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I was working at the home of my illustrator pal Tim Oliver, on Sept 11th, 2001. I was outside the house, working in a wooden shed studio in the back garden. Tim came running in, clearly agitated and excited, saying I had to come inside and see what was on the TV. I think it was a sunny day in the UK/The Fens, just as it was in the US.

Now, 20 years later, it’s still very powerfully affecting, seeing the footage and images of that fateful day. And there are a number of interesting ‘twentieth anniversary’ type programs on TV and other media, about these unbelievable events. This particular program is particularly fascinating, as it’s a view into the nerve centre of the American government as it came under attack.

I remember the way one thing after another kept happening: first one plane, then another, hitting the first and then the second tower, then a plane crashing into the Pentagon, then one tower coming down, then the other. It was a series of hefty punches, raining down, one after the other. This program conveys that well.

As well as the panoply of illustrious and powerful talking heads – all the key players: Bush, Cheney, Rice, etc. – who so suddenly seemed rendered powerless, there’s a cleverly deployed visual timeline. The combination of source materials, such as footage of the events themselves, audio recordings, and stuff like the computerised data of aircraft in flight, is incredible, and very well presented. The whole adds up to a very powerful experience.

One could argue that this might be official and therefore hagiographic propaganda. And maybe it is? A joint production by Apple TV, and the BBC, it appears, at first glance, to be independent. Certainly it’s very candid, with full and frank admissions as to the unpreparedness of US govt’ for such events.

The chief protagonists come across very well. Bush in particular impresses. Compared to some of the buffoons that have disgraced high public office on both sides of ‘the pond’ recently, the levels of eloquence and dignified calm in the face of such trauma are salutory.

Bush was doing a meet ‘n’ greet at the Emma Booker Elementary School, Saratoga, Florida, when he learned of the unfolding events. Watching how he reacted to learning the news is powerfully compelling viewing. And as things escalated the President and his entourage had to work out how to react; where to go, what to say.

This programme shows how uncertain things were. Bush wanted to go straight to Washington. But the bureaucratic machinery around the President overruled him, and they went instead to USAF Barksdale, and then a secure bunker in Nebraska.

One thing that this brief but impressive doc’ doesn’t address, which is something many non-Americans will think about (hopefully some Americans also?), is how America is happy to use violence abroad, but is so shocked when it comes home to roost. And of course there’s the irony of violence begetting yet more violence.

One of the things about Bush and his coterie of advisors at this point is that they were clearly very competent. It’s good to hear the former President acknowledge the importance of such resources as the teams of advisors he had around him, and to see that this was real and meaningful advice – willing and able to contradict him if need be – not just place-serving ‘yes men’ (and women!).

But after all of this, Bush felt, and undoubtedly rightly so, that he had to get to somewhere visibly ‘central’, which for him was Washington, and be seen and heard to be calmly in command. Bush, an assertive and competitive man, was psychologically exactly the right kind of leader for this ver challenging moment.

I may object to his religious platitudes, apple pie Americanisms and machismo, but Bush handled the unfolding events pretty damn well. On the day. But maybe the longer term legacy of such blue-blooded American posturing hasn’t been so good? To their credit, the production team don’t duck this issue (see below).

BBC ‘Do you think your actions after 9/11 made the world a safer place?’
GB ‘I’m comfortable with the decisions I made.’

One particularly poignant thread, amongst many, is that of Ted and Barbara Olson. Ted was, at that time, a very high ranking official in the Justice Dept, and his wife, Barbara was a conservative journalist/pundit. Barbara took a later work-related flight than originally planned, in order to share Ted’s 61st birthday with him, leaving a love note to her husband on his pillow (which he reads, very movingly, in this film). A note he would first see and read very late on the very same day he knew she had died.

Towards the end of the documentary, and in real timeline terms, on the 14th Sept – so three days after the events – Bush and his entourage visited ground zero. ‘It was almost like Pompeii’, says journalist David ‘Stretch’ Gregory.

All in all, this is an excellent programme, that gives an incredibly powerful, unprecedented and surprisingly candid insight into some very powerful era-defining events. Definitely well worth watching.

Well, I’m amazed. I’ve made a bodhran, or frame drum. It’s made from a cut down 13” rack tom, from a cheapo ex-school beginner kit.

It’s quite high pitched and resonant. And I think a ‘true’ bodhran would have a bigger heavier frames and lower tone. But hey, it’s a first attempt. And I have to confess I’m chuffed. Chuffed it’s a playable drum at all!

I’ve kind of jumped from the previous post to the finished thing, with this second post. I might at some point put up more pics and info’ on the complete build process.

