Kevin Ayers and The Whole World’s Shooting at the Moon. He’s a name that I’ve always been familiar with, but not so his music. My endless journey towards being lost in a summer of Prog continues. We may be coming towards the fag end of the summer days but this doesn’t stop my musical time travelling back to the early 70s. I remain convinced I was born in the wrong decade.

There’s something just so innocent about Shooting at the Moon. It’s a bit of a messy album in that there are so many styles and structures taking place. That’s the jazz thing going off, innit. But some of the more considered song pieces really are well crafted and have a very pastoral warm sense that just fits these final days of the summer of 2026. It’s a shame I came to it all more than half a Century too late.

The Orb are one of those artists that I really should listen a lot more to but I never really get round to it. What’s the point? A lot of it all sounds very familiar, but that does them a disservice.

With Oblivion you feel like you’re listening to a mixtape from the mid to late ’90s, which I guess essentially this is what it is - and that’s no bad thing. As ever the album takes you on a journey through the ups and downs, with plenty to explore in between.

It’s music of its period, with a certain amount of post-rave hippy shit thrown in. It’s also highly infectious and another example of the ideal music in which to work along to.

I really should listen to The Orb a lot more, even though I’m only really half listening to them.

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Gee Vaucher Art Foundation seeks start-up funding

via HNWB

Royal scroungers grab £50 million ‘pay’ rise

via Socialist Worker

I’m getting pretty pissed off reading endless articles or posts where people diss AI big time. I often wonder if some of these criticisms are AI generated themselves.

Oh - and don’t even get me started on AI - generated posters for your local jumble sale. Yep, they’re absolute shite. Be gone! You could do a better job using Microsoft Paint.

But wait! What’s this?

For all you AI doomsters and gloomsters, as someone once said, it’s all about how you use the tech, right?

In less than 15 minutes this morning my very friendly Claude work colleague managed to whack out a spreadsheet that randomises almost 3,000 albums each day.

If you’re a long term reader of this blog, you’ll know that R and I have been going through the daily exercise for maybe three or four years of having the exact same album served up to us each morning to listen to, and then add some feedback notes.

This was part of the original 1,001 Albums to Listen to Before You Die list. Such definitive lists are of course bollocks in themselves, but the daily revelation of a new piece of music has opened up my tastes and also my CD collection.

We long since finished the original 1,001 Albums list. We moved on earlier on this year to the Colin Larkin list.

So far so good. There was, of course, some duplication, plus the crappy old website displaying the Colin Larkin list was full of ad-heavy gunk. It didn’t half slow your browser down.

I managed to find a spreadsheet online where some dude had imported all of the Larkin albums, as well as combining these with some of the other definitive muso beard-stroking lists that are out there.

I thought, Hey! We could just go through this each morning as R and I work our way down the combined list.

But the problem was that they were all A to Z. When you hit an artist that you think is absolute crap - for argument’s sake let’s just say, erm, Aerosmith - then you’re going to get 10 Aerosmith albums across 10 days.

No ta.

I turned the task over to Claude. I gave it a fairly brief prompt and said, Yep my tech skills are diminishing. Just bloody do it for me.

A few tweaks here and there and 10 minutes later, a Google script was produced, which aggregates every album on the list and then at the click of a button both R and I get served up the same album each day.

Others, of course, are free to join in. I’ve made the link shareable so all you need to do is to open this Google Sheet in your browser. You’ll get the exact same album as us each day once pick Random Album in the Google menu bar.

Of course I could tinker around with this and have an option to leave a shared listening experience with some brief listening notes. I might fire up Claude and see what he’s got to say.

So yeah, stop and think before you post up some shite dissing AI. You should be able to tell what AI slop is, certainly in terms of images and probably text these days.

But for the tech coding side of things this is truly a SHIT THE BED breakthrough advance.

Disclaimer: This is one of those seminal albums that defined me as I was growing up. It only touched on my personal development for a brief time, but for 6 months or so around 1985, it was pretty much all I listened to.

I love the posturing. I love the ridiculousness of it all. I love the leather trousers. Sure it’s a bit of a leap away from the Southern Death Cult. You can see the logical progression, which then leads you towards hair metal. I’m happy for my limited heavy guitar indulgences to soak up the Love album, but I’m a little scared to look over the edge and see what comes next.

It gets a little hippy shit in places, with tracks such as Brother Wolf, Sister Moon" She Sells Sanctuary is mid-80s metal indie perfection. I can almost taste the pints of cider and cherry brandy as the riff steamrolls you over. Gosh those were the days.

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Gosh Miles was bloody prolific. It’s always a pleasure to discover a new album by him. When I say discover I mean one that I didn’t even know existed. A little further online digging reveals that this is just one in a series of four similarly themed albums recorded at the time. That should keep me busy over the weekend.

Cookin' starts off with a great underplayed cover of My Funny Valentine. You’re then straight into it with a bit of bebop action as he changes the mood and the pace.

I’m coming to the conclusion that you really can’t go wrong with Miles Davis from any era. That’s quite a stretch, from the ’50s through to his late ’80s output. Jazz remains the perfect music for me in which to get things done. Cookin' with the Miles Davis Quintet captures this perfectly.

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What a bloody horrid album. What an absolute racket. This sounds like a theremin that was turned up to 11, natch. It’s not even funny. It’s everything music shouldn’t be. It’s crude. It’s sexist. It has absolutely zero soul. There’s not even any song structure to speak of. It’s just noise and not even noise in a good way. What a waste of two minutes that was.

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This sounded a little laboured to be honest. It’s almost as if there’s a desire to craft the perfect pop song. The secret should be simple. You don’t need to add on all the extras and fruity toppings to get pop perfection. A good song is a good song.

The songs seem to stick to the same formula: Poppy, jingly jangly guitar, some killer hooks and then a chorus that even AI would struggle to come up. If that’s your kind of thing then it’s a decent album. But there’s not much grrr in this album.

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I had no idea what to expect from this album beyond the Memphis song. It’s one of those tracks that has grown in popularity over the years despite being something of a low key affair when it was first released. What followed was pretty much the Memphis song from start to finish. There’s nothing wrong with that.

The Memphis song is pleasant enough, with its Bruce Hornsby style light piano, which builds up, backs down, and then builds up once again. Dude can certainly sing and he can pen a half decent pop song. It’s not the music I would turn to by choice but I might listen to it if I wanted to try and doze off. Damned faint praise etc.

The acoustic tracks work best here. They allow the genuine soulfulness in Neil Young’s voice to be showcased. When he plugs in the guitars he reverts to just being any old hairy rocker wearing denim.

The pipedin crowd noise gets on your tits a bit. The Woodstock interjections from a decade previously are just weird. All the tracks drag on. This is something of a Neil Young trademark.

It’s a decent enough album but it also proves that when it comes to Neil Young, he matures like a fine wine.

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