A fascinating 21 act play depicting scenes from Josephine's book, "Tommy Turns Cars".
(Josephine takes) 21 strides in 21 days is a delightfully dysfunctional piece that amuses and antagonises as it twists its way across the Camino to Santiago de Compostela. It is thought producing, melancholic, but ultimately uplifting and hysterically funny as the characters unravel over a 500 mile walk.
An ambitious production given that each act is only delivered once and effectively there is only one complete performance, the 60 seconds narration to commence each show helps with the delivery and the daily programme sales will undoubtedly help with the funding.
As the 21 acts are delivered consecutively on its 21 day run, it has the potential to be a hot ticket as the mid afternoon slot wont often find conflict and aficionados will want to say they attended all 21 performances, but each act stands up on its own.
The title is taken from Act 7, at the end of the first week.
Jose gives the game away as halfway through the performance she cuts TC short.
"You have your way!" she shouts at Tommy, "I like doing it my way" Josephine smiles as she turns narrator to the audience.
"But counting to 21, you'll do that a lot over 500 miles" interjects Tommy Carruthers
"I do TC, but often I dont make it to 21. I only start counting when my mind is empty and its never empty here. I look at the path for my feet, I look left and right for the views, I look straight ahead for my soul and I look back and smile. My achievements are behind me and so are my car crashes."
"Aye, like when I pummelled into you coming down from Pamplona"
"And more besides Tommy, more besides"
The conversation carries on and the sticks clatter off the stage floor, while the projected image displays the countryside and the setting.
There are three main settings, which the set designers have pulled off superbly. Namely these are the paths, the bars and the Albergue Dorms.
The paths and walkways of the camino. There are different surfaces throughout the camino but cleverly and perhaps obviously, the surfaces are the same in each act. Asphalt, dirt path, rocky, sandy and the luxurious pine needles. After hearing about the pine needles I wanted to carpet my flat in them!
Most of the Camino is in full sun and the views as produced by the displays are enticing enough to make you want to go to Azofra, Villares, Arzua or the many places depicted.
That the bars all look the same is a bit unfair. The uniquely different provinces of Spain are clearly identified with flags coloured differently and if one beer outside looks the same as another, its to do with the backdrop being the countryside. There is undoubtedly only one joiner and the budget didnt extend to different draught beers, but now I'm just being picky. The owner changes in every cafe/bar but we usually get the same one for the scene when its a pueblo and its the only cafe in town. The joy of this is when Jesus Gonzalez of La Trebede in Leon or Jose in Cafe Ligonde demonstrate the intrinsic role played by the people of Spain in the Camino. In the notes we are reminded that real characters and bars have been used although all the Pilgrim characters are fictitious or composite. I thought Jesus and Jose were so good I wanted to ask if they had just played themselves and were they enjoying Edinburgh, but decided I didnt speak any Spanish.
Finally the setting of the Albergues. There is no greater sense of the claustrophobic nature of the camino than a cramped stage and a packed audience. Had this been an evening performance, the snoring might just have extended to the audience. Its not easy to depict a bedroom scene where the joke is the snoring if you dont leave it on long enough. ~It can be like getting warm bread instead of toast, but equally for the audience, it can feel like the bread is burnt toast. I'm not sure if the producers wanted us to feel the anger of the snorers, if they did, it worked! By the morning when the fun and laughter of the bold snorer takes over from his snoring as he rustles his polythene bags, coughs, splutters and asks in a stage whisper if his fellow pilgrims are still sleeping, to be greeted with "its 5.55, not yet you schnacker, fuck off, get a coffee and let us get an hour at least." The laughter from the other beds in the dorm isnt universal, as is the audience's reaction, although clearly a lot of people did get it and laughed. I think I felt the pain too much, maybe I'm too precious. The other Albergue scenes were well handled with topics ranging from the changing and modesty, noisy mid afternoon siestas, ("Looks like we've a live one tonight" laughed Jose as TC dangled his headphones from the bunk above), early to bed, late to bed, the staggered start with shining headlamps and finally the emptying out by 8am.
The complex nature of the characters make it difficult for me to sum up but the variety of characters is what makes '21 strides', this so endearing. The absolute genius is clearly that the camino represents a society that is multicultural, multilingual but fundamentally friendly. The common cause of walking forth together, of helping people out not just in adversity, but in gentle comradeship. As Scotland meanders towards a second indie referendum and England vote for Brexit, 21 strides reminds us that we want to walk together, nations from Korea to Ireland, people from Vancouver to Berlin. There is a global community on the camino and whilst their ethnicity may be diverse their values are peculiarly common. "Atapuerca, it where they found the missing link between Neanderthal and Homo Sapien." Simone from Berlin quietly informs the big Irishman Conor, as they sit in the cafe at a table adjacent to Jose and Harry. Jose, a one time novelist, tries to evade the pompous prick Harry who idolises her because of her genius, but is yet again leading the young apprentice on a merry dance as she deciphers the code of 'The Egg Hatcher' for him.
I'm not sure I would give all 21 acts a five star rating as there are days that I adored the play but equally the snoring gag was lost on me, but I guess like the camino, there are good days and bad. My journey with 21 strides was my own, just as I sure it'll be yours too.
When I have the 2017 dates I'll put them out.
Sunday, 16 October 2016
Deadbeat the brand - Tapes, singles, fanzines and t-shirts!
Western civilisation is a misnomer. We are not civilised in the west we are happily subdued by our phones etc.
The end of the world is nigh - but not through any Armageddon - merely through us....yes US - not the USA - just us.
We are all tired and cant stand up any more, we cant fight. The 1960/70/80's produced music in the UK to make us stand up.
Now we produce plays. The voice is no longer loud, but nagging, gently nagging. Its a vibration against the colossus that is cacophony of phony nonsense. The brand has now extended to include every item of expenditure and debt too.
The economic concept of the brand was to develop something that was popular because of its usefulness, reliability, longevity or something that was beneficial.
The wise guys spotted it. Why build something, just build a facade. Its not new. Look at Georgian architecture, its all fur coat and no knickers. The problem is we used to recognise it was a facade, now with our snow blindness, all we see is facade.
Now its turned on its head, the only job now is to establish the brand, regardless of virtue. Once the brand is established the job is done. When people followed skunks and gave their names to scents, the game began again. How can you sell an empty box? Find someone stupid enough used to be the answer, now the answer is make everyone stupid!
So now media darlings are the governors of our culture. We love expressions like "edumacation" from our 'randomly' selected jokers. National treasures or international sporting celebrities. The meek have not inherited the world, but maybe the deaf, dumb and blind kid can stop playing pinball and lead us somewhere better. Let's face it, ever since Bowie asked Major Tom, "the papers want to know what shirts you wear...."
I detest the brand - as the brand became bastardised prior to Warhol.....the red star, the coca cola can, campbells soup etc.......I wrote about it 30 years ago but I was lazy....Orwell shouted it in 1984.....but its gone now ....the game is a bogey when the US debates Trump/Clinton.
The debate is wrong, but is it the only show in town?
The end of the world is nigh - but not through any Armageddon - merely through us....yes US - not the USA - just us.
We are all tired and cant stand up any more, we cant fight. The 1960/70/80's produced music in the UK to make us stand up.
Now we produce plays. The voice is no longer loud, but nagging, gently nagging. Its a vibration against the colossus that is cacophony of phony nonsense. The brand has now extended to include every item of expenditure and debt too.
The economic concept of the brand was to develop something that was popular because of its usefulness, reliability, longevity or something that was beneficial.
The wise guys spotted it. Why build something, just build a facade. Its not new. Look at Georgian architecture, its all fur coat and no knickers. The problem is we used to recognise it was a facade, now with our snow blindness, all we see is facade.
Now its turned on its head, the only job now is to establish the brand, regardless of virtue. Once the brand is established the job is done. When people followed skunks and gave their names to scents, the game began again. How can you sell an empty box? Find someone stupid enough used to be the answer, now the answer is make everyone stupid!
So now media darlings are the governors of our culture. We love expressions like "edumacation" from our 'randomly' selected jokers. National treasures or international sporting celebrities. The meek have not inherited the world, but maybe the deaf, dumb and blind kid can stop playing pinball and lead us somewhere better. Let's face it, ever since Bowie asked Major Tom, "the papers want to know what shirts you wear...."
I detest the brand - as the brand became bastardised prior to Warhol.....the red star, the coca cola can, campbells soup etc.......I wrote about it 30 years ago but I was lazy....Orwell shouted it in 1984.....but its gone now ....the game is a bogey when the US debates Trump/Clinton.
The debate is wrong, but is it the only show in town?
Best meal ever - Cafe Domenico
Its that simple - a tasting menu and a happy camper!
I love this place, so no surprise but my wife is still telling me to give it 5 stars!
"I am" I shout!
another short review when a couple agree over everything.....I should've said the muscles were 'under' but the weren't they were perfecto!
I love this place, so no surprise but my wife is still telling me to give it 5 stars!
"I am" I shout!
another short review when a couple agree over everything.....I should've said the muscles were 'under' but the weren't they were perfecto!
Monday, 26 September 2016
September Deadbeats
Quite apt really, as Vinny Bee slides into the autumn of his life, or as we say in Scotland, winter, so Deadbeat routinely slowed down, even when we were in our energetic youth.
Nowadays that means I wander off on the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, or as my pals will tell you the tinto tapas tour of northern Spain.
For some its a deeply religious experience and for others, like me, its just a fantastic way to live your life. Moving in a long unending chain towards Santiago you pass through vineyards, cereal fields, walk amongst the sunflowers, meet a delegation from the UN, eat, drink and generally make merry. If you're a fat boy like me you lose a stone on the way, whats not to like. So before I switch channels to www.fatal-bananas.blogspot.com blog a quick reminisce on September Deadbeats.
Issue 2 was photocopied in September 1982 and featured Paul McLaughlin formerly of the Prats who had released "Party Girl" under the AHAB banner. He'd been sitting having coffee that morning so seemed the obvious choice for the cover once the pictures were developed. I quickly learned that colour didn't work with photocopiers, black and white wasn't to clever either, so it was excellent to find 30 years on that I still had a copy of the picture so I could slam it on this blog. I discovered Aztec Camera in issue 2. Clearly everyone else knew about them, "We could Send letters" had been out for some time. I absolutely loved Pillar to Post particularly what I heard in my bones as a hint of northern soul to add to the jangly guitars, so much so I reviewed it as 'Pillar to Pillar', clearly in a hurry to get back on the dance floor in my room.... and happily by issue 5 we'd interview Roddy Frame, oh.... and Stu the roadie.
Issue 18 with the Screaming Nobodies also appeared in September but not every September did.
Issue 26 was put out in July to last August and September in 1984 when I was doing my resits. I used this technique in 1985 when issues regularly became irregular. I knew we wouldn't have time to put out any issues and it was the early warning alarm bells as Issue 27 stumbled out in October 1984 with the Wild Indians adorning the cover. Only one more issue that year would see Twisted Nerve finally buy me enough drink to make the cover of issue 28. Colin Moxley looking good like he still does! By this time the local music scene, certainly Dundee, Glasgow, Perth and Edinburgh had become a village for us and my ability to drink it in clearly impacted on production!
Issue 32 with Dundee's Plastic Surgery also squeezed September into the cover and lasted October and November before the Alarm took over the mantle of the Dying Deadbeat. I wax lyrical on the end and if you click on the above link for 1984-1986 you'll get the full story.
September is a great time to reflect and I'll be doing more of that than ever this year. My Mum's memory has failed her to such a degree this week has all been about care packages. It is sad to see a woman who once contributed so much to society now on the receiving end, but its also joyous to remember how the print machine was also used to print the 'busy person's cook book', a collated set of recipes she sold to raise money for some cause. A more polished version called Dear Francesca by a different author became a great bestseller some years later but I do wonder how many 'busy person's cook books' are still circulating! She certainly had it published before lean in 15's Tom was born, or Jamie's avocado had been peeled. My Mum's shop, the Picnic Basket opposite the Pear Tree in Edinburgh is still there. She acquired the premises around 1984 and I think it had been a bookshop. She started by selling the usual rolls but quickly its became clear that the Brie, Date and Apple were flying off the shelves at £1 faster than the cheese at 25p. Along with the home baking she had great fun and her 5 kids got the leftovers, yum yum!
I'll take those happy thoughts with me as I stumble along the Camino from Burgos on Friday.
Nowadays that means I wander off on the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, or as my pals will tell you the tinto tapas tour of northern Spain.
For some its a deeply religious experience and for others, like me, its just a fantastic way to live your life. Moving in a long unending chain towards Santiago you pass through vineyards, cereal fields, walk amongst the sunflowers, meet a delegation from the UN, eat, drink and generally make merry. If you're a fat boy like me you lose a stone on the way, whats not to like. So before I switch channels to www.fatal-bananas.blogspot.com blog a quick reminisce on September Deadbeats.
Issue 2 was photocopied in September 1982 and featured Paul McLaughlin formerly of the Prats who had released "Party Girl" under the AHAB banner. He'd been sitting having coffee that morning so seemed the obvious choice for the cover once the pictures were developed. I quickly learned that colour didn't work with photocopiers, black and white wasn't to clever either, so it was excellent to find 30 years on that I still had a copy of the picture so I could slam it on this blog. I discovered Aztec Camera in issue 2. Clearly everyone else knew about them, "We could Send letters" had been out for some time. I absolutely loved Pillar to Post particularly what I heard in my bones as a hint of northern soul to add to the jangly guitars, so much so I reviewed it as 'Pillar to Pillar', clearly in a hurry to get back on the dance floor in my room.... and happily by issue 5 we'd interview Roddy Frame, oh.... and Stu the roadie.
Issue 18 with the Screaming Nobodies also appeared in September but not every September did.
Issue 26 was put out in July to last August and September in 1984 when I was doing my resits. I used this technique in 1985 when issues regularly became irregular. I knew we wouldn't have time to put out any issues and it was the early warning alarm bells as Issue 27 stumbled out in October 1984 with the Wild Indians adorning the cover. Only one more issue that year would see Twisted Nerve finally buy me enough drink to make the cover of issue 28. Colin Moxley looking good like he still does! By this time the local music scene, certainly Dundee, Glasgow, Perth and Edinburgh had become a village for us and my ability to drink it in clearly impacted on production!
