This still sounds so fresh, right from the opening synth drum beats of New Life. There couldn’t be a more perfect opening to an album with the nominative determinism to welcome it. Depeche Mode were always at their best when they were young, clean, and full of optimism. Speak & Spell personifies this approach. For a band so young at the time, the depth of songwriting is impressive. Big Muff always raises a smile. An album that defines modernism at the start of a new decade.
⭐ ⭐ ⭐
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.
To the sailing club! …on Monday evening for the latest in the social table tennis sessions. Our first obstacle wasn’t the game itself: we had to overcome a cow that had strayed onto the estuary path. Silly cow…
Our Monday evening the table tennis social is starting to grow. We had six players for this evening. There’s talk of two more joining us in the coming weeks, which all makes for table time a little tight.
Thankfully the weather conditions in the sailing club loft were a little fresher. Some energetic games took place. I seem to play the best shots when I’m up against it and require a degree of gymnastic dexterity to win a point.
Away from the table and sailing club politics was the topic of conversation. I was happy to sit on my hands and take it all in without offering any contribution.
We finished off with some games of doubles. At one point my partner and I were trailing 10-1. We somehow managed to turn it around with an unlikely victory. Spin it to win it, Jase.
And so it begins. The first courgette harvested from the allotment. I say courgette, it looks more like a kid’s football. How the fuck did this happen?
I blame the intense heatwave of the past few days. Somehow it has got to the heart of the courgette and exploded it from within. We were tempted to leave it for another few days but it will take over the entire bloody patch.
This is just the start. Don’t be fooled by courgettes, they are Cucumbers from the Gods.
We’ve harvested hundreds over the years in our garden. Now we’ve taken the game up an extra level over at the allotment.
You learn to be creative with the courgette once you get bored of them being fried with pasta. Then it’s time to turn towards courgette fritters.
The courgette needs to be shredded and then you add in some grated cheese and plenty of flour to hold it all together. These need to be fried at an extremely high temperature.
Job’s a good ‘un.
And so Jackass 5 was a hell of a lot of fun. I’m not sure it’s quite what we had in mind when we decided that Monday afternoons would be cultural afternoons at Colchester Odeon - and yes I do realise that an afternoon of culture in the Colchester Odeon is something of a misnomer.
I’ve always liked Jackass. It’s dumb as fuck. I’m still not convinced that it’s all genuine. Is wrestling fixed, etc. Certainly parts of Jackass 5 felt like the returning old faces were playing to the camera with maybe a little bit of a safety net already in place.
There’s not quite enough new content either to pad out an entire film. The incredibly good-looking Johnny Knoxville has declared that this is the last ever Jackass movie. The incredibly good-looking Johnny Knoxville always declares that each Jackass is the last movie.
And so Jackass 5 is used as an opportunity to reflect on what’s taken place before. I’m not sure what the exact ratio is but there is a fair amount of old pranks dropped in to the schedule.
This actually adds a little depth to the film. I would place it along a similar theme as Trainspotting 2 or even Spinal Tap 2. It’s a bit of a love letter, a film where the narrative is more than a passing thought about the passage of time.
The Jackass dudes are all hitting 50 plus. They are too old to have their bollocks being smashed full-on by a mallet. This would seem like a suitable time to bow out.
Poo jokes feature heavily. They are taken to an extreme and do cause you to actually wince and look away throughout some of the film.
Elsewhere and the new character, Larry the AI robot, comes close to stealing the show. I can’t help think that an AI robot rectal examination is the future.
Knoxville and the boys have seen a huge transformation in the way they go about putting across their message. What initially started off as their own private video pranks soon became an MTV phenomenon. MTV in itself was pretty much killed off with the modern interweb.
Now all you have to do is scroll through your stupid phone at some dumbass TikTok videos and you have your own Jackass curated experience. The modern interweb is full of dumb shits who want to make a fool of themselves in public.
Knoxville however is something of a camera star. I love the way that he sets his buddies up and yet is rarely at the butt of his own jokes. Spoiler alert: he does take one for the team in Jackass 5 with a very randy ball that involves an ambulance towards the end scenes.
We didn’t exactly find high culture in the Sunny Colch Odeon on Monday afternoon. Thankfully we also didn’t find an audience that was so impolite that they spoke shit all the way throughout. Jackass tends to attract a different kind of audience, natch.
We had something of our own Jackass experience as we headed upstairs briefly for a visit to the toilets. The Sunny Colch Odeon escalator has Jackass embedded within it. It moves incredibly slowly until you step on it and then it goes into fast forward.
Hi, my name is Jase and you’re watching Jackass on the Escalator.
A Stuart Pearce The Leader T-shirt from around 1993. I actually had an original of this back in the day. I pretty much didn’t take it off for a two-year period, and that included running half marathons in it.
I’ve still got the photo of me looking not quite so fresh-faced, wearing The Leader as I crossed the finish line in the 1993 Robin Hood half. Betcha I could still duck under my one hour 45-minute timing for that particular race.
I have questions about this T-shirt. The first is that The Leader is obviously playing on the popular song title of a convicted paedophile. Oh dear. You couldn’t get away with that these days.
There’s also Stuart Pearce Promotions. It’s not an official Forrest product, but something that Psycho obviously went about doing himself. I don’t think image rights were a thing for professional footballers in the early nineties.
Then there’s that iconic picture: on my days, those thighs, that bulge in his shorts. Don’t focus on that bulge in his shorts, Jase.
I think it’s the celebration following the goal in the 1991 FA Cup Final. That had a happy ending, right?
The T-shirt itself is in surprisingly good nick for something that is over three decades old. I can’t see any visible sweat marks under the armpits.
I did have the thought that maybe it is my original that I sold around 10 years ago that has now come back to me, but the lack of sweating under the armpit suggests not.
Christ, he was such a hero of mine at the time, and remains so to this day.
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.
⭐ ⭐
“That’s where the literate social web went, and the bloggers too. Like how birds are really dinosaurs.”
Dave Winer on email newsletters
Happy 35th, 56a
via Transpontine
Erm, Free Swiming for Every Resident
via LabourList
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.
