s alternative take on the then still developing prog rock landscape, where their drifting experimentation finally locks into something more advanced without losing the eccentric edge that always made them one of the most interesting bands of their time. They arguably created their own genre here and built the album around it. If Dark Side brings together the philosophy, the message, and the soundscapes; Meddle invents and test-pilots them.*
The clearest evidence is the track “Echoes” itself. Nothing on Dark Side comes close to its ambition or tonal range. It isn’t just a long track, it’s a journey, moving from calm to disorientation to something almost spiritual without ever feeling contrived or forced. Dark Side is full of brilliant songs that link together to illustrate a set of concepts, but none of them travel quite as far as “Echoes” does. If albums are judged by their highest peak, Meddle wins outright.
There’s also a difference in how the two albums feel. Dark Side is immaculate, but that perfection can feel stylized and cold. Meddle breathes. Tracks like “A Pillow of Winds,” “One of These Days,” and “Fearless” are lived in rather than engineered, as if the band is discovering the music as it unfolds instead of executing some master plan. That looseness gives the album a warmth and humanity Dark Side sometimes sacrifices for its precision.
Thematically, Dark Side aims for universality and some ultimate explanation of things: time, money, madness, death. No explanation ever comes; it just is. It’s profound and disturbing. There’s nothing wrong with that, but Meddle’s message is quieter, more measured, and more inward. It doesn’t explain itself or push a message; it only invites you to go along with it. That makes it less immediately accessible but far more rewarding in the longer term. I’m never bored with any of the Meddle material, after a whole lot of listens across decades.
Dark Side of the Moon fully deserves its reputation; the sales and the numbers are crazy, but reputation isn’t the same as greatness. It is Pink Floyd at their most perfect, and it will never be repeated. Meddle is Pink Floyd probably at their most freely creative and adventurous, before the big bucks, big stages, and bigger disagreements came along. If what you value is risk, atmosphere, and genuine exploration rather than flawless execution, Meddle isn’t just better, it’s the album that made everything that followed it possible.
Please note I’m not saying it’s been downhill for Floyd all the way since Meddle; that would be nonsense. Their subsequent work has produced great and lasting material; a lot of heat and a few duffers, but… Meddle wins it for me.
* For clarity, I should add that one album sits squarely between Meddle and Dark Side, that being Obscured by Clouds, which came out in 1972. As it’s a soundtrack album, some might say it doesn’t really count as part of their progressive and creative lineage. I’d disagree with that, it’s an album I always quite liked, though it can be seen as a bit of a sidestep. That might also be said of More, another soundtrack album, but again, well worth a listen.
Everyone struggles with Captain Beefheart because they expect music to behave. They also expect other people to behave at funerals, to back away when they lose and arguement and for mayo never to be seen on top of mashed potato. It's a "follow the yellow brick road" reaction. The thing is that music does not behave, it can be wonderful and disturbing at times. Maybe at the same time but not so often at conventional funerals where music serves a more reflective purpose. Nothing to do with our Don though or his hat size.
Click the picture above and you can go on to read this in a more agreeable font, depending on your taste.
Most listeners want a tune to give comfort or order. They want to tap on the steering wheel at the lights. Beefheart refused this. He broke songs apart and left the pieces where they fell. These were recorded eventually. There is some melody, but it limps. There is rhythm, but it fights against itself and the listener's expectations. This can make people uneasy.
Audiences might need to unlearn a few things. Would that be useful? They feel the ground move whilst standing on an earthquake free (for the time being) continent and do not like it. Horses are spooked. The mind hears chaos and tries to reject it, but we were all born into chaos. The ear looks for a handrail and finds none. Unsighted at the top of a long staircase. Listeners may be simple people with heavy loans and outgoings. Weight in the wrong places is such a bad sandwich.
His voice does not try to please. It growls and shouts. It speaks like an animal that learned words with its tongue but kept all it's spikey teeth. Like being uncomfortable and drunk at a stranger's wedding, one your partner casually brought you along to. I doubt it's true that he had a tin trumpet that he would use to communicate with the dead. That was probably someone else.
The band (the Magic Band in various forms) always sounded loose, but it was not loose. It was controlled and hard. Let's not talk about the actual process involved. That's now chewed up history and TV talk show content. We know history loves warfare and abuse more than detail. Man's inhumanity etc. This situation was not at all perfect and it's the survivors right to tell their story or at least make it interesting and fanciful while people are alive enough to still care. I for one was almost 5164 miles away at the time.
Sometimes people value a delivered gift more than a personal visit. That just might explain his wordiness and lyrics.
To enjoy Beefheart you must stop asking if it could ever be pretty or easy. You must listen the way you look at rough countryside, derelict buildings, or bad weather. You accept it. It exists. Then you may begin to like it. After a while, you wonder if you could live there.
Some Beefheart tracks like these below might make this whole process run more easily:
“Her Eyes Are a Blue Million Miles” is gentle and sad and almost kindly.
“Clear Spot” has a groove you can sup with a honey straw.
“Big Eyed Beans from Venus” swings, even while it mutters. Has lunar influences.
“Electricity” is strange but hypnotic. Like the real thing.
“Nowadays a Woman’s Gotta Hit a Man” has humour and bite without losing the plot.
These are places to start. They give you a door instead of a wall. Having said that, walls are important parts of construction theory. Tap or lean on one today to test this out. Use an orange claw hammer.
In the end, or the ending, Don Van Vliet, aka Cpt. Beefheart, is not for everyone. That is part of his strength. He did not ask to be liked. He had a conditional condition and only asks that you listen and walk away if you have to. This kind of applies to all music and the wider world of artistic efforts in general because sometimes the coffee jar is too deep for the spoon.
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