I don’t know how to play it. Leastways not in the authentic bodhran manner. And I don’t have a stick/tipper/beater thing. I’m trying (unsuccessfully so far!) to put up a short video or two, just for a quick sample of the tonal characteristics.

A terrific group portrait.

I literally just finished this excellent book. The two main characters in it are are Samuel Johnson and James Boswell. The titular Club was actually founded by painter Joshua Reynolds, to get Johnson out of one of his regular depressions. Boswell wouldn’t be invited to join for quite some time.

More than a history of The Club, this is really a group portrait of figures in the Johnson Boswell orbit, and of the places and times they lived in. It’s heavily illustrated, which is great, really adding several layers of warmth and depth to what is already interesting, helping one imagine the characters and the settings of their lives more vividly.

Damrosch clearly loves the whole era, and the great majority of the colourful cast. But this doesn’t stop him from giving a balanced portrait, warts and all, so to speak. Johnson is a cranky conservative prude, as well as the witty savant behind his famous dictionary. Boswell is an inordinately vain womaniser, in thrall to Johnson, and both are in many ways unattractively hidebound and old-fashioned.

But the chief attraction of this book is that it vividly and compellingly captures the multifarious facets of a kaleidoscopic era, populated by a diverse bunch of very interesting (if frequently flawed) people. And it does so with equal measures of detail, balance and excitement, such that it’s both very informative and highly enjoyable.

It’s perfect for me, as a way to start to learn more about a whole slew of folk I’m interested in, from Johnson and Boswell, to Adam Smith and Edward Gibbons, and many more besides. It’s pitched in the sweet spot between scholarly and suited for the lay reader. I loved this book, and would unhesitatingly recommend it.

Utter garbage. I’m amazed I bothered to watch it all the way through. How many lame ass Nic Cage films am I going to inflict on myself?

White-trash prick-tease Teena (Anna Hutchinson) gets gang-raped – with her daughter as witness – by four cartoon rocker ne’erdowells. The loathsome quartet are then acquitted, thanks to the biggest insensitive prick of a judge ever, oh… and Don Johnson, as the most oleaginous Harley riding lawyer ever.

Throughout this pitiful movie the heavily made up Nicolas Cage disappears from the screen for long enough – poss due to the time required attempting to make him look younger? – to call his star billing into question. The real screen time is shared by the white trash trio of Debs Ungar (as granny Agnes), Teena, and Bethie, the traumatised daughter.

I knew this movie was going to be complete arse when the Patriot Films part of the titles rolled. What passes for patriotism in the US of A these days seems to be gun-fetishism and vigilante ultra-violence. This film sho’ is patriotic, ticking both boxes.

Set in the Niagra Falls community … aw, shoot…I really can not be bothered spending any more effort reviewing such toss. Avoid.

I’m making a bodhran for one of Teresa’s special needs clients. He’s into Scottish/Celtic type music, apparently. I’m only making the drum. He’ll have to source a beater (or whatever the stick thing is called) elsewhere.

I’ve made it from an old 13” rack-tom, cut around the circumference to a suitable – guestimated! – depth. Added a single cross-bar (some have none, some one or two, others have a ‘T-bar’, etc).

Our pal Ken routed a new bearing edge on the playing side (again, totally guessed at!). And today I had to sand back to natural wood after having sprayed and lacquered the raw birch black/gloss.

And then came the fraught process of gluing the goatskin head to the frame. Got in a bit of a panic over this. But I think we triumphed (Teresa helped!) in the end.

Letting the skin glue overnight. Tomorrow I’ll be hammering in shortened (if not shortened they’d go straight through the shell) furniture tacks, and cutting the excess goatskin away.

Kind of scary, having no experience in this area at all. But fun as well. Hope it turn out alright!?

Quite a while back, I decided to cut back the ivy growing up between our rear gate and the shed. I had done so once or twice before. But this time I wanted to be shot of it.

The consequence of this was that the gate post and the portions of the fence that had been encroached upon by the very rampant well developed ivy were utterly destroyed.

After a very long hiatus, over this summer of ‘21, I finally got around to dealing with this. I had hoped to hire a builder. And we had a few round to quote for the job. The job being getting the ivy roots and the hardcore/cement and remnants of the previous gate post dug out, and a new post put in.

The builder whose quote we were best pleased with, a chap named Tommy, never showed, nor returned any of my calls as to when he might deign to come and do the job. So the task reverted to me. Good job, really, as I hadn’t the money to pay him!

So, after a long hard go at removing the roots and concrete, etc, with a view to rehanging the old gate in the same spot, I eventually gave up. But it before I’d got about a foot down, removing earth, and then drilling into the cement/hardcore mix with a long masonry bit, in my larger hammer drill. But progress from that point on was torturously slow.

