Pouk Hill - Slade

The Way I Walk - Cramps

99 Ways To Die - Megadeth

Pain Is So Close To Pleasure - Queen

King Volcano - Bauhaus

^ Good idea, but be careful what you post about. Don't post anything about banks. They will hack this site, get your IP and track you down. I had a run-in with a major international bank a few years back, when I uncovered some extremely dodgy information about them and their practices after they fucked with my account. I threatened to expose them and demanded siginificant money for my silence. On and off over the next few weeks, I was followed around by a series of cars with blacked-out windows, which also sometimes parked opposite my house. One day, a blacked-out Merc tried to run me off the road. Fortunately, I was on a high-powered bike at the time, so I managed to evade & lose them. In the end, I backed down and settled for a £10k ex-gratia payment. And I never saw the cars again.

Tampa 5.5.73. 'Just sit the fuck down, goddammit!' Relieved to hear a new set-list after all the Oct 72 - Apl 73 shows. OTHAFA really didn't work as the 2nd number, IMO. Celebration Day FTW . Wish they hadn't dropped Dancing Days, though... First airing of No Quarter too...

FWIW, I think the little guy in front is probably one of the cartoon characters used to advertise flour (Homepride?) in the UK in the 70s. For some reason, they chose a bunch of bowler-hatted businessmen to depict the sterotypical housewife's ideal 'little helpers'. Nowadays of course, it would be a bunch of loin-clothed sex slaves...

Very strange indeed - although threads do get pulled sometimes....does that happen here? Now I come to think of it, there was some other 'Truth Seeker' site I used to frequent, and someone called Atlas used to post there a lot. And then one day, his posts vanished...could just be a coincidence... ...or maybe not.

Queens of Noise - Runaways

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfyQds7GFNI&feature=related

Hmmm.....she looks like she possibly might be able to show you a good time

I will read this, but I don't know why cos they blow any credibility in the first paragraph: 'The idea was to make us perceive we were "free and independent", but actually we are still subject to the British Commonwealth.' What a bunch of horse shit. And this: 'Well, look at President Bush, wherein two years ago he went to England and was knighted by the Queen.' WTF??

Cocksucker Blues - Rolling Stones

A great read, a companion to 'The Dark Stuff', his collection of articles from 70s NME & elsewhere. Quite a bit of LZ content, including a tale I hadn't heard before about Peter Grant sitting on a sleeping Vernon Presley Kent's taste mirrors mine uncannily, so I was delighted when I came across this passage concerning my ultimate hated group (yes, I DO hate them), which I found so amusing and spot-on that I'm gonna type it out for you all: 'My next assignment was a sudden lurch from the sublime [Nick Drake] to the ridiculous. NME had found a patron to pay for my round-trip airfare to LA and a weeks' worth of hotel bills - after which I was to be left to my own devices. There was one snag, however: the patron was Jethro Tull. 'In Christopher Headlington's lofty tome A History of Western Music, Claude Debussy is quoted as having once claimed that he favoured featuring flute in the foreground of many of his compositions because he felt the slender wind instrument possessed the mystical power 'of a melancholy Puck (the mischievous sprite in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream) questioning the hidden meaning of things'. But Jethro Tull leader Ian Anderson showcased it in his own repertoire for less poetic reasons. He tootled away on it because it added a suitably mellifluous 'age of Aquarius' tonality to his group's otherwise generic late-sixties blues-rock bleatings and because it was also a useful prop for his incessant human-scarecrow posturing whenever he found himself in front of a paying audience. 'The Tull had started out as trailblazing 'crusties' but soon jettisoned their initial 'playing the blues for greatcoat-sporting students who rarely wash themselves' gameplan to climb aboard the good ship 'prog rock' and seek their fortune through playing electrified madrigals in 7/4 time with lyrics about high-born lusty temptresses beating stable-boys' naked buttocks with a riding crop. Against all conventional logic, their new direction paid off like a one-armed bandit choking up its entire contents of coinage to some dumb-lucky gambler. By 1975 they were one of the world's biggest-selling musical attractions. In America they could sell out all the mega-barns any promoter could throw at them. In Los Angeles alone, they'd been booked for four consecutive nights at the prestigious 20,000-seater-capacity Felt Forum. That's what I'd essentially been flown in to trumpet back to the home front. They seemed to think I'd happily adapt to the role of becoming their token media shill but as usual I had other more personal agendas to pursue. 'Their US press officer - a shrill, hyperactive Bobbi Flekman lookalike with a voice like paint-stripper - met me at the airport and then drove me straight to the first of the Felt Forum shows previewed for that evening. I was already in a bad way from the jet lag - as well as probable drug withdrawal - and considered my imminent fate much like a prisoner about to face the gallows. Marshalling a half-hearted stiff upper lip, I staggered into the huge auditorium only to find myself in a scene to rank with Dante's Inferno: 20,000 double-ugly Americans going gaga over a musical spectacle so bizarre that it beggared description and which none of them could have even remotely comprehended. If they had, they wouldn't have been there in the first place. Each song the Tull performed was as long and windy as a discourse on agrarian reform in the nineteenth century, and to top it all they'd incorporate old Monty Python sketches into their routine and pretend to their Yankee rube fan base - who'd yet to see Python on the telly in their country - that they were doing something audaciously original. I couldn't believe my eyes and ears. Where was the appeal? Why all the bums on seats? I asked Anderson these very questions later and even he was at a loss to explain his group's popularity. But I already knew - it was bad taste, pure and simple. They say good taste is timeless. But bad taste has been around just as long and is invariably more lucrative'. Kent goes on to score some smack via Iggy Pop, and since he has no money apart from traveller's cheques, he buys a hairdryer and other stuff the dealer fancied from the hotel shop on room service, and charged it all to Tull. CLASS!

