I go through summers where I find myself being sucked towards a particular genre and being obsessed with certain albums as the season plays out.

A couple of years ago it was the Great Blues Summer. I beefed up my CD collection with some classic Muddy Waters albums, as well as some more contemporary takes on the blues. This summer I seem to have unwittingly been sucked into prog. Oh dear.

Prog gets a really bad name. I’m not sure why. It’s basically jazz music for rock bands. I think a lot of the shit around it comes out of the whole stereotypical late sixties to early seventies scene, and the not-so-flattering looks that accompany it.

King Crimson’s Larks' Tongues in Aspic is a worthy listen - or at least I thought it was. It was on their 1001 albums to listen to list. I must have been served this some time in the past couple of years. I added it to my eBay daily watch list. They drop each day, clocking in anything between £10 and £50 or so.

And then one copy dropped for a grubby fiver at the start of this week. I’ll have a bit of that, I thought. A clickety click here and there, and job’s a good ‘un.

Lark’s Tongues in Aspic arrive this morning. I did actually give it a stream before I hit the purchase, just to make sure that my musical judgement from a couple of years ago hadn’t slipped. It had. It wasn’t the masterpiece I had remembered.

But still, a prog summer is a prog summer. I do love this kind of music to play whilst I get on with other tasks. I wouldn’t call it background music, but you try getting to grips with a particularly prickly work project when you’ve got some west coast hip-hop blasting out.

Anthems! Bangers! Bombastic indie that is somehow caught between Britpop and that weird type of major mainstream indie that chugs along and still manages to fill stadiums! I’ve always struggled with this type of music but I still have something of a soft spot for it. It’s a mighty long way down rock ‘n’ roll from the C86 indie scene to these elongated, stretched-out songs. If they were recorded by someone like Will Young then they would be pure pop perfection. Embrace manage to rough it up a little but it’s still extremely slick. You should listen to this without being a music snob. I find that tough. I think it’s just that at the time I was struggling to shake off my indie past. Embrace made the job an awful lot easier.

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Another perfect jazz album for a summer’s morning. Miles has such a calming effect. He’s happy to take a back seat on many of the tracks and allow the piano to take over. But then he’s always lurking there behind the scenes, ready to interject and play his very understated part. It’s actually quite an emotional album without having any lyrics. That’s a pretty clever trick. Music to drink endless cups of tea to as the heat starts to build outside.

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I was pretty sure that I had this album but nope; I was pretty sure that I must know this album inside out but once again no. The lead track is something of a well-trodden path. Sure, it was recorded live but it would have sounded much better as a bedroom DIY effort than with all the whoops and hollers coming from the crowd.

Once you’ve skipped the crappy live opening track, then you’re in classic Neil Young territory. Old Shaky is obviously at his best when he’s doing the Old Shaky thing. This involves an understated vocal performance, bashing away on an old acoustic, and the general light touch all round. This album is also boosted by some breezy saxophone, which helps it swing a little. Decent.

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A crappy Insta ad for the Duran Duran gig as part of BST at Hyde Park cropped up in my feed far too early for me on Wednesday morning but it did kinda catch me. I was caught up in the early morning Wednesday Duran Duran vibes. I never knew such a thing existed.

I had little spare time as I slurped away on my endless morning cups of tea, pondering life and wondering at what time of the day it would be suitable to give up on the idea of doing the housework during a balmy heat wave.

I admit to getting sucked in ever so slightly down a Duran Duran rabbit hole. I never thought I would be spending my Wednesday mornings doing this.

My own Duran world never really get going with the first album, but I went in big time with Rio. I say big time, that phase probably lasted no more than a couple of months. That’s the pace at which the musical timeline operates when you have a young and eager musical mind, and £3.99 to indulge in vinyl each week.

I started scrolling, following the links, and generally being ushered into places in the Duran universe where I really didn’t want to be.

One of those portholes was Neurotic Outsiders. This was the supergroup that involved John Taylor, Steve Jones of the Pistols, and a couple of members of Guns and Roses. I thought I went to see this rabble back at the old LA2 club in Soho around 1996. What can the modern interweb provide me with here?

The gig itself was part of my different life when I was working in the crazy world of Rock and Roll. Every night was GIG NIGHT back in those days.

I rode the Britpop wave, blagging up all the freebies, seeing the most shitty, shitty Britpop bands in toilet venues, to then dining out with royalty at the major Britpop events.

Something such as Neurotic Outsiders didn’t really fit the times. They were an LA rock supergroup, very much out of kilter with the Cool Britannia vibe that was going off.

