I saw an advert for Steven Seagal’s Blues Band, Clapham Grand, July 25th
Tragically this is not a joke. We all remember Bruce Willis, don’t we? And YouTubing Steve confirms that he has the moolah to hire a good band and buy a bizarre snakeskin coat, and the chops to approximate a grunting blues/rock style allied to a very odd playing technique… but dear God, can you imagine two hours of it?

I learned how to make an EDM track in 5 minutes
Sad, but possibly true…

My ears pricked up…
…during Brazil v Croatia’s halftime break as the Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Darlin’ be Home Soon” soundtracked a McDonalds Ad. Seems awful when songs you really like become used to hawk something. Written for Francis Ford Coppola’s 1967 film You’re a Big Boy Now, it’s possibly the only song ever to use the word “dawdled”.

I heard the best Rockabilly Busker ever, Tottenham Court Road Tube
Shaking his booty, chops to die for. As I walked past he seemed to be essaying a bit of Cliff Gallup crossed with Danny Gatton. He really had it all…

I bought Harvey Kubernick’s “Turn Up The Radio” in the gleaming new Foyles
There to hear Mark Kermode talk, it was nice to see a bookseller with faith in the Bricks and Mortar, and it reintroduced me to browsing the racks. It felt like the days when you could only get imported American books in Compendium at Camden Town, and I left with a list of things to go back and buy. Turn Up The Radio is terrific, both in words and pictures, and it sent me back to listen to Skip Battin’s album Skip, as Kim Fowley was the lyricist, and he features heavily in the book (it’s subtitled Rock, Pop, and Roll in Los Angeles 1956-1972 and is highly recommended for lovers of that time and place). Skip was a record I found in the mid-Seventies at the library in Theobald’s Road, which was obviously stocked by a connoisseur of LA Rock (unless the connoisseur was a customer who just asked the librarian to order in all kinds of strangeness). Whatever, I borrowed this album a lot at the time, mainly for a song I loved, called “The St. Louis Browns”, a strange retelling of the story of the Cleveland Browns baseball team and their relocation to St. Louis. While that still sounds great, the song I liked most as I listened again was the one in the music player on the right, “Captain Video”.