Once again I'm looking forward to combining two of my favourite pastimes - music and beer: I've been added to the bill at Nottingham's Bar 71 on Sunday 25 August. It's a Bank Holiday, so the atmosphere should be quite special.
Bar 71 is a thriving community micro-pub a mile or so from the city centre (and conveniently a mere hop, skip & a jump from where I live). The incomparable Paul Carbuncle is compering the event and headlining too. I think I'm on at 5pm. Promises to be a great day.
Some very interesting photos appeared on my Twitter feed today - not least that one of the Black Hole. It's 55 million light years away (1 light year = 6 trillion miles) and measures, at least, a billion miles across. Just thinking about what those numbers mean hurts my brain; so I'll park it up for now and come back to it when I've had a little lie down.
In the meantime, the one above is a lot easier to get your head around - the Golden Gate Bridge taken in the early 1960s. So that makes it roughly 5,500 miles and 50 years away. I can cope with numbers like that. I just love everything about this photograph - if there's been a better photo taken of San Francisco's iconic landmark, I've not seen it.
Paul Weller was in town this week. For some reason I didn't fancy it; I'm kicking myself now.
I wonder if he played anything off All Mod Cons? You're probably aware that this year marks its ruby anniversary. Christ, where did the last 40 years go? (I can remember clearly the day I bought my copy) - the worrying thing being that 40 years prior the Second World War hadn't yet broken out. Stop the world I want to get off.
Anyway, you can keep Down in the Tube Station at Midnight and 'A' Bomb in Wardour Street - if I'd been at the Arena on Tuesday night I'd have asked him, politely, to "play that silly little poem you wrote when you didn't know any better." The words are naff, obviously, but it has a certain charm nonetheless. Chances are he'd have probably pretended not to hear me, but I think Fly would make any Weller Top 10 (there he goes with the lists again), don't you?
On this day in 1977 Polydor Records signed up and coming Mod revivalists The Jam; whether or not the suits journeyed out to Woking to get the lads' signatures isn't documented. A handful of weeks later they recorded and released their debut single In The City; the album of the same name quickly followed with ten more amphetamine fuelled R'n'B nuggets. This footage shot at Manchester's Electric Circus captures them at precisely that time.