I have very vague memories of the evening. I remember it being bakingly hot. I have no idea what the set list was, and if I close my eyes I can just about visualise what I saw on the stage. I may have even left early.

I managed to stumble on an online review from some Pistols fanboy site. There’s no grainy YouTube footage of the LA2 gig, but there is of other Neurotic Outsiders gigs.

The set list surprised me. They opened that LA2 gig with Planet Earth. I’m sure I would have remembered that at the time? Some Pistol songs, as well as even a Clash cover, are in the set list. I was probably boozing, but I doubt if I was completely out of it.

This then got me thinking about all those gigs that I attended from around 1990 in Sunny Colch, a manic period of a year and a half or so of some truly classic early Britpop gigs at the Charlotte in Leicester, and then my two years of gigging and ligging it on the London music scene.

Tickets weren’t really a thing those days. Most of the gigs on the London circuit were either showcases or guest lists as part of my job. It was a pretty cool as fuck job to be honest.

I really would struggle to perhaps name possibly even a tenth of the gigs I went to during that period. I did have a long lost digital file of the artist I interviewed, but even that has somehow been lost in time.

I really wish blogging had been around back during that period. My archive would have been an absolute goldmine for me personally in trying to capture and remember many of those live performances.

I often whinge now seeing Young Boys and Girls Around Town trying to capture every single moment of live experiences on their phones; just live for the moment, etc.

Maybe that’s the approach I should take with my long lost years of Sunny Colch, Leicester and London gigging. I had some hit and miss moments, but the highs definitely outnumbered the lows. I’m sure they meant something special to me at the time.

Lesson learned: never fall down a Duran Duran rabbit hole at 6 a.m. on a Wednesday morning.

Oh - and something I do remember is interviewing part-time Duran guitarist Warren Cuccurullo in his Putney home during this period. It was another heatwave day. The front room was completely blacked out and he had an unhealthy collection of dildos on his mantelpiece.

Like I said, the crazy crazy world of rock and roll.

Blimey. Here’s a blast from the past: Blak Twang and So Rotton.

I heard this for the first time in around 30 years when it was dropped as part of a Radio 1 Drum and Bass mix. Yeah yeah, I know. As I speed towards my 60th birthday, I really should be listening to drum and bass. But I still love buzzing off me tits.

The D&B version of the track pinged my interest. I vaguely remember this, I thought.

Oh yes, I remember when Lamacq used to drop it frequently on the Evening session during the late 90s. It was an interesting time where the bloated Britpop had finally been killed off and Lamacq was dropping all sorts of top UK hip-hop tunes that were mashed up with elements of big beat style.

I’d rather listen to this UK incarnation of hip hop than any old West Coast. In fact there was some fella shooting some hoops on the court next to us whilst we were playing pickleball yesterday. He was blasting out the most mundane 90s West Coast crap. Give me Black Twang any time.

I’ve no idea who Black Twang are, or even were. I’m not really interested. But I do love being reminded of these blasts from the past and some of the messy memories from that late 90s period.

I’m a sucker for this absolute slush. No Secrets is an album SO far removed from my own lifestyle. I think it’s the escapism in being transported to a time and place that I only experience in movies. I was surprised to read that the album was recorded in… London. It sounds like the West Coast rather than the West End. No Secrets is dreamy, airy and borderline early 70’s radio jingles territory. We’ll never return to that world. Happy happy joy joy.

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Pleasant enough jazz by numbers for a summer’s morning. The guitar playing is of course immaculate, but I would rather have heard more from the trumpet. The blues crossover works well. It’s almost as if each track has two sides to the story, with the whole jazz / blues thing going off. Another half decent album in which to work along to.

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Neither proud nor ashamed to say that I’ve listened to this hundreds of times - but not in the past forty years or so. And none of it sticks, apart from the singles. Nothing was memorable. That’s not to say that it’s a poor album, far from it. It’s a very easy, smooth listen, as you would expect. But apart from the lead tracks, I wouldn’t find myself humming along to the more minor tracks whilst I’m looking for an ear worm. The early 80’s were very much like that; the same could be said for Let’s Dance. Save a Prayer is the exception, and is worth the extra star alone.

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The sound of an artist learning and showcasing his craft in real time. Which is kinda what demos are… Still, it’s a fantastic listen, and raw as fuck. Almost 70 years later and there is still an air of excitement and danger. Plus no one ballads like Elvis - even in his early Elvis incarnation. Extra marks for sounding ace in mono.

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