Where Worlds Collide

I first saw Mostly Autumn a few months back in Manchester, and immediately wanted to see them again; they were that good. Unfortunately I couldn’t make it to any dates on their November “V” tour due to other commitments, so the next opportunity I had was their Christmas gig at the Limelight Club in the old railway town of Crewe.

Before the show, I met up in the bar at Crewe station with an old friend, Crewe resident Sasha, who I haven’t seen for something like a year. An hour or so (and a couple of beers) later, I set off into the windswept and rainy streets of Crewe in search of the venue, the location of which I had the only the vaguest of ideas. Fortunately The Limelight Club turned out to be roughly in the area I though it was, and I managed to locate it without getting lost.

The Limelight is one of those warren-like clubs, with a maze of twisty passages all alike leading to the main concert hall; I suspect the internal layout must have been designed by someone who used to write Dungeons and Dragons adventures; all that was missing was the neo-otyugh by the bar. Unlike some clubs I’ve attended, they do serve decent beer; unfortunately Mostly Autumn don’t do drum solos.

There’s always something special at a packed gig in a small club with a great band, especially when much of the crowd is made up from hard core fans. Tonight was no exception. Mostly Autumn hit the stage at about half-past nine before an expectant crowd, and certainly did not disappoint.

Mostly Autumn sit at the opposite end of the progressive rock spectrum to bands such as Dream Theater or King Crimson; they’re not about complex time signatures and high energy technical virtuosity that blurs into white noise. Instead they’re about atmospheres and melodies, evoking the wide open spaces of the Yorkshire moors, still classed as ‘Progressive’ because their rich sound is nevertheless an order of magnitude more complex that the fashionable three-chord stuff that seems to pass as ‘rock’ nowadays. Pink Floyd’s Richard Wright is a big fan.

Just to get people worried, only five of the seven appeared onstage for the opening number, ‘Return of the King’ from the “Music Inspired by Lord of the Rings” album, with Bryan Josh singing. But missing members Heather Findlay and Angela Goldthorpe made a dramatic entrance at the end of the song, and they stormed straight into ‘Caught in a Fold’. After that they proceeded with song after song with little or no stage announcements. With a short interval, they played well over two hours of superb music, ranging from Floydian atmospherics and soaring epics through Tull-like hard rockers to folk-rock instrumentals showcasing Angela Goldthorpe’s flute playing.

Much like the last show I saw, the setlist drew heavily from the recent albums “Passengers” and “The Last Bright Light”. They still played the highlights from the first two albums, such as ‘Spirit of Autumn Past’, ‘Evergreen’, ‘The Last Climb’ and ‘Heroes Never Die’, with it’s echoplexed guitar reminding me a lot of the late lamented Twelfth Night. An instrumental section in the middle of the set included ‘Shindig’, with Angela’s flute playing what had originally been the violin part. They also played one new song, ‘Heart Life’, presumably from their forthcoming “Storms over Still Water”.

Being two days before Christmas, the band treated us to some special Christmas encores. First was a spine-tingling rendition of the traditional carol ‘Silent Night’, sung solo by Heather. Then came a version of Greg Lake’s ‘I Believe in Father Christmas’, and Slade’s ‘Merry Christmas Everybody, sung by guitarist Liam Davidson (accompanied by most of the crowd), wearing an elf’s hat with Noddy ears. You can hardly accuse them of taking themselves too seriously with that one. They followed that with ‘Fairytale in New York’. Finally, just in case anyone had forgotten they’re not a pub cover band, they closed with the soaring epic ‘Mother Nature’, which has become their signature song, summing up everything that’s great about the band fifteen minutes.

Setlist:
The Return of the King/ Caught in a Fold/ The Dark Before the Dawn/ Something in Between/ Evergreen/ Half the Mountain/ Close your Eyes/ Simple Ways/ Passengers

The Last Climb/ Distant Train/ Answer the Question/ Shrinking Violet/ Heroes Never Die/ The Spirit of Autumn Past/ Out of the Inn/ Shindig/ Never the Rainbow/ Heart Life

Encores
Silent Night/ I Believe in Father Christmas/ Merry Christmas Everybody/ Fairytale of New York/Mother Nature

While the rest of us were celebrating Chrismas, the bottom-feeding slime of the internet were busy in their trailer parks. I had to delete four hundred comment spams from the same idiot, posted while I was offline from three days. Not a nice thing to come back to. I hope the spammer got a bad case of haemorrhoids for Christmas…

Chad Orzel is not impressed with The Streets.

I mean, why is this clown getting radio airplay, from “alternative” stations, no less? His “songs” marry plodding, uninteresting beats (“Fit But You Know It” would have the most crashingly dull hook of the year, were it not for the existence of Lenny Kravitz’s “Lady”) to obscure and unintersting British slang, and wraps the whole thing in a “Wot you fink about dat?” accent that’s just this side of Dick Van Dyke in “Mary Poppins”.

I have managed to avoid hearing anything by this possibly overrated act, but it does seem symptomatic of the malaise that seems to affect British music at the moment; everything is hopelessly inward- and backward-looking. ‘Indie’ has effectively become what passes for mainstream rock, and it’s become so conservative and unadventurous that almost all bands sound exactly the same. The cloth-eared music-press scribblers are obsessed with lyrics and don’t appear to have any interest in actual music, which is why we get a diet of three-chord slop or the ‘plodding, uninteresting beats’ of The Streets. And the lyrics are always so parochial that there’s no chance of anyone outside of Britain being able to identify with any of it. Radio just plays whatever rubbish the music press drools over. There is better music around, but it’s completely underground, and has trouble finding an audience. The best bands aren’t even on the media’s radar screen.

