Santa Page - he never delivers any presents, but he's planning to do it next year...

No worries, mate. Norman Wisdom was a little cheeky chappie comic actor whose voice used to get really histrionic when he got panicky. According to Visconti, when they all lived at Haddon Hall, Ronson once had too many shandies when they were in the pub and took the piss, laughing that Bowie was singing a song like Norman Wisdom! The only thing I think it could be is The Supermen - the 'turn to mould' verse on TMWSTW version is a deadringer for Norman! Did Bowie take it all in good part and go along with the joke? Not really...

Even if it'd been true, I'd've boycotted if Jimmy was sporting a 'tache, man...

Yes, Jimmy played guitar on the session for I Pity The Fool, one of Bowie's early attempts at an r 'n' b 7", in 1965. One of the first times Jimmy used a fuzzbox on a recording, apparently. He casually gave Bowie a riff, which he eventually used on The Supermen in 1970. Bowie sings it like Norman Wisdom if he'd been in PiL, but it's a classic metal riff - unfortunately, Mick Ronson's guitar is buried so low in the mix, you can barely hear it! Even on the recent remix, you have to strain to pick it out - frustrating as all hell because Ronson's sound is glorious. Why can't the rhythm part be as loud as the little Beck-style lead line he plays near the end? Grrrr. There's also the rearranged version that they did for the Glastonbury Fayre album in 1971 - Ronno's a bit louder on that (but still nowhere near enough!), but it doesn't have the stabbing riff under the verses. Why Bowie re-used the riff on Dead Man Walking decades later, I dunno.

Love it, Jimmie ray! But, man, if drinking makes you more amenable to Christmas songs, I'm glad I've been sober my entire life! 😄 The best Xmas I've ever had was the first time my parents went away and left me in the house by myself - I ignored Xmas altogether that year and I've been replicating it ever since. Hard to recapture the magic of the first time, though, eh...! 😏

Can't say it any better than that.

Speaking of Madeline Smith...

Ian Hunter from Mott the Hoople's got this thing on his website where you can ask him a question. Someone's asked him: 'Who does your hair and do you like Come On, Eileen?' 😲 Best. Question. Ever.

Anyone But England! Heard it from this Welsh bloke on a site we were digging and it was too good a wind-up not to use when I got back to the office. I'm sure it was funny the first 17 times I said it... 😉

A.B.E. 😉

Siled it down for 12 hours straight. Better than any heatwave!

You can blame The Bourne Identity for making it fashionable in the first place. Doug Liman was an indie director and shot a lot of it himself with the camera on his shoulder and edited it a certain way. The problem was with the two sequels, when another (much inferior) director misunderstood what Liman had done and cocked up his attempt to replicate it. The trendy copyists found it easier to imitate the shaky cam of the sequels than what Liman had done in the original - so it was everywhere for a while.

Shame they let someone from Sheffield on the same stage, though... I used to know Hawley's guitarist, Shez, in the '80s and, ironically, he was an absolute Jimmy fanatic but he's not on this - whereas Hawley himself has no interest in Zeppelin whatsoever. The harsh vagaries of life, eh, Shez?

Coverdale had been called 'Cover-version' long before Still of the Night, though. There's a reason for that. See if you think he'd heard things like this before he wrote Blindman. There's plenty more where these came from.

I dunno, I tend to agree with Rotten on this one.

😂 Thing is, it's almost true - apart from a school trip to the British Museum as a kid, I was 30 before I'd ever been south of Sheffield or north of Leeds! That's about a year for every mile! 😆

Because, like James Corden, Williams is an unrelentingly annoying bell end and the urge to smack him is a bottomless well?

I've never been out of England. And I do mean England, not Britain! I think I mislaid that sense of adventure sometime back in 1975...

Well, when you put it like that...

I never want to hear it, man - because I know I'll never UNhear it afterwards! 😄

It's like a goddamned banana republic, is what it is. 'Catastrophically illiterate disgrace' is actually accurate. In Truss's case , it's literally true - remember when she was Education Secretary and she refused to try to spell 'literate' live on air? That's like having a Chancellor of the Exchequer who once couldn't get a job as a bus conductor because he failed the maths test. Oh, wait...

Yes, that's generally the case in the UK too. Although here, any overgrowing branches etc that you cut off your neighbour's tree have to be put on his property afterwards! It's bizarre - chucking the branches over his fence always strikes me as more likely to cause trouble than just cutting them off in the first place! In this particular case, it could be that the trees are specifically mentioned as contributing to the setting of a listed building (in which case, Listed Building Consent would be required - this is probably what Jimmy got and which Williams was refused). The trees in front of Williams' house could have tree preservation orders on them - to get rid of them he'd have to show that the damage they were causing outweighed the benefit of keeping them. If they were likely to fall on the house that'd be one thing - undermining a boundary wall, not so much. I'm just glad that Williams was told 'no' for once.😉

I don't remotely mind the humming of amps. I want Zeppelin to be visceral and emotional, not pristine and sanitised. On the other hand, I'm glad I've never yet heard the squeaking bass drum pedal in SIBLY!

Yeah, that's partly what's funny about it! 😄