Having decided that this wasn’t really working, I had to go with plan B, and attach a post not down into the earth, but up against the rear wall of our property.

This meant drilling through a 4” post and into the brickwork. In the end I secured the post with five long screws, going into wall-plugs into the bricks. I also used a ‘no more mails’ type fixative – a whole tube – to help really bond this post to the wall.

Having let that go off overnight, next step was to re-hang the gate. It had to be rotated through 180°, so it’s now upside-down! First attempt I screwed it into the wrong face of the post! Second attempt, success.

The vertical angles are none of them plumb. But I used a spirit level anyway, just to get a half-decent alignment.

Next it was time to return to the original post-hole. Ding-ding… seconds out, rounds three and four. Eventually, after working with a saw, chainsaw, axe, pry-bar, chisels and a skill-saw, I got as much of the ivy root system out as I could, without either going insane or mutilating myself.

I could then proceed with putting in a new post (actually an old one, reclaimed from a local skip!), which would now be the one to receive only the latch fitting, rather than, as formerly, supporting the gate itself. I fixed this in situ using some old shelf-support brackets.

The post-hole on the right of the gate, seen from our side, needed back-filling with some of the soil I’d dug out. Once that was done, using moistened soil (aka mud) so it’d hold its shape, I poured water into the hole, to half way. Then I poured on some quick-setting post-crete.

As the photos here attest, this was a rough n’ ready type job. Not quite Robert Adam or Nostell Priory! But we will be tidying it all up, in ‘dew coarse’. It’s good to get these little jobs ticked off. And also to not be paying tradesmen to do ‘em.

This album is quite divisive amongst some Stones fans. For some reason it was the first and only Stones album I had (as an original album, I had numerous on cassette!), as a young’un.

I liked it back then, and I still like it now. It’s a bit of mixed bag. But then all of their albums are. Like practically all Stones albums (once they’d turned from a covers band to an originals group) there are two great tracks: She’s A Rainbow and 2,000 Light Years From Home, on this occasion.

Then there are a number that are just ok, but that’s The Stones for you. Even the repeated Why Don’t We Sing This Song motif, which is the most dated and of its time, isn’t all that bad.

I’m not sure if I’m remembering aright, but I believe I saw a Jean Luc Godard movie either by or about or featuring The Stones, from around this era. It might even have included stuff from the album? The memories are a bit hazy!

The whole whacked out late-‘60s psychedelic vibe does both look (that cover!) and sound rather dated and silly now. But for some it may retain certain charms? I feel like I can kind of have my cake and eat it, with this disc: it really is quite silly in places. But I really rather like it, nevertheless.

All told? Well, yes, it’s a bit of an oddity in their catalogue, but not that big of an aberration, as some would have you believe. I like it enough that, having lost or got rid of my original copy, many moons ago, I’ve recently re-acquired it.

With its classic Andy Warhol cover art, and kicking off with the rambunctious ode to inter-racial love that is Brown Sugar, quintessential Stones if ever a song was, Sticky Fingers gets off (titter) to a great start.

Hardcore Stones fans will probably want to crucify me for such sacrilegious views, but many of the non-hit album tracks, from Sway to Dead Flowers are rather perfunctory, for all that Jagger may wail away at full cry.

As with so many Stones records, there are basically two great tracks. Here it’s Brown Sugar and track three, the plaintive Wild Horses. These two tracks alone make the album worth having.

Track four, Can’t You Hear Me Knocking, kind of epitomises a quality of The Stones I find perplexing: after a promising start, it goes through several stages of ‘überjam’ self-indulgence, occasionally quite compelling, but overall winding up rather thin, and definitely out-staying its welcome.

Another regular feature of many Stones recordings is the presence of one of more covers of old Blues classics, in a nod to their roots, here it’s You Gotta Move, by ‘Mississippi’ Fred McDowell and ‘Rev’ Gary Davis.

Bitch grooves along nicely, benefitting from a funkily soulful horn section. The horns continue on I Got The Blues, a slower number in a six feel, which has some nice organ playing in it. I’m not a fan of Sister Morphine, nor the whole Marianne Faithful groupie-louche-druggy aspect of The Stones.

Dead Flowers is another of the more pedestrian Stones fillers, being rather undistinguished. Fortunately the final track is somewhat better; Moonlight Mile is no classic, unlike The Stones greatest hits, and meanders a fair bit, but it’s a cut above the stodgier filler material. The strings are a nice touch.

So, yet another very patchy entry into the canon that is The Stones run of ‘classic’ late ‘60 early ‘70s albums, made essential by two fab tracks, with a smattering of second division pieces, and finally filled out with some fun but less inspired material.

