Jimmy grew a beard only once, while staying at Bron Yr Aur in May of 1970. He shaved it off just before the gig in Sydney, February 27, 1972. Robert also grew a beard at Bron Yr Aur, but shaved it off in the summer of 1971, at some point after the disastrous concert in Milan in July. Details on Jonesy and Bonzo later. Jimmy wore the sweater west at many gigs, in Copenhagen, Milan, at Wembley Empire Pool, etc.

Definitely.

Nice pic - and I spy Botticelli's La Primavera in the background.

And these are from the Swan Song launch at Bel Air Hotel, Los Angeles, May 13, 1974.

These are from the Swan Song launch at Four Seasons Hotel, New York, May 7, 1974.

There were two separate occasions. The pics you just posted are from the LA launch - great pics, BTW, I've never seen them before.

Yeah, I guess you're right. But that's exactly where the discussion becomes pointless for me. If anybody says their favorite band is The Beatles, The Stones, Cream, The Who or Led Zeppelin - or indeed that they think Bob Dylan is the best - I just think, yeah, who could argue with that? Now if somebody had said Def Leppard on the other hand...

I know opinions differ, and all that, but this is absolute nonsense - they certainly ARE in the top league, no question about it. For a long while The Who were generally recognized as an impossible act to follow live, and for more than a decade they managed to release albums that are still generally agreed to be among the best in the history of rock music.

but it was even earlier, on October 4th.

That's Dave Pegg, bass player with Fairport Convention and Jethro Tull. He's from the same area in the midlands I believe as Robert and Bonzo.

You mean up front, Riot? That's Cole. It's a good photo - better quality here, and no watermark.

Ah, this thread reminds me. If you see this Jan, just get your ass over here again, will you.

That's a great photo, 3hrs - thanks for sharing!

Of course, should have remembered about your maths - after all, my dad is a mathematician. One more case where the relevance of things depends entirely on the particular context, I guess. Philosophy of maths is not my own field, and for a valid reason: when I look into one of my dad's books on old favorite subject, namely differential equations, I go My own field is more social theoretical philosophy, and phenomenology has become relevant for me just recently. As I said, mostly Merleau-Ponty. The book I mentioned that I was reading is on Husserl, not by him, written by a young Danish specialist, Dan Zahavi, who has also published several essays in English. I don't know Skovmose. I may have replied in the thread, but let's have the e-mail exchange also.

Well, both pics are from the Polar Prize ceremony in Stockholm a couple of years ago. The woman standing between Jimmy and Robert is Ekaterina Semenchuk. She performed at the Polar Prize ceremony. The one sitting at the table with Jon Lord and Jimmy is Princess Victoria, of Sweden.

Percy meets Kate Bush

Really? That just seems like such an odd choice of reading material! I mean, I am no specialist in Husserl, but presumably what you are referring to are things he wrote around 1890 or so, where he commits to a position on logic that he then abandoned, perhaps as a result of Gottlob Frege's criticisms. The critique of 'psychologism' became the point of departure in his massive study Logical Investigations (published in 1900, I think), and the final chapter of that work in turn became the point of departure of his phenomenological philosophy - at least in his own opinion. What the sin of psychologism (I believe John Stuart Mill had also developed a psychologistic account in his A System of Logic) consisted in was confusing the thought act with the logical moment as such, which latter had to be seen as an ideality not reducible to a real act. Husserl's later position, and of course Frege's, are still taken seriously, whereas I don't think Husserl's earlier position is seen as defensible nowadays. After 1900 Husserl focused on developing a new mode of investigating consciousness and consciousness activity that would befit its specificity and irreducibility to the world of things, intentionality for example. He developed a new method of reduction to avoid the objectivistic fallacy, which he more or less adhered to in all his later efforts, but the basic understanding of phenomenology was something he really kept working on until his death in 1938. His later works develop a much more complex theory, especially of the constitutional aspect. Instead of the much narrower focus of his earlier versions of phenomenology, where individual consciousness remains the single basic prerequisite, he now sees it more consistently in interrelation with intersubjectivity and the lifeworld. That's really what I find most interesting in Husserl, and it forms the particular legacy that Maurice Merleau-Ponty was heir to. That's really the phenomenological philosopher that I find most interesting. He was a friend of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir as you might know, a central figure behind Les temps modernes in the first years of that journal, and a great philosopher. He wrote a massive treatise on perception for example, The Phenomenology of Perception, that was published in 1945, two years after Sartre's Being and Nothingness if I remember correctly.

A bunch of books about philosophy. Am reading a book in Danish about Edmund Husserl's phenomenology these days.

Jimmy met Sofia Coppola when he was staying in Japan in March, 2004. Here's one of the photos Ross Halfin took.