Issue 32 with Dundee's Plastic Surgery also squeezed September into the cover and lasted October and November before the Alarm took over the mantle of the Dying Deadbeat. I wax lyrical on the end and if you click on the above link for 1984-1986 you'll get the full story.
September is a great time to reflect and I'll be doing more of that than ever this year. My Mum's memory has failed her to such a degree this week has all been about care packages. It is sad to see a woman who once contributed so much to society now on the receiving end, but its also joyous to remember how the print machine was also used to print the 'busy person's cook book', a collated set of recipes she sold to raise money for some cause. A more polished version called Dear Francesca by a different author became a great bestseller some years later but I do wonder how many 'busy person's cook books' are still circulating! She certainly had it published before lean in 15's Tom was born, or Jamie's avocado had been peeled. My Mum's shop, the Picnic Basket opposite the Pear Tree in Edinburgh is still there. She acquired the premises around 1984 and I think it had been a bookshop. She started by selling the usual rolls but quickly its became clear that the Brie, Date and Apple were flying off the shelves at £1 faster than the cheese at 25p. Along with the home baking she had great fun and her 5 kids got the leftovers, yum yum!
I'll take those happy thoughts with me as I stumble along the Camino from Burgos on Friday.
Monday, 29 August 2016
Sunday, 28 August 2016
How good are the tips on the "11 Happy Hints" page
As the post bag reveals "Very important!"
Yes Crows for a pose is one of the most visited pages on this site and as we approach the 25,000 hits I chuckle and think back to how good a turkey looks with a tammy.
I trust you enjoy the 1980's humour, and nobody has really been saving up two decades of egg cartons as detailed in the "protect and survive manual.
Yes Crows for a pose is one of the most visited pages on this site and as we approach the 25,000 hits I chuckle and think back to how good a turkey looks with a tammy.
I trust you enjoy the 1980's humour, and nobody has really been saving up two decades of egg cartons as detailed in the "protect and survive manual.
Monday, 22 August 2016
Happy Birthday Deadbeat....from August 1982 with love!
Thank you, 34 again, its a great feeling. VB & KB take a bow
Sunday, 21 August 2016
O is for Hoolet by Ishbel McFarlane, ***** Scottish Storytelling centre, Royal Mile 7pm August 21st-29th www.oisforhoolet #HooletFringe
Great night, thought provoking and entertaining. Watching the spark of creativity ignite into a bonfire on the stage at the Scottish Storytelling centre was superb as Ishbel worked her way through her characters and subject. In this age of skype, you close your eyes and you'd think Professor David Crystal has been beamed in from his home in North Wales, and is on a big screen above the stage. Dr Johann Unger makes a similar appearance as award winning Ishbel displays her full talents as an actress and a mimic. Roles for young Ishbel provide additional insight into the writer while infant Ishbel provides the eloquent backdrop to the story.
The story is Scots. The story is the Scots language. The story is, I'm telling you it is official. Scots is a language, just ask the English ambassador who interviewed Mary Queen of Scots, (a transcribe of which is kept at Prestonfield Golf Club where Mary played her golf back in the day).
Through the marvellous construction of this piece the audience are taken on a journey. A journey many of us have never contemplated. If Americans can do the 500 mile camino in a week, Paris in a day, who am I to deny them the chance to a linguistic doctorate in 75 minutes. After listening to Ishbel's engaging play, they're perfectly entitled to a badge of honour.
There's an energy that Ishbel brings to the stage, an energy that burns brightly through her writing and ignites our interest in her subject matter. It becomes our subject matter and it becomes our evening's discussion. It is transcribed into texts, emails and reviews the next day. It is the Fringe at its best. New writing invigorating our lives. New performers painting with new patterns. T-in-the-park has left Kinross, the grass has gone and all those balls kicked into the long grass long ago (Pre-T) by politicians are now revealed. A wee shout from the field.
I'll transcribe for you, 'Ye can let the grass grow but our longue will ne'er die. C'mon, lets drink to the Scots mither tongue."
Obviously that's my interpretation, that's my thought processes and that's what I loved about the show. i found fires in my imagination had cleared away the debris and revealed a past. Suddenly, I was 9 years of age. I was taken back to America, 1972 where for 2 years my Dad was a diplomat in Washington DC. Our grade 5 teacher used to give us spelling tests. 20 words every day. I used to write Aluminum and then in the next column Aluminium. Every day there would be 3 words that were spelt differently in Maryland, USA, and I knew they were so I told my teacher that I would spell them this way in America but not in Scotland. Mr Stein laughed, but I didn't think he got it. I was trying to tell him he needed to tell the rest of the class. I was the same when they asked us to stand for the pledge of allegiance. I just said no. My parents were called in and a diplomatic mission required to absolve me from the crime. I was apparently excused on religious grounds.
This is why O is for Hoolet is such a fantastic show for everyone. We have told over 30 of our friends that they will find themselves alive after the show. Check the pulse and look in the mirror. It will remove creases from foreheads and those famous crows feet from around the eyes. The sun will shine brighter and you will find enlightenment. If only I had social media, it would be 1000's of friends.
Its no surprise to see the fireworks in the sky as we walk up the Royal Mile, Ishbel's show is a great reason to celebrate. Treat yourself to an evening out, go down the Royal Mile and see it, its on every night, but be aware, the clock is ticking and the last show is August 29th 2016.
If the Scottish Education minister is reading, O is for Hoolet is education and touring Scottish schools, colleges and Universities doing workshops would be a great way to inspire a nation. Eh, here's an idea, make it happen!
Our Five star fringe award.... if you only go to one show......make sure it is......O is for Hoolet!
Congratulations Ishbel McFarlane,
PS - I hope like Eddie Izzard did two years ago you re tweet it and Deadbeat gets 5000 hits in 25 minutes....!!
www.oisforhoolet
#HooletFringe
The story is Scots. The story is the Scots language. The story is, I'm telling you it is official. Scots is a language, just ask the English ambassador who interviewed Mary Queen of Scots, (a transcribe of which is kept at Prestonfield Golf Club where Mary played her golf back in the day).
Through the marvellous construction of this piece the audience are taken on a journey. A journey many of us have never contemplated. If Americans can do the 500 mile camino in a week, Paris in a day, who am I to deny them the chance to a linguistic doctorate in 75 minutes. After listening to Ishbel's engaging play, they're perfectly entitled to a badge of honour.
There's an energy that Ishbel brings to the stage, an energy that burns brightly through her writing and ignites our interest in her subject matter. It becomes our subject matter and it becomes our evening's discussion. It is transcribed into texts, emails and reviews the next day. It is the Fringe at its best. New writing invigorating our lives. New performers painting with new patterns. T-in-the-park has left Kinross, the grass has gone and all those balls kicked into the long grass long ago (Pre-T) by politicians are now revealed. A wee shout from the field.
I'll transcribe for you, 'Ye can let the grass grow but our longue will ne'er die. C'mon, lets drink to the Scots mither tongue."
Obviously that's my interpretation, that's my thought processes and that's what I loved about the show. i found fires in my imagination had cleared away the debris and revealed a past. Suddenly, I was 9 years of age. I was taken back to America, 1972 where for 2 years my Dad was a diplomat in Washington DC. Our grade 5 teacher used to give us spelling tests. 20 words every day. I used to write Aluminum and then in the next column Aluminium. Every day there would be 3 words that were spelt differently in Maryland, USA, and I knew they were so I told my teacher that I would spell them this way in America but not in Scotland. Mr Stein laughed, but I didn't think he got it. I was trying to tell him he needed to tell the rest of the class. I was the same when they asked us to stand for the pledge of allegiance. I just said no. My parents were called in and a diplomatic mission required to absolve me from the crime. I was apparently excused on religious grounds.
This is why O is for Hoolet is such a fantastic show for everyone. We have told over 30 of our friends that they will find themselves alive after the show. Check the pulse and look in the mirror. It will remove creases from foreheads and those famous crows feet from around the eyes. The sun will shine brighter and you will find enlightenment. If only I had social media, it would be 1000's of friends.
Its no surprise to see the fireworks in the sky as we walk up the Royal Mile, Ishbel's show is a great reason to celebrate. Treat yourself to an evening out, go down the Royal Mile and see it, its on every night, but be aware, the clock is ticking and the last show is August 29th 2016.
If the Scottish Education minister is reading, O is for Hoolet is education and touring Scottish schools, colleges and Universities doing workshops would be a great way to inspire a nation. Eh, here's an idea, make it happen!
Our Five star fringe award.... if you only go to one show......make sure it is......O is for Hoolet!
Congratulations Ishbel McFarlane,
PS - I hope like Eddie Izzard did two years ago you re tweet it and Deadbeat gets 5000 hits in 25 minutes....!!
www.oisforhoolet
#HooletFringe
Monday, 1 August 2016
#Harrytheplay @kingsheadthtr 25/7/16
A trip to the Kings Head theatre to see Harry is a mere 800 mile round trip, but in the comfort of East coast trains, London buses and then the luxurious theatre itself one feels totally pampered.
The excitement grows as Harry begins and the cast of Caitlin and Sophie bounce around in their first year accommodation like Bambi on ice, in stereo. The rhythm of the play is sharp and fast, the voices rising to fever pitch as they clatter into each other in perfect unison. Its like dining out and savouring perfect fusion cooking, this is no deep fried mars bar this is sublime. The salmon has....wait I digress, I'm salivating over the play not the meal.
The action is superb and the humour perfectly timed. The girls are having a ball and its only the first 1D album. They have nothing in common except a certain little prince of pop, with a head like a mop, and the face of a pixie. Clearly I'm not 17 but I can see that they are. They are in love. They share a special bond, they share Harry and they share him with 100 million others!
The play allows them to age all the way through the album releases until they graduate and I cant divulge where the journey takes them but the world of fandom isnt all frivolous girlie smiles and screams. There is laughter aplenty but there's a sinister twitch. There's a sense of danger, the elephant wanders into the room and suddenly it's taking centre stage.
Watch it you'll love it - Harry is playing at the Kings Head theatre Tuesday 9th August @ 7pm and Tuesday 16th August 2016.
#Harrytheplay - Enjoy www.poormichelle.co.uk
The excitement grows as Harry begins and the cast of Caitlin and Sophie bounce around in their first year accommodation like Bambi on ice, in stereo. The rhythm of the play is sharp and fast, the voices rising to fever pitch as they clatter into each other in perfect unison. Its like dining out and savouring perfect fusion cooking, this is no deep fried mars bar this is sublime. The salmon has....wait I digress, I'm salivating over the play not the meal.
The action is superb and the humour perfectly timed. The girls are having a ball and its only the first 1D album. They have nothing in common except a certain little prince of pop, with a head like a mop, and the face of a pixie. Clearly I'm not 17 but I can see that they are. They are in love. They share a special bond, they share Harry and they share him with 100 million others!
The play allows them to age all the way through the album releases until they graduate and I cant divulge where the journey takes them but the world of fandom isnt all frivolous girlie smiles and screams. There is laughter aplenty but there's a sinister twitch. There's a sense of danger, the elephant wanders into the room and suddenly it's taking centre stage.
Watch it you'll love it - Harry is playing at the Kings Head theatre Tuesday 9th August @ 7pm and Tuesday 16th August 2016.
#Harrytheplay - Enjoy www.poormichelle.co.uk
Sunday, 26 June 2016
The Wedding Present new album
Not so much a review just a heads up. A reminder for me as well as you. I first encountered The Wedding Present about the same time as Biff Bang Pow and other Creation records started coming through the door. That's not to say they were on Creation, its just in my head it would be 1984-1985, or over 30 years ago. I like doing this memory nonsense out loud as it helps with my early onset dementia when I write it down. Back to the Wedding Present though and I'm thinking they were one of the best bands I never got to see, I'm guessing because they were from across the EU border in England. The good news for me is I'm going to get that chance this year as they are touring and I might even manage it when I'm down in London to see "Harry" the play at the Kings Head in Islington on July 26th. Harry is a play and not from 1985 so its new and fresh, but I do like the whole nostalgia thing and as its rife in London I'll get pad and paper out to roll back the clock. Tick tock.
Around the same time were another great band from down south that I never got to see, The June Brides. The list was quite a long list. I just had a quick look at the covers to see what issues covered the period and the June Brides were in issue 26, the relations from Perth I did manage to see, as I did Crucial Xylophones from Dundee, Rhythm System from Glasgow, although I dont think I ever got to see The Men Men. Drink frequently got in the way and if it wasn't drink it was a doorman or a doorway, in fact kerbs used to stop me in my track quite often too.
Around the same time were another great band from down south that I never got to see, The June Brides. The list was quite a long list. I just had a quick look at the covers to see what issues covered the period and the June Brides were in issue 26, the relations from Perth I did manage to see, as I did Crucial Xylophones from Dundee, Rhythm System from Glasgow, although I dont think I ever got to see The Men Men. Drink frequently got in the way and if it wasn't drink it was a doorman or a doorway, in fact kerbs used to stop me in my track quite often too.
Friday, 24 June 2016
Black Friday? or just not quite so blue friday
Europe has lost one of its stars, certainly not the brightest in the class but one of its stars none the less. I think the poll probably reflects my thinking in terms that I was neither that bothered about staying in or leaving, it was a 50/50 thing that on balance I was an in. I thought the vote would be like it was in Scotland, 60/40, but in the end it was much more like the independence vote and went the way of the exit.
The worry for all of us is that we have nobody to negotiate our exit or our trade deals and as a result we'll be legged over by lengthy uncertainty and as divorces go, we'll probably be left with the broken dishwasher and hoover while the new washer/dryer goes back to Bosch. The notion of Great Britain is such a compelling marketing slogan, but alas it is just that. We are anything but great. We've meandered along a path to mediocrity and I'm sorry but Boris and co are more than likely to have the best banquets around but we'll not be scoffing at their table.
Yes we'll get a dozen Albanians off our streets and for once they wont return, but we'll also send home Aussie physios, Doctors from New Zealand, Nigerian Nurses, Polish plasterers, German grafters, Italian chefs and Gambian gamemasters, oh and aquire a skills shortfall.
If we thought we had a shortfall in our pension funds, we'll find it gets a wee bit bigger or will we? BT is now only £7bn short of where it needs to be and although this figure is growing, there is a potedntial crumb of comfort.
