Tuesday, December 4th

I thought that normal service was resumed, but life can be complex sometimes, as Chas and Dave noted in 1975, what with “one fing ’n’ anuvver.” Here’s a quick Five Things, with a promise of various things seen and loved recently (Bill Frisell! Ry Cooder!) being written about soon. WordPress have just changed everything about the blog designing process, so bear with… Oh, and I have two tickets that I (sadly) can’t use for the fascinating Julia Holter at Hackney EartH on December 12th. Email me at martinworkbench@gmail.com if you’re interested.

{ONE} BEST RECENT AUCTION LOT
I love the “Late 20th Century” attribution, but sadly it’s being sold without the fibre optic lights…

{TWO} DANCE ME TO THE END OF… AFRICA?
From Time Out… “Everyone loves ‘Africa’ by Toto. It’s a fact. It’s dance floor catnip, a glorious 4 minutes and 55 seconds of pure 80’s tune-age. Because we just can’t get enough of the ear worm, there’s now a club night where you can hear the nostalgic banger non-stop for a whole four hours. That’s right, Toto’s ‘Africa’ played 53 times on repeat. And if you stay for the whole thing you might finally be able to perfect that weird As sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti line.

{THREE} CAROL KAYE WRECKS BASSES…
The legendary “Wrecking Crew” bassist on her chosen instrument…
Reverb: You’ve said the Fender bass wasn’t a great instrument, but it got a certain sound that no other instruments got. Why was it not great?
Carol Kaye: It was a great instrument for recording those kinds of sounds back in the ’60s and ’70s, but it wasn’t great like a Steinway piano or a Gibson L-5. It was a board with four strings on it, but it got the job done; it got the sound and the feel for the music. The first Fender I played was neck heavy and always pointed toward the floor. You had to constantly hold that neck up because it was not balanced, and that is very hard on your neck. I usually bought a new Fender every two years to get new strings. I was working day and night, so I’d run into the music store on my lunch hour, grab a new bass, and sometimes I had to pull the neck off real fast to put a shim in the neck to make it play well.

{FOUR} FROM PRIVATE EYE‘S PSEUDS CORNER. WONDERFUL.
“There was 15 one-way streets and one solitary two-way street where me and my brother got to meet in the middle. Two worlds definitely collided. When two worlds collide, two things happen: destruction or the genesis of new beginnings, and you created water on a new planet.” – Matt Goss on the reformation of Bros, The Sun

{FIVE} JERRY CHRISTMAS…?
A frightening bunch of musical Santas channelling Jerry Garcia at a Garden Centre somewhere in the Home Counties…

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“He writes with the insight of someone who has inhabited the world of the professional musician but also with the infectious enthusiasm of someone who is a fan like anyone of us. It’s entertaining and inspiring in equal measure.” – from an Amazon review by Zuma

“What a treat! And it has the years before I discovered your blog…” – Dan Franklin, Publisher

“A terrific book, stuffed to the gills with snippets of news items and observations all with a musical theme, pulled together by the watchful eye of Martin Colyer… lovingly compiled, rammed with colour photos and interesting stories. Colyer has a good ear for a tune, an eye for the out-of-ordinary and he can write a bit too.” – Steve Carr, everyrecordtellsastory.com

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