There will not be a decent music scene in Britain until the last commercial radio DJ is strangled by the last copy of the New Musical Express.

I am not at all sure what to make of this latest product from Märklin. It keeps reminding me of an infamous Dutch TV advertisement featuring an Inter-City 125 and Parson’s Tunnel in Devon. (Link from Martyn Read).

While some of next year’s shows might be sold out already, I’m still going to see the wonderful Mostly Autumn at the Limelight in Crewe tonight. Fortunately I’ve already got a ticket; I believe this show is close to being sold out (only fifty tickets left on Monday).

The trouble with being on a short-term contract is you can only plan things two to three months in advance; which means that you have problems with gigs that get sold out months in advance. So it looks as though I’m going to miss out on The Mars Volta in March and Nightwish in February.

I suppose I should look on the bright side. If a Finnish symphonic goth-metal band can sell out an entire tour in a in a country where the music scene was until recently totally dominated by boring navel-gazing indie miserablists or repetitive three-chord garage strummers, then maybe there’s a chance we’ll see more tours by the sorts of proper rock acts that previously only played the occasional one-off shows in London. We can but hope.

After far too long an absence, Unbiased Al-Freebie Information Minister, Muhammed Saeed al-Shergar is back at Electric Nose, with advice for his fellow minions of mediocrity. The infamous Baseball Cap Western shows us just what his minions have been up to. Westerns of mass distortion indeed.

Time for a Monday Mashup. This is an old one from more than a year ago: Star Trek. That’s the original show with Kirk, Spock and McCoy, when the Klingons were bad guys, and phasers were set to kill. Seek out new civilisations, and boldly leave no infinitive unsplit!

To recap what Monday Mashup is about:

Every Monday, I pick a piece of popular media — a book, a movie, a TV show, or even an album. You pick a roleplaying world and talk about how you’d combine the two.

Star Trek would work quite well in my current science-fantasy campaign world, Kalyr. For the games I’ve run, all the action has taken place in an area roughly the size of western Europe. Everything beyond this small region is unknown territory.

A bit of background. Kalyr is a post-collapse world. Once, there was a world-spanning advanced technological civilisation. A couple of thousand years ago, it collapsed into chaos after war and plague. Only a few pockets of civilisation survived, isolated from each other. The largest of these is the area in which all my games are set. It’s culture has become conservative and inward looking, and coupled with a very low birthrate, they had no interest in exploring the rest of the world.

Until now.

It would be a spoiler for my ongoing game to say exactly who might sponsor the expedition or why. But the craft will be a massive airship, not just because the idea is cooler than an seagoing craft, but because it will be able to reach inland destinations. The instructions are simple. Travel the globe, find out who or what is out there, and report back.

What will they find? Just about anything. For a start, there will be other surviving pockets of civilisation, some reverted to primitive hunter/gatherer communities, others perhaps retaining more advanced ‘lost’ technology. Then there will be ruins, lost secrets of those communities that died out. What treasures might those ruins contain? Nearer to the borders of civilisation there will be more recent settlements, founded by runaway slaves. And finally, other stranger creatures who have settled remote areas and claimed it for their own. Many of these may well be hostile, and some might have access to technology more advanced than that of the PCs.

And the Klingons? Lets just say big orange furry things.

I’m not sure quite when Continental Modeller jumped the shark, but it has. The magazine has completely succumbed to the ‘narrow gauge disease’ that has afflicted it’s parent magazine.

If you’re interested in standard-gauge mainline modelling, especially with modern diesel and electric operation, January’s issue is very thin indeed. They’ve gone into obscurity in a big way, the railway equivalent of the John Peel Show on an off-night. We have the following:

• Six pages of Peruvian 3′ gauge, with all photographs of the same class of loco.
• Six more about narrow gauge line in Germany, 100% operated by railcars.
• Four pages of scale drawings of a Bosnian Klose articulated tank engine (last one withdrawn in 1967) with an absurdly complicated system of connecting rods. Only a skilled engineer working in a large scale could hope to build one.
• Four more pages of Cumbres and Toltec (3′ again)
• Four pages of a Dutch 60cm diorama.
• Another couple of pages on a narrow gauge layout set in Cuba.
• Another page wasted on a stupid 15″ gauge tourist railway in Tasmania.

This has gone beyond parody. I’m beginning to think we’ll be seeing more D&E era continental stuff in MRM!

Why are Peco Publications so obsessed with narrow gauge? The Railway Modeller often gets criticised for too much emphasis on narrow gauge, but recent issues of CM seem to indicate it’s getting even worse. Not that I’m against narrow gauge in small doses, it’s just that I object to two-thirds of what was once a worthwhile magazine to be taken up something that represents a tiny fraction of the world’s railways.

Using the sides of railway locomotives as advertising billboards is a recent development which, while not always very aesthetically pleasing, at least earns money for the railways that would otherwise have to come from either fares or subsidies. But I’m not sure what to make of this one.