Like the Eco system, scrathcing the economy's arse can often have a relieving thought in the brain and if our interest rates need to rise to help sterling then our pension funds will feel a huge burden lift with the rise. Unfortunately, as with scratching the arse once, you often have to scratch it again, redoubling your efforts mean that house prices are affected and the broader economy will suffer. Wait, is that not the recession we're just coming out of?
Oh no, if we dive further into recession and BT isnt able to make profits how can it keep making enough money to pay into the pension....efficency savings, that'll be the way
Oh well, scratch away, you never know it might work, that's what the marketing guys tell me. I've spoken to the project managers too, they tell me there's a lot of project work on at the moment discussing how best to scratch, the most efficaceous way to scratch, maximum resistance, you name it, anything but when its ok.
Apparently the timeline still hasn't been decided you see, as there's a bit more negotiation, oh well, I'll go out for a long walk then....
The worry for all of us is that we have nobody to negotiate our exit or our trade deals and as a result we'll be legged over by lengthy uncertainty and as divorces go, we'll probably be left with the broken dishwasher and hoover while the new washer/dryer goes back to Bosch. The notion of Great Britain is such a compelling marketing slogan, but alas it is just that. We are anything but great. We've meandered along a path to mediocrity and I'm sorry but Boris and co are more than likely to have the best banquets around but we'll not be scoffing at their table.
Yes we'll get a dozen Albanians off our streets and for once they wont return, but we'll also send home Aussie physios, Doctors from New Zealand, Nigerian Nurses, Polish plasterers, German grafters, Italian chefs and Gambian gamemasters, oh and aquire a skills shortfall.
If we thought we had a shortfall in our pension funds, we'll find it gets a wee bit bigger or will we? BT is now only £7bn short of where it needs to be and although this figure is growing, there is a potedntial crumb of comfort.
Like the Eco system, scrathcing the economy's arse can often have a relieving thought in the brain and if our interest rates need to rise to help sterling then our pension funds will feel a huge burden lift with the rise. Unfortunately, as with scratching the arse once, you often have to scratch it again, redoubling your efforts mean that house prices are affected and the broader economy will suffer. Wait, is that not the recession we're just coming out of?
Oh no, if we dive further into recession and BT isnt able to make profits how can it keep making enough money to pay into the pension....efficency savings, that'll be the way
Oh well, scratch away, you never know it might work, that's what the marketing guys tell me. I've spoken to the project managers too, they tell me there's a lot of project work on at the moment discussing how best to scratch, the most efficaceous way to scratch, maximum resistance, you name it, anything but when its ok.
Apparently the timeline still hasn't been decided you see, as there's a bit more negotiation, oh well, I'll go out for a long walk then....
Monday, 16 May 2016
Heads together single 1984
Thursday, 5 May 2016
Pensions - some more chat on the real crisis
Post Maxwell the attention was solely on where the money was invested. I invited Alastair Darling into our offices in George St pre-election in 1997 and explained why we as a company wanted a way to give staff more shares in the company. While happy to back markets and privatisations, he was against widening staff share ownership. I joked about Marx and controlling the factors of production and then passed him on to our market dealers where he seemed fascinated by the screens.
I couldn't help thinking Maxwell was a long time ago and suggested our biggest issue in Pensions was the control management exerted over trustees and their capacity to create prospective early retirements on full pay. This was the creation of a liability that would just grow and grow.
This was highlighted again when the Government sold the Royal Mail without the pension. The pension had assumed a massive liability during restructuring in the 80's, 90's, and the Consignia days. The Unions successfully negotiated excellent deals and the restructuring pot was placed firmly in the Pension and away from the business. Some view this as crooked accounting others think they've got away with someone else paying the tab. Quite simply the debt and liability is now the taxpayers. This is
BT & RBS are big news and no wonder. Management forced through restructuring involving massive pension liabilities. They are not alone and eventually these amounts of money break companies as witnessed by BHS. The question with BHS is whether the previous incumbent who paid out huge dividends to BHS when allegedly standing behind the pension. Similar questions will be asked of all companies who offered final salary schemes. It was raised 10 years ago and slowly they been closed but faster, has been the growth of liability. Pensioners continue to live even longer, Stock Market returns have frustrated trustees and administrators, so guess what, these funds will run out of cash during the 2036. When I say run out of cash they will be obliged to tell pensioners earlier, but they will be out of cash and very few will be able to pay their liabilities in full during the 2030's.
Why my confidence? Its quite simple. If the individual companies generate a profit level significantly below that of their obligation to the pension fund for the shortfall then their share price will not rise, in fact it falls. Lack of stock market returns means it a vicious spiral. I'm away to crunch some numbers.
I couldn't help thinking Maxwell was a long time ago and suggested our biggest issue in Pensions was the control management exerted over trustees and their capacity to create prospective early retirements on full pay. This was the creation of a liability that would just grow and grow.
This was highlighted again when the Government sold the Royal Mail without the pension. The pension had assumed a massive liability during restructuring in the 80's, 90's, and the Consignia days. The Unions successfully negotiated excellent deals and the restructuring pot was placed firmly in the Pension and away from the business. Some view this as crooked accounting others think they've got away with someone else paying the tab. Quite simply the debt and liability is now the taxpayers. This is
BT & RBS are big news and no wonder. Management forced through restructuring involving massive pension liabilities. They are not alone and eventually these amounts of money break companies as witnessed by BHS. The question with BHS is whether the previous incumbent who paid out huge dividends to BHS when allegedly standing behind the pension. Similar questions will be asked of all companies who offered final salary schemes. It was raised 10 years ago and slowly they been closed but faster, has been the growth of liability. Pensioners continue to live even longer, Stock Market returns have frustrated trustees and administrators, so guess what, these funds will run out of cash during the 2036. When I say run out of cash they will be obliged to tell pensioners earlier, but they will be out of cash and very few will be able to pay their liabilities in full during the 2030's.
Why my confidence? Its quite simple. If the individual companies generate a profit level significantly below that of their obligation to the pension fund for the shortfall then their share price will not rise, in fact it falls. Lack of stock market returns means it a vicious spiral. I'm away to crunch some numbers.
Tuesday, 26 April 2016
The Big Short - Financial planning for contrary old gits
As many of the readers of young Deadbeat move into their 50's there's a bit of contrarian thinking to throw out to you. Many of you will have heard about mis-selling of stuff and will have long since had rebates. Regulators like to fine people after the event, not warn us or release good advice. As I'm not a prophet, and will not profit, any words I use are merely thoughts of a deranged Vinny Bee.
As background I argued against endowment mortgages as I wanted a repayment one in the 80's and I was refused in a few places before finally getting what I was after. When advised in the 90's to put all your pensions into one pot I thought 'not'.
And now its 2016, I think differently. I think from a personal point of view I'm getting my cash out as its a great bargain, I reckon 55%-65% better than leaving it. I also think that death is an issue better handled out of a SIPP and after the life I've led, it cant be far away. Finally I think the rush for the exit created by pension reform could bring down some pension funds and although I think my two are fine, I wouldn't like to see all the lifeboats gone before arguing my case.
I'll touch on the latter later, but for now why the change in value?
If I had transferred my pension in the 90's from a 'final salary scheme' I'd have been given a chunk of money deemed enough to buy a pension in 2022 (when I'm 60). Quite simply they'd have looked at the likely return over the next whatever years. Interest rates were higher so all the projections would suggest a decent return if you just put the cash in the bank and got interest on it every year. To buy a pension of £5000 a year would probably have cost about £60,000-£80,000. So that's the size of the pot of cash I'd have got transferred out.
The pot size can be confusing. While a member of a scheme, you dont own a pot, you own a final salary pension and the pension fund has the responsibility to pay whatever price it is for your pension. That price goes up and down and only when you transfer out does it become your pot. That transfer value is the amount required to buy you a pension at the date of transfer. Its a bit like leaving a casino just after a winner or 4 spins later, or worse still 2 spins before your winner. The amount required to buy a pension will vary, largely with interest rates which impact on annuity costs. 0% interest is the best time to transfer.
Today interest have been at a low for a long time, a very long time and all projections from the Bank of England suggest this may not last for ever, but probably a wee bit longer. In other words the window might just be closing. To buy a similar pension would cost a lot more - roughly 30 times £5000 = £150,000 probably. I'm no actuary, I just add up. So if you had transferred out that mis selling mob deserve all the abuse they get. I dont care about the past - its the here and now, and all of you who still have a final salary pension should ask the question. Trustees no longer send out benefit statements as they dont want people leaving when the values are so high. They have a pot to protect on behalf of all the members of the scheme.
Where anyone has a 'final salary scheme' even one they've been told closed two years ago or whatever, they should ask for a transfer value figure. Asking doesn't mean you'll have to transfer out it just means you know what its worth. You ask for a transfer value and also a statement of benefit and a what if I retired at 55 or 60, just choose your favourite number between 55-60.
Governments seriously mess retrospectively with legislation and while I had thought I was hoping to retire at 50, Tory Blair changed the rules and I was fecked. At 55, I plan to get out and with 18 months left it seems a grand time to shuffle the eggs into a row. The deal is you can take 25% tax free so if that transfer pot is so large you might find your tax free, 'in yer mit' cash is huge. Before anyone starts spending it, remember this is to last you a lifetime and the reason why pensions are protected is so that we dont go out and party like its 1999. A wee splurge is good though and looking at the figures above, if I get £150,000, I get £37,500 tax free, that's £5000 a year for 5 years after my retirement party and in the meantime the £112,500 left can still go up in value. So here's how it plays in my head. I splurge £12,500 in year one and have £5000 a year until I'm 60. Then I take £5000 a year every year until 84. If I have got any kind of interest then I'll have something left, if not I jump off a cliff. The alternative is to leave it where it is and get £5000 a year, no splurge and hope I get past 84...
In all seriousness, the £112,500 left in the pot needs to be managed and you should get a minimum of 2-3% from very safe investments. If you go for higher risks then you're just gambling and that's what we did with the £12,500 at the retirement party. If you get 2-3% every year then your pot at 84 will still have £60,000 in it, which is £6000 a year for 10 years which will see you to 94. If you get to 94 your pot will be pretty decimated but at 2-3% you will probably have about £10,000 left to get you some fags and beer on your way to a 100, when I'll push you off that cliff!
The alternative I've been offered was £20,000 lump sum and £3,500 at 55, or £5000 at 55. As you can see from the figures above I'm getting a larger lump sum and still taking £5000 a year. A wise financial manager will point out that an annuity bought will be for life so what you have is a gamble on how much money you need when you're 100. Some of us also are looking at the other side of the equation and what happens when I die before I'm 80. Well the good news about the SIPP is that the cash just gets handed on to the beneficiaries at their marginal rate of tax. Obviously if you go down the route of transferring the financial advisor you appoint, has had to do an exam and will know all that shit, and inform you. The bottom line is you get more but please remember to use the pot over 30 years, some arseholes are cashing in the full whack and paying tax on it. You dont need to be a financial guru to work out how foolish that is, although it does mean the tax man has the cash to pay for the bail outs and then will be a few.
Most pension funds have been underfunded for a while. The nature of the fund is usually that during lower rates it will appear under funded but over the life cycle and because of the age demographic of the fund it will even itself out. Not now and all bets are.
Nothing is more guaranteed than a massive financial collapse of pension funds housing final salary schemes. Every company that operates one will be under serious pressure as people like me tell everyone to get their cash off the table. We are talking Chicago Speakeasy 1930's prohibition, please finish your drinks, its a raid. This will be as bad if not worse than the house selling frenzy that preceded the 2007/2008 crisis.
Capitalism has gone rogue and is at the vagaries of clueless greedy bastards. Quite simply if I got offered the same figures as before I would not run for the hills. As a clueless greedy bastard, I'm not stuck between a rock and a hard place, I just need to jump. I dont want to be filling in forms claiming I was part of a scheme that is now skint. Pension fund trustees cant borrow money to pay your back. They are controlled ponzy schemes where people will get their money back if they just wait and form and orderly queue. Guess who was at the centre of this, clueless greedy bastards running banks.
Pension funds are pots of cash that go up and down. During the 1980's there was so much cash in the pension funds that they were raided by firms and governments.
Many of the banks gave early retirement to members of staff with augmented terms, paid for from the riches in these over funded pension funds. Redundancies would be paid partially by the firm but the real cost was in the pension fund. Enhanced terms meant that people left on full pension at age 50. Their package was as if they had gone at 55 or 60, it was fully paid up for them, but not to the pension fund. Quite simply this was one of the worst abuses of pension funds.
The banks argued that the Pension fund was free, it wasnt. It was part of the terms of employment that a non contributory pension existed. All employees essentially paid in as their salary was lower than it might have been. When they signed up as 20 year olds to a job in the bank or insurance company, this job for life would see them progress through grades and salary bands until they received their final salary as a pension. This was their rights in 1980 or 1990 or 2000. Then word hit the street. We cant fund this anymore. ER? YES YOU FECKIN CAN! This money stolen out of the pension fund by greedy custodians of businesses who gave themselves bonues for making 50 year olds redundant and promising them unlimited cash.
What were the UNIONS doing? Nothing. They looked after the members who exited. They got the members who retired at 50 and outstanding deal, they also helped sign the death warrant for their other members, the ones who now find they've lost their final salary scheme. This explains why the UNIONS never pursued it. They were as culpable as the greedy management. It absolutely makes my calm exterior go purple with rage.
These funds were so over funded during the 80's that post MAXWELL, the only thing our idiotic legislators could do was pass laws that gave management carte blanche to raid the funds. If they ever looked under funded they had to put a plan in place. When Brown became Chancellor that was the tin lid. If you can all raid them then the government will too. Our tax raising powers became the envy of the world when the pension funds lost their dividend tax credits.
The problem is all pension funds were hit and this meant over funded and generally balanced schemes. Over funded schemes had been created from good prudence which used to be a great Scottish trait. Money for a rainy day in your back pocket, down your sock and in that secret compartment in the heel of your shoe. Weak management and boards would allow baby bruisers to turn the prudent over even finding the stash in the shoes. Worse still, these arseholes got promoted. Did we learn nothing from Nick Leeson? Yes we did, its that greed works, you just need to keep greasing the palms. Our senior politicians now view their book tour with avarice. Their agents cant wait to get them off the political stage fast enough, to get them earning. Lets face it once you've served some time as an MP your lifetime allowance is assured - your final salary scheme does not rely on number of years completed and so why waste any more time at the sauce, aka HP.
