Some do New Music Monday. I like to do Tatty Tunes Tuesday.

And so there I was about to fire up another Drum and Bus Show when R pinged me early on Tuesday morning.

Hey! Are you enjoying that current toe-tapper that everyone is talking about? Synthesising the Silk Roads… somehow passed me by on the Smooth Radio playlist this week.

Blimey.

And so what we have here is forgotten underground music from 1980s Soviet Central Asia. As the title suggests, it fuses disco, rock, electronica with traditional Silk Road folk and jazz. It’s not going to bother the top 40 anytime soon.

A lot of the album comes from dead stock vinyl that was pressed in the Soviet era plants in Uzbekistan. If dear old Andy Kershaw was still with us, he’d be having multiple wet dreams over this.

It’s not for the faint-hearted but then again it really is quite accessible compared to some of the crap I try and silence on the radio these days. I barely get beyond two to three minutes of any contemporary station before Alexa is told to change.

I’m always up for experimentation, and synthesising the Silk Roads is a step in the right direction. You’d go pretty batshit crazy if this was your only musical exposure. It’s all about dipping in and dipping out of different styles and tastes.

I continued the game of musical ping-pong. I pinged back over to R Redman International and We Run Things. This is a 40-track compilation of Ddgi dub from the early to mid-1980s.

It’s not a million miles away from Synthesising the Silk Roads in terms of aspirations, if not influences. Music is all the much better when different genres blend together. Digi and dub work just as well as disco and Uzbekistan folk.

Fancy that.

A couple of CDs. You don’t say.

Let’s start with the absolute bonkers bat shit crazy first. Here we have Aphrodite’s Child and their 666 masterpiece. It’s a double album and it came shrink-wrapped and box fresh. I wasn’t expecting that.

This stumbled into my feeds a few weeks ago. I knew nothing about it before then. It turns out it’s some late 60s prog effort that actually boasts Denis Rousos on lead vocals.

It’s absolutely NUTS. The Wikipedia entry informs me that it attempts to retell some biblical story. This gets lost after the first track.

It doesn’t sound like it’s a late 60s prog effort. In fact, some of the tracks have quite hypnotic beats and could quite easily fit into a GP playlist.

I absolutely bloody love it. It’s my summer drop for 2026. Never say that I am behind the times.

And then we come to Miles. Last month was pretty much all about Miles with the hashtag #miles100, all over my audio feeds.

Someday My Prince Will Come is Miles at his most accessible. There’s nothing wrong with some of the deep shit that Miles got up to during his peak period, but also you can’t go wrong with something light and breezy like the Someday album, especially on a lazy summer afternoon.

If you were to tell me 30 or 40 years ago that I’ll be closing my days out listening to late 60s prog and Miles Davis, then I would have told you to get a fucking life, Grandad.

Like a fine wine I like to think that my musical tastes have aged well.

A little too heavy for my liking. I love Winwood’s vocals; I can tolerate Baker’s drumming. But Old Slow Hand doesn’t half go off on one with his guitar wanking. I can’t Find My Way Home borders on neckerchief rock - no bad thing. It then strays into a showcase album for each individual member, rather than a collective effort. Sure you can play - just not together as a band.

⭐ ⭐

This is a bit of a weird one. There I was buying my milk on a Sunday morning when I walked past the usual part in the co-op where all the freebie books are left. It’s usually full of Bridget Jones shit. I usually walk on by.

But wait! What’s this?

There was a pile of around half a dozen or so CDs. I had a quick shifty through them. It looked like it was early 90s standard indie fare, with a fair sprinkling of CD singles. CD singles are the worst format ever invented. At least with a 7 inch vinyl, or even a 12 inch vinyl, you get a feeling of physical superiority.

I flicked through for all of 5 seconds… Nope. NOPE. NOPE!!!!

An album then jumped out at me: Somewhere Soon by The High. Never judge a book by its cover etc, but there was something about the simplicity of the album design, albeit reduced down to a CD level, and the band name that somehow triggered something in me.

The High? I think I’ve heard of them, but I really can’t place them. In between all the excitement of buying six pints of milk, I thought I’d take a punt on Somewhere Soon. It was placed inside my milk-carrying bag.

Back at base and a quick online investigation followed. Oh, that’s interesting. The High have not only Stone Roses, but also Buzzcock connections. They’re a kind of super group without being super. They’re the indie runners who might have been if it wasn’t for different times, different styles, and different label politics.

I gave it a play later on in the day. It’s not going to change the world. I’ll probably only play it once every 10 years or so, which perhaps suggests I should have left it outside the co-op. But it is interesting in the early 90s indie time capsule type of way.

They can’t quite decide if they want to go down the shoegazing route or perhaps take something of a slight twist and head a little bit more down a Madchester Stone Roses offering.

I confess to looking on eBay to see what the prices are. The cheapest is £5, with an average selling price around £10. That could buy my milk supply for the coming week. That’s not quite in the spirit of a freebie corner though, is it?

I’ll stick with it. My indie days are thankfully done, but I do like quite discovering lost relics from this period.

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.

⭐ ⭐ ⭐

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.

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

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.

⭐ ⭐ ⭐

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.