After the perhaps rather aberrant Satanic Majesties, The Stones return to rather safer waters. Kicking off with the terrific percussion-driven Sympathy For The Devil, and with Street Fighting Man starting side two, as was, this disc has ‘classic’ ‘70s Stones stamped all over it.

From what many, myself included, regard as their ‘purple patch’, Beggar’s Banquet benefits from the non-hits, or ‘album tracks’, being, for the most part, rather better than on some of their other albums.

Indeed, some of the lesser known tracks on BB are amongst my favourites of what one might call their ‘second division’ songbook. No Expectations, for example, is a delightfully simple and wistfully mellow number.

The following two much more bluesy tracks, Dear Doctor and Parachute Woman, are just a whisker more interesting than much standard stodgy blues clichés… just! Jigsaw Puzzle, on the other hand, is a wispy jam on an undistinguished cycle of chords, with Jagger singing a less than classic lyric that harks back to the more psychedelic vibes of their previous two albums.

Although Brian Jones was still alive, and technically speaking ‘in the band’, at this point, his drug usage mean he’s pretty much out of the picture, musically (altho’, this said, apparently that’s him playing the lovely slide guitar on No Expectations). So the band is really a quartet on these recordings, plus Nicky Hopkins on piano/keys, taking up Jones’ slack.

Street Fighting Man ups the ante again, and shows how much The Stones could get out of a pretty minimal musical idea. The late lamented Charlie Watts and the boy’s in the band drive an energetic groove along with an almost elastic-band type propulsion.

Prodigal Son, the album’s only cover (written by Robert Wilkins) is great; a nicely rootsy slightly haunting early acoustic southern folk-blues. Stray Cat Blues, which follows is, by contrast (for me at least), more pedestrian Stones-by-numbers type fare.

The album wraps up with Factory Girl, a pleasantly country tinged after-hours folksy ditty, replete with fiddle, before ending, with more of a whimper than a bang, with Keith Richards singing Salt Of The Earth. Jaggers’ joins in, as do a chorus of dusky soulful backing singers, lifting things a little, the song eventually morphing into a ‘sanctified’ double-time gospel feel, Hopkins piano coming to the fore.

But it’s a weak ending, alas, to a stronger than average entry into The Stones run of late ‘60s early ‘70s classic albums. So, whilst rather patchy, Beggar’s Banquet just about manages to attain a place in the company of the ‘best of The Stones records’.

Surprisingly good… and perhaps the end of an era?

This is probably sacrilegious to hardcore Stones fans, but I think this is actually the album Exile On Main Street was hoping it might or could be. Ok, it’s definitely not an exact equivalent, as it’s much shorter and far more focussed. But it’s better for both those reasons. It’s also more consistent and better written overall.

The cover is interesting, looking very much as if intended to transform Jagger’s shaggy mop-topped noggin into a tufted lady-grotto, via a lacey sheet and soft lighting.

Unlike many Stones albums, that kick off with a hit, here you have to wait until track five (or the last track of side one, as it was in LP form), when Angie hits the motherlode. And that’s it, a far as ‘standout hits’ goes for this disc!

Fivetunately, as my dad liked to say occasionally, pretty much all the tracks that lead up to Angie are better than many of the fillers and potboilers that make up substantial amounts of a lot of other Stones records, the sort of meandering fare that has traditionally been suggestive of the idea ‘they were never really an albums band’.

Coming directly after Exile, The Stones were indeed still working/recording as itinerant tax-exiles. Adding further to the continuity, Mick Taylor and Nicky Hopkins are still contributing their distinctive flavours to the satanic stew.

Side one – or the first five tracks – is definitely stronger and more focussed, with side two sounding more ‘in the vein’, so to speak, of Exile, with looser more jam-like feelings dominating proceedings.

Side two get does get stronger and more focussed as it goes on, right up until the ending, where – despite the tight-ish Chuck Berry style music, the ‘rock star excess’ lyrics fall rather flat, all these years later – with the infamous Starfucker (released as a single – and banned by the BBC – with Ahmet Ertegun insisting it be renamed Star Star!).

This tracks reminds me of why I’ve generally avoided the Stones over the years; it’s such pop trash! The music and lyrics are, in all frankness, pretty piss poor. It’s The Stones playing their signature ‘bad boy card‘, and it’s lame.

This aspect of the band has meant that, for years, I’ve dismissed them as musically uninteresting poseurs. And, despite this string of Stones posts celebrating Charlie Watts and the band’s best bits, that still holds, alas.

But, thanks to the moderate amounts of focus and polish (helped by the presence of strings and jazzy horns), and the funkier more soulful material (mostly side one), this less revered disc eclipses the much more lionised Exile. For me at any rate.