I like how the source of the Thames gets bastardised into a cultured "I'm off to the sauce" by the cheery fat MP of a monday morning.
I digress, back to the funds. I still find it abominable that changes to employees terms and conditions can see the removal of the final salary pension scheme and have no legal challenge. When people suggest the unions are in management's pocket, its hard to disagree. Board room chats and chocolate biscuits, never mind the selection of wine at lunch, or networking as I believe its called.
So if all transfer values are inflated by 55% then all pensions will most definitely be underfunded. If pensions are definitely underfunded and people start transferring out because its a good deal, there is a collapse.
It cant be any simpler. If the pension fund has £50m or £50bn, if it is 55% short, its more than the parent of the pension fund.
Another clarification here. Pension funds act independently from the parent, but they rely on the parent as the only source of new funds. Back in the 1980's and 90's when all these deals were being cut the independence of trustees was not so assured. Trustees frequently had dual roles as masterminds of the main business, hence the goofy idea that we've got loads in the pension this week so offer them enhanced terms.
The funniest, or most comedic for me of these pay offs at 50 was that actuarially you life expectancy was 80-82 in those days. HEY! Elastica, not if you stop working at 50 with a pension of £30,000 guaranteed to go up ever year. Your life expectancy has just had 10 years added to it. Cheek by jowl in Glasgow are Partick, Possil, Bearsden, Yoker, Drumchapel and Milngavie. If you've retired at 50 after 10 years as a bank manager you live in the area that dies on average at 95. If you got emptied as the cleaner of that branch when it shut you live in the area that dies at 58. Its called the post code lottery. In Edinburgh the same 78 year old branch manager retired at 50 and lives in Davidson's Mains 400 yards down the road from the Muirhouse flat his 59 year old cleaner died in last week.
The pension funds are bust and will only get more broken with time. The pensioners who are locked in and receiving their money will feel brilliant while it gets paid and I suggest they may even be the ones who are protected more when push comes to shove. They will be in their 80's and 90's when their pensions suddenly dont get paid by the pension fund. The government will step in on a first come first served basis but it will be too little too late. Figures out recently on a high street store suggest the first disaster is even closer than I expected.
What could they do now? Well raise interest rates for starters. It would stop munchkins like me suggesting you transfer out. The transfer value would drop and my rush for the exit with it. Even if I did leave I'd not be taking so much out of the pot. Policy makers have so many instruments but as I've said Capitalism is a busted flush as there's so much money to be made from spotting the need to raise interest rates. Corruption has always existed but in my humble opinion it is now as big a lever as many other economic instruments and yet there is not as much written on the subject. Laws are being written retrospectively so even if you get your money out of a scheme some bright spark might levy a tax on anyone who was once part of a scheme thats now gone bust.
Hey! Elastica dont care, their hit was in the 80's and not long after that Dad got his retirement from the bank. 33 years he's been away from that place and he's looking better every day.
"Its funny how the bank managers are living longer these days" he laughs. "In my day you got the manager's chair when the previous one had a heart attack and died slumped on his desk."
As background I argued against endowment mortgages as I wanted a repayment one in the 80's and I was refused in a few places before finally getting what I was after. When advised in the 90's to put all your pensions into one pot I thought 'not'.
And now its 2016, I think differently. I think from a personal point of view I'm getting my cash out as its a great bargain, I reckon 55%-65% better than leaving it. I also think that death is an issue better handled out of a SIPP and after the life I've led, it cant be far away. Finally I think the rush for the exit created by pension reform could bring down some pension funds and although I think my two are fine, I wouldn't like to see all the lifeboats gone before arguing my case.
I'll touch on the latter later, but for now why the change in value?
If I had transferred my pension in the 90's from a 'final salary scheme' I'd have been given a chunk of money deemed enough to buy a pension in 2022 (when I'm 60). Quite simply they'd have looked at the likely return over the next whatever years. Interest rates were higher so all the projections would suggest a decent return if you just put the cash in the bank and got interest on it every year. To buy a pension of £5000 a year would probably have cost about £60,000-£80,000. So that's the size of the pot of cash I'd have got transferred out.
The pot size can be confusing. While a member of a scheme, you dont own a pot, you own a final salary pension and the pension fund has the responsibility to pay whatever price it is for your pension. That price goes up and down and only when you transfer out does it become your pot. That transfer value is the amount required to buy you a pension at the date of transfer. Its a bit like leaving a casino just after a winner or 4 spins later, or worse still 2 spins before your winner. The amount required to buy a pension will vary, largely with interest rates which impact on annuity costs. 0% interest is the best time to transfer.
Today interest have been at a low for a long time, a very long time and all projections from the Bank of England suggest this may not last for ever, but probably a wee bit longer. In other words the window might just be closing. To buy a similar pension would cost a lot more - roughly 30 times £5000 = £150,000 probably. I'm no actuary, I just add up. So if you had transferred out that mis selling mob deserve all the abuse they get. I dont care about the past - its the here and now, and all of you who still have a final salary pension should ask the question. Trustees no longer send out benefit statements as they dont want people leaving when the values are so high. They have a pot to protect on behalf of all the members of the scheme.
Where anyone has a 'final salary scheme' even one they've been told closed two years ago or whatever, they should ask for a transfer value figure. Asking doesn't mean you'll have to transfer out it just means you know what its worth. You ask for a transfer value and also a statement of benefit and a what if I retired at 55 or 60, just choose your favourite number between 55-60.
Governments seriously mess retrospectively with legislation and while I had thought I was hoping to retire at 50, Tory Blair changed the rules and I was fecked. At 55, I plan to get out and with 18 months left it seems a grand time to shuffle the eggs into a row. The deal is you can take 25% tax free so if that transfer pot is so large you might find your tax free, 'in yer mit' cash is huge. Before anyone starts spending it, remember this is to last you a lifetime and the reason why pensions are protected is so that we dont go out and party like its 1999. A wee splurge is good though and looking at the figures above, if I get £150,000, I get £37,500 tax free, that's £5000 a year for 5 years after my retirement party and in the meantime the £112,500 left can still go up in value. So here's how it plays in my head. I splurge £12,500 in year one and have £5000 a year until I'm 60. Then I take £5000 a year every year until 84. If I have got any kind of interest then I'll have something left, if not I jump off a cliff. The alternative is to leave it where it is and get £5000 a year, no splurge and hope I get past 84...
In all seriousness, the £112,500 left in the pot needs to be managed and you should get a minimum of 2-3% from very safe investments. If you go for higher risks then you're just gambling and that's what we did with the £12,500 at the retirement party. If you get 2-3% every year then your pot at 84 will still have £60,000 in it, which is £6000 a year for 10 years which will see you to 94. If you get to 94 your pot will be pretty decimated but at 2-3% you will probably have about £10,000 left to get you some fags and beer on your way to a 100, when I'll push you off that cliff!
The alternative I've been offered was £20,000 lump sum and £3,500 at 55, or £5000 at 55. As you can see from the figures above I'm getting a larger lump sum and still taking £5000 a year. A wise financial manager will point out that an annuity bought will be for life so what you have is a gamble on how much money you need when you're 100. Some of us also are looking at the other side of the equation and what happens when I die before I'm 80. Well the good news about the SIPP is that the cash just gets handed on to the beneficiaries at their marginal rate of tax. Obviously if you go down the route of transferring the financial advisor you appoint, has had to do an exam and will know all that shit, and inform you. The bottom line is you get more but please remember to use the pot over 30 years, some arseholes are cashing in the full whack and paying tax on it. You dont need to be a financial guru to work out how foolish that is, although it does mean the tax man has the cash to pay for the bail outs and then will be a few.
Most pension funds have been underfunded for a while. The nature of the fund is usually that during lower rates it will appear under funded but over the life cycle and because of the age demographic of the fund it will even itself out. Not now and all bets are.
Nothing is more guaranteed than a massive financial collapse of pension funds housing final salary schemes. Every company that operates one will be under serious pressure as people like me tell everyone to get their cash off the table. We are talking Chicago Speakeasy 1930's prohibition, please finish your drinks, its a raid. This will be as bad if not worse than the house selling frenzy that preceded the 2007/2008 crisis.
Capitalism has gone rogue and is at the vagaries of clueless greedy bastards. Quite simply if I got offered the same figures as before I would not run for the hills. As a clueless greedy bastard, I'm not stuck between a rock and a hard place, I just need to jump. I dont want to be filling in forms claiming I was part of a scheme that is now skint. Pension fund trustees cant borrow money to pay your back. They are controlled ponzy schemes where people will get their money back if they just wait and form and orderly queue. Guess who was at the centre of this, clueless greedy bastards running banks.
Pension funds are pots of cash that go up and down. During the 1980's there was so much cash in the pension funds that they were raided by firms and governments.
Many of the banks gave early retirement to members of staff with augmented terms, paid for from the riches in these over funded pension funds. Redundancies would be paid partially by the firm but the real cost was in the pension fund. Enhanced terms meant that people left on full pension at age 50. Their package was as if they had gone at 55 or 60, it was fully paid up for them, but not to the pension fund. Quite simply this was one of the worst abuses of pension funds.
The banks argued that the Pension fund was free, it wasnt. It was part of the terms of employment that a non contributory pension existed. All employees essentially paid in as their salary was lower than it might have been. When they signed up as 20 year olds to a job in the bank or insurance company, this job for life would see them progress through grades and salary bands until they received their final salary as a pension. This was their rights in 1980 or 1990 or 2000. Then word hit the street. We cant fund this anymore. ER? YES YOU FECKIN CAN! This money stolen out of the pension fund by greedy custodians of businesses who gave themselves bonues for making 50 year olds redundant and promising them unlimited cash.
What were the UNIONS doing? Nothing. They looked after the members who exited. They got the members who retired at 50 and outstanding deal, they also helped sign the death warrant for their other members, the ones who now find they've lost their final salary scheme. This explains why the UNIONS never pursued it. They were as culpable as the greedy management. It absolutely makes my calm exterior go purple with rage.
These funds were so over funded during the 80's that post MAXWELL, the only thing our idiotic legislators could do was pass laws that gave management carte blanche to raid the funds. If they ever looked under funded they had to put a plan in place. When Brown became Chancellor that was the tin lid. If you can all raid them then the government will too. Our tax raising powers became the envy of the world when the pension funds lost their dividend tax credits.
The problem is all pension funds were hit and this meant over funded and generally balanced schemes. Over funded schemes had been created from good prudence which used to be a great Scottish trait. Money for a rainy day in your back pocket, down your sock and in that secret compartment in the heel of your shoe. Weak management and boards would allow baby bruisers to turn the prudent over even finding the stash in the shoes. Worse still, these arseholes got promoted. Did we learn nothing from Nick Leeson? Yes we did, its that greed works, you just need to keep greasing the palms. Our senior politicians now view their book tour with avarice. Their agents cant wait to get them off the political stage fast enough, to get them earning. Lets face it once you've served some time as an MP your lifetime allowance is assured - your final salary scheme does not rely on number of years completed and so why waste any more time at the sauce, aka HP.
I like how the source of the Thames gets bastardised into a cultured "I'm off to the sauce" by the cheery fat MP of a monday morning.
I digress, back to the funds. I still find it abominable that changes to employees terms and conditions can see the removal of the final salary pension scheme and have no legal challenge. When people suggest the unions are in management's pocket, its hard to disagree. Board room chats and chocolate biscuits, never mind the selection of wine at lunch, or networking as I believe its called.
So if all transfer values are inflated by 55% then all pensions will most definitely be underfunded. If pensions are definitely underfunded and people start transferring out because its a good deal, there is a collapse.
It cant be any simpler. If the pension fund has £50m or £50bn, if it is 55% short, its more than the parent of the pension fund.
Another clarification here. Pension funds act independently from the parent, but they rely on the parent as the only source of new funds. Back in the 1980's and 90's when all these deals were being cut the independence of trustees was not so assured. Trustees frequently had dual roles as masterminds of the main business, hence the goofy idea that we've got loads in the pension this week so offer them enhanced terms.
The funniest, or most comedic for me of these pay offs at 50 was that actuarially you life expectancy was 80-82 in those days. HEY! Elastica, not if you stop working at 50 with a pension of £30,000 guaranteed to go up ever year. Your life expectancy has just had 10 years added to it. Cheek by jowl in Glasgow are Partick, Possil, Bearsden, Yoker, Drumchapel and Milngavie. If you've retired at 50 after 10 years as a bank manager you live in the area that dies on average at 95. If you got emptied as the cleaner of that branch when it shut you live in the area that dies at 58. Its called the post code lottery. In Edinburgh the same 78 year old branch manager retired at 50 and lives in Davidson's Mains 400 yards down the road from the Muirhouse flat his 59 year old cleaner died in last week.
The pension funds are bust and will only get more broken with time. The pensioners who are locked in and receiving their money will feel brilliant while it gets paid and I suggest they may even be the ones who are protected more when push comes to shove. They will be in their 80's and 90's when their pensions suddenly dont get paid by the pension fund. The government will step in on a first come first served basis but it will be too little too late. Figures out recently on a high street store suggest the first disaster is even closer than I expected.
What could they do now? Well raise interest rates for starters. It would stop munchkins like me suggesting you transfer out. The transfer value would drop and my rush for the exit with it. Even if I did leave I'd not be taking so much out of the pot. Policy makers have so many instruments but as I've said Capitalism is a busted flush as there's so much money to be made from spotting the need to raise interest rates. Corruption has always existed but in my humble opinion it is now as big a lever as many other economic instruments and yet there is not as much written on the subject. Laws are being written retrospectively so even if you get your money out of a scheme some bright spark might levy a tax on anyone who was once part of a scheme thats now gone bust.
Hey! Elastica dont care, their hit was in the 80's and not long after that Dad got his retirement from the bank. 33 years he's been away from that place and he's looking better every day.
"Its funny how the bank managers are living longer these days" he laughs. "In my day you got the manager's chair when the previous one had a heart attack and died slumped on his desk."
Saturday, 23 April 2016
Friday, 15 April 2016
HARRY - N16 Theatre Balham - upstairs at the Bedford
I'm at a play about the obsession of young fans. Specifically Sophie and Caitlin are one direction fans. Simple world this. Two freshers, twinned and entwined in the same desire, finding a common interest. It's normal in many universities to be randomly thrown a room mate and many become lifelong friends. The signs are promising for Sophie and Caitlin as they find commonality in their adoration of boy band one direction. They pursue their common interest throughout their first year and the playful nurturing of their obsession treats us to joyful fantasies as they indulge themselves in potential encounters.
