Regeneration

Assuming you have visited here before, you may have noticed that I’ve implemented some of the changes in layout first hinted at just prior to Christmas.

We now have a homepage, a portfolio (of sorts), and this blog has shifted to its own parent page.

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Mentioned in the same breath as NME

It’s not often I find myself mentioned in the same breath as NME and Uncut (and to a lesser extent The Sunday Telegraph), but if one were to suck in a big gulp of air and read down this page on the ATIC Records website, it is just possible.

My psych and prog website, Head Full of Snow, gets quoted following a review of one of the label’s acts, The Witch and the Robot.

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Cliff Richard Looks at Birmingham

Not to be outdone by Telly Savalas, Cliff Richard gets in on the Birmingham love, six years prior to everyone’s preferred shiny scalped, lollipop-loving tough guy.

As in the case of Telly Savalas Looks at Birmingham, this clip from 1973′s Take Me High serves as a mini-travelogue of the city following the 1960′s slum clearances and redevelopment scheme. Albeit one featuring Cliff-(insert your own favourite expletive)-Richard. Ar kid wouldn’t approve.

Horror of horrors, he even sings, so you may wish to mute your screen.

Give me the “liquid tones” of Telly Savalas’s ‘Who Loves Ya, Baby’ anyday.

Edit Bugger! It appears Cliff doesn’t wish to appear on Have Pen, Won’t Travel. Ah well, if the prospect of his asinine cat-strangling hasn’t put you off, you’ll just have to click on over to Youtube to watch.

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So long Birmingham… Here’s lookin’ atcha!

There’s every chance that during his 72 years on the planet, Telly Savalas never once set foot in Birmingham. Nevertheless, this didn’t stop him recording the voiceover for this wonderful little Quota Quickie, Telly Savalas Looks at Birmingham, which ran in cinemas as a supplement to the main feature in the early 80s.

Filmed in 1979, the city shown has changed a great deal in the intervening years and would probably be unrecognisable nowadays to those who’d not known it through the 70s, 80s and for the greater part of the 90s. Despite the cheesiness of Kojak’s dialogue, it’s still a rare treat to see the old town as it once was. An artefact of a time long passed.

So long Birmingham, indeed.

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Near-hysteria of Impending Apocalypse Proportions

It’s still snowing.

This time last week I dismissed the snow as little more than a light dusting; a passing sprinkle that despite bringing a woefully unprepared country to a grinding halt, was NOT like the stuff we had in the late 70s and 80s when I was a lad.

Well, I stand corrected… to a certain extent.

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Snow News is Bad News (For the UK, at least)

Woke up this morning and found we’d been gifted with a light dusting of snow, rekindling the strange fascination that the British have with the fluffy white stuff.

Great Barr – Where the snow lay roundabout, deep and crisp and even

It’s has become somewhat the cliché to state that with the first sign of snow, the country grinds to a halt. Even so, to employ yet another tired cliché, there’s no smoke without fire, and it’s been proved time and again that the slightest dusting does indeed bring things to a standstill.

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