More here: http://www.dldewey.c...ns/schnidrf.htm And here: http://www.abovetops...thread61316/pg1 Above Top Secret is full of wonderful stuff, like this: http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread719361/pg1

Now that's more like it! Fuck politics, education, religion, music, Lady GaGa.....this is the real shit we should be discussing. Well done, Spiders.....and MORE LINKS, please, cos I'm LAZY

Well, I'd never heard of Derek Trucks either, but I now see he's some kind of prodigy who's ended up in the Allman Brothers Band. I don't care for Southern Rock, jam bands or the Allmans. Booo-ring. So I don't see how ignorance of DT should disqualify me or anyone else from discussing EC, who is not widely associated with that minority-interest genre. Next thing, you'll be saying that unless we're conversant with all the obscure hee-haw bands that Jahfin lionises, we're not qualified to discuss LZ either

He might have been GOD then, but he isn't GOD now, and arguably hasn't been since late 1966 when a certain Mr Hendrix upset the applecart and threw the rule-book out the window. That's a fairly short reign for a GOD. EC has spent the past 40 years playing anodyne Armani blues & icky derivatives, and snoozed his way through the most important decade in rock, contributing practically nothing of any substance to the 70s canon. Sure, he's a great guitarist if you like that kind of thing, but many don't, and remain baffled by his deification, particularly in view of the fact that stylistically he's a pure copyist, and has written so few memorable songs during his career. IMO.

No, that's not what I meant. I'm sure EC's playing just as well as he was in the 70s, if not better.

Never mind the quality, feel the width.

Indeed. How these clowns can piss and moan about their pay when they get aound 13 weeks of annual holiday is beyond me. Generally, the public sector unions over here are setting themselves up for a fall later this year, when they've threatened the biggest strike since 1926. Over what? The protection of their exorbitant, copper-bottomed pensions, and the totally outrageous idea that they should have to wait to retire at the same age as the rest of the population. Let's hope that Cameron can finish the excellent work started by Thatcher in the 80s.

A good point, one I meant to raise myself but forgot. When I was a kid, my main interest/recreational activity was listening to music, and I usually combined this with doing my homework. In fact, it was conducive to homework, as it created a relaxed and thought-provoking environment. Anyway, apart from the TV, there wasn't really very much else to do back then. But now, all the little buggers want to do is play shoot 'em up video games online with their buddies, or watch utter shite on Youtube. They can't do their homework at the same time, and the psychological state these activities induce is not conducive to homework, which becomes a rushed afterthought at 10.30pm when they realise they've pissed the whole evening up the wall on mind-rotting crap...

Last year's OECD world education rankings make uncomfortable reading for the bulk of posters here: http://www.guardian....science-reading The only solace for the UK is that we rank above the US, based on our average score over the three subjects . But why are we both so low, and falling? What's going on here? Take at look at who's at the top. Finland??? I mean, no disrespect, but what's so special about Finland? How is it that they appear to be doing things so much better than us? I can't comment on the US education system, but here's a few observations on ours: My sons are 12 and 14. When I started to read their teachers' comments on their homework many years ago, I was shocked to see that whereas they were criticised for poor handwriting, no attempt whatsoever was made to correct their spelling, and rarely their grammar. When I queried this at parents' evening, I was told that they don't do it anymore. Why? Because it would 'discourage the really bad spellers' . Furthermore, on one of the few occasions that their grammar was corrected, the only error I could see was made by the teacher. My elder son is a maths genius. Since Year One, he has been about three years ahead of his classmates' standard. He used to love the subject, but now he hates it. Why? Because his school is unable to give him challenging work. They argue that their budgets have been cut. I argue that it would cost no more if he were given more advanced textbooks to study, instead of him wasting his time doing stuff he knew how to do two years ago. They don't listen - and now it doesn't matter anymore, because he no longer has any interest in the subject. Over the past 30 years, the standards of our O-Levels and A-Levels (taken at 16 & 18 years respectively) have fallen to such an extent that a modern A-Level is hardly more difficult than an O-Level used to be, with the result that everyone is now getting A-grades. So now they've had to introduce tiers of A-grades. And of course, anyone and their dog can get into university these days. Not a proper university, you understand - mostly second-rate establishments that used to be called Polytechnics, like Luton or Liverpool. They were all upgraded to university status awhile back, to cure the social evil of elitism. So nobody leaves school at 16 anymore to work an apprenticeship in the traditional manual trades. Instead, they go to an ex-Poly to do a degree in Media Studies, or Self-Actualisation Through Macrame. Of course, they all end up unemployed, and hey presto - double whammy: we no longer have enough home-grown plumbers or electricians, so we have to import them all from Lithuania. Many graduates go on to become teachers - not, as used to be the case, as a vocation, but because there are no cushy jobs-for-life anywhere else anymore. But guess what? Half of them are barely literate (see above points), so they become substandard teachers, and so.....the cycle starts again, and the self-perpetuating downward spiral continues. Any thoughts?