There's a dark undercurrent though, a shark fin gliding through the stage. There's a shudder and then it's gone. You're not quite sure what happened but you felt it. The girls are giggling and laughing on stage, but you felt something in the audience, a tremor, it was minute, but it was real.
The girls glide into their 2nd year and it's all fun still. The band release another album and it's clear Harry is the best. He's the brightest star in the one direction constellation.
The shark fin is spotted again. There's the beating heart, oh, it's my own.
It disappears again and the rat-a-tat-tat rhythm of the prose fires comedy into the air. Ronnie Barker is looking down and laughing. The double act come together and it's as smooth as velvet.
Then a shudder - is that a shark in the water.... Or is it just a nutty magnum on a warm spring evening...?
It's the final year and I won't put a spoiler alert here, in fact I'll just stop writing. I got my camera out to take a picture and I put it away again. I was captivated.
This is a cracking show and having sold out all week it's getting a matinee and an evening show on Saturday. Well crafted and delivered, it's what 5 stars are for.
Harry is playing at Theatre N16, Balham - I hope someone picks it up for the Fringe 2016
Vinny Bee
Deadbeatfanzine
Sent from my iPhone
There's a dark undercurrent though, a shark fin gliding through the stage. There's a shudder and then it's gone. You're not quite sure what happened but you felt it. The girls are giggling and laughing on stage, but you felt something in the audience, a tremor, it was minute, but it was real.
The girls glide into their 2nd year and it's all fun still. The band release another album and it's clear Harry is the best. He's the brightest star in the one direction constellation.
The shark fin is spotted again. There's the beating heart, oh, it's my own.
It disappears again and the rat-a-tat-tat rhythm of the prose fires comedy into the air. Ronnie Barker is looking down and laughing. The double act come together and it's as smooth as velvet.
Then a shudder - is that a shark in the water.... Or is it just a nutty magnum on a warm spring evening...?
It's the final year and I won't put a spoiler alert here, in fact I'll just stop writing. I got my camera out to take a picture and I put it away again. I was captivated.
This is a cracking show and having sold out all week it's getting a matinee and an evening show on Saturday. Well crafted and delivered, it's what 5 stars are for.
Harry is playing at Theatre N16, Balham - I hope someone picks it up for the Fringe 2016
Vinny Bee
Deadbeatfanzine
Sent from my iPhone
Tuesday, 12 April 2016
Ayoungertheatre.com
I'm off to see Harry in London as you can gather from earlier mention "Harry" is a play. The reviews are flying in now as the opening night was 24 hours ago and so I recommend you check out the review on the above site. It's clearly early days but with @poormichelle_ being booked to deliver two performances on Saturday it's all smiles!
Sent from my iPhone
Sent from my iPhone
Monday, 11 April 2016
October didn't last as long as it usually does
But then again its not over yet, so its probably doing as well as always. Giving it 31 days however was always a bit of a silly one.
Let's face it, the guys and ah'm sure ah ken, they were all men back then, just sat down and slam dunked a 31,30 & 31 day month to end the year. What were they thinking? Ah sorry, we ran out of months?
You cant run out of months, its your own idea to put days into months so you cant run out. What the fuck were you doing putting 28 days into February, even every 4 years it only goes up to 29. C'mon, we had an abacus, work it out. Start with 30's and 31's and if its a leap year, give us an extra day in July!
I sat down and worked out what it should be and here it is. January 30, February 31, March 30, April 31, May 30, June 31, July 30 (except in a leap year), August 31, September 30, October 31, November 30, December 31.
As I typed them, I couldn't help thinking by July they'd got one right and that was only once every four years.
To be fair the last 5 months are spot on, so clearly they were learning and if given another bite at the calendar cherry would've cleaned up.
I figure its a bit late to change now as that means many birthdays would move, but I'm ok and anyone born after August will be fine, but its gonna be carnage for my Mum. She was born 3/3/33 and its just not going to work for her. 1/3/33 just doesn't have the same ring.
There's also a campaign starting around February 31st. Apparently its just not got the same feng shui as March 2nd. 31/2 v 2/3. From an arithmetical point of view I do get it. The '2' & the '3' are still used but its the new 1 to make the February date that just seems to spoil everything.
I get it if people are a bit confused and are worried they have to get a new passport and birth certifcate but apparently all death certificates will stand and we dont need to upgrade them. It must've been murder when we shifted from imperial to the metric system, although a bit like the way we use the metric system, its envisaged that the new system will have a colloquial balance. Just as we say half a pound, 30mph or 100 yards, schools are teaching the conversion tables so old people wont be left behind.
Luckily for me I've an inbuilt adjuster, a wee shock absorber in my head. When things jar, like being asked in Gaelic for 8 kilos of cheese, I know they mean 8oz. Its a great way to age people and now with this new calendar we'll have another way to work out if you are a 21st century girl or boy, or part of the new dark ages.
I love the way we've now changed April fools day to March. Its time for the Mad March hare to make a comeback!
Having said that its not going global. The Olympics might be 100m but that's was not going to be enough for certain countries and the new date system is already being greeted as an interim solution. Daylight days are being investigated and there is talk of a longer summer and hibernation being encouraged in winter. Summer time and winter time will involve the whole of society as working hours in summer are being reduced to 4 hours a day and winter hours being increased to 10. University graduates and School leavers have been delighted to hear the news as they embark on their first jobs, they know its only 4 hours a day for the first few months.
All from one dreary day in October!
Let's face it, the guys and ah'm sure ah ken, they were all men back then, just sat down and slam dunked a 31,30 & 31 day month to end the year. What were they thinking? Ah sorry, we ran out of months?
You cant run out of months, its your own idea to put days into months so you cant run out. What the fuck were you doing putting 28 days into February, even every 4 years it only goes up to 29. C'mon, we had an abacus, work it out. Start with 30's and 31's and if its a leap year, give us an extra day in July!
I sat down and worked out what it should be and here it is. January 30, February 31, March 30, April 31, May 30, June 31, July 30 (except in a leap year), August 31, September 30, October 31, November 30, December 31.
As I typed them, I couldn't help thinking by July they'd got one right and that was only once every four years.
To be fair the last 5 months are spot on, so clearly they were learning and if given another bite at the calendar cherry would've cleaned up.
I figure its a bit late to change now as that means many birthdays would move, but I'm ok and anyone born after August will be fine, but its gonna be carnage for my Mum. She was born 3/3/33 and its just not going to work for her. 1/3/33 just doesn't have the same ring.
There's also a campaign starting around February 31st. Apparently its just not got the same feng shui as March 2nd. 31/2 v 2/3. From an arithmetical point of view I do get it. The '2' & the '3' are still used but its the new 1 to make the February date that just seems to spoil everything.
I get it if people are a bit confused and are worried they have to get a new passport and birth certifcate but apparently all death certificates will stand and we dont need to upgrade them. It must've been murder when we shifted from imperial to the metric system, although a bit like the way we use the metric system, its envisaged that the new system will have a colloquial balance. Just as we say half a pound, 30mph or 100 yards, schools are teaching the conversion tables so old people wont be left behind.
Luckily for me I've an inbuilt adjuster, a wee shock absorber in my head. When things jar, like being asked in Gaelic for 8 kilos of cheese, I know they mean 8oz. Its a great way to age people and now with this new calendar we'll have another way to work out if you are a 21st century girl or boy, or part of the new dark ages.
I love the way we've now changed April fools day to March. Its time for the Mad March hare to make a comeback!
Having said that its not going global. The Olympics might be 100m but that's was not going to be enough for certain countries and the new date system is already being greeted as an interim solution. Daylight days are being investigated and there is talk of a longer summer and hibernation being encouraged in winter. Summer time and winter time will involve the whole of society as working hours in summer are being reduced to 4 hours a day and winter hours being increased to 10. University graduates and School leavers have been delighted to hear the news as they embark on their first jobs, they know its only 4 hours a day for the first few months.
All from one dreary day in October!
Caitlin McEwan proud dad
Wednesday, 6 April 2016
When Harry met Caitlin hasn't been penned yet but when it does
April 14th 2016 is the final night of the play "Harry" by Caitlin McEwan, and you can contact the production company via twitter @poormichelle_
The play is fast selling out so a visit to Edinburgh in August might be on the cards. N16 Balham hosts the play from Tuesday 12th - Thursday14th April.
I'm really looking forward to it, although as a luddite with a capacity to do a blog but not even a facebook page, I'm still in 1990s technology. I was so slow getting a CD player that I got an ipod instead, but enough of me.
As the interview in Now mag online, celebsnow.co.uk Caitlin McEwan talks up fandom in a female shakedown that will have fans of the young ones craving for the follow up four in the flat, this time from a feminine perspective.
A review will follow - but this is the heads up for those who want to go - be quick its not a big theatre space and these tickets wont be selling on ebay until 2026 when they'll be priceless....
Wednesday, 23 March 2016
March 2016 - and March 1986
What a difference 30 years makes - or not as the case may be. Ross Bradford, drummer of Life Support pictured below at a gig in Baxter park just had his 50th birthday - surely he wasnt only 20 in that photo!
Simon Kettles, Fat Al aka vinny b and Rich (with Fran doing the photo's) make up the rest of the band that day.
As for the fan, Ziggy, Garry and Fat Keith were there and yet 30 years on its wee Gaz who's not so wee and Ziggy still looks the same....nice graffiti on the bench...I'm saying Baxter park but I've no idea what it was called, I just know it was Dundee and Jo Doll and the boys were the big band that day!
Simon Kettles, Fat Al aka vinny b and Rich (with Fran doing the photo's) make up the rest of the band that day.
As for the fan, Ziggy, Garry and Fat Keith were there and yet 30 years on its wee Gaz who's not so wee and Ziggy still looks the same....nice graffiti on the bench...I'm saying Baxter park but I've no idea what it was called, I just know it was Dundee and Jo Doll and the boys were the big band that day!
Sunday, 10 January 2016
Happy New Year - 2016
I remember 1984 in the Tron and thereafter its pretty much been a blur. I was discussing ankles with my daughter today and its the first time I've pulled myself up over "je n'est regret rien".
The whirlwind that was Deadbeat and Life Support could've been done so much better but it was about living and we lived it, loved it and then it stopped. There were anxiety attacks over where we could've gone what we could've been and even the odd utterance about "contenders", but the truth was we stumbled onto some fun, had fun, became consumed by it and then left the burning embers of Rome to set up a new town called Paris.
So, Je n'est regret rien. Or so I thought, until the ankle conversations. I turned mine repeatedly playing the midfield genital at uni and afterwards with the Bob Hope all stars, the Avon Albion or Borehamwood. If only I'd understood how pissed off I'd be when doing my 500 miles Spanish Stroll with a dodgy ankle in my 50's I'd have looked after them a bit more.
To be honest, as we traded stories about the size of a baseball, softball, jaffa orange and honeydew melon I could tell that Caitlin had the same inflatable sense of the dramatic as I and her ankle was clearly worse than mine had ever been so I settled on agreeing that it was the right ankle and explained even a left hander like me had the family right ankle. Its gone through a number of generations. My Great Granddad won the powderhall new year's day sprint man moons ago but his career was cut short by his inflammable right ankle. This was nothing to do with going up in flames as would be suggested but rather the tendon issue or lack of tissue.
The bottom line is, Caitlin like many generations before her will doubtless eschew this valuable piece of information and wake up in her 50's and mutter, je n'est regret rien.
Back in 1984 I remember talking about the big brother state and how Orwell was right on so many things, but in 2016 I think the biggest thing that wiki-leaks discovered was that he was a few years out. As funny as Gogglebox is you cant help thinking we really are sleepwalking our way towards an Orwellian vision, but to be honest most of us dont really care. We're doing what we want to do. As the gun lobby in the USA will tell you as long as they can buy an AK-47 to protect themselves they dont mind. That country seems to have expanded its poverty class faster than Mao did when he got them melting the woks. Is it wrong to suggest the height of their ambition is to become a reality tv star.
I missed the Stone Roses in 1986 as my head was up my arse. Deadbeat had finished and I was working 24/7, getting married and divorced, roughly in that order. I completely missed the Stone Roses, discovering that I'd heard all the songs before in 2009. Perhaps one of my best bouts of Rip Van Winkle although my wife and daughter think not. I didnt know who they Kardashians were, and apparently like the Broons, they just ARE. They ARE. Well fuck me, I know who the Stone Roses are now and they really WERE. They really WERE. I just dont quite get what this society wants so I'm slipping back underground again, aka going on a long walk.
I'm properly at a cross roads. We're being fed such a rich diet of shit news. One minute the refugees heading en masse away from someone bad towards something better. Its the land grab made so famous by General Custer when he battered a few of the locals, stole their land because they had better guns. Custer the soldier saw the atrocities first hand and suddenly realised he was doing the bidding of Tony Blair and the other warlords. Some legally elected some just old fashioned gangsters with guns. In the USA you could never really tell which elected representatives were straight as the level of corruption is so high there is now "legally straight", like the mob that stole the great $20bn art collection of Dr Albert Barnes in Phildaelphia. A legal theft which they are no longer fighting in the courts. The truth is the court aint a good place to fight, no bar stools. I remember watching that saga unfold and thinking Barnes, the guy who made the bequest would be doing a triple pike corkscrew if he could see what they were doing.
Gangsters the lot. They did it a clever way. Like the Thomas Crowne affair there was a good bit of planning, but its execution was simplicity itself. The collection being worth so much was key. The collection was under the control of underpaid poor trustees. This was simple when it was family who understood the wishes of the collector but as time goes by it is easy to unpick. In this case it was simple, find your way onto the trustees board, then buy your way into a more privileged position. The trustees at this stage had been diluted to include a local university. So the state offers to build the university some new blocks in exchange for another couple of trustees and then runs the collection into arrears and then rides into town to save the day by stealing it and making it accessible to all and charging.
Apparently this fantastic collection, assembled 1900-1920, which he had personally hung in his large suburban retreat was available only to art students and scholars. It was not to be made available to everyone. Barnes bought it when they were unfashionable and surely as he was ridiculed for his taste and allowed to be laughed at back then, he could have the last laugh now, but no.....it was city hall his arch rivals who got the last laugh. First with bus tours, then with overseas tours and since a few years ago a new museum down-town.