I still remember when I first heard them. It was in 1976 and I was 11, and two new songs came on the radio, as a sort of introduction to their new album: Dance on the Volcano and Mad Man Moon. They quickly became one of my favorite groups after that. I got Wind and Wuthering later that year, or it could have been in 1977, can't remember exactly. I used to really love those early Collins-as-singer albums, especially the live album, Seconds Out; and playing-wise it was great, no question about that. But later came to find some of the songs a little too cheesy at times after Gabriel left - don't really like things like Blood on the Rooftops or Afterglow, etc. nowadays. A Trick of the Tail was a much stronger album. By And Then There Were Three I started losing interest in them, and can't say I've changed my opinion since on that. I loved them for the more daring statements, not as a run-of-the-mill pop group. Hence, my favorite for a long time now has been the Gabriel era - especially The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. But most of those albums are very, very good - Nursery Cryme, Selling England, Foxtrot, Genesis Live. All wonderful stuff.

That's logical, because (apart from Knebworth and the Copenhagen warm-ups) they only played the song on these two tours.

This is just a repost of something I wrote on ALS a good while ago on the old forums. I didn't say anything about Jonesy's great bass playing, or on the lyrics, both of which certainly merit discussion, but anyway, here goes. That whole album, Presence was done very quickly, in three weeks, that is - the whole thing - and, under quite unusual circumstances. Robert Plant was in a wheelchair, injured as he was after a bad car accident (with his family). It was still not entirely clear how he would heal. At one point, Robert was really into it - and he fell off that chair. He later said that he’d never seen Jimmy move so quickly. That incident to me really captures an important aspect of the album as a whole, and of Achilles Last Stand in particular. The words that come to my mind when describing the music on that album are anxiety or unease; it’s extremely frantic, and sounds a bit raw. And yet, in fact, it’s very accomplished. ALS is the first track on Presence, of course, and it starts out with two big, mysteriously sounding chords on electric guitar, picked note for note, in an ascending - descending, ascending - descending pattern, and gradually building in volume; once it’s become loud, Jimmy changes the later notes on the ascending part, and then partially strums that chord at the higher end; the chord fades shortly, and then all the instruments suddenly come in, with the rhythm section building a furious tempo, and Jimmy playing in a melancholic E minor. Robert then comes on, in a pattern of almost talking, then singing out some five higher notes... The mood is set, mysterious, tense, frantic; and it builds from there, with several sections, yet strongly cohesive. Bonzo’s drums are very instrumental in creating that atmosphere, the fills on the drums are absolutely amazing, indeed, one of them (early in the song) truly does sound “almost humanly impossible”, as Dave Grohl put it recently. But the song is not simply played live. There are like a dozen dubbed guitar parts, forming an orchestrated, layered, moving sculpture of sound - if you’ll pardon my using such a metaphor: but Jimmy really is something of a musical painter. His solo is on the song is bluesy, melancholical, with short silences separating flurries of notes building strange patterns - some of them almost like a man stuttering. It’s one of his absolute best (and he thinks so himself). Robert’s vocal performance is absolutely fantastic. In one of the sections of the song, the guitar almost disappears behind the rhythm section and he starts to sing a repeated pattern of ascending notes, and then a repeated pattern of descending ones; the ascending part maybe slightly reminiscent of the wail of Immigrant Song, but this whole idea mirrors or suggests the opening guitar chords - which do get repeated at the end, and bring the track full circle, closing it off. This time of course the volume fades out. It’s an extraordinary creation. It’s Rock & Roll at it’s most fierce, but has the quality of musical composition, of fine art, of a self-contained universe; sad, but you wish it’d never stop.

Well, it wasn't very cold in fact, but of course it was summer when they came. Jimmy actually remarked on it in one of the interviews, and said that it wasn't as cold here as he had expected.

Steve is right about Robert writing the lyrics for Immigrant Song while they were here; so it would seem quite unlikely that they played it in Laugardalshöll, even though they did perform it only a week later, at Bath Festival. But the thing is, they probably did perform it here as well. The setlist was probably a lot like the one at Bath. We know they did Dazed, as you mention, and also Heartbreaker, How Many More Times, Bring It On Home, Thank You, Moby Dick; some unidentified acoustic number was played (probably That's The Way); and the encores were Whole Lotta Love, Communication Breakdown and...."a new song".

There probably is another thread about them, but if so, it's buried deep anyway. Yep, count me in, I think they're great, and along with Siouxsie and the Banshees really the best thing that emerged from the British punk/new wave scene. Many of their early songs showed a peculiar sensibility, a simplicity and catch-iness that sounded like nobody else (Killing an Arab, Jumping Someone Else's Train, things like that, for instance) - but for me, on the whole. it was after Robert Smith had spent some time playing guitar with Siouxsie and the Banshees (in 1983-1984) that The Cure finally started to achieve music that was perhaps more substantial and complex. It was more diverse, and yet at the same time had a stronger unity, because the band had developed a great deal and the changes were perceptible in every song. The occasional heavy feel of the earlier albums (One Hundred Years on Pornography being the most obvious example) didn't go away, but rather became part of a more unified musical profile - and the catchy feel was also preserved in a new guise, as in my favorite Cure song, which is on Kiss Me - How Beautiful You Are. I think there is quite a bit of Syd Barrett in Robert's songs, which I like a great deal.