But I digress, as I remember reviewing in 1984, Craig Tannock's, "The hypocrisy of this democracy" is not a new concept merely one that becomes ever so repetitive with age. I dont knock down as many walls as I used to and its probably as well as the targets really are moving around these days.
Justice - what justice. What price the law? The wrong price, I say. Administering the law is like Custer looking after the cookie jars on the reservations. If laws are bad it just gets harder and harder. A bit like Dentists, aka, Hairdressers with degrees, the rules of engagement have changed. I still smile when I think how the Dentistry profession was set up on the back of the NHS and health for all initiative. By now surely we should have a 6 monthly check up for our brains, lungs, livers and if you're a boy, your balls, but its all about statistics, the ones you request and the ones you ignore. Here's how it works with me - how much do we spend on the effects of a shit smile and how much do we spend on the effects of a fucked up head. Just before they shut the lid on me, screw down the bolts and send me to the great ashes producing fire, I'd like to get those arithmetically illiteratti removed from any microphone.
The stats monsters. The people who say we've cut crime by 7%. Fuck off you havent. That statistic doesnt exist as it would be erroneous. If all crime is reported then you have a chance to document it all and have a solid base on which to work. However not all crime is reported. Furthermore neither is all that is reported documented. That would assume the person reporting the crime was articulate and the person documenting it highly skilled at eliciting what crimes had been committed. That means being as skilled as a lawyer in the law. The long and short of it is young women throughout this country are being drugged, raped and unaware of what happened. Just because a date rape drug is invented does not mean that crime has fallen. It means that a drug has been invented that saves the politicians from being aware of a crime as it is not documented. It is not in the statistics so it is not a crime. News just in....it fucking is!
I worked in the Financial world and most crime there goes unreported. I'm not talking about people dodging tax or stealing amounts under £5000 as its seemingly impossible not to do that these days so these are no longer crimes. I'm talking about maladministration and the randomness with which people look after other people's belongings. If they accidentally steal £40,000 from a client, you would think that money would be reimbursed on discovery but sadly that is not the way. Like with the Barnes collection our morality has moved a wee bit and so the question asked is "has the client spotted it?". Phrases like "We dont want to look like clowns......giving them their money back would open us up to an interest claim."
All the time I'm thinking how good it must be to be fleeing Syria and anywhere else to arrive at a place that is calm and comfortable. Comfortable of course means the roof doesnt get blown off your house every few days.....
So now I must stop writing to watch some overpaid sportsmen kick a ball about. Its in my nature to slump on the sofa of a sunday admiring the finesse and poise of these wonderful players, and all because they dont have dodgy ankles!
Je n'est regret rien....
Take Care
Vinny B
The whirlwind that was Deadbeat and Life Support could've been done so much better but it was about living and we lived it, loved it and then it stopped. There were anxiety attacks over where we could've gone what we could've been and even the odd utterance about "contenders", but the truth was we stumbled onto some fun, had fun, became consumed by it and then left the burning embers of Rome to set up a new town called Paris.
So, Je n'est regret rien. Or so I thought, until the ankle conversations. I turned mine repeatedly playing the midfield genital at uni and afterwards with the Bob Hope all stars, the Avon Albion or Borehamwood. If only I'd understood how pissed off I'd be when doing my 500 miles Spanish Stroll with a dodgy ankle in my 50's I'd have looked after them a bit more.
To be honest, as we traded stories about the size of a baseball, softball, jaffa orange and honeydew melon I could tell that Caitlin had the same inflatable sense of the dramatic as I and her ankle was clearly worse than mine had ever been so I settled on agreeing that it was the right ankle and explained even a left hander like me had the family right ankle. Its gone through a number of generations. My Great Granddad won the powderhall new year's day sprint man moons ago but his career was cut short by his inflammable right ankle. This was nothing to do with going up in flames as would be suggested but rather the tendon issue or lack of tissue.
The bottom line is, Caitlin like many generations before her will doubtless eschew this valuable piece of information and wake up in her 50's and mutter, je n'est regret rien.
Back in 1984 I remember talking about the big brother state and how Orwell was right on so many things, but in 2016 I think the biggest thing that wiki-leaks discovered was that he was a few years out. As funny as Gogglebox is you cant help thinking we really are sleepwalking our way towards an Orwellian vision, but to be honest most of us dont really care. We're doing what we want to do. As the gun lobby in the USA will tell you as long as they can buy an AK-47 to protect themselves they dont mind. That country seems to have expanded its poverty class faster than Mao did when he got them melting the woks. Is it wrong to suggest the height of their ambition is to become a reality tv star.
I missed the Stone Roses in 1986 as my head was up my arse. Deadbeat had finished and I was working 24/7, getting married and divorced, roughly in that order. I completely missed the Stone Roses, discovering that I'd heard all the songs before in 2009. Perhaps one of my best bouts of Rip Van Winkle although my wife and daughter think not. I didnt know who they Kardashians were, and apparently like the Broons, they just ARE. They ARE. Well fuck me, I know who the Stone Roses are now and they really WERE. They really WERE. I just dont quite get what this society wants so I'm slipping back underground again, aka going on a long walk.
I'm properly at a cross roads. We're being fed such a rich diet of shit news. One minute the refugees heading en masse away from someone bad towards something better. Its the land grab made so famous by General Custer when he battered a few of the locals, stole their land because they had better guns. Custer the soldier saw the atrocities first hand and suddenly realised he was doing the bidding of Tony Blair and the other warlords. Some legally elected some just old fashioned gangsters with guns. In the USA you could never really tell which elected representatives were straight as the level of corruption is so high there is now "legally straight", like the mob that stole the great $20bn art collection of Dr Albert Barnes in Phildaelphia. A legal theft which they are no longer fighting in the courts. The truth is the court aint a good place to fight, no bar stools. I remember watching that saga unfold and thinking Barnes, the guy who made the bequest would be doing a triple pike corkscrew if he could see what they were doing.
Gangsters the lot. They did it a clever way. Like the Thomas Crowne affair there was a good bit of planning, but its execution was simplicity itself. The collection being worth so much was key. The collection was under the control of underpaid poor trustees. This was simple when it was family who understood the wishes of the collector but as time goes by it is easy to unpick. In this case it was simple, find your way onto the trustees board, then buy your way into a more privileged position. The trustees at this stage had been diluted to include a local university. So the state offers to build the university some new blocks in exchange for another couple of trustees and then runs the collection into arrears and then rides into town to save the day by stealing it and making it accessible to all and charging.
Apparently this fantastic collection, assembled 1900-1920, which he had personally hung in his large suburban retreat was available only to art students and scholars. It was not to be made available to everyone. Barnes bought it when they were unfashionable and surely as he was ridiculed for his taste and allowed to be laughed at back then, he could have the last laugh now, but no.....it was city hall his arch rivals who got the last laugh. First with bus tours, then with overseas tours and since a few years ago a new museum down-town.
But I digress, as I remember reviewing in 1984, Craig Tannock's, "The hypocrisy of this democracy" is not a new concept merely one that becomes ever so repetitive with age. I dont knock down as many walls as I used to and its probably as well as the targets really are moving around these days.
Justice - what justice. What price the law? The wrong price, I say. Administering the law is like Custer looking after the cookie jars on the reservations. If laws are bad it just gets harder and harder. A bit like Dentists, aka, Hairdressers with degrees, the rules of engagement have changed. I still smile when I think how the Dentistry profession was set up on the back of the NHS and health for all initiative. By now surely we should have a 6 monthly check up for our brains, lungs, livers and if you're a boy, your balls, but its all about statistics, the ones you request and the ones you ignore. Here's how it works with me - how much do we spend on the effects of a shit smile and how much do we spend on the effects of a fucked up head. Just before they shut the lid on me, screw down the bolts and send me to the great ashes producing fire, I'd like to get those arithmetically illiteratti removed from any microphone.
The stats monsters. The people who say we've cut crime by 7%. Fuck off you havent. That statistic doesnt exist as it would be erroneous. If all crime is reported then you have a chance to document it all and have a solid base on which to work. However not all crime is reported. Furthermore neither is all that is reported documented. That would assume the person reporting the crime was articulate and the person documenting it highly skilled at eliciting what crimes had been committed. That means being as skilled as a lawyer in the law. The long and short of it is young women throughout this country are being drugged, raped and unaware of what happened. Just because a date rape drug is invented does not mean that crime has fallen. It means that a drug has been invented that saves the politicians from being aware of a crime as it is not documented. It is not in the statistics so it is not a crime. News just in....it fucking is!
I worked in the Financial world and most crime there goes unreported. I'm not talking about people dodging tax or stealing amounts under £5000 as its seemingly impossible not to do that these days so these are no longer crimes. I'm talking about maladministration and the randomness with which people look after other people's belongings. If they accidentally steal £40,000 from a client, you would think that money would be reimbursed on discovery but sadly that is not the way. Like with the Barnes collection our morality has moved a wee bit and so the question asked is "has the client spotted it?". Phrases like "We dont want to look like clowns......giving them their money back would open us up to an interest claim."
All the time I'm thinking how good it must be to be fleeing Syria and anywhere else to arrive at a place that is calm and comfortable. Comfortable of course means the roof doesnt get blown off your house every few days.....
So now I must stop writing to watch some overpaid sportsmen kick a ball about. Its in my nature to slump on the sofa of a sunday admiring the finesse and poise of these wonderful players, and all because they dont have dodgy ankles!
Je n'est regret rien....
Take Care
Vinny B
Monday, 23 November 2015
When we were younger - issue 16
In second year I added a crash course 1st & 2nd psychology and was delighted to find myself being asked to diagnose a speed freak in the exam. That was one subject I never needed to resit.
Enough of me, although curiously that is the point. I sit here in my 50's looking back a generation and I realise Deadbeat is my diary. I wrote a lot of pish and others wrote really well so for 10p it was a steal. Stealing is also what we felt we did well in issue 16! The charismatic duo that were Strawberry Switchblade put this issue up in the top 5. To this day the autism in me doesn't understand why a couple of artistic genuises should force a docile public to buy the copy. Pictures printed by Fat Al or Vinny Bee are unlikely to be flattering so why buy on a cover....I'm still working on Je'n'comprend pas, but I love the fact I knew not to question it. That would be for my philosophising later in life, just now I had to get these bands out on the streets....oh and the ads...The long period allowed us time to get adverts and make it a 24 page edition. Our ads ranged from Hendersons to the Hoochie Coochie club in Edinburgh and Salon 51 covered St. Andrews and Dundee along with Dance Factory, Record Shak APB and even Coppers in Cockburn st, one of my happier taverns. I had drunk there for 6 years when I celebrated my 21st, oops! The long and short of it was that these ads kept us at 10p and as the section below from the issue suggests as a society, some of us were very mindful about cost. The "young ones'esque show below being £3, or £2 ub40 etc. It was during 1982 that the worst of our oil revenue boom times were being pissed up against an unemployment wall which had grown staggeringly quicker than its Berlin counterpart.
In the UK we had begun a process of crippling the poor and enabling the rich for generations. The First seeds of the underclass had been scattered on the barren soil and the country's great north of Watford divide had commenced. I was writing pish songs like the penny Drops as the mushroom rises and we were all staring into the abyss. Within a year Michael Foot was to take a bath and Maggie would have the keys to every factory, mine, steel works and shipbuilders. All paid for by black gold, council house sell offs and bargain basement giveaways of BT etc. I got so incensed I starting going to economic tutorials to noise them up but I don't really think it helped. Why not subsidise the coal I would argue. If the income tax the miners pay is more than the level of subsidy, why not. If their tax and ni contributions were greater than the subsidy we are all net winners and so are all the shops in their communities. Even a wee stupid student like me could add up. (My other resit was maths). I would argue that the coal could be stock piled. It could be our fossil fuel deterrent only to be used in the event of the oil running out or the wind and water blowing dry. I talked of keeping the steelworks to produce the steel for our wind turbines, using the coal mines for theme parks with deep tunnelling fair ground attractions creating the scariest ghost rides. Alas I failed to convince my audience and I then watched as Rome burnt and our huge oil windfall was squandered. When she sold off the houses and never built a new one I was flabbergasted. Another opportunity to let us work was missed. If every house sold had been replaced there would've been employment for all those pummelled into the dirt - alas no.
My point of course was this, I hadn't even turned 21 and already I felt old.
How could I charge 20p for a Deadbeat?
One year later the summer holiday would prove fairly terminal. Issue 26 suggested we weren't churning them out as fast as year 1 and issue 30 would see our 3rd anniversary but Britain in 1985 was a different place, then 1986, cue the Stone Roses - the interview that never got published!
Friday, 13 November 2015
The queue for issue 13 in 1983
Sunday, 8 November 2015
The story of indie was repeated recently
>
>
Another Girl Another Planet is back
Its like a big retro thing going down with the Only Ones getting more airplay now than they did in 1979. I've heard it 3 times this week in adverts and tv dramas - obviously everything comes to those who wait - and its superb - I sit down with my 'favourite songs of the 70's' bingo card, especially, when watching the Christmas ads.....now when is Candy Skin gonna get its chance....surely we cant just jump straight to Oasis.....
Thursday, 27 August 2015
Sunday, 23 August 2015
Showstoppers - Pleasance courtyard Saturday 22nd - ***** - yes, that's this year's 5 stars
It was pissing down outside as our queue observed, and our compere reminded us as we dquelched into the comfortably cosy cloth cushioned seats. I couldnt help chuckling about the poor wee souls who would have to stand with hair dryers drying each and every one, but a nudge in the ribs brought me to order.
Showstoppers opened with a little bit of audience participation to set some general guidance for the show and the cast before the improv team set about their job, improvisation. On Saturday night with the help of the audience, Sean McCann edited our evening into Strummthorpe - the world air guitar championships set in Scunthorpe with music and chat at the mercy of the cast.
Random in every sense, hysterically assaulting all the senses. When you find that your making a bar chord in time with the music you know you've lost control of your sense and I surely did.
Ruth Blatt was outstanding as the current world champion of air guitar and despite the assualt from the across the pond, even at the outset there could only be one winner. You know its improv, you know the cast will take you on an adventure, but trust me, Ruth was winning that championship in 45 minute time.
The story line unfolded and MC turned narrator Sean McCann would occasionally give them a rest, cast them off in a new direction and the cast were loving it. Talk about throwing a dog a bone, Adam Meggido would slalom in as Elvis and at the behst of some nonsensical audience participation we were treated to an improv operatic diversion that Lloyd Webber would doubtless want to applaud. The singing was superb and the dialogue to die for, straight faces must've been tough for all the cast.
Pippa Evans & Nell Mooney had this great mother daughter sister thing going on while the love interest that was the geeky air guitar bassist Justin Brett absolutely aided the absurdity adding amps and cranking up the atmosphere at every octave.
Some picky bastard sitting next to me told his pal that one of them was playing Em7 all the time and I just collapsed. The audiences really join in during improv. I nudged him and suggested that Nell seems to be playing Iggy Pop's the passenger in open chords and to quote the Temptations "that aint right", surely this song was a 12 bar blues number.
Salvador Dali would be proud of the way Showstoppers melted time and no sooner had we arrived in 1961 and we had our homage to Buddy Holly, Elvis was suddenly in the building and fresh back from his time as a GI would become related to the cast. Time didnt just melt as Elvis stepped into his tardis, we moved through the 5th dimension, even Ruth air guitar had been moved to a different location.
Open stories develop differently in the audiences head and this story line was open and consequently brilliant. The performed and abstract narrative developed seamlessly, the musicians were outstanding and all the singing was a shining example of how much talent was on our stage. I feel very very fortunate to have such theatre explode upon my senses and at the ridiculously reasonable price of nothing. Our darling daughter treated us to the £14 tickets. In Edinburgh during the Fringe, they say £14 doesn't buy you much -
HELLO!!
Shop wisely Shop Showstoppers - these are performers in their prime and buy the box set for your Christmas, it might not be on sale, but like any good air guitar just believe it is!
#Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2015
Notes to all - Deadbeat is responsible for all typos inaccuracies and nonsense it writes, apologies for all the mistakes.
Deadbeat only write 3 or 4 reviews as bad reviews are pointless. If I tipped race horses I'd tell you about the ones I really thought should win, not the hopefully next time....We only write about things we really are enthusiastic about. We might attend 20-30 shows but as in the 80's our policy is only to talk up what we like - unless of course your the erse sat next to me talking about Em7. I'm sure I always played saxophone by lifting my knee to me jaw and playing my tibia - but cmon pal - go with it.
Showstoppers opened with a little bit of audience participation to set some general guidance for the show and the cast before the improv team set about their job, improvisation. On Saturday night with the help of the audience, Sean McCann edited our evening into Strummthorpe - the world air guitar championships set in Scunthorpe with music and chat at the mercy of the cast.
Random in every sense, hysterically assaulting all the senses. When you find that your making a bar chord in time with the music you know you've lost control of your sense and I surely did.
Ruth Blatt was outstanding as the current world champion of air guitar and despite the assualt from the across the pond, even at the outset there could only be one winner. You know its improv, you know the cast will take you on an adventure, but trust me, Ruth was winning that championship in 45 minute time.
The story line unfolded and MC turned narrator Sean McCann would occasionally give them a rest, cast them off in a new direction and the cast were loving it. Talk about throwing a dog a bone, Adam Meggido would slalom in as Elvis and at the behst of some nonsensical audience participation we were treated to an improv operatic diversion that Lloyd Webber would doubtless want to applaud. The singing was superb and the dialogue to die for, straight faces must've been tough for all the cast.
Pippa Evans & Nell Mooney had this great mother daughter sister thing going on while the love interest that was the geeky air guitar bassist Justin Brett absolutely aided the absurdity adding amps and cranking up the atmosphere at every octave.
Some picky bastard sitting next to me told his pal that one of them was playing Em7 all the time and I just collapsed. The audiences really join in during improv. I nudged him and suggested that Nell seems to be playing Iggy Pop's the passenger in open chords and to quote the Temptations "that aint right", surely this song was a 12 bar blues number.
Salvador Dali would be proud of the way Showstoppers melted time and no sooner had we arrived in 1961 and we had our homage to Buddy Holly, Elvis was suddenly in the building and fresh back from his time as a GI would become related to the cast. Time didnt just melt as Elvis stepped into his tardis, we moved through the 5th dimension, even Ruth air guitar had been moved to a different location.
Open stories develop differently in the audiences head and this story line was open and consequently brilliant. The performed and abstract narrative developed seamlessly, the musicians were outstanding and all the singing was a shining example of how much talent was on our stage. I feel very very fortunate to have such theatre explode upon my senses and at the ridiculously reasonable price of nothing. Our darling daughter treated us to the £14 tickets. In Edinburgh during the Fringe, they say £14 doesn't buy you much -
HELLO!!
Shop wisely Shop Showstoppers - these are performers in their prime and buy the box set for your Christmas, it might not be on sale, but like any good air guitar just believe it is!
#Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2015
Notes to all - Deadbeat is responsible for all typos inaccuracies and nonsense it writes, apologies for all the mistakes.
Deadbeat only write 3 or 4 reviews as bad reviews are pointless. If I tipped race horses I'd tell you about the ones I really thought should win, not the hopefully next time....We only write about things we really are enthusiastic about. We might attend 20-30 shows but as in the 80's our policy is only to talk up what we like - unless of course your the erse sat next to me talking about Em7. I'm sure I always played saxophone by lifting my knee to me jaw and playing my tibia - but cmon pal - go with it.
Thursday, 13 August 2015
June Brides & Great Guitars
This was the tape that was the preliminary Deadbeat tape 4, well in my head. It also includes the Frontiers, bring on the ambience....if my ears are working.
Great stuff - not just them bands - those bands were supplemented by Mission Impossible, Page Boys, Jasmine Minks, and the priceless Half Kilos
What I love about demos from this time is the light and shade of the music
Every generation is defined by the drugs they took and while the 70's was one or two things and the 90's seemed about ecstasy and some craic...er well crack, the 60's invented acid....we were about taking speed and possibly running as close as we could to the edge......
The beat of the drum and the rhythm of the bass pushed us forward with an urgency. We followed the arrows....the amarillo fleschas.....despair this way....party this way......
We're all lucky to have had a generation of music when we were growing up whatever age, the golden period is pretty vacant age 14 and pillar to post....age 19. Candyskin at 16 was one of those freak shows you live with. Another of my great songs for the camino. I can sing "Candyskin" for about 5 hours when I wander across Spain and I still dont know the words....but I hear the riff in my head so I dont care.
The only issue with all these demos I have is you have to turn a cassette over, even the Proclaimers are digital in this house.....they are post 1985!
Take Care
Vinny B
Great stuff - not just them bands - those bands were supplemented by Mission Impossible, Page Boys, Jasmine Minks, and the priceless Half Kilos
What I love about demos from this time is the light and shade of the music
Every generation is defined by the drugs they took and while the 70's was one or two things and the 90's seemed about ecstasy and some craic...er well crack, the 60's invented acid....we were about taking speed and possibly running as close as we could to the edge......
The beat of the drum and the rhythm of the bass pushed us forward with an urgency. We followed the arrows....the amarillo fleschas.....despair this way....party this way......
We're all lucky to have had a generation of music when we were growing up whatever age, the golden period is pretty vacant age 14 and pillar to post....age 19. Candyskin at 16 was one of those freak shows you live with. Another of my great songs for the camino. I can sing "Candyskin" for about 5 hours when I wander across Spain and I still dont know the words....but I hear the riff in my head so I dont care.
The only issue with all these demos I have is you have to turn a cassette over, even the Proclaimers are digital in this house.....they are post 1985!
Take Care
Vinny B
Wednesday, 5 August 2015
2014 Eddie Izzard - When I heard Iain Stirling I think we have another new direction to head...c'mon comedy....we love it!
An hour in my life that I'll never get back and ah never want back. The journey Eddie Izzard takes you on is still the same. It is simply superb surreal comedy. Dali would love the way he melts time. As scholarly as his artistic licence allows him, he juggles time and states-people (well statesmen really, that's the way they write history....), moves seamlessly through the epochs and never forgets to give the Gods a glance. Giving punchlines away would not spoil the show as his delivery is everything. We all know why later copies of the bible suppressed the bit when Adam and Eve discussed cross dressing. We wont dwell on the ego of a performer or even older phrases on the power of deep voices, its the delivery, and Eddie delivers across a diverse eclectic range of topics. The crowd hang on every syllable and when it doesnt arrive the tension just makes the humour better. Has he forgotten?... is it for effect?... what is he thinking? The Danish have laughing clubs and Eddie clearly has his own touring laughing club. There is no tension in the room. He tries to remind us that the right wing are still alive and kicking us, but we know, and we pretend it doesnt hurt. Tonight, of course, it doesnae hurt. We have our saviour, our talismanic, idiosyncratic action transvestite. Go on yersel big man, well in those heels we'd all be big men.
The last time I saw Eddie in a venue this small was in the last months of Thatcher's Britain at the Brighton comedy club. I'd travelled down from Edinburgh and after a game of 5-a-sides stumbled into one of the finest nights of my life. Joint second with my wedding and daughter's birth. All through the 80's we had divided the country in two. Comedy was the same. Alternative comedy grew out of the ashes of our manufacturing industry although the greatest irony was working mens' clubs gave voice to the old right wing fascists, but I digress. As Thatcher's cabinet was nimbly applying pressure to the pillow they had lifted over her whisky stained gob a more sophisticated alternative comedian had appeared. Eddie shone in that Laura Ashley frock back then. He was a more overt transvestite but his mind was as sharp as the tangent at the point of a circle. Yeah, really sharp.
He looked 25 years older but that could just be the marathons he's run or the fact that he is 25 years older and even action transvestites dont believe a nip and a tuck is a good use of financial reserves. Instead Eddie very kindly let the impoverished public wander in for £15 to an intimate gig which he did in German and French earlier in the evening. The same show performed every hour for 3 hours in 3 languages is his well publicised new gig. Some language teachers need to look at getting the kids along to his shows. The French gig tonight was not sold out, that is simply a scandal. Fanfuckintastico when he adds Spanish to the list. He'll be doing 4 hours a night, even when footballers have to go to extra time and penalties they still dont do that long and they charge more than 4 x £15....
Quite simply Eddie Izzard is a human being in our space, on our planet at the same time as us. Quite simply in the absence of God and the Clash, he is the new religion. Quite when he'll have the resources to do the show in Gaelic is unknown but I'm sure he'd relish the challenge.
Iain Stirling @the pleasance - great gig & Beirut - take two - its even better
HAPPINESS - I never tire of good food and BEIRUT reviewed last year is superb - good comedy made my evening even better. Its that simple. Iain Stirling was funny. Nervous at times about how funny he was but when he let go.... he was very funny. A raconteur is not always best when his audience is in another room but in Iain's case it frequently was the case that he used these interruptions to good effect, his act is brilliant in both versions....the audience was 99% happy - grateful for a good show but the comedian worried.....Until he didnt - then he rode the temple of the shiniest member of the audience.
I never like to give the gags away and like the best Fringe performers, Iain has the lines to fill the gaps not just where the punchlines belong.
I never like to give the gags away and like the best Fringe performers, Iain has the lines to fill the gaps not just where the punchlines belong.
It was a great gig where things worked really well. Edinburgh audiences populate the early shows; as we are tight fisted (quietly).
I went to a school - HOLYROOD, nuff said.////. Iain laid us out bare with Morningside jokes and the rest - I felt St Tams might take a tanning - but there were no cancer jokes so I laughed loudly internally...guffaw is not Edinburgh but this was BRILLIANT! ****
I went to a school - HOLYROOD, nuff said.////. Iain laid us out bare with Morningside jokes and the rest - I felt St Tams might take a tanning - but there were no cancer jokes so I laughed loudly internally...guffaw is not Edinburgh but this was BRILLIANT! ****
Wednesday, 22 July 2015
What's that Skip? August approaches
Ah yes, August does approach and with it comes the sunshine in George Square gardens and a longer visit for KB & VB to meet up with everyone we usually fail to see.
2015 will be different.....
2015 will be different.....
Tuesday, 2 June 2015
Life Support single re-released
30 years after it first burst onto the scene 95 copies of Life Support's debut single "About You" were found as Fat Al moved house. Clearly a sign that many had been lost in transit as 905 of the original press of 1000 surely hadnt been sold, or so we here at Deadbeat thought. At a recent reunion of Wood Mackenzie, it transpired that over 50 had made their ways into the hands or onto the turntables of these fine individuals and employees of Stocktrade claimed to have a fair old number between them.
The single which featured the 2 minute pop masterpiece "State of Mind" and dark drumming of Gothic urban angst anthem "The Penny drops.... as the mushroom rises" on the b-side had grown popular for the brief period that Peter at Pierhouse recorded it. By the time of the singles pressing the band had already started drifting apart and moving to different cities. Although broadcast locally on Radio Forth and nationally by John Peel the lack of interest from the band was self evident as the sales figures plummeted and the allure of the Tayside Bar grew.
As with many groups from the early 80's the band recently got back together to do a farewell tour, but as many of the venues had now gone the way of the Tayside bar, it would prove problematic. Si, Hilary, Rocky Reihill and Vin had met to discuss who would be the drummer and tried to draft the Prof, JJ Salisbury and his boogie box, but the call was never answered. This proved sufficient distraction for Hilary to return to Dundee and Rocky to relocate to London, just as he had in 1984, leaving Si and Vin with a familiar problem. They then met with Rich who replaced Rocky in the mid 80's, but still no drummer appeared and Rich returned to London, just as he had in 1985. Finally Si, Vin & Gordon met up and dragged Ross out of retirement and as the last line up of Life Support they met up and performed one last time.
The gig was a slow burner. Vin & Tucker performed a respectfully quiet "Dock of the Bay", aided in no small measure by a power cut and poor acoustics. When the power was restored it became clear the vocal P.A. would enjoy a good fight with the electronic drums as the mixing desk mayhem ensued. Timeless classics, "On your Own", "The Donkey", "In the End", "State of Mind", "Penny Drops" and "About You" were all eschewed in favour of a Reckless Eric cover and abortive attempts at the Only Ones "its the truth" and "Another Girl, Another Planet". Completing the show with a 'Teenage Kicks' car crash the band triumphantly left the stage to rigorous applause and shouts of derision. They returned to perform their London hit "Out of time, out of tune" but a burst bass string would prove fortuitous and with a shrug of the shoulders, a wave to the crowd and 4 fingers for the barman, they left the stage to drink their drink and hawk 95 singles to the downloading generation.
The single which featured the 2 minute pop masterpiece "State of Mind" and dark drumming of Gothic urban angst anthem "The Penny drops.... as the mushroom rises" on the b-side had grown popular for the brief period that Peter at Pierhouse recorded it. By the time of the singles pressing the band had already started drifting apart and moving to different cities. Although broadcast locally on Radio Forth and nationally by John Peel the lack of interest from the band was self evident as the sales figures plummeted and the allure of the Tayside Bar grew.
As with many groups from the early 80's the band recently got back together to do a farewell tour, but as many of the venues had now gone the way of the Tayside bar, it would prove problematic. Si, Hilary, Rocky Reihill and Vin had met to discuss who would be the drummer and tried to draft the Prof, JJ Salisbury and his boogie box, but the call was never answered. This proved sufficient distraction for Hilary to return to Dundee and Rocky to relocate to London, just as he had in 1984, leaving Si and Vin with a familiar problem. They then met with Rich who replaced Rocky in the mid 80's, but still no drummer appeared and Rich returned to London, just as he had in 1985. Finally Si, Vin & Gordon met up and dragged Ross out of retirement and as the last line up of Life Support they met up and performed one last time.
The gig was a slow burner. Vin & Tucker performed a respectfully quiet "Dock of the Bay", aided in no small measure by a power cut and poor acoustics. When the power was restored it became clear the vocal P.A. would enjoy a good fight with the electronic drums as the mixing desk mayhem ensued. Timeless classics, "On your Own", "The Donkey", "In the End", "State of Mind", "Penny Drops" and "About You" were all eschewed in favour of a Reckless Eric cover and abortive attempts at the Only Ones "its the truth" and "Another Girl, Another Planet". Completing the show with a 'Teenage Kicks' car crash the band triumphantly left the stage to rigorous applause and shouts of derision. They returned to perform their London hit "Out of time, out of tune" but a burst bass string would prove fortuitous and with a shrug of the shoulders, a wave to the crowd and 4 fingers for the barman, they left the stage to drink their drink and hawk 95 singles to the downloading generation.
Thursday, 12 March 2015
Mad March IV - the 3rd sequel
It was my Mum's 82nd on March 3rd, 3/3/33, an easy birthday to remember when you were growing up and I remember her 50th really well as we were interviewing Annie Lennox in Dundee!
The best interview I took no part in.
I just stared while Hilary asked all the questions.
Annie was superb, warm, friendly and an excellent host as the tequila threatened to get shared out, but more of that later.
My Mum doesn't remember me coming through the door, nor when I went away to get her a coffee, but funnily enough she's ok on 30 years ago, I think she'd thrown me out the house, She knew!. She had tired of the rat's tail that was growing down my face and the inverted skunk look, she told me to leave. Fair enough I thought, Dundee and St Andrews were certainly more fun for me than Edinburgh at that time. Edinburgh was still very partisan, punk or mod, student or hippy, Hibee or Jambo! Unless you were on the broo and shootin' up you werent cool, and if you were, it didnt matter. My Mum didnt want me shootin up, far from it, she just wanted me turning up like the wee Catholic boy she'd brought up. You were always having to choose sides, although when it came to politics there were no sides to choose, you were either for the testing ground or you were'nae. You could escape and watch the Young Ones while they tried to parody all of this psuedo anarchy and get yourself completely straightened out, but that was never going to 'heppen', not when there was a gig at the Baracuda and a really bad sound system for poor Annie and Dave.....I knew we'd get back there. I bet Terry Pratchett would approve, Sweet Dreams, el Tel.
Issue 11 was a great issue, Keith loved Eurythmics and had given us these questions which meant I could just drool and stare at Annie while Hilary did the work of asking the questions, writing down the answers and making us look like we had a clue. I'm sure I mentioned it a hundred times on the pages of Deadbeat through the years but Annie's smile was so infectious and later when she did "Sisters" with Aretha Franklin, I remember thinking I heard her say, it must've been the pinacle of her career (,,,well,,,after that interview with Deadbeat........not)
I remember signing off the Hiccups page with 'Take Care', and in my head I'd always thought it was to do with AIDS.
History suggests it would be 1986 before we were talking about it in Edinburgh so it must just have been a cautionary thought after I was caught straddling a table in the tayside bar while wearing the gold lammie and my chuckies dropped into an ashtray full of lit fags.
The putrid smell of burning bollocks is not to be advertised but I will suggest 'Dont try this at home'.....
Its a while now since the band tied me to a tree. It was the night of the election, and tied to a tree in 83 ....it was no more than I deserved after....after, well, to be honest, the amnesia does have its benefits, but it was in May 83 and so its irrelevant....
The part below (as above) was written two years ago, but I was so lazy I didnt bother to re-read it....2 years on the truth continues to come out.....Happy 2015
You can always re-invent history so when you see Deadbeat promoting Gary Glitter's rescheduled dates you can tell that what it now says is him and jimmy so vile were disliked by all at Deadbeat and should've been strung up by the short and curlies until one by one the curly ones gave way and......well at least that's what it said in the cartoon in issue 11.......but enough of that revisionist nonsense the review of his Dundee gig says he was 'strutting and posing like a cock in heat', aye you heard it here first.
There were many bands interviewed in issue 11 and where are the Swing Club now, Purveyors of the "Sloane Square malady" and many others that worked well for me. It really is 30 years ago and some since they supported Aztec Camera, and a bit like my mum, I seem to remember that gig better than the last time I went to a gig.
Its of the moment though, music, it has its moment, its vibe lives for ever, but it is a moment in time, and me singing Sloane Square melody, malady etc, will always have me strolling happy through the streets of Dundee.
Dundee looked a lot better then by the way, Jam jute and the Junkies, or was it Jam, jute and Jo Doll!
Also passing through the Dance Factory doors that month were the Bluebells and Roy Terre confidently predicted that Ken would adorn the front cover of smash hits, although it was hardly much more of a prediction than backing Desert Orchid to win the King George or Gold Cup, Red Rum to win the national would've seemed an outside chance and Shergar to be in a Tesco near you 100/1.
We were really pissed about the Cruise and Pershings missiles, and in our own little Cuban Crisis decided to print a page of enlightening talk about just what dual control meant when it came to launching these things, before getting back to the serious matter of comparing Altered images Clare Grogan with Bonnie Tyler, now there is a comparison to make you shudder. I know which one I'd want singing the eurovision song....
By issue 23, 1984 had arrived Hibs had still not won the cup, JFK's nephew pled guilty to possession of H and we remarked that at 30 he should really be a bit wiser. That enabled a seamless link to a Mr President review before my traditional moan, this time about someone stealing my ghetto blaster from the motor while I jumped out to buy some fags. Having given out the time and location, make and model, you'd have thought I knew a Deadbeat reader had it.....but alas, no, and I had to carry on without it and do my interview with Malcolm Ross with paper. A Ghetto blaster for those under the age of 50 is the things they carry on their shoulders in films from the 70's, it never looked good when you turned up at someone's flat with a ghetto gblaster to do an interview.
Picture the scene, as the interviewee looks over your shoulder to see if there's an entourage and their flat is about to be wrekced by some freak with a ghetto blaster and his 50 mates. It was quite a light ghetto blaster and as such would've been easily lifted out of my motor, by someone as young as 3.......but I digress. The interview with Malcolm proved that March was the month for good interviews. He was just trying to get 'Ape the Scientific' off the ground, and admitted to enjoying the Farmers Boys despite himself! A far cry from the days of watching the Fire Engines, Thursdays and Scars.
It was a good month for Albums as well was March, and Keith got the Smiths first offering through the post (and kept it). It was the greatest thrill getting an album like the Smiths for nothing, I got Sparkle in the Rain. Simple minds are a good band, but there was no comparison, THE SMITHS, were a great band, and at that moment, in 1984, I knew I was getting first dabs on the next postbag
The beautiful voices of Sunset Gun were reviewed and we expected "Stay with me" to be hugely successful but somehow it wasn't. We reveiwed Autumn 1904, and despite being out of season we predicted great things, hmmn, a theme is developing, oh well, we were wrong there too. I still stand by how good everyone was.
Take Care
Vinny
The best interview I took no part in.
I just stared while Hilary asked all the questions.
Annie was superb, warm, friendly and an excellent host as the tequila threatened to get shared out, but more of that later.
My Mum doesn't remember me coming through the door, nor when I went away to get her a coffee, but funnily enough she's ok on 30 years ago, I think she'd thrown me out the house, She knew!. She had tired of the rat's tail that was growing down my face and the inverted skunk look, she told me to leave. Fair enough I thought, Dundee and St Andrews were certainly more fun for me than Edinburgh at that time. Edinburgh was still very partisan, punk or mod, student or hippy, Hibee or Jambo! Unless you were on the broo and shootin' up you werent cool, and if you were, it didnt matter. My Mum didnt want me shootin up, far from it, she just wanted me turning up like the wee Catholic boy she'd brought up. You were always having to choose sides, although when it came to politics there were no sides to choose, you were either for the testing ground or you were'nae. You could escape and watch the Young Ones while they tried to parody all of this psuedo anarchy and get yourself completely straightened out, but that was never going to 'heppen', not when there was a gig at the Baracuda and a really bad sound system for poor Annie and Dave.....I knew we'd get back there. I bet Terry Pratchett would approve, Sweet Dreams, el Tel.
Issue 11 was a great issue, Keith loved Eurythmics and had given us these questions which meant I could just drool and stare at Annie while Hilary did the work of asking the questions, writing down the answers and making us look like we had a clue. I'm sure I mentioned it a hundred times on the pages of Deadbeat through the years but Annie's smile was so infectious and later when she did "Sisters" with Aretha Franklin, I remember thinking I heard her say, it must've been the pinacle of her career (,,,well,,,after that interview with Deadbeat........not)
I remember signing off the Hiccups page with 'Take Care', and in my head I'd always thought it was to do with AIDS.History suggests it would be 1986 before we were talking about it in Edinburgh so it must just have been a cautionary thought after I was caught straddling a table in the tayside bar while wearing the gold lammie and my chuckies dropped into an ashtray full of lit fags.
The putrid smell of burning bollocks is not to be advertised but I will suggest 'Dont try this at home'.....
Its a while now since the band tied me to a tree. It was the night of the election, and tied to a tree in 83 ....it was no more than I deserved after....after, well, to be honest, the amnesia does have its benefits, but it was in May 83 and so its irrelevant....
The part below (as above) was written two years ago, but I was so lazy I didnt bother to re-read it....2 years on the truth continues to come out.....Happy 2015
You can always re-invent history so when you see Deadbeat promoting Gary Glitter's rescheduled dates you can tell that what it now says is him and jimmy so vile were disliked by all at Deadbeat and should've been strung up by the short and curlies until one by one the curly ones gave way and......well at least that's what it said in the cartoon in issue 11.......but enough of that revisionist nonsense the review of his Dundee gig says he was 'strutting and posing like a cock in heat', aye you heard it here first.
There were many bands interviewed in issue 11 and where are the Swing Club now, Purveyors of the "Sloane Square malady" and many others that worked well for me. It really is 30 years ago and some since they supported Aztec Camera, and a bit like my mum, I seem to remember that gig better than the last time I went to a gig.
Its of the moment though, music, it has its moment, its vibe lives for ever, but it is a moment in time, and me singing Sloane Square melody, malady etc, will always have me strolling happy through the streets of Dundee.
Dundee looked a lot better then by the way, Jam jute and the Junkies, or was it Jam, jute and Jo Doll!
Also passing through the Dance Factory doors that month were the Bluebells and Roy Terre confidently predicted that Ken would adorn the front cover of smash hits, although it was hardly much more of a prediction than backing Desert Orchid to win the King George or Gold Cup, Red Rum to win the national would've seemed an outside chance and Shergar to be in a Tesco near you 100/1.
We were really pissed about the Cruise and Pershings missiles, and in our own little Cuban Crisis decided to print a page of enlightening talk about just what dual control meant when it came to launching these things, before getting back to the serious matter of comparing Altered images Clare Grogan with Bonnie Tyler, now there is a comparison to make you shudder. I know which one I'd want singing the eurovision song....
By issue 23, 1984 had arrived Hibs had still not won the cup, JFK's nephew pled guilty to possession of H and we remarked that at 30 he should really be a bit wiser. That enabled a seamless link to a Mr President review before my traditional moan, this time about someone stealing my ghetto blaster from the motor while I jumped out to buy some fags. Having given out the time and location, make and model, you'd have thought I knew a Deadbeat reader had it.....but alas, no, and I had to carry on without it and do my interview with Malcolm Ross with paper. A Ghetto blaster for those under the age of 50 is the things they carry on their shoulders in films from the 70's, it never looked good when you turned up at someone's flat with a ghetto gblaster to do an interview.
Picture the scene, as the interviewee looks over your shoulder to see if there's an entourage and their flat is about to be wrekced by some freak with a ghetto blaster and his 50 mates. It was quite a light ghetto blaster and as such would've been easily lifted out of my motor, by someone as young as 3.......but I digress. The interview with Malcolm proved that March was the month for good interviews. He was just trying to get 'Ape the Scientific' off the ground, and admitted to enjoying the Farmers Boys despite himself! A far cry from the days of watching the Fire Engines, Thursdays and Scars.
It was a good month for Albums as well was March, and Keith got the Smiths first offering through the post (and kept it). It was the greatest thrill getting an album like the Smiths for nothing, I got Sparkle in the Rain. Simple minds are a good band, but there was no comparison, THE SMITHS, were a great band, and at that moment, in 1984, I knew I was getting first dabs on the next postbag
The beautiful voices of Sunset Gun were reviewed and we expected "Stay with me" to be hugely successful but somehow it wasn't. We reveiwed Autumn 1904, and despite being out of season we predicted great things, hmmn, a theme is developing, oh well, we were wrong there too. I still stand by how good everyone was.
Take Care
Vinny
PS - 1985 - would've been issue 29, which I mentioned last month, we were too busy hawking the Deadbeat tapes around A & R guys in London. They rarely got signed, but we did get them some publicity and, we got our free LPs!
Mad March has arrived
Clearly this dafty is off to do another camino but on my return Fat Al aka Vinny Bee will do something funny for money.....a red nose on that pilgrim for example....fatal